The ‘New’ Taylor Swift Still Has a Race Problem

Taylor Swift is back on her bullshit. So to speak.
Where did it all start?
If you know the Kim/Kanye/Taylor saga then skip ahead. It began last year with the release of Kanye’s track Famous, in which he espouses, ‘I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex. Why? I made that bitch famous.’ Swift quickly condemned the lyrics, claiming humiliation and offence to being referred to as a ‘bitch’ and retreating to the embrace of her special brand of weaponised feminism-of-convenience. Kanye repeatedly claimed to deaf ears that he’d asked her permission to use the lyrics but Swift utterly denied the story, painting headlines red with Kanye’s name. It wasn’t until Kanye’s wife Kim Kardashian noted she had video footage of a phone call between the two that the story gained real traction — and, ignoring a legal order from Swift’s team, Kardashian unleashed footage of the whole conversation on Snapchat. The evidence was brutal: Taylor had told Kanye she understood the lyrics as being a “compliment”, with Kanye explaining to her, “What I give a fuck about is just you as a person and as a friend. I want things that make you feel good, I don’t wanna do rap that makes people feel bad.” Swift responds, “Go with whatever line you think is better. It’s obviously very tongue-in-cheek either way. I really appreciate you telling me about it, that’s really nice.”
Cue the internet having a collective meltdown, and Taylor being branded a ‘snake’, putting her career on hold and going on a social media blackout from July last year.

The ‘New’ Taylor
Look What You Made Me Do is both a comeback record and a ‘reinvention’. Sampling Right Said Fred’s 1991 hit I’m Too Sexy (no, seriously), the 27 year-old claims that the ‘old’ Taylor is dead, but does so in classic Taylor Swift style — by opening her Burn Book, and publicly rewriting the pages of her tabloid-worthy nemeses. She references that they’re all on her “list” in ‘red underlined”, appealing to drama-hungry young fans but boring the adult world with her rehashed tale of victimisation. It’s a safe formula she’s profited from since the dawn of her career, and reveals nothing of a ‘new’ Taylor.
Throughout the track, it’s assumed Swift takes aim at both Katy Perry and the “feast” she threw in her single Bon Appetit, and Kanye West by disliking the “tilted stage” he utilised during his Saint Pablo Tour.
The lyrics flit curtly between various, vague and vanilla threats directed at a collective ‘you’, but their lack of venom reveals Swift to be a snake with more milk than rattle.
With the single, Swift is adopting the same approach that minorities and victims have in the past in an attempt to own their own narrative. By using the snake imagery in her teaser, wearing a snake ring in her video and even selling gold and silver-plated snake rings on her website, she’s attempting to reclaim a label that’s haunted her for the past year. This is the same approach the LGBT community took with the ‘queer’ label, and that the black community adopted by colloquialising the term ‘n*gga’ .
The only problem is: Swift isn’t a victim. She never was. And in 2017, false victimhood isn’t just yawn-inducing, it’s now politically incorrect.
Tone Deaf Taylor
Swift’s history of being racially tone deaf is well-documented. A country singer who grew up with two financial fund manager parents, Swift is a glowing product of white America. She’s such a perfect representation that Neo-Nazis and the alt-right have claimed her as an Aryan goddess (admittedly through no fault of her own — though her aversion to political dialogue has meant she’s never denounced the claim).

Aside from her blindingly white ‘Swift Squad’, a dollhouse of unbelievably beautiful and predominantly white female celebrities that includes the likes of Karlie Kloss, Cara Delevigne, Lily Aldridge, Hailee Steinfeld and Jaime King, Swift has made headlines numerous times for her disregard toward black culture and issues.

In 2014, she released Shake It Off, a viral hit with a video filmed around breakdancers and twerkers. All cast members, including Swift, were dressed in stereotyped clothes. Rapper Earl Sweatshirt offered a saliently somber comment on the video, calling it “inherently offensive and ultimately harmful”, and going on to vocalise the portrayal of novelty black culture as, “perpetuating black stereotypes to the same demographic of white girls who hide their prejudice by proclaiming their love of the culture”. Team Swift returned the volley by missing the point and calling the video “massively inclusive” (“if you look carefully”).

In 2015, she did it again. Her video for Wildest Dreams featured a whitewashed romanticisation of colonial Africa. Shot in both Africa and California, the video is a reflection of white privilege, holding a distorted mirror to the historically ugly period of African colonisation, and showing it as a dreamscape haven for rich white folk in which few black people exist. It served to confuse and alienate the black community further. Again, her team defended the video, while she remained silent.

Later in 2015, she fell deep into a trap of racial ignorance — this time, with Nicki Minaj. When the 2015 MTV Video for the Year nominees were announced, Minaj felt snubbed when her Anaconda video didn’t receive a nomination — a viral clip which had a deep cultural impact for its commercial representation of curvier women. Swift’s Bad Blood, however, was nominated, a video that featured her entire thin white Swift Squad. Minaj took to Twitter to question the nominations, tweeting, “If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you will be nominated for vid of the year”. Her point was aimed at ignoring black artists — a problem often discussed — but Swift immediately went into victim mode, dipping her pen in her well of distorted feminism to respond with, “I’ve done nothing but love & support you. It’s unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot…” The headlines took the story right from Minaj’s hands, denying her the chance to speak on the systemic discrimination she intended to comment on, and instead bolstered Swift by reintroducing her as the victim of the mythical ‘angry black woman’. Even serial slug Piers Morgan weighed in, telling Minaj to “not play the race card” (a frustrating instruction to any person of colour from a white commentator).
The Commercialisation of Victimhood
This ability to turn the tables and commercialise her victimhood has been Swift’s biggest boon. Outside of her albums, she first did it in 2009, when she appeared on SNL and poked PG fun at Kanye, who had interrupted her VMAs speech earlier that year. She has made serious bank doing this time and time again, writing songs about and spurring tabloid stories about seemingly everyone — Taylor Lautner, John Mayer, Harry Styles, Calvin Harris, Katy Perry, Joe Jonas, and plenty more. Her entire success rests on news cycles which send fans on scavenger hunts to decode her lyrics and find their subject, ensuring a continuous narrative that incorporates everyone within her immediate orbit. Sounding familiar? It’s exactly what she’s done with this latest single.

Look What You Made Me Do is a weak attempt to gain relevancy by creating a perpetrator of West, although this time with no cause. Her lyrics showcase her total lack of learning from her time in the wilderness, including a claim that Kanye forced her to play a role in the saga. The lyric is a reference to her public statement toward him in which she said, “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of” — an ironic angle, considering her career’s foundation on publicly dragging ex-lovers without their permission. She goes on to continue characterising Kanye as the angry black man, one who publicly attacked her through no fault of her own. It’s Disney-level villainy, and the innocent princess mantle is one she happily takes up, musing her need to become “stronger and harder” to combat the negative circumstances. Her narrative is one her fans have lapped up — expressing solidarity with her in an us vs world mentality, and using both a man, and a black one, as the villain.
The problem she now has is her attempt to rewrite history — specifically, to ignore that she and Kanye had buried the hatchet. Her attempt to subvert the story into a chart-topper (which there is no doubt she will achieve) is a blatant rewriting of circumstance, and one that displays her refusal to acknowledge a social responsibility.
Capitalising on In Vogue Black Culture
The video for the single premieres this weekend, but we’ve already had a taste. The ‘new’ Taylor is something we’ve seen before, but never so boldly. She adopts imagery from Beyonce’s seminal hit Formation, a critically-acclaimed ode to black culture. She’s flanked in the video by a squad of half-black half-white male dancers — her suite complete with Todrick Hall, who choreographed Beyonce’s Blow video. The ‘new’ Swift is Beyonce lite — it’s a digestible white version of the iconic black artist, one devoid of the divisive racial commentary that Knowles frequently engages in. As such, it’s a persona more commercially accessible to young middle-class white audiences, a key market in record sales.
We’ve seen Swift play the victim one too many times. Look What You Made Me do isn’t a new Taylor , it’s a Taylor who’s chosen to commercialise her ‘snake’ label by hitting West right where it hurts, in adopting a culture he’s partly responsible for building. In fact, she’s even stolen right from Kanye’s stable of merchandise — her new ‘rep’ merch has a typeface lifted directly from West’s Saint Pablo merchandise. Swift has again masterfully played ignorance to the real issues, using her adoring fans and a ubiquitous global dislike of Kanye to print a fortune.

Lessons Never Learned
Finally, let’s not ignore perhaps two of the grossest facts from the ‘new’ Taylor.
Breaking over a year of social media blackout, the track’s teaser and release come within ten days of Swift winning a sexual assault case against a radio DJ, wherein she made positive headlines for the first time since July 2016.
And the real clincher: Swift’s new album release date is also the 10th anniversary of Kanye West’s mother’s death. Is this a coincidence? Maybe. But from a woman whose sheer pettiness caused her to release her entire discography on Spotify the day that Katy Perry released her new album, is it really safe to assume this is an accident?
The Queen and Her Crown
Taylor Swift is royalty to white audiences who don’t understand why they can’t say the word ‘n*gga’. With this crown comes immunity to racial criticism, but that doesn’t mean that criticism shouldn’t be vocalised. While Katy Perry’s social ‘wokeness’ has been condemned, Swift’s refusal to engage in social commentary cannot be ignored. In the current social climate, it’s more important than ever to unmask players who not just benefit from white privilege, but actively capitalise on the black narrative, responding only to the extent that they can profit.