The teardrops on her guitar
Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love Taylor Swift
By Diane Newberry
I first discovered Taylor Swift’s music in summertime seclusion. It was the summer after her debut album was released in 2006. The album had been out for half a year, but most of my music listening was confined to my mom’s adult contemporary stations and my dad’s classic rock CDs. I’m not sure when I would have ever heard country music radio other than during a camping trip with my grandma, which is when Swift’s ‘Teardrops on My Guitar’ caught my attention on its frequent radio plays.
Swift’s real first hit was ‘Tim McGraw,’ but because her lyrics are the soul of her songwriting, I couldn’t connect as much to the longing, more mature love story of that song, nor the country music fandom on which its chorus hinges. What I could relate to as I went through another growth spurt the summer before fifth grade was feeling invisible to the people around me.
“I’ll bet she’s beautiful/That girl he talks about/And she’s got everythin’ that I have to live without,” Swift sings about the girl her unreciprocated love has his heart set on. With an earnest voice and self-consciously put-on twang, Swift sounded ambitious, but insecure. She was “relatable,” a fraught word in a media criticism, but palpable to a precocious 10-year-old.
I would never own a copy of a Taylor Swift CD, even though I actively tried to catch ‘Teardrops on My Guitar’ on the radio. I wasn’t a kid who asked for material things often, and my methods of listening to music were unstable. I would have CD players for a while, but they tended to be cheap and I tended to be careless. Sometime during fifth grade, I would finally get the holy grail: an iPod nano. But by the time I was buying songs at $0.99 a pop, my interest in ‘Teardrops’ had waned. The turning point had happened in autumn, when I returned to my New England elementary school and everyone seemed to be talking about Swift.
My fifth grade experience, to be clear, was not devoid of appreciation for wide-sweeping pop culture, but for some reason the fact that everyone seemed to know about Swift was more offensive to me than sharing a love of another pop star or TV show. Here, I was using Swift’s vulnerable songwriting against her. Her songs are written like secrets between friends, the lyrics full of richness and specificity. The best of them are an immersive and emotional experience, if one is willing to feel big emotions in their fullness, the way young girls perpetually do. It was a way for me to explore the adult world I was beginning to be cognizant of, and other people sharing that experience made me feel embarrassed.
So, for a long time, I simply lost interest in Swift. Her next two albums, ‘Fearless’ and ‘Speak Now’ made little impact on me. I could recognize some singles but didn’t seek her out. In my tweens and teens, I stuck mostly to classic rock, even hosting a radio show on a local AM station from about 2011-2013 that trafficked in deep cuts from the 60s, 70s and 80s.
A teenage girl’s attraction to classic rock does reflect a certain amount of internalized misogyny. It is a genre respected and championed by mostly men. In those earlier days of Facebook, I was used to seeing memes attacking the merits of pop music (especially pop music that appealed to teenage girls), but not so much vitriol directed toward Janis Joplin or the Beatles. That’s not to say my love of 60s and 70s music was insincere; I still do love much of it. But for a long time, it was core to my identity because it felt safe. As someone who didn’t always fit in at school, it was also an emotional outlet that felt private to me, in a way Swift’s popular girly, showy emoting could not at the time.
Swift’s next albums, ‘Red’ and ‘1989’ were harder to ignore, their smash success scattering her massive singles across culture like confetti. My personal music listening was still constrained to my parents’ CD collection, vinyl I’d managed to buy with babysitting money and classic rock radio, so my memories of these albums are mostly of watching the singles’ music videos on YouTube. I felt compelled to watch them because I was so intrigued by what everyone in school and ballet class was referencing, and I found myself coming back to them once in a while, even though I didn’t think of myself as a Swift fan in any real sense.
When I finally subscribed to one of those new-fangled music streaming services, Spotify, in early 2015, Swift was withholding her music from the platforms in a very valid protest of a revenue model that cheated artists and songwriters. A worthy protest, looking back, but another element that kept me at a distance from Swift’s work, my only impressions of her from her music videos and constant tabloid and media criticism chatter. Although I might not have been listening to her, it was almost impossible in 2015-2016, as I entered college, to look away from her.
This was the height of her jet-setting, it-girl status. Though I wouldn’t say I actively disliked her, the media images I got at the time didn’t endear Swift to me. Her sleek Instagram photos heavily featured ‘The Squad,’ a social group of young starlets and models who were mostly thin, rich and white. Swift seemed to exert a large amount of control over the women. Their rituals, like surprise appearances on her ‘1989’ tour and annual 4th of July blowouts at her Rhode Island mansion, reminded me of the ostentatious sorority activities on my college campus.
At this time, I also had a troubled relationship with my body. This shaped the way I thought about Swift, who seemed to be at her thinnest in these years, her wardrobe almost completely comprised of crop tops. Swift has since talked about her struggles with disordered eating and compulsion to stay thin in her Netflix documentary ‘Miss Americana’ and an essay written for Elle Magazine, ‘30 Things I learned Before Turning 30.’ She was feeling the same pressures I was in regards to her body, and my resentment of her was based heavily on my perception that she was conforming to the beauty standard better than I was. My dislike of her was rooted in my own insecurities. Swift herself makes a similar observation in her Elle essay:
“…never being popular as a kid was always an insecurity for me. Even as an adult, I still have recurring flashbacks of sitting at lunch tables alone or hiding in a bathroom stall, or trying to make a new friend and being laughed at. In my twenties I found myself surrounded by girls who wanted to be my friend. So I shouted it from the rooftops, posted pictures, and celebrated my newfound acceptance into a sisterhood, without realizing that other people might still feel the way I did when I felt so alone. It’s important to address our long-standing issues before we turn into the living embodiment of them.”
Part of what chafed me about the ‘Squad’ was the slick conformity of them, and the breathless way in which the press reported who seemed to be “in” and who seemed to be “out.” Swift’s embrace of familiar high school hierarchies made me distrustful of her.
It wasn’t just me turning against Swift at this time, as she had become a prominent symbol of ‘white feminism.’ She seemed entitled, with an aggravating victim complex. When Kanye West’s 2016 album ‘The Life of Pablo’ contained lyrics referencing his infamous 2009 interruption of Swift’s Video Music Awards acceptance speech, a frustrating era in Swift’s career began.
“I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/Why? I made that bitch famous,” West sings on ‘Famous.’
Though West claimed Swift had approved the lyric, Swift’s camp immediately denied this, calling the song “misogynistic.” At this point, I and most of the world were on Swift’s side. West’s VMAs interruption was widely regarded as rude, and even though he and Swift had appeared friendly in the intervening years, this joke wasn’t in good taste.
The tide would turn against Swift when West’s wife, Kim Kardashian West, released a Snapchat video featuring Swift hearing part of the lyric over the phone and approving it. If one wasn’t following the granular, drama-filled trail of clues here, it was easy to walk away believing a simple narrative of “Taylor pretended to be a victim, and Kim had the footage to call her out.” Swift’s withering musical tear-downs of her high-profile exes and championing of “feminism” from a consicuous place of privilege served as fodder for this narrative. If you believed the worst, you saw the worst.
Later, it would be revealed that Kardashian West had doctored the video in such a way to imply that Swift had approved the full lyric, but in truth, it was not
“I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex” she objected to; it was “I made that bitch famous.” She would forgive West for his manners, but not for claiming any of her hard-won success. Swift released her album ‘Reputation’ in 2017, and most of the press revolved around its nods to her celebrity drama.
‘Look What You Made Me Do,’ while one of the weakest songs on the album, was a lead single, and the music video had one hell of a splashy debut. I watched it on my phone, sitting outside of my apartment after a long day of college classes and work. I had locked myself out, and while I waited for my boyfriend at the time to come home, I struggled to connect to the weak wifi signal because I needed to see the video I had heard murmurs about all day, in person and online.
‘Look What You Made Me Do’ is a camp masterpiece, with Swift visually embracing the stone cold, master-manipulator image she had been saddled with amid the West controversy. She lies in a bathtub full of jewels, she holds court on a golden throne surrounded by snakes, she utters the immortal line: “I’m sorry, but the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, because she’s dead.” Above all, it’s funny, and a sense of humor and self-awareness was exactly what had been missing from Swift’s image over the past few years. There were glimmers of it in the 2014 ‘Blank Space’ video, but that send-up focused on romantic relationships, while ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ had more ambitious aims.
The finale of the video features several caricatures of Swift at different points in her career, fighting amongst themselves. The Swift wearing the 2009 VMAs dress is meek, the awkward teenage Swift from the ‘You Belong With Me’ video is twee, and the Hollywood-glamour Swift is shallow and calculating, stirring up drama online. Though mostly a gag (and a great visual example of Swift’s endurance as an evolving icon), this scene is also a shrewd commentary. Swift has narrativized her life since she was 17, imbuing her art with personal stories and details. She trafficks in vulnerability, but doing so during her formative years meant the world would see her falter, fail, and learn. And while part of her appeal to die-hard fans is the chance to delve into the richness of her biography, a casual pop culture consumer is inclined to base their assumptions of her very public life on the bits and pieces of persona that make their way to them through tabloid covers, morning DJs and social media quips.
Though Swift’s 2019 album ‘Lover’ is one of her weaker releases, it is the first album of hers I listened to intentionally, and continued to have on heavy rotation as I faced an hour-long daily commute at the time. I had been rejected by all of the post-grad programs I’d applied for and was working my first “real job” post-college. I had never been so unsure of my own identity.
On ‘Lover,’ Swift isn’t as focused on the anger being misunderstood by the public makes her feel. Though less musically inventive than ‘Reputation,’ its lyrics show more introspection, and at that time, it was comforting to hear Swift start to sound more mature, more at peace. ‘Lover’ – whose (terrible) first single is aptly titled ‘ME!’ – is Swift’s last real album that is about being Taylor Swift. It’s well-constructed pop, but it’s easy to hear her straining against the confines of the confessional genre she dominated at her pop peak in ‘1989.’
It is not a coincidence that this was her last album before the pandemic. Her next two albums were released because of – not despite – the tumultuous year of 2020. The first of the two, ‘folklore,’ was made in work-from-home isolation. It’s a stripped down, indie rock-influenced masterpiece that highlighted Swift’s artistry. The second album, ‘evermore’ often gets overlooked due to being her second surprise release in one year, but its unconventional folk songs showcase Swift’s lyrical strengths at their fullest.
Both albums convey a sense of isolation. The songs are no longer about the busy, glamorous, drama-filled social life of a young woman. They are mature stories full of imagined characters and complex emotions. Swift’s records always dealt in part with her conflict over how the public perceived her, but on these two albums, she has let loose, baring her artistic soul in a way that doesn’t leave her private life dangling as an exposed nerve for public scrutiny. She’d been using music to process the complexities of emotion for the past 14 years, but on these albums, she has more distance, more maturity.
The pandemic has fundamentally changed the way most – if not all – people see the world. Old assumptions and petty worries seemed to slough off through the months. I made some major life changes, and have accepted there’s more of a degree of uncertainty to life. ‘folklore’ and ‘evermore’ exemplify this feeling to me. It was a new, honest, uncynical direction for a pop star.
My love of these albums spurred a deep exploration of Swift’s discography. Her career when sketched out can be seen as a complex, arcing narrative, each album a clear step forward sonically, professionally and personally. As Swift achieves massive success in ongoing re-recordings of classic albums of hers, critics can contend with what her sharp storytelling meant then, as well as now.
Swift has always been a complicated icon, her mix of honesty and showmanship always a lightning rod for social critique and reflection. Her career and work are rich texts that continue to enthrall me and many others, and as she dives into her 30s, I look forward to what else she has to say about the maddening experience of being alive.
Barnard Street Tattler 