what I talk about when I talk about Taylor Swift
I’ve long been on the record advocating for a new Disney animated villain who is a hot, skinny blonde woman. It’s an archetype that exists in the world and that should exist in the culture, that children need to know about.
As a comfortable, expensively-educated white woman who’s gone from very blonde to blonde-ish to very blonde again several times over in life and who benefits from all kinds of adjacent privileges around my body in the world, I’ve spent a lot of time as an adult first learning how easily I might, accidentally, without ever intending it, become a real villain, and then trying actively to stop myself from becoming one. I’m sure I’ve failed to prevent myself from behaving villainously more than once. I feel guilty about those times, and I feel even more guilty that I probably don’t even recognize some of the times it’s happened. The way I think about it, my job is to be aware of how easy it is for me to slip into that role and do my best to combat harm done to other people.
Reams have been written about white women who, in the interest of protecting their own privilege, have sided with the even more powerful white men who will help them preserve what status they have, and who in doing so actively hurt other people. White women often get defensive about this critique. I believe part of the reason for the defensiveness is that white ladies are so often told over the course of our lives that we’re sweet, kind, generous, caring. That’s the ideal many of us have tried to embody in our lives – or rather, many of us have been told that’s the ideal we just embody, without much work on our part.
The trouble is, you can be sweet, kind, generous, and caring in your interpersonal life and still be wildly insensitive to how your decisions can hurt other people. Sometimes believing so strongly in your own goodness might make you even more likely to behave in ways that fail to consider other people. But we’ve built a system where that supposed sweetness and kindness acts as a shield – how could I possibly have been selfish or harmful when everyone who knows me believes I’m so sweet and kind? Why would I need to do work to be informed, to understand the world around me? I’ve always been told I’m perfect exactly the way I am, and all the images I’ve grown up with in the culture have reinforced how special and valuable and good I am.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about pretty blonde villains, and the reason, naturally, is Taylor Swift. You may have heard that Swift is releasing a new album next month and has released a couple of singles so far in the lead-up. That rollout has got me thinking about the ways celebrities build narratives, how those narratives work, and why they are important.
For the record, I love Taylor Swift. The reasons why, however, have to do with both her talents and the way her villainy works in both straightforward and complex ways.
“Blank Space” is both a perfect pop song and a brilliant piece of performance art. “White Horse” is a both a perfect ballad and a sweetly evocative document of growing up, of learning to understand when you’ve been naive and when it’s right to leave something behind, to know you can take control of your life and don’t need to be rescued. “You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter,” a casual line from a minor Swift song, is so writerly it feels like she’s showing off just because she can. “I forget about you long enough to forget why I needed to” is a whole movie in 12 words.
But who said villains can’t be talented? Villains in fact are able to become villains because they have talent, because they know how to lure people in. In most cases, I would argue, villains’ talents are, in the end, mediocre – if they were the best, they would win, and we’d think they were heroes. But still, they need to have charisma to become villains in the first place.
The best way to think about celebrities is the same way we think about characters in 19th century novels or about the petty squabbles of the gods in Greek and Roman myths. Taylor Swift is, I have long maintained, a real Becky Sharp type, except instead of scheming her way up from nothing, she’s schemed her way even further up from a wealthy family in finance. And just as “Vanity Fair” is a commentary on the materialism and mercenary social-climbing of its day, just as the work of Jane Austen shows how degrading it was for women to be forced to compete against each other for the attention of dull men just as a means to survive, the stories that play out on gossip sites and in the ways celebrities construct their images mirror back some of the values of the world we live in now about who’s allowed to aspire to which roles and who gets celebrated for what accomplishments.
For example: “What’s clear reading Austen today, or watching one of the countless adaptations of her work, is how much the women in her novels have in common with so many of the women on reality television,” Sophie Gilbert wrote a few years ago in the Atlantic in a piece about Austen, “The Bachelor” and the Kardashians. “Her female characters are defined by two primary qualities: their privilege and their powerlessness. Her writing focuses almost entirely on women searching for stability and status, deploying the very limited means available to them. Deprived of intellectual gratification or professional empowerment, they scheme, manipulate, and get bogged down in petty rivalries with each other.”
Swift is obviously in a different category than the women cast in “The Bachelor.” Instead of squabbling with other rich-but-still-relatively-powerless women in a quest for stability, Swift’s is a story of what happens when a woman cares about power and not much else, and has the savvy to successfully achieve it on mostly her own terms.
One of the keys to Swift’s rise to power in pop music is how intricately she’s linked her public persona, the stories that play out in the tabloids, to her art, how successfully she’s been able to craft and control the story about herself. Swift has claimed sometimes to fear and resent the microscope she lives under, and that could well be true, but she’s also used that microscope to draw attention to her work in ways that feel very intentional.
About ten years ago, I stayed in Brooklyn over Thanksgiving to work (shout-out to any of my education people reading this who remember the Friday-after-Thanksgiving Cathie Black certification drama, in retrospect one of the truly silly working weekends of my life). That was the year that Taylor Swift spent the holiday with the actor Jake Gyllenhaal at his sister Maggie’s house in Park Slope, maybe a mile from where I lived. It was impossible to avoid. A picture of the two of them walking, Swift wearing a striped scarf and holding a cup from Gorilla Coffee, was on the front page of the Daily News and everywhere else. It was later reported publicly that at the coffee shop, the two ordered maple lattes.
Two years later, Swift released the song “All Too Well,” rumored to be about Gyllenhaal, and I was struck by how blatant the lyrical references to the tabloid coverage of that weekend were. “I left my scarf there, in your sister’s house,” she sings in the first verse. In the liner notes, where Swift has always left her fans “clues” about each song by capitalizing letters that spell out meaningful words and phrases, fans noted that “All Too Well’s” lyrics spelled out “maple lattes.” Surely maple lattes were not the only food Swift and Gyllenhaal shared that weekend, but that detail – the very public one – was the one she chose to mark her supposedly private and emotional song.
“Oh,” I remember thinking when I first heard the song. “Taylor Swift is maybe a calculating evil genius.” I was actually really impressed. She was 21 years old.
Swift has since basically admitted that she does this on purpose. “I want to remember the colour of the sweater, the temperature of the air, the creak of the floorboards, the time on the clock when your heart was stolen or shattered or healed or claimed forever,” Swift wrote in an essay for British Elle. “The fun challenge of writing a pop song is squeezing those evocative details into the catchiest melodic cadence you can possibly think of.” So there’s the songwriting formula: take some details, maybe if not especially details your fans recognize, and build a perfect pop song around them.
The result has been that Swift has developed a fanbase that unpacks her every move or statement for deeper meaning about her life with a rigor and dedication that rivals the investigative reporters in “Spotlight.” Swift increasingly encourages it, dropping clues that might lead you to believe she thinks an album release rollout is a conspiracy story of Watergate-level complexity. On New Year’s Day — not coincidentally the title of the last song on Swift’s last album — she tweeted 115 rainbow emoji with very little context; 115 turns out to be the number of days between January 1 and her album release. Last October she posted a picture of herself playing Scrabble with the caption, “let the games BEGIN,” also a reference to her last album, and as it turns out, she announced the first single on her new album on National Scrabble Day. Both of these ideas require a level of planning and birdseed-laying that strike me as a tiny bit deranged, both to think them up and to figure them out.
With this album rollout, Swift increasingly also has included complicated meta-narratives in her videos as well as her lyrics. It seems that nearly every detail in both of the videos are either clues about what may be coming or references to the larger story of Taylor Swift. She stealthily revealed the name of the forthcoming album in the first video, for example, and also teased a Dixie Chicks collaboration that has yet to be confirmed (I will say, that collaboration better be real; we all need more Dixie Chicks in our lives). The first shot featuring Swift in the “You Need to Calm Down” video is of her sitting on a bed wearing an eye mask – also the first shot of the singer in her video for “Blank Space,” a song the new single sonically emulates. (There’s a cake-grab shot later in the video that also closely resembles a shot in “Blank Space.”)
But here’s the problem with all of this narrative-building: the narrative it’s working toward seems about as substantive as cotton candy, all sugar and air. The whole project seems to be about linking one fact about or reference to Taylor Swift to other facts about or references to Taylor Swift, with very little else to say. Swift’s elaborate system of codes and clues always point just back to herself, like a sequence of infinity mirrors that reveal only her own image.
That’s one of the reasons I’m so interested in all of the speculation that Swift was going to parlay all of the rainbow imagery and Pride-related celebration into an admission that the rumors that she’s queer are true. Swift has been using some openly queer imagery – even before the “You Need to Calm Down” video explicitly celebrated Pride, the “ME!” video featured a team of women, including Swift, dancing in brightly colored suits with slicked-back hair. Also, Swift’s long history of planting clues about her emotional truths easily lends itself to theorizing that she has, all along, been suggesting through subtext what she wasn’t comfortable saying publicly. If she was coming out, all of the narrative-building around herself might seem important, bigger than just a shallow celebrity. If she’s not coming out — and at this point it does not seem like she is — then it seems cynical, a way of using rumors and iconography to grab attention.
The obvious contrast to this kind of celebrity storytelling is, of course, Beyonce. While Taylor Swift uses imagery in her videos to remind us of other videos where she played a fancy lady who lived in a castle, Beyonce uses imagery in her videos to evoke the Black Panthers, to play with our ideas of Southern plantations, to remind us of how the American government treated New Orleanians after Hurricane Katrina, to reflect on the roles that black women have played in America throughout history. Taylor Swift uses marching bands to play at being a cheerleader; Beyonce uses marching bands to celebrate the role that historically black colleges and universities have played in American life.
I think that contrast is important for several reasons. For one, Swift’s self-absorption has certainly hindered her newfound political activism. “You Need to Calm Down,” both the song and its video, were pitched to us as a form of LGBTQ activism and pride. But the lyrics equate violent homophobia with the type of razzing celebrities get on the internet, which feels wildly out of touch. Moreover, the video is a who’s-who of famous gay and queer people, but it gives each of them only a second or two of screen time and, worse, climaxes with a sequence depicting Swift’s reconciliation with Katy Perry after their fight over backup dancers (that is, the world’s dumbest celebrity feud). In the end, the story of the video isn’t about gay rights, it’s about two famous white women becoming friends again after a fight about nothing.
So in the end, the white artist has centered herself, and has used other people — people with real struggles — to bring attention to herself. The black artist has expanded our worlds, drawn attention to stories that many privileged people in America never bother to hear. That’s the true story about America that Taylor Swift and Beyonce are telling us, I think, about how much we let that happen.
I recently read Robin DiAngelo’s book “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” a book I’d encourage all white people to read. In it, she describes a story I’ve heard many times in different versions – the white woman who, when confronted with her role in perpetuating American inequalities, or just with the way she treats other people, cries, then expects to be comforted, who turns the conversation into a conversation about herself, not the inequities she claimed to want to talk about. The underlying assumption is that her comfort must be paramount, no matter who else is in the conversation or how she’s behaved toward them or what benefits she’s had at their expense. One of the interesting things about DiAngelo’s book is how she shows other people running to comfort that white woman.
Taylor Swift is dramatizing a version of that story for us, and her drama helps us see how complex the conversation can get.
Swift had a phase in which it sort of seemed like she was trying to lean into her villainousness. Her last album, “Reputation,” was framed as a response to her repeated conflicts with Kanye West, which Kim Kardashian West mostly-successfully used to brand Swift as a “snake.” Swift then adopted snake imagery both throughout the album’s rollout and on her tour, adopted a cheesy “dark” visual palate, and released several songs seething about the conflict.
If you listen to those songs, though, it becomes clear that Swift doesn’t actually think she did anything wrong. The song features a song called “I Did Something Bad,” whose bridge revolves around the refrain, “they’re burning witches even if you aren’t one.” That’s the tension: Swift wanted you to think she was enjoying being the evil antagonist while at the same time insisted she was actually the victim.
The narrative behind Swift’s now-decade-long fight with West and Kardashian, has always been on some level about white womanhood, though Swift doesn’t seem to consciously realize that. The public dynamic between West, a black man, and Swift, a conventionally attractive white woman, was never not going to be about race, and it’s part of what led Swift to lean into her brand of sweetness and innocence (it’s not a coincidence that the song Swift wrote about Kanye crashing her VMAs speech was called “Innocent”). And it took Kim Kardashian West, a white woman, to effectively call Swift out.
At the same time, when Swift complains that people, including Kanye, have taken credit for her success, success that she built herself by writing good songs and running her business with finesse, she has a point too. Similarly, Swift’s advocacy for equality is a fantastic – if overdue – example of celebrities using their platform not just to make statements, but also to encourage their followers to organize and vote. And I will always believe that so many of her early songs are great feminist works, calls for young women to believe in the importance of their own emotional stories, even when men tell them to believe something else. The repeated refrain in "All Too Well" – "I was there," insisted over and over again, demanding that her version of the story be considered – I think that's really important.
But part of her deal has always been that Swift has mostly just been interested in doing one thing – writing and performing wildly popular songs — and being the best at it. She’s very, very good at her job, and she’s rightly indignant when people diminish her or criticize her simply for being successful at the business of music. “Calculating” has often been used as an insult against her. I think it should probably be a compliment, but then again, isn’t the primary motivation of the best villains the pursuit of power?
So, it’s complicated. The lesson of Taylor Swift is about how white women’s tendency to center themselves can undermine any of the other worthy goals they have. They can be unfairly castigated for their ambitions, but their response to those criticisms can make them true villains.
Tell me why you want to read
It’s summer, I’m obviously feeling frothy this week, so I’m going to give some vacation-related recommendations.
My book club friend and neighbor Sarah Rothbard wanted “an airplane/vacation novel that I won’t feel guilty for reading but will go down like an easy drinking rose on a Sunday afternoon.”
Full but unimportant disclose: I sent these to Sarah weeks ago before she went on her actual vacation, but I wanted to share them with everyone too, because if you haven't gone on vacation yet, get to it. I feel like there are two categories of rose reads – the book club rose reads about groups of friends, and the pool rose reads that are driven enough by plot that you don't put the book down and end the day with a water-logged book that you've plowed through. I tried to give Sarah options for both.
If you want funny and/or emotional stories about friendship:
“The Clasp” by Sloane Crosley: This book is inspired by the Guy de Maupassant story "The Necklace," sort of, if that story was about a bunch of privileged college friends' jaunty caper across Europe. It's a little guilty, in that the plot is kind of contrived and ridiculous, but it's funny enough that it mostly doesn't matter. It reminded me a lot of Curtis Sittenfeld's work – a beach read with wit. (Speaking of connecting Jane Austen's work to reality shows, Sittenfeld’s “Eligible” does just that and also fits squarely within this category.)
“The Ensemble” by Aja Gabel: I'm not sure exactly why when I thought "vacation read" I immediately went to two novels about groups of friends, but here we are. (I also thought about Mary McCarthy's "The Group,” for what it's worth.) When it came out, this got compared a lot to Meg Wolitzer's “The Interestings,” and that comparison makes sense in that it's about a bunch of friends obsessed with their art. I liked “The Ensemble” a little bit more, though, because it felt more emotional and less cliche. Aja Gabel used to be a cellist herself, so the depictions of the elite classical music world are really vivid and interesting. And the writing is just lovely.
If you want something more thriller-y/plot driven:
“Transcription” by Kate Atkinson: I don't know exactly what I was expecting when I started this World War II spy novel about a young woman working for MI-5, but funny and campy were not it. But it's funny and campy! I loved it also because it turns out that the campy performative-ness of it turns out to be critical to the book's central spying themes. And I found the third-act twist deeply fun and satisfying.
“Tangerine” by Christine Mangan: This one is a little further on the guilty spectrum; it's basically a Patricia Highsmith rip-off and has a profoundly dumb evil lesbian thing going on. But it's a thriller that takes place in Tangiers in the 1950s! It's kind of like a B-movie that hits all the notes you think it will, but is still fun.
And finally, I recommended this to Sarah knowing that she was already fully on board the train for Eve Babitz, patron saint of our Los Angeles book club, but really, anyone who wants something that goes down like a nice glass of wine but that won’t make you feel like the alcohol is damaging your brain needs to read Eve Babitz. She’s the smartest shallow writer I have ever encountered. Start with “Slow Days, Fast Company.”
Thank you for reading. As always, thanks for bearing with me as I figure this thing out, and also for all the typos that I miss because I write quickly and with no editor. And also as always, if you like this kind of dispatch from my brain and know someone else who might, too, please do share it. You can subscribe here.