Taylor Swift, Rockist

that's right bitch

makaiyla willis via wikimedia commons

Taylor Swift was a welcome surprise. Her early hits—“Our Song,” “Love Story,” and “You Belong With Me”—were still playing on the radio. They’re sort of country rock songs with great rhythm guitar parts, and Nashville polish and production added. And Swift was at least recognizable as belonging to the old singer-songwriter tradition I grew up with. She actually wrote her own songs. We both loved her.
—John Seabrook, The Song Machine¹

To head it off at the pass: yes, this is a bit of a clickbait take. “Rockist” is a quasi-meaningless term. As nearly as I can tell, it has always described an imagined enemy more than it’s described a position anybody would describe themselves as holding. “A rockist is someone who reduces rock 'n' roll to a caricature, then uses that caricature as a weapon,” wrote Kelefa Sanneh in “The Rap Against Rockism,” which does not, personally, clarify a lot. Maybe rockism is Pitchfork refusing to cover Katy Perry, but that really didn’t hurt Katy Perry much.

Furthermore, rockist has always described a critical position, not an artistic one. Arists aren’t “rockists,” they’re rock musicians or they’re rock stars or whatever. And despite this one kind of goofy (but also compelling) performance of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” Taylor Swift is none of these things. Though, to be clear, Taylor, if you’re reading this, or if somebody who can talk to somebody who can talk to somebody who can talk to somebody who can talk to somebody who can talk to Taylor is reading this: you should do a rock album! We all want you to do a rock album!

Anyway. Sorry to introduce such attention-grabbing but cheap tricks into the hitherto pure and uncommercial world of Taylor Swift studies. It will happen again.

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Now that that’s out of the way.…

A joke I like to make about myself is that Christopher Nolan’s movies are like the result of me wishing for a director who upheld various ideals and practices I cared about on a monkey’s paw. Nolan is a director who cares about telling original stories, who cares about practical effects, and who is very good at making complicated plots easy to follow. He cares a lot about movies and how movies are made. But I also find him so humorless and so uninterested in people that the idea of watching one of his movies fills me with dread. (This isn’t an Oppenheimer hot take, since I haven’t been able even to decide not to see that one.)

Similarly, I kind of feel like Taylor Swift is the result of somebody wishing for a throwback artist to make it big on a monkey’s paw. They wished for somebody who would get famous for her songwriting, somebody who could play her own instruments, somebody who was unafraid to tangle with labels and big corporations in the name of her art. And they got their wish. And it looked… like… this.²

But that’s the answer still when people tweet, as they periodically do, why Taylor Swift? You can only get a Taylor Swift song from Taylor Swift.³ That’s ultimately the answer. Now, if her songwriting leaves you totally cold, that’s not a very helpful answer… but it’s still the answer.

Because Taylor does not, as we’ve mentioned before here, have the big qualities world-famous pop stars are supposed to have. She dances exactly as well as she needs to. She’s not “sexy” in the sex object sense. She doesn’t have an amazing, amazing voice—granted lots of pop stars don’t have an especially good voice—though she’s worked very hard on her vocals. Meanwhile, the qualities she does have—like the songwriting, the guitar playing, and so on—are ones she isn’t supposed to need, especially in her initial position as teen sensation. Teen stars are supposed to be convenient blanks for their teenage peers to project on and (as the case may be) crush on, but it doesn’t really matter if they can do much beyond that. (Or such is my impression, anyway.)

Whereas caring about who writes the music and who plays the instruments is a kind of classic “music bro” thing I believe—going all the way back to dunking on The Monkees for being fakes. But Taylor was very specifically marketing herself toward teenage girls, her own peers. That’s why “Our Song” is on her debut album: her classmates liked it. But you might think that this would mean the rest of it didn’t matter so much. Why not lean hard on professional songwriters—especially when you’re writing your own songs at fourteen and must know on some level that there’s a level of sophistication you can’t bring to them?

As far as the literal subject matter of her songs go, Taylor never really touches any of this directly. Certain kinds of feelings got translated into the language of romance (“I'll bet she’s beautiful, that girl he talks about / and she’s got everything that I have to live without”). If you look at an unreleased song like “Who I’ve Always Been,” which she would have written around the time of her debut album, you can see her try to tackle this whole topic head-on:

You walk in here with your guitar man
Your shiny boots and your full on band
A smile on your face, a knife in your hand
Singing songs you’ve got memorized
With whatever talent money buys
So polished that it slips right through your hands.…

I walk in here with a beat-up case
The same guitar I’ve always played
And the words I wrote down on a page
When I was twelve years old and small town raised…⁴

Why sit on a song like this? Plenty of reasons that I can think of, among them that this is not especially relatable to your average sixteen year old. Thus, she shifts the context, and when you translate this kind of rivalry into the world of romance, it expresses itself as feelings of need, inadequacy, yearning, ugliness. She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts. But when you look at it in terms of her own ambition, I think she ends up saying something kind of different. Her frustration stems from pursuing an excellence that’s neither expected from her or even really wanted.

Something I think might be true is that the teen girls who latched onto Taylor and formed the beginnings of her titanium fanbase responded to her on both these levels. There was the actual text of the songs, in which she adopted a kind of fierce and unbroken loser persona,⁵ and which took the feelings she and her peers were having very seriously. Part of what makes Taylor’s songs so cathartic to listen to is the way the feelings are presented: there’s no irony about them, no sense of embarrassment. If you’ve broken up with somebody you loved it gets every piece of sadness and rage she has to give you. Zero perspective.

But then there was the subtext of the songs—the fact that they were there at all—and that presented them with a girl who was like them (unlucky in love, unhappy with her looks) but who wasn’t settling for anything less than doing things on her own terms with her own talent. And that was a winner persona.

One thing this probably explains is why it’s always, in a weird way, been fine to be a little too into Taylor Swift even if you were a fully grown adult when her debut came out. (See the John Seabrook quote above.) I was literally introduced to Swift by a guy in his forties! She had that odd level of cred because she was doing things the hard way. What she had in her corner was not the assurance that she was a genius or a brilliant manager or authenticity but the gut-level knowledge that she was doing something nobody else could do and writing songs nobody else could write. Not because they were so out of the box or avant-garde or anything like that, but simply because she was the one doing these things.

And she only really needed to hook you with one song to pull you in to the rest of it. Because—and this is probably the next installment of Taylor Swift studies—every Taylor Swift song is sort of about every other Taylor Swift song. Sort of. If you want it to be.

If you want to read the other Taylor Swift posts for some reason, they’re here.

1. I was going to sit on this until I finished The Song Machine but then I went to the hospital. Life is uncertain and what if I died before I got to send out a newsletter with this hilarious headline? So out it goes now.

2. She is also successful in basically old-fashioned ways: she conceives of her albums very much “as” albums and she sells them.

3. Even the ones she initially gave to other artists (like “Babe” and “Better Man”) she’s slowly started to reclaim by making them vault tracks for her rerecords.

4. Young Taylor Swift’s extreme animus toward the girly girls is maybe one of her more mysterious if also endearing traits (same song: “let’s talk about your childhood days / you were the prom queen / I was on this stage”).

5. Please enjoy this insane commercial from the Speak Now days: