Okay, Let's Talk About Taylor Swift
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On Friday (or late Thursday depending on whether you prefer the de facto or de jure interpretation of release dates) Taylor Swift released 1989, the latest in her album re-recordings. If you’ve been attempting to ignore Taylor Swift out of some kind of sisyphean contrarian spirit, or have managed to create a life that doesn’t involve either ongoing celebrity discourse or social media, you may have missed it. I did not, although I waited to listen to it until a respectable 9:00 am on Friday morning, rather than waiting up to listen on Thursday night.
I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a swiftie. Though I love Taylor Swift’s music, and enjoy keeping an eye on her public comings and goings, I have not sought the specialized knowledge that comes with fandom. But, she is the only artist whose album releases I track, whose music I listen to the day it’s first released. The first single I remember was Love Story in 2008, preluding her second album release, sent to me by a beloved friend1 who to this day keeps me in concert tickets and gossip updates. I’ll be honest, at the time I thought Love Story was kind of boring until the last verse, a happy little hiccup tonal shift that Taylor does so well in her more narrative songs. Since then every new album release has hit just a little differently, new songs to love, to feel seen by.
To call Taylor Swift the voice of a generation is an unimaginable exaggeration, not least because we much too often falsely universalize the experience of white women. But there is something about her highly specific song writing style that resonates widely. Of course, the puzzle of sorting out which of her songs applies to her public relationships and public breakups adds context, makes each song feel more intimate - girls in their bedrooms at a sleepover, making a best friend out of a distant popstar. But there’s something to the specificity even beyond that performed intimacy. Perhaps you haven’t had a breakup or a relationship or an experience that echoes hers, but the strength of her feelings, the yearning, the anger, the heartbreak, the guilt, the nostalgia, that can be so very familiar. Those I’ve been able to weave within my own growing up. And of course, every once in a while there’s one that feels like she pulled it right out of my heart, put words to something I don’t know how to say, a story I don’t know how to tell.
When 1989, the stolen version (see here for details), was first released, I was in grad school, living in Boston. Forever and always, I will associate it with our favorite dive bar, the site of untold numbers of whiskey gingers, with an unplugged hotdog machine in the corner and a dance floor that would emerge around 11:30 every night. The best nights involved a bar full of plaid and safety-pin clad hipsters jumping up and unison to Shake It Off. I met some of my favorite people in undergrad, but mostly those years were a haze of anxiety and uncertainty, crawling into myself. Grad school, in some ways, was a chance to do it better, more sure of myself, at home in different parties and performing better in different classes. In 2014, Taylor and I both stepped onto a bigger stage.
But as she put out other albums, was embroiled in bigger publicity messes, stumbled and then disappeared, I always felt like 1989, as good as it was, was also the album where Taylor was trying most to be in on the joke. Knowing how the world tracked her movements, dissected her relationships, demanded intimacy and then judged it, 1989 was a wink and a smile and a fabulous dress. It's spectacularly done but it still very much wants to be liked. In 2014 Taylor and I both still very much wanted to be liked. As the pop music critic for the Washington Post, Chris Richards, wrote, “Has anyone this revered cared this much about what many millions of strangers are thinking about them on an hourly basis without losing their focus, let alone their mind?” I don’t have her millions of strangers, but boy do I have her caring.
And yet, with the new version of 1989 Taylor doesn’t seem to care as much - it no longer feels like she’s trying to be in on the joke, she is in on it. The wink and the smile is no longer for us, but for her younger self who thought by laughing along with everyone would make it hurt less when they were laughing at her, a gentle acknowledgment that she didn’t have to care so much then and the release both she and her music seemed to find when she stopped. As Richards also wrote about Taylor Swift’s re-recorded albums, albeit more specifically about Speak Now, they are “weird little jolts of time travel…Swift is giving us two versions of the past: an original yesterday, and a re-created one that’s just technically less old.” The vault tracks she added bring the vulnerability the original album was missing - Slut the other side of the Blank Space coin, the more dissonant hurt underneath the more polished rebuttal. They are 2014’s heartbreaks and 2014’s hurts, but we get to hear them today because of the intervening years.
Taylor Swift lives in a world that constantly wants more of her, and constantly demands to see less. After her most recent relationship ended after 6 years in which we hardly ever saw her in public, after she was rumored to leave her apartment in a suitcase to avoid the cameras and crowds, she’s suddenly out and about more. She’s dating a football player, she’s going to parties and restaurants, hanging out with her friends and her boyfriend’s mom and her ex’s ex. The more she’s out, the more people speculate, demand, interpret, and the more people seem to wish she would go back to hiding in suitcases. It’s not that I think anyone should feel sorry for her or refrain from critiquing her. Celebrity is a rich text and what we see and what she performs are rife with meaning and interpretation. But as her music and her public performance intersect it's worth noting that the original 1989 precipitated her hiding herself more from the public eye, and its re-record released as she put herself back front and center.
Taylor and I are both privileged blond white women in our early thirties, but that’s really where the resemblance between our lives stop. Still I relate to the way she worries over moments in her life, coming back to them again and again wearing them smooth and yet still finding sharp and biting places. I relate to the fantasies she creates, the way builds and breaks them and tries to find them. And I love the way she keeps coming back to find softness and grace for her younger self, revisiting the striving and yearning and heartbreak and romance of her younger years, knowing it might not mean the same thing to her now that it did then, but what it meant then was real and important. I hope to do the same.
hi megan!!