Am I A Taylor Swift Fan? It's Complicated.
White feminism, misogyny and exhausting contradictions.
In the nearly two decades since Taylor Swift burst onto the scene as a confessional country songwriter, her star has ascended beyond the known peaks of pop superstardom.
To-date, she’s written and released 10 acclaimed albums, few of which belong to the same genre. She’s re-recording six of those albums, an ambitious project (and flex) that’s so far been a massive commercial success. Her name is among the probably 100 or so names that most people on the planet have heard.
It wasn’t until releasing folklore and evermore, I think, that Swift gained a certain kind of grudging respect among snobbish holdouts as a singularly gifted songwriter, and I remembered what made me stop listening to her years ago. But I’m having complicated feelings about what it means to return to her music.
After folklore earned Swift stamps of approval from the cool art crowds and intellectuals, she went from being a global pop superstar to a global pop superstar whose work could — and should — be taken seriously, and not just by critics and the legions of loyal girls and women who built her career.
Listening to Taylor Swift was cool again. You didn’t have to be “feeling nostalgic;” you could queue her up alongside other cool artists, like Haim, Bon Iver, MUNA, Phoebe Bridgers, The National or St. Vincent — all of whom she’s collaborated with in recent years. Men — men! — could listen to her. Women could revisit her cozy, familiar catalog without feeling like they were indulging in a guilty pleasure. Maybe that’s just how it felt to me.
Like countless Millennials and elder Gen Z’ers, I grew up on Swift’s albums, many of which serve as the soundtrack for much of my adolescence and young adulthood. Red, for instance, is early college, miserable at a viciously conservative private university, which I would soon leave. 1989 is the backtrack to a lot of puking.
But soon, I graduated, and got a job, and began living as a Real Grown Up. And I stopped listening to Taylor Swift. Also, a bunch of other pop artists, too — not even Lady Gaga (!) or Beyoncé (!!) were immune to the sudden switch. It’s not as if I remember sitting down one day and deciding to delete all their songs from my phone (I have no idea we stored music 7-8 years ago). But when I look back, I see it: one minute, I’m listening to “Judas” or “Out of the Woods for the 4th time that morning; the next, a lever’s flipped, and, yeah, I’m actually into serious music now? Fringe indie songs about death? I also listen to mainstream indie rock, but it’s still totally off the beaten path?
Which feels deeply misogynistic, right? Why is pop music frivolous? Why do pop artists so often only get the reverence we quickly give artists of other genres after many years have passed? Damn! I’ve done a lot of work to dismantle internalized misogyny’s day-to-day impacts; then again, I subconsciously avoided my favorite artists in music’s biggest — and girliest — genre … for years?! Woof.
I’d completely forgotten how much I listened to Swift; as a songwriter, she’s unparalleled in her ability to communicate deeply personal stories that, by the end of the song, listeners swear they lived themselves. I forgot how much I loved escaping into those cozy, familiar stories over and over and over again.
“I was lured back, and I realised that I had missed it,” writes Bizzi Lavelle of revisiting Swift after folklore’s release.
Still, I’m torn. On the one hand, when I say I’m a Taylor Swift fan and feel a gut twinge, I fear it’s the pang of sexism and self-judgement so embedded as to be impossible to excavate. On the other hand, I think there are plenty of valid reasons to have complicated feelings about Taylor Swift!
Of course, there’s the Matty Healy of it all, which is to say Taylor Swift recently dated an awful rockstar troll who made racist jokes about the rapper Ice Spice on a podcast. Ice Spice is Nigerian and Dominican; Healy said she resembled a “chubby Chinese lady” and an “Inuit Spice Girl” with all the edge and intelligence of a steaming turd.
Outcry over Healy’s podcast appearance soon reached a fever pitch; within a couple weeks, the fling was over. A couple weeks after that, Swift featured Ice Spice on a remix. Swift’s smart and calculating, so people wondered: was the feature a star-boosting gesture of solidarity (not that Ice Spice needed Swift, of course), or was it clunky, contrived damage control? (My take: I truly have no idea. Maybe both?)
In addition to the white feminism of it all, there’s also Swift’s colossal wealth, nonstop corporate collaborations and a general desire among pretty much all her left-leaning fans that she be more explicit in expressing the convictions I suspect she holds. Also, too many smaller scandals to list, like the leaked Kanye call, which I do not and will never feel like getting into.
Here’s the thing: I wish Swift would use her reach to affect more profound political change. I wish tons of people with massive platforms did this, but I really wish she’d do it, because her power is, uh, insane. I believe it’s fully and indisputably immoral to hoard hundreds of millions of dollars for yourself. A couple million? OK, sure. Have some dubiously ethical fun. But hundreds!? What could you possibly need hundreds of millions of dollars for? To ensure your family’s prosperity for 200 generations?
Private jets suck; to fly one is to engage in peak cognitive dissonance. (Then again, how is somebody who’d get trampled to death in coach supposed to fly? I don’t know! I don’t come bearing solutions!)
The white feminism is particularly distressing. Getting with a guy like Healy — some sort of charismatic edgelord provocateur — sends a sad, confusing message to Swift’s millions of Black and brown fans. It also, unfortunately, sends a message to Swift’s younger fans that Healy’s behavior isn’t beyond the pale; that it’s fine to date guys like that, they’re just edgy. Nope! Not true!
And, quickly, as for Ice Spice: I think it’s cool to feature her on a remix. But without doing much else publicly, it looks like you’re saying, “To my fans of color: I am sorry I offended you. Here, look! It’s me, being nice to a woman of color!”
My suggestion for a meaningful, symbolic gesture to Swift’s hurt fans that wouldn’t feel as calculated? A very, very sizeable donation.
“But when her actions and inactions are not aligned with mine, or, in my view, supportive of me as a Blak person … it’s difficult,” writes Bizzi Lavelle in the same essay.
Obviously, I think all of those issues are worth critiquing and feeling legitimate frustration over. And that’s why it feels complicated to call myself a Taylor Swift fan. Too often these days, I worry it’ll mistakenly suggest I’m the worst kind of Swiftie: the kind that treats any criticism of Swift as sexist ol’ sexism that WoULdN’T Be sAiD aBoUT a MaN!
To be fair: Swift, like all famous women, is 100% held to a higher moral and ideological standard than her male counterparts. Swift also — Swifties, stay back — has lots of room for meaningful improvement. That’s … OK, I think? Disappointing, yes, but true of most people on the planet? Overall, she doesn’t strike me as an out-of-touch monster whose humanity has all but withered away, but as a probably decent person who continues to show growth in areas where there was once insensitivity or ignorance.
We forgave Beyonce for clutching her homophobic pearls after Britney and Madonna’s 2003 smooch at the VMAs. We’ve forgiven plenty of others for their misdeeds, too. I’m willing to extend some grace to someone who seems, again, more decent than despicable — as long as that remains the case.
Then again, this is starting to feel like a waste of energy. I am, not kidding, writing this at the airport while two men within earshot rave about Michael Jackson. What, exactly, is all this hand-wringing accomplishing? Are we centering the conversation around what (or who) matters, or are we just obsessed with talking about Taylor Swift?
Instead of pointing out the obvious sexism Swift is subjected to as reason not to criticize her at all, what if we … stopped talking about Swift so much? Thought about meaningful ways to hold all supremely wealthy people to higher standards? Questioned the very need for such wealth to exist? What if we called her out over her shit, of course, then focused on supporting and improving the communities we’re furious at Taylor Swift for offending … maybe, in part, because lots of us love talking about Taylor Swift so much?
This was on my mind when my husband and I caught the Eras film last Thursday. I’d been held up at the dispensary getting some essential concessions for a three-hour concert film; John’s backpack was stuffed with leftover burgers they fed him at work. In the theater, two young teenage girls were sitting in our assigned seats, smack in the middle of the row. When John politely told them they were in our seats, the girls stared at him, dumbfounded, and then looked straight back at the blank movie screen. They weren’t moving.
“Swiftie law,” I whispered. “Those are their seats now.”
We tucked our tails and shimmied past them, settling a few seats down the row. The theater was peppered with disparate pairs and trios of women and girls, all buzzing with giddy anticipation. One teen produced a large glass bottle from her tote; it was absolutely not purchased at this movie theater.
At the first shot of the Eras film, I gasped: the scale of the thing immediately takes your breath away. Immediately, you’re soaring above SoFi Stadium, packed with 70,000 screaming fans. Swift doesn’t wait long to arrive onstage, clad in her crystal-encrusted bodysuit. The spectacle that follows — dazzling, effervescent, humongous — solidifies her not just a singular songwriter who can make a football stadium feel intimate, but as a pop-phenom vixen who commands the stage without a trace of that innocent awkwardness that endeared her to the world 17 years ago. A lot has changed since then. It’d be foolish to assume she’s reached her final form.
I loved every word of this.