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The Tortured Poets Department and the broken way we talk about pop music.
Taylor Swift has always been a pop culture Rorschach test. Every song Swift releases, every single she performs or awards show she attends, every candid photo of her is up for everyone’s interpretation. What people see depends on how they feel about her.
To some, she’s a ruthless capitalist who crisscrosses the Earth on her private jet, yells at her sweet professional football player boyfriend, and doesn’t have the integrity to take a side in the upcoming election. Plus, she might have ignored Celine Dion at the Grammys.
To others, she’s the greatest songwriter of her generation, a feminist who isn’t afraid to be successful or even misunderstood — because everything she does is for her fans.
Extreme interpretations could never fully capture the totality of Taylor Swift, but they offer a portrait of her gravitational pull on pop culture. The clearest thing about Taylor Swift is that no one can stop talking about her, and that when it comes to the pop star, it’s impossible to remain neutral.
Ahead of her album release — The Tortured Poets Department on April 19 — Swift has become exceptionally famous, and in doing so she has maybe broken all of us. She’s always been successful and thrived in the spotlight, but over the last few years she’s seemingly achieved a rare level of celebrity that makes her and the attention swirling around her feel inescapable, even for Swift.
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“Whatever’s happening and whatever she’s doing, it’s working. Her persona and cultural dominance feel more saturated than ever,” DJ Louie XIV, a fan of Swift and host of the podcast Pop Pantheon, told me. Louie has adored the star since 2008’s Fearless but says he could do without the constant debates surrounding her.
“As the biggest star of the moment, it can feel like Taylor Swift devours 80 percent of our entire pop cultural discourse. But there’s also an element of that dominance that is not even necessarily her fault,” he added.
It’s impossible to avoid everyone’s feelings, ideas, criticisms against and adoration for her, and even more difficult to remain impartial on Swift. Like a Rorschach, some of that’s by design. But some of it is a peek into how efficient social media has become at crushing any kind of nuance.
What makes being Switzerland on Swift so difficult is that the discourse that follows her — her fans and her critics fighting with each other — is omnipresent. After releasing three new albums in as many years (Tortured Poets will be four since 2020) she embarked on the record-setting worldwide Eras stadium tour, created a box office smash movie about said tour, and found the time to announce that she would be directing her first feature film. She also started dating professional NFL player Travis Kelce and went on to attend not just a handful of his games but also his Super Bowl win. Amid all these events, Gannett, which publishes USA Today, announced that it was hiring a Taylor Swift reporter to keep up with everything Swift.
Because she’s so famous, Swift pulls focus. These things that she does become less about the things themselves and more about Swift. A Variety feature like Directors on Directors is usually inside baseball for film dorks, but when Swift talks to The Banshees of Inisherin director Martin McDonagh about the short film for her song “All Too Well,” it becomes another part of Swiftie lore. Now when she attends an awards show, she isn’t just a guest but the guest, with the camera frequently cutting to her as she dances and gasps in the audience. Ahead of this past year’s Grammys, Swift and her team changed the profile photo on her Instagram account, sending the public into a frenzy trying to decipher the meaning. That meaning was revealed during her Album of the Year acceptance speech, when she announced Tortured Poets.
This focus-pulling phenomenon became almost painfully clear when she started going to Kelce’s football games. Her week-to-week attendance at America’s most favorite televised sport became a story on its own, which devolved into male fans chastising networks’ decisions to devote (even minimal) camera time to her. Unfortunately, some critiques dipped into misogyny. At the same time, her attendance at games upped the ratings and brought new fans, primarily women, to the NFL.
Swift-Kelce became such big news that former President Donald Trump weighed in on their relationship. Swift’s impact on the NFL is just a microcosm of the Taylor Swift effect.
Even if you don’t have a direct opinion on Taylor Swift or her music, a conversation about sports or movies eventually becomes directly about her.
The polarized reaction Taylor Swift creates among her critics and devoted fans isn’t accidental. Like other ultra-successful pop stars — Madonna, Beyoncé, Britney Spears — Swift has created a persona that people respond passionately to.
Swift’s persona has always been one of all-American relatability and perceived accessibility. Primarily, Taylor Swift has always publicly positioned herself as a good friend. The 1989 album and tour, Instagram posts about her famed Fourth of July parties, paparazzi shots, and awards show cutaways entirely devoted to Swift’s friends, including Selena Gomez, Gigi Hadid, and Blake Lively. She’s a bestie who just so happens to be the biggest pop star in the world.
Adding to that lore, Swift’s songs are peppered with Easter eggs, inside jokes, and tidbits that only fans who truly know her — her best friends — would understand. If you really know her music, you really know who Swift is and her friendship seems as obtainable as it is fantastically desirable.
Swift has also long presented herself as the industry’s underdog.
This part of her persona goes back to the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, when Kanye interrupted her speech to tell her that she did not in fact have the best video of the year. It continued with her response to the jokes made at her expense and the lazy reductionist reviews of her music being about the men she’s dated. There have also been moments where Swift has spoken up and addressed concerns like sexual harassment, artists getting paid for their music, and the music business’s misogyny in which men (Kanye West specifically, Scooter Braun obliquely) try to undercut women’s success. That message trickled down to her fans, who are quick to point out when they feel like she’s been slighted, particularly by men.
People want to protect underdogs. Friends want to defend their friends.
The thing about these personas is that in order to be successful, they need something to push back against. You can’t be friends with everyone. You can’t be an underdog if no one is dragging you down. Swift’s personas need criticism as much as they need loyalty.
Can one like Swift’s music but not the Easter egg accouterments that accompany every album? Is it possible to like the positive things Swift inspires in young girls but not like her music? Can you be annoyed at the conversation that surrounds Swift but actually like her as an artist? Is it possible to like none of it but keep that fact to yourself?
Maybe once upon a time it was. But on social media, where stan culture dominates the conversation, all different types of Swift criticism and praise get flattened into very simple and caustic pro or anti arguments.
“There are so many people out there participating in the discourse where anything less than sheer adoration is grounds for an attack,” pop culture expert DJ Louie told me. “How are we supposed to have any sort of nuanced, critical discourse about any of this? Taylor and Beyoncé and all pop stars are all worthy of praise and criticism — we should want that to exist in our culture. But I feel like we’re just getting into a situation right now where it’s nearly impossible to have any sort of nuanced cultural debate.”
To that point, a Reddit forum called SwiftlyNetural exists where fans and critics are encouraged to voice their opinions but keep the conversation civil and respectful. There, criticism isn’t seen as an attack and praise isn’t the only belief. One can also find discussions about the aesthetics of her new album and the changes in her musicality.
Perhaps the silliest thing about all this chatter is that it doesn’t affect Taylor Swift herself. All the things we feel about Taylor Swift end up saying more about us — our hangups, our desires, what we like and don’t like about ourselves — than anything about her.
This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.
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