Are You Ready for It? Re-Evaluating Taylor Swift

Half of me—an intangible half—is alive;

the other part has gone I don’t know where—

  … 

I amble the library stacks and get lost in YA;

I want to go home, paint my nails until they iridesce,

clamp on my headphones, and pray to Taylor Swift.

“(Epigram 42)” Stephanie Burt, After Callimachus (2020)

Taylor Swift is a monument to the idea that there once was a place called America. She recalls an old American dream—of high school popularity contests, apple pies, dreamy boys next door, and a very old, very white, Christian nation. She is classic, insofar as her lyrics are about ‘me and the boy’, rarely tag the present moment, and animate sing-alongs at her family-friendly concerts (she is a children’s performer by trade). With apologies to Greil Marcus, she’s ‘the old normal America’, made up into a meme-able, glitter-pink, red lip, femme identity, easy to co-opt into whatever paradoxical meanings her various twenty-first-century fans might need.

‘Mommy, is Taylor Swift still white?’ a young boy asks his mother as she tucks him into bed at the end of Saturday Night Live’s (2016) mock movie trailer entitled ‘The Day Beyoncé Turned Black’. The skit parodies white audiences’ confusion over Beyoncé’s music video (‘Formation’) and subsequent pro-Black Superbowl performance that somehow don’t seem to be made ‘for them’. The skit pokes fun at white fans losing their minds when they discover that Beyoncé is Black. The punchline of the skit plays with Taylor Swift’s overcoding as white, even though it only works because she too, like Beyoncé, is one of the ‘Girls [who] Run the World’ of pop. Indeed, Taylor Swift has become an archetype of whiteness in the modern pop music world, a whiteness often encoded by commentators into her awkward dancing and stilted body movements. As one critic put it, ‘She’s got the poise of a wax figure! … She’s a Human Statue’.¹ Taylor may be a monument to an old, white America, but she’s also an avatar of a future that is female.

Via her varied personas—girl-next-door, cheerleader, heartbreaker, nerdy girl, businesswoman or cottagecore explorer—Taylor Swift is both a monument to the past and a modern megalith, toppling the music industries through her appeal to people that historically and culturally have been told that their musical tastes are invalid (like Country fans and teenage girls). To her international fans, Taylor Swift is a cute Barbie, seen as the quintessential American girl (notwithstanding Barbie’s post-WWII birth as a statuesque German sex doll). And she performs a contradictory image, appealing equally to six-year-old girls and sixty-year-old men (that final fanbase, at last, secured by her folklore album). To ‘know’ Taylor Swift is the prize of the pleasurable, unpaid labour of her fans, who believe they have sleuthed to find her authentic, oh-so unposed truth. But her truth is like that of Bruce Springsteen² (see Frith 1988), paradoxical and perplexing: Taylor Swift is the girl-next-door/millionaire, the hopeless romantic/savvy businesswoman, and a silly teenager/serious adult singer-songwriter.

Taylor Swift has long been comfortable with conflicting personas, even as she embodies a feminist American dream for girls and young women finding their way in a nation still riven by misogyny as well as racism. Her lyrics can be equivalent to a basic rom-com plot or demonstrate how feeling different or getting bullied can propel an escape out of small towns to the cosmopolitan centres of America, placing art practice as a ticket out of a mundane life. Taylor Swift’s endless rise in American popular culture supports Dyer’s ([1979] 1998) view of stardom as a reflection of the American Dream of upwardly mobile success.

At once villain and victim, Swift has played off her multiple (and growing) list of contradictory personas since some of her earliest performances. The music video for ‘You Belong with Me’, the one that infamously beat Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’ for ‘Best Female Video’ in 2009, has Taylor playing two femme archetypes: she’s the literal girl-next-door, longing and looking out of her suburban bedroom at the just-out-of-reach boy next door, and she’s also the video’s villain, a far-more popular cheerleader who actually has the boy wrapped around her finger. It reminds us of Swift’s adeptness at ‘playing’ personas that range far indeed from her lived truths. And yet, at the core of these performed personas, we encounter a consistent claim to authenticity, signalling her good girl truth, enhanced by her biography of having been raised on a Christmas tree farm as a polite, innocent, Christian child. Her performances have been so convincing that, when folklore arrived, the general public bought into the myth that this was her first time ever writing music that was not somehow about her own life and experiences; but her fans were sold the idea that they were now getting a behind-the-scenes exposé of the real ‘Taylor Swift’.

And that’s the point. Although people still want to believe in a particular idea and ideal of an America that has passed into history, Swift equally gives them room to imagine a feminist future. Taylor Swift’s career has morphed as she has accrued experience in the entertainment industries. This is why Taylor Swift is the last great rock star, still selling CDs at scale in a time when CD sales are effectively over (see Théberge 2021). The best-selling album of 2019, Lover, had four deluxe versions released. Each included different diary entries claiming to document Taylor’s life as she was starting out as a performer, but importantly also included blank pages meant to prompt her young fans toward their own forms of self-expression.

Taylor Swift is not only one of the highest grossing American artists today. She is also one of the few female artists effortlessly headlining Stadium tours—when that industry existed—ably promoted via social media and awards show kerfuffles. Although played in the media as a catfight, her feud with Katy Perry (2013–2014) was also a business dispute, about employees and contracts (scheduling conflicts over back-up dancers that were needed by both performers at the same time). And while Kanye West claimed to make her famous, among other things,³ at that time, she was already successful, but only on one side of the U.S.’s sonic colour line (Stoever 2016).

When Taylor Swift retaliated with her Reputation Tour, one critic called Taylor Swift a battle rapper,⁴ and it is an insightful comparison. Although her attempts to do anything hip hop fail—after all, her image is quintessentially white girl without rhythm—her penchant is to use public feuds (almost always over business) as fuel for songwriting content, as hip hop artists often do. Yet when she dabbles, unsuccessfully, with rap and hip hop iconography, or with twerking and with trans/drag/queer protest movements, she is called out for cultural appropriation (see Avdeeff 2021, and Smialek 2021, who both address responses to her video, ‘You Need to Calm Down’). When she was celebrated by an alt-right website and did not speak out, the public was disappointed by her absence. In this context, Prins (2020) argues there is a similar emptiness in how her lyrical content signifies, leaving room to be (mis) interpreted by white supremacists. That Taylor Swift has come to represent an Aryan goddess for the alt-right reveals the complexity of her identity. The alt-right’s embrace of her white, skinny beauty myth suggests that it, too, is going out of fashion; is no longer the ideal. As Sabrina Strings (2019) explains, in the late nineteenth century, ‘the Nordic/Aryans were thought to be characteristically tall and lean. And since the United States was viewed as the melting pot par excellence of the Nordic/Aryan races, thinness came to be viewed as a form of American exceptionalism’ (147). The conversation about American ideals of ‘thinness’ also played out around nominations for an award show: as Nicki Minaj posted in 2015, ‘If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you will be nominated for vid of the year’ to which Taylor Swift, who was nominated, unlike Minaj, responded, ‘I’ve done nothing but love & support you. It’s unlike you to pit women against each other … ’ Minaj responded in turn that it was not about Swift, but rather about her own lack of nominations for her music, and the feud-hungry ‘white media’. Culture has shifted swiftly since then. Yet Taylor’s epic status in popular culture seems to beg the question: can she ever be toppled?

Swift’s Reputation tour, her last stadium tour before the COVID-19 pandemic, was the highest grossing of 2018, and epitomised a hybrid, new/old America: more self-assured, selling the spectacle of a woman pop star-millionaire done wrong and now gone bad (yet without the requisite self-sexualization of so many of her peers⁵). Although fans were sceptical, many old fans, mostly women in their twenties who grew up listening to Taylor, felt relieved to find she only had a few scorned-woman-gets-revenge songs and that they could still find her crooning the sweet, girly songs about love.⁶ Her REPtour was a global conquest; headlining the Croke Park stadium in Ireland, for example, Taylor proudly announced that she was the first female performer to do two nights in a row there. Here is a feminism of American frontiers⁷; success as a measure of firsts, from a country still not come to grips with its own self-centredness, never mind its self-destructiveness.

Taylor Swift’s collaborative songwriting practices are equally paradoxical. When Taylor Swift first left Nashville and interloped into the realm of contemporary pop, it simultaneously heightened attention to the co-production of her songwriting⁸ and solidified her auteur status, with her own signature melodic style (see Sloan, 2021⁹). The general public must now believe that ‘she writes her own music’ in order for her to join the pantheon of rock or pop Gods: for the mythology to work, the co-production of all of her albums, not to mention her live shows, has to be organised so as to obscure the collaborations, even as she identifies them explicitly (see Arnold 2021). To claim artistic agency, a feminist must also claim a degree of industrial autonomy her male peers do not. Downplaying collaboration involving men supports another disavowal about how ownership of music works: that Taylor writes her own music but doesn’t own her own back catalogue. The public feud with Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta obscures the board of directors, shareholders, and various others that have profited from Taylor Swift’s labour¹⁰ including her own parents (see Théberge 2021).

On folklore (2020), Swift returns to a narrative formula taken from country music conventions in the song ‘the Last Great American Dynasty’, about a middle-class, white woman who marries rich, and proceeds to throw crass parties and blow through widow money. The country-genre-inspired turn of events concludes with the big reveal that the house, where the woman threw lavish and loud parties, had been ‘bought by me’. The ‘me’ being Taylor Swift, the trilogy: singer, songwriter, and persona. This is what Antoine Hennion (1990) identifies in his remarks on how persona works in popular music: the voice, the image, and a history are co-produced in the studio so as to cohere and convince. Stars need to be believable in who they say they are, they need to look and sound the part, and it’s a team that works together to ensure that happens. Pollock (2014) argues that Taylor Swift’s believable innocence is tied to white privilege. And, for women in the pop industry, it’s always a tough sell to convince audiences that they are the producers of their words, images, and sounds, especially when they are young.¹¹

A telling insight into Taylor Swift’s personas is found at the Grammy Museum in 2015, where she performs ‘Blank Space’ dressed in a black turtleneck, like a serious 1960s woman poet.¹² Although not her first attempt to distance herself from a tween persona,¹³ there is a moment, when she introduces the song while holding her acoustic guitar, that profoundly shows her crafting of personas. She explains that she took the media’s personification of the dumb blond, boy-crazy, gorgeous/desperate ‘Taylor Swift’ and turned it on its head for the song’s source material.¹⁴ Her vocal performance then enhances her explanation of her songwriting. Swift’s vocals are breathy and background one moment and over the top melodic and articulated the next, showing how there are two sides to the caricature and, yes, it is all a bit unhinged even as it is carefully controlled and perfectly in tune.

Caricatures of the wealthy also inform her songwriting. Richard Dyer ([1979] 1998) explains that Hollywood behind-the-scenes photos are produced to sell the extravagant lifestyles of the stars, such as the lavish swimming pool parties they throw. Taylor Swift takes the behind-the-scenes media star-texts and turns them into song content by also writing songs about parties with champagne-filled swimming pools, and her music video content includes her strutting through a mansion or in a bathtub clutching her pearls. Unlike Springsteen, she must mock media misogyny at every turn because the available, believable personae for women in art (and commerce) are so limited. She regularly downplays her millionaire status, disavowing media (mis)representations of her wealth and undercutting the very ecosystem of entertainment that put her on top of the pop charts.

There is a clear shift in sister albums folklore and evermore to Taylor as an artist somehow now on the outskirts of American society rather than dominating its de facto centre. In the evermore song, ‘Cowboy Like Me’, the singer is simultaneously a con woman duping people out of their money, and a hopeless romantic, Swift’s tried-and-true trope. ‘Forever is the sweetest con’, sings a star who knows her personas and is truly her own myth-making musical Paparazzo.¹⁵ Lately, she has been serenading us whilst waltzing around the countryside, like some quintessential devotee of TikTok lesbian cottagecore. In doing so, she is imagining a new national anthem, less a monument to old, outdated American values, and more a tenacious and tender, newly-hopeful romantic one: a fem(me)inism uploaded for the twenty-first century.

***

Ever since the invention of electronic media, from the phonograph to TikTok, people have defined their personal histories through the music they were hearing when they were living them. And music has also defined the other. The 60s were characterised by psychedelic rock. The 70s sounds like disco, rap and punk. The 80s gave us Madonna, and the 1990s were all about grunge. But when people look back at the world after 9/11, what music will they remember best? Surely the songs of Beyoncé and her husband Jay Z will be high on the list. Everyone knows at least one song by Adele, and there is quite a few popping little numbers by other artists that we will all hum and sing along to at the golden-oldies concerts of the future. And yet … if one were to name the single artist whose story encapsulates many of the urgent conflicts in early twenty-first-century American culture, that artist might well be … Taylor Swift?

Yes, it sounds crazy. Surely a conservative, young, white woman working in the field of mildly catchy country-pop doesn’t have quite the same cultural stature as a Bob, a Beyoncé or a Bruce. We, the editors, beg to differ. While it is true that her music is aggressively apolitical, there are many aspects of Swift’s career that are emblematic of the era in which she came to prominence in and that highlight changes in popular music, the music industry, and in audiences since the days when Bob Dylan spoke for times that were a-changing. In fact, in 2018, at the age of 29, Swift’s place in the zeitgeist, was eerily similar to that of the 29-year-old Bob Dylan. Like him, she had ten albums out (including four live albums); also, like Dylan at 29, she had already cycled through several significant changes of genre. Throughout the 1960s, Dylan’s work was intensely, sonically, influential. And while Swift’s oeuvre itself may not stand the test of time in quite the same way, a recent survey by the guitar maker Fender revealed that over half of new guitar sales are now made to women, a phenomenon which they dubbed ‘The Taylor Swift factor’, meaning that her influence may have an even more lasting effect on how popular music sounds, going forward (Wang 2018; O’Connor 2018). Like Bob Dylan, Taylor Swift is ubiquitous.

That Swift may be replacing Dylan feels a bit like reparations. Dylan’s work influenced a generation of singer/songwriters, as well as those who wished to write about music, rather than make it, but unfortunately, he is responsible for, among other things, a swath of material which relegates women to objects and does worse. The women of his songs, as many have noted, are, as Katrina Forrester (2020), writing in N + 1, put it, ‘Unappealing. They were clawing, childish, neurotic, and demanding, women who wanted too much or took what he didn’t want to give.¹⁶ The feminist invocation of Dylan inhabited the uncomfortable terrain between critique and homage: could they use his words to transcend the relations of a world that he described so well yet also embodied? When Ellen Willis (2012) later revised her classic 1967 essay on Dylan, she wrote that he exemplified the ‘bohemian contempt for women’.

Contempt for women, in songs, on the radio, in bands, in media, and in the music business in general has been a byword since that industry’s inception, but due to his high stature and influence Dylan’s embrace of that vision in his music surely has had some impact on subsequent generations of songwriters. If Swift’s work is inspiring young women to buy guitars and write their own songs, then we have a reason to encourage this. That Taylor Swift matters today in the same way that Dylan did in the 1960s is indisputable. This was made clear recently when, after 13 years of silence on political matters—even in the face of her cooption by the alt-right, who called her ‘an Aryan goddess’ (see Prins 2020)—Swift reversed course, endorsing several Democratic candidates and urging fans to register to vote: and within 24 h, over 160,000 had done so.

It is this that has prompted us, as editors, to consider her as the subject of this special issue. Just as Dylan’s early history and work encapsulate much about the 1960s, we see Swift’s work as symptomatic of some of the more vexing aspects of the twenty-first century, and therefore able to provide the perfect lens through which to consider issues of race, class, gender, and the rise of neoliberalism in America. The chapters in this Special Issue approach the topics of her stardom, songwriting, and business sense from frameworks that seek to centre the musical phenomenon that is Taylor Swift. Thus, Nate Sloan discusses Taylor Swift’s songwriting through a series of case studies that show how the competing forces of commercial success and the need for a focused and coherent star identity shape and propel the technical skills of music creation. These case studies also reveal the collaborative effort, as discussed above. Gina Arnold compares the choices made by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé Knowles, for live shows and Netflix specials, to get at the heart of American racial injustices and oblivions. By comparing the two media productions ‘Reputation’ and ‘Homecoming’, Arnold highlights the ways in which social, political, and cultural conflicts play out in the media, and the powerful forces within music, dance, and image that shape social change. Paul Théberge addresses Taylor Swift as a businesswoman in a changing music industry. As Swift herself has projected an image of business savvy and success, Théberge reflects on the ways in which commercial and aesthetic decisions arise out of the conflicting power structures that define those two polarities, exploring the often contradictory but symbiotic relationship between art and industry. Mila Volpe takes a more person-centred approach to explore the experience of the fan embodiment of Taylor Swift, through the domestic performance of her songs. As guitar sales have surged in the wake of Swift’s success, as discussed above, Volpe investigates the experience of the individual fan performance of covers of Swift’s songs as a radical way of knowing. Melissa Avdeeff considers the effects of social media and digital spaces on wider issues of popular culture, and the position of the star figure within it. Using sophisticated methodological approaches, Avdeeff analyses the reception of Taylor Swift’s music on different social media platforms, exploring online communities and ambient affiliations, performative allyship, and cancel culture. Eric Smialek, like Avdeeff, considers Swift’s music video ‘You Need to Calm Down’, but from a political perspective, exploring how Swift’s lyrical choices have provoked public discussion that impacts on wider political formations and contentions extending beyond popular culture, showing the power of the star figure, and of the music industry, to focus issues and propel social change.

In the era of #metoo and #BLACKLIVESMATTER, we are moving past pop and rock narratives that are centred on white male artists and perspectives. We hope that this special issue will contribute to the process of reconsidering and repositioning not only Swift, but also other women artists and their fans, as young scholars who grew up listening to Taylor Swift find themselves called to the study of serious (i.e. Taylor Swift) music.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mary Fogarty

Mary Fogarty is Associate Professor in the School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design at York University (Toronto, Canada). She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies and a special issue of Global Hip Hop Studies about Breaking and the Olympics (both forthcoming). Currently, Fogarty is the President of IASPM-Canada and Editor-in-Chief of IASPM Journal.

Gina Arnold

Gina Arnold is a former music writer and critic who now teaches Rhetoric and Media Studies at the University of San Francisco. Her latest book, Half a Million Strong: Crowds and Power at Music Festivals, From Woodstock to Coachella (University of Iowa Press, 2018), is about the ideology at music festivals. She is also co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock (2020).

Notes

1 http://www.mtv.com/news/2719033/taylor-swift-posture/ (Lindner 2015).

2 Actually Frith’s reading of Springsteen’s fashion and posing for paparazzi has striking parallels to Ed Sheeran’s everyday Joe/streetbusking man in uniform of plaid and jeans no matter the circumstances.

3 See Cullen (2016) for a great read on the racial melodrama of the Kanye West and Taylor Swift feud.

4 See Donnella (2018).

5 See Brown (2012).

6 Mary Fogarty attended six performances of the Reputation Tour in four countries. Many fans before the show included explanations that they preferred the ‘old Taylor’ or ‘McGraw Taylor’ (i.e. country music Taylor) but enjoyed the concert, nevertheless. A father in an elevator filled with little girls assured that he enjoyed the show until they had all exited the elevator, at which point he bemused, ‘who doesn’t like to be surrounded by thousands of screaming girls?’ Many tired mothers looked relieved when Taylor Swift hit the piano thus signaling to the crowd that they could return to their seats.

7 See Greg Grandin’s (2019) overview of the changing meaning of the word ‘frontier’, in his chapter, “A Caucasian Democracy: ‘All beyond was wilderness’.” in The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.

8 See McNutt (2020) for a detailed account.

9 On the musicologically-informed podcast, Switched on Pop, on an episode devoted to Taylor Swift, Sloan and Harding (2020) elaborate on Taylor Swift’s musical signatures including the ‘t-drop’.

10 See Swan (2012) for the legal transformation when artists became property; a gendered affair that, like Taylor Swift’s public feuds with Scooter Braun, draws attention to the ties between misogyny, music, and ownership and provides some historical context.

11 A curious turn for Taylor is that in her re-recordings of early albums, her more mature voice doesn’t sound convincing for the innocent narratives of young love that she had original wrote.

12 Margaret Atwood (2002) describes how there were two options for white women at this time, housewife in sweater set, or poet/art type in turtleneck.

13 See Keightley (2016) for a historical example of the Beach Boys’ marketing efforts to transition them from boy band to serious artists. Taylor Swift’s album folklore makes a similar pivot in public perception and also squarely landed her back in apolitical songwriting land.

14 Swift (2016) performs ‘Blank Space’ at the Grammys Museum.

15 Diaz (2020) suggests that paparazzi are often Latinx men, and while the celebrity press is mostly middle-class white women, these two groups working in symbiosis, although one is given some clout and the other is demonized.

16 As Dylan howls in “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” (1965), “I want to be your lover, baby, I don’t want to be your boss”.