"Taylorbot"

all i do is try, try, try

el_ave vis wikimedia commons. is it just me or does she look like nicole kidman here

But some of your former critics have become your friends, right?
Some of my best friendships came from people publicly criticizing me and then it opening up a conversation.… Like, Ella — Lorde — the first thing she ever said about me publicly was a criticism of my image or whatever. But I can’t really respond to someone saying, “You, as a human being, are fake.”
—Taylor Swift to Brian Hiatt, Rolling Stone (2019)

Do you remember when Camille Paglia called Taylor Swift a “Nazi Barbie”? I didn’t either until my friend Clare reminded me about it. Anyway, in that piece she also comments: “Writing about Taylor Swift is a horrific ordeal for me because her twinkly persona is such a scary flashback to the fascist blondes who ruled the social scene during my youth.” Can’t relate, Camille. Though I sort of wish I did. But here we are.

Here’s something I don’t think anybody would argue with, least of all Taylor: Taylor Swift isn’t cool. She’s never been cool. There was a period of time when anger over not being cool radiated through her music and her persona.¹ It’s been a kind of badge she wears (“22,” “Shake It Off,” basically every song on Speak Now) or a subject of intense resentment (“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” basically every song on Speak Now). Unfortunately, the only thing less cool than just not being cool is being really angry about it.

“For Taylor, fifteen means falling for a boy and dreaming of marrying him,” Dodai Stewart of Jezebel wrote back in the day. “My fifteen was more like: Flirt with this one, make out with that one, try a cigarette, get drunk, lie to your parents, read some Anais Nin, wish you lived in France, attempt to adopt Shakespearean euphemisms for sex into casual conversation.”² The word “cool” doesn’t come up in this piece but nonetheless I think it’s being invoked. Granted, I don’t think that last item in the list is really cool kid behavior either, but I don’t really know because I didn’t go to high school. I spent age fifteen doing basically none of these things. I think I was at fencing camp. Not the whole time obviously.

Anyway.

Taylor Swift isn’t cool. She is one of the most popular figures on earth—but she’s not cool. She’s on track to becoming a billionaire off her music, but she’s not cool. She has a massive, psychotic army of stans behind her, but she’s not cool. She’s a star, but she’s not… You get it. She’s a dork. I’m a dork too. Lots of people are. They like seeing a superdork on top. I certainly do. But being a triumphant superdork by itself isn’t the magic that makes her into Taylor Swift™️.

In a (admittedly somewhat smug) line from her recent song “Karma,” Taylor sings: “Ask me why so many fade, but I’m still here.” Let’s stipulate there’s no single answer to this kind of question. This Taylor Swift series is an attempt to provide some answers (some of which may contradict each other, we’ll see) to the question of Taylor Swift’s insane career longevity and hitherto unstoppable growth.³ But here’s one… you can’t stop being cool if you were never cool.

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Taylor Swift isn’t cool. Why? Because Taylor Swift is fake. But earnest. She is, as far as coolness goes, a lethal combination of fake and earnest. It’s a very country music mix of qualities. And Taylor might not be a Nazi Barbie… but a Barbie? Isn’t she—kind of—a giant human Barbie doll, blonde hair waving in the breeze, with all the fake plastic sunshine that implies, chirping “you guys!” to her fans?

Fake, earnest. A guy who (allegedly) claims to be the inspiration for “Love Story” (allegedly) told somebody Taylor “would go into this ‘zone’ while she was working that she called ‘Taylorbot’ when she needed to put on a front for fans, media, etc. And she would get ‘stuck’ in this Taylorbot mode and was hard to be around.”⁴ Calvin Harris has a music video about her where she’s a glitchy robot. John Mayer has a song people think is about her (that he denies is about her) called “Paper Doll.” Much like whether or not the other guy ever called her “Taylorbot,” it’s a little immaterial if it is about Taylor—the point is people drew the association themselves, they found it believable. Doll—robot—fake.

Shirley Manson once said, of Taylor Swift, “she’s like a Terminator to me.”⁵ She meant it as praise, much like I meant “blonde Godzilla” as praise a few newsletters ago, but, you know. Usually, if you want to say people just keep going you say that they’re like the Energizer Bunny, not a death robot. In a recent interview, Hayley Williams of Paramore (a friend of hers) recalled finding out that Swift had a big closet full of “a closet filled with ready-to-send gifts for people she's thankful for.” When she went on TV, when somebody complimented her, Swift used to respond thank you for saying that and find something nice to say in return in exactly the conscientious tone of a well brought-up teen, and she kept doing this even when she was very, very famous.⁶ On her Speak Now tour she’d play a song written by a local artist at each concert. A Terminator on a charm offensive.

For most people, the upshot of all of this means she will come off as a nice person. If they got a gift out of a closet of potential gifts, their first thought won’t be yeah but she just has like a spreadsheet for this it’s not exactly personal but hey Taylor Swift gave me a present how nice. They see the things she does for her fans or they find the videos of her going to sing in hospitals or read about her paying Kesha’s legal bills and they think, what a nice girl.⁷

And if you look at the longevity of Taylor Swift’s working relationships, it seems safe to say that being “Taylorbot” works for them. She’s had some of the same backup singers since 2012 and she’s on good enough terms with most of her old collaborators to bring them back for her rerecords. As far as one can tell from the outside, she looks out for her own: Christopher Owens, one of her backup dancers, went from having a solo dance with her for “King of My Heart” during the reputation tour to starring in her music video for “Lover” to opening for her on her current tour under the name OWENN. He’s good too, check him out:

For a small percentage of people, however, this kind of pre-planned, concentrated, by-the-book niceness is not only unbearably insincere, it’s suspicious. If you have to work that hard at being nice, doesn’t that mean you’re probably kind of a nasty person? Shouldn’t niceness be spontaneous to be real?

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Of course, a lot of cool people are fake, too. But they’re fake in a cool way. (Like star power, coolness is to a certain extent a circular quality.) Courtney Love could sing “I fake it so real, I am beyond fake” and be cool. Lady Gaga was “fake,” but in a way where the artifice was very clearly a part of her whole deal. Lana del Rey was “fake,” which initially made her uncool but eventually made her cool again. As a rule of thumb, it’s cool to be fake in ways where you seem to be creating yourself over. But it’s not cool to be fake in the way most people are fake, i.e., socially polite.

Taylor, on the other hand, was too real in some ways—the confessional lyrics, the insistence on writing her own things—and then too fake in others—her niceness that was too clearly good manners, the put-on country twang. She responded too transparently to criticism. She wrote an entire album by herself just to prove she wrote her own songs. She was too obsessed with being liked, or being regarded as a good person, or what people thought of her.

I put that quote from Taylor up top—“but I can’t really respond to someone saying, ‘You, as a human being, are fake’”—because I think it’s actually pretty insightful. It is an unanswerable charge… for everybody, not just for her. And when I write “Taylor Swift is fake,” I also don’t mean that she’s a fake person in the sense that she’s talking about in the Rolling Stone interview—cold, calculating, manipulative, and so on. I mean she’s a person with a filter. Unless she’s writing a song, that filter (probably) never comes off.

But what I do think is true is that this studied, mannered lack of coolness has made her much, much more durable as an artist than anybody could have expected. The people who loved Taylor Swift didn’t care that she wasn’t cool because they, too, had never been cool. Her lack of coolness and her visible effort and her personal songwriting have snowballed to make her somebody her fans identify with to a degree that’s actually kind of frightening.⁸ She lost (in her mind, anyway) her good girl image when Kim Kardashian and Kanye went after her in 2016, but she still packed stadiums.

Every once in a while I’ll hear somebody who works in the gossip world get asked about Taylor on a podcast and you can hear them get nervous in real time. The pitch of their voice goes up. She doesn’t like them. Her security team isn’t nice to them. She’s not all sugar and spice and everything nice, they want you to know. That’s a put on. She’s a business as much as she is a person.⁹

But of course the flipside of all this is that most people don’t really mind. They don’t care if her niceness is studied if the end result is that she’s nice to them. They admire her work ethic more than they think she lacks spontaneity. And if she isn’t nice to paparazzi, well.… Most people won’t mind that either. Even if they voraciously consume celebrity gossip, they despise the people who bring it to them. Is that fair? Probably not. But it’s how it is. There are scandals that could sink her if they happened, but being mean to people trying to take her picture isn’t one of them.¹⁰

If there is a dark side to Taylorbot, it’s not that Taylor herself is hiding anything, but that when Taylor stops being Taylorbot—when she gets messy—people get mad. When their big human Barbie turns out to be a person, they don’t like it. (We’ve discussed this.) Still, I have a tendency to view Taylor as a victim of her own fame in a way that I don’t think corresponds to her actual actions. She dated Matty Healy exactly long enough to make it clear that she wasn’t stopping because people were angry at her. She keeps adding tour dates because she loves it, not to placate anyone. I’m always looking for the cloud that goes with the silver lining. Maybe there isn’t one.

People like Taylor because she plays ball. If you ask her to do a Victoria’s Secret concert, she will really show up for it. If it rains, she’ll do her concert in the rain. If the hydraulics on the stage are slow, she’ll sprint across the stage. If she announces a concert date, you’re getting that concert unless there’s a military coup.¹¹ She values your time (or at least puts on a good show of valuing it, which comes to the same thing). If she is, to quote one of her songs, “a pathological people pleaser,” well, she’s good at it. And if it’s ultimately a problem for her, personally, to be this way—and she seems to think it is, judging from her comments about her people pleasing in Miss Americana—it’s still an enormous asset in her career.

Taylor Swift was never “the moment.” It’s questionable whether you could call her iconic. But who wants to be an icon? Once you’ve hit that status, you’re a static image, you’re dead. Whatever else is true about her, as an artist, Taylor Swift is very, very much still alive.

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When I think about this quality of artificiality, what I find myself thinking of, weirdly, is Cordelia in King Lear, who tells her father she loves him as much as she is obligated to, no more and no less. This unsatisfying, even chilly answer proves to be more durable than her sisters’ more theatrical professions of undying devotion.¹² Sometimes it really is better just to do the things you’re supposed to do because you know you’re supposed to do them.¹³

In certain ways, goodness is fake, by which I mean, goodness is the accumulation of deliberate choices to do one thing rather than the other, instead of acting always on gut instinct. Being inauthentically kind doesn’t mean that you’re authentically mean. Being a filtered person doesn’t require there to be something dark about yourself that you’re filtering out.

I don’t have any read on if Taylor Swift is “good”—I will never meet her, so it’s sort of a meaningless question. And moreover I don’t really care, that’s not my point here. My point is that her fans regard her as fake but real. The emotions are real, the art is real, and the niceness is real because it’s what she’s choosing to do. They appreciate the work that goes into being Taylorbot. They appreciate her dutifulness. Sometimes a front is just the front of something.

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

1. If I were to half ass a theory here I think with folklore and evermore Taylor proved something about the kind of colleagues whose respect she has… so now she can chill out. But it also might just be getting older. Or maybe she hasn’t chilled out at all and the lead single off her eleventh album is going to be a cover of “Cooler Than Me.”

2. Something interesting to me: while people are way too terrified of Swifties to write this now, the needle on Taylor discourse hasn’t really shifted either. Though maybe it never does, for celebrities? Like their image and the conversation gets locked in and then that’s what it is.

3. Per Speak Now vault tracks, she’s been singing about her career is about to be over since at least 2010.

4. I heard about this comment from this podcast. I’m not totally sure I buy this as a real story, partly because there are other comments about things this guy (allegedly) said from other people out there and they seem pretty different. (Not always.)

But for the purposes of this particular newsletter, it doesn’t actually matter if he said it or not—what matters is if it’s a plausible lie.

5. I’m informed Shirley Manson played a Terminator. I don’t know what to do with that exactly.

6. I’m not really sure if she does this anymore. I kind of hate watching TV interviews!

7. If they then discover that Taylor Swift was criticized for giving Kesha money because it would have been more meaningful to tweet, they get confused. (As do I, I’m going to be honest.) Sorry I still think this is one of the funniest celebrity call-outs ever.

8. I feel like there’s a horror movie thing where a monster is actually somebody’s rampaging emotions or whatever, and sometimes I feel like this is sort of Taylor and her fans. Like if she’s angry the anger get magnified through them, if she’s sad the sadness does, but she can’t really control them.

9. I’m think specifically of this podcast episode. You can also hear Enty of Crazy Days and Nights’s voice go uppp when asked about Taylor in this episode of the same podcast but I don’t have a good timestamp, sorry.

10. In no particular order, here are things that I think would absolutely do it: getting caught trash talking her fans on a hot mic, covering up sexual abuse, lying about writing her own music. All of these would torpedo her career. Do any of these strike me as likely to happen? No. But two of them would break the contract with her fans and one would render her too personally repulsive to identify with.

11. Though—and I’m not trying to jinx anything—if she gets through the year+ Eras concert tour without having to cancel one show I’ll be shocked.

12. Of course, her sisters never meant it—it’s not as if they were sincere in their protestations of love but failed to live up to them—so the dynamic in King Lear isn’t exactly about wild emotion versus obligation, but about being able to tell when people are gassing you up and when they aren’t.

13. Now Taylor Swift isn’t much like anybody in King Lear and if she’s a candidate to be any of them eventually it’s probably Lear, not Cordelia.