Will We Ever Be Sick of Taylor Swift?
A longform look at the discography of Taylor Swift and an analysis of the future of delusional Swifties.
I love Taylor Swift. This is the most lukewarm opinion ever, and will likely never not be. Taylor Swift defies pop stardom with her Madonna-like longevity and absolute chokehold on the pop culture in a way that only Beyonce can really match. What Beyonce lacks is the tumultuous, feverish personal life of Taylor Swift and the public intrigue to match. There is no celebrity more comfortable burning under the microscope light than Tay. Coupled with a fanbase that thrives on tabloid-esque tatters of headline worthy relationships, Taylor has always remained popular entirely due to the scarcity of information regarding these relationships. Her lyrics have always toed the line between vague and suggestive, and her public life or “reality” pales in comparison to this romantic world she adopts in her songs.
This is not a new concept. The separation of art from artist is a separation that is needed for art to transcend audiences and become universal. Art is a two-way street, and one must relinquish control at some point. Typically as careers unfold, the artist struggles more and more with relinquishing control of their own work, resulting in an almost self-destructive output that obliterates their fame with full intention of doing so.
Nirvana and Pearl Jam are great examples of this. Existing in the same time period, both bands experienced great fame, found the lack of control over their own work terrifying, and willingly self-destructed. Kurt Cobain tragically committed suicide and Eddie Vedder steered more and more into a hard-rock black hole, completely erasing all Grunge presence they had at the peak of the movement.
Some artists experience this vertigo and choose to evolve or move past it. These artists, such as Radiohead, David Bowie, Billie Eilish, etc. are the classic success stories, and are more historically successful. The ability to successfully mutate without alienating your audience is a valuable skill, and can have disastrous consequences if done wrong. One must have the courage to throw themselves fully into new sounds and the confidence that their audience will not respond negatively.
Taylor Swift acts as the antithesis of either of these stories. Her first three albums adopt a similar country sound, the latter two especially showing an impressive quality for songwriting for such a young artist. In this trilogy, Taylor Swift buries herself in this sound, perfectly crafting a formula for a hit Taylor Swift song (lyrics undressing a relationship, big choruses, never a wasted word). Her incident with Kanye West completely upended this formula and shoved her into a new stratosphere of starlight. Only then was there ever an interest in her personal life.
One could argue that the advent of Facebook and MySpace and other social media avenues changed our definition of celebrity to the point where it ruined Taylor Swift for Taylor Swift. This could be right, but I would argue that this was the pivotal instant, with an angelic Taylor beaming over the “clearly wrong” Kanye West cemented by Barack Obama.
Now Taylor Swift had to change, now she had to capitalize. With the heat turned up, she delivered Red, a perfect balance where country met pop, where personal storytelling met universal musings, where stardom met personality. Red felt like Taylor Swift feeling the pressure and using it to her advantage, and she blew it out of the park in every way. The album is the most Taylor Swift album of all time and remains an anomaly in her catalogue.
Deepening down on the pop sensibilities of Red, Taylor released 1989. The album is the first to bring bespectacled wonder boy Jack Antonoff along for the ride, and is soaked in his synth sheen from front to back. I love this album and think its a perfect companion to Red, completing the inevitable switch to pop following the Kanye incident. 1989 sells more copies than any other Taylor Swift record by a huge margin and cements her and Jack in the pop world forever. It won Album of the Year at the 2014 Grammys in an infamous battle against rap gospel Good Kid Maad City, sparking some dialogue concerning the biassed waging of white artists against black artists.
Taylor Swift up till now had never voiced any opinions publicly. She kept an excruciatingly low profile, and only appeared in relation to her music. Citing the Chicks, she stayed out of politics and essentially any other social issue other celebrities cared about. When Kanye’s best-and-worst-at-the-same-time album The Life of Pablo released, Taylor Swift finally spoke out. She blasted him for using her name in a song, and her likeness inappropriately in a music video, saying it had a “strong, misogynistic message.” Then, a video surfaces of Kanye and Taylor talking amicably about him using her in a song, and her calling it a “compliment.”
Her previously airtight reputation was compromised. Flurries of tweets and messages stormed in, like the public had spent years waiting for one misstep. Taylor receded from the entire situation and was silent for a good nine months, wherein she apparently stewed in the stew with indie Harry Potter Jack Antonoff. At the end of it all, we received Reputation, a blanket justification of her own actions and a vindictive attack against her critics.It leaned into the supervillain-like largeness of it all, and raised the stakes to melodramatic heights. In contrast to Melodrama, the other Jack Antonoff project of 2017, the songs on here suck.
Half of the songs on here use the exact same chords in the same order, which is called “boring” in the music industry. The soundscape is industrial and hiphop-influenced, taking nods from Kanye’s Yeezus and Lady Gaga’s The Fame Monster, with little success. The best songs on here sound like Lorde throwaways from Pure Heroine or like songs Sky Ferreira wasn’t allowed to release. The commercial success of this album is undeniable though, as many had no care for my own opinions on this one. It skyrocketed her back beyond the realm of superstar, where her fame was unable to be touched by any leaked video or politics or anything.
Taylor quickly tested this by becoming political randomly in 2019, after her less problematic version of the Yeezus tour. She released the hilariously millennial “You Need to Calm Down”, complete with a music video that stands as the gayest thing Taylor Swift has ever done. This ushered in the bloated, massive exodus of personality that was the Lover era. Locking herself in the studio with Jack again, Taylor shoved so much more of her personality into this album that it is kind of alarming. There are so many absolute smashes, and so many songs that are hideously cringe, swapping with almost no warning. What was different was the commercial reception.
While Swifties were fed, I don’t feel as if anyone else were eating. The politics and statements and honestly, the personality of Taylor Swift herself put many on edge. This invulnerability felt in the Reputation era had dissipated because of the vague intersection between Taylor and her music. There wasn’t any disconnect anymore, and when people were criticizing the songs, they weren’t. They were criticizing who they thought Taylor was.
Taylor’s response was to obliterate any connection entirely. The twin albums of Folklore and Evermore, conducted during Covid with the help of Jack and The National’s Aaron Dessner, tried a more poetic, character-driven approach to her songwriting. This style is eerily reminiscent of her earlier country stuff, but made the sweeter by her own artistic, lyrical, and emotional maturity. These are brilliantly-wrought songs, and rightfully soundtracked the lockdown period as some of her best music. Taylor experienced massive critical and commercial success from these two, with many saying that she solidified her place as one of the best songwriters ever.
What happened next is what is so interesting about Taylor Swift. I would argue that Folklore was her last “real” album, with Evermore conceded because of its creation in the same sessions. Why would I not contend that 2022’s Midnights and 2024’s Tortured Poets Department are “real” albums? Because of the audience’s control of the source material.
Tired of the storytelling, Taylor attempted to come back to personal matters with Midnights. Her worst-grossing album ever, the record still threw 10 of its 13 songs into the Billboard Top 20. The album quickly sunsetted within a fortnight, while songs like The 1975’s “About You” remained on the Top 10 for many more weeks on end, despite being released just a week before. Many disparaged the album for its lackluster production, looking at Jack Antonoff as the problem with Taylor’s music (which is not entirely wrong). The production is horribly dull and simple by Jack’s standards, and lacks any sense of personality that was so evident in the Lover era.
If one looks at clips from this album’s making, it seems to have been made in a series of drunken delusional nights in Electric Lady. This would explain the horrific lines and weird vibes given by some of the songs, especially “Anti-Hero” (I would rather die than listen to that song probably). This sentiment carried in the Tortured Poets Department, as Swift spends pages ripping into The 1975’s Matty Healy in the same literary, childish way Hemingway ripped into Fitzgerald. The record feels like a massive scavenger hunt, with the reward being a little too much knowledge of the inner workings of Taylor Swift’s mind.
The audience here has too much control. The quality of these songs is dropping steadily, and while Jack is certainly to blame, (just look at the incredible new Bleachers record or at “Please Please Please”. He hates her, I swear.), Taylor’s own lack of prerogative to maintain distance with her fanbase is the real virus. As she is consistently dissecting herself into her music with no regard for anyone or anything involved, she is raking in massive amounts of new followers and global audiences. Her ~90 million Spotify listeners land her at Top 5 in the world, following Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars. Why would she ever be less honest?
Because it would let her be an artist. I don’t see how this version of Taylor Swift is sustainable. I feel like this is not an “era” issue, it has lasted for four years now and shows no signs of stopping. Are we finally getting tired of Taylor Swift? Commercially, no, but critically and personally yes by a mile. This saddens me because I am a big fan of her music, and love her emphasis on songwriting in the highly saturated world of pop music. I don’t love searching for meaning in the drawn-out metaphors and half-winking allegories of The Tortured Poets Department. I want her to be Taylor Swift again, and that means leaving some off the table.