From the time of Fearless (and the infamous Kanye West interruption), Taylor Swift was a massive phenomenon. She’s reached levels of visibility, acclaim, and cultural ubiquity that are frankly unfathomable. As inescapable as she is, it’s also impossible to escape discourse about her life and success. Does she deserve it? How did she achieve it? Can it be replicated? What is it about her? And what is it about this moment that has brought her to a peak that few, if any, other artists have ever achieved?
BBC News sought out some other singers to pontificate on these questions, including Raye, who called Swift a “powerhouse” and “one of those rare timeless artists who gets it right every time” while K.T. Tunstall observed that “She’s got the resilience and the chutzpah to be the boss of an enormous machine”. But it’s Lana Del Rey, Swift’s friend and collaborator, who has the most simple but telling answer of all: “She wants it. She’s told me so many times that she wants it more than anyone. And how amazing—she’s getting exactly what she wants,” Del Rey said. “She’s driven, and I think it’s really paid off.”
The old dictum “you’ve got to want it” in terms of achieving goals is typically so generic as to be functionally meaningless, but when it comes to Swift, entire universes are contained in that simple sentence. Famously, she convinced her parents to move to Nashville to help launch her career when she was just a kid, and she spent her pre-teen years running into record labels and dropping off a demo she made of herself singing karaoke music. Lots of artists have self-made origin stories, but few have maintained the ruthless, unflagging determination required to rise to the ranks of the biggest pop stars in the world and stay there.
In the years since finally being plucked out of Nashville-transplant obscurity, Swift has wrested control of her music, her brand, and her business. She’s brushed off criticisms of her “power moves” as misogynistic dreck (If she was a male artist, “They’d say I hustled/Put in the work/They wouldn’t shake their heads and question how much of this I deserve,” she sings on the speculative Lover track “The Man”). She’s shrewdly harnessed her political power when it works for her career, softening the self-serving nature of her stances with vulnerable and poetic confessions of her own overthinking, mastermind ways (“Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism/Like some kind of congressman?” she admits on “Anti-Hero”). She’s cultivated a fanbase of deeply invested devotees that will rally around her at the smallest perceived slight. She overcame so-called cancellation and won over skeptics with an unceasing wave of work that’s both fresh and familiar. Her nostalgic album re-recording project is just one example of the fact that no one alive knows how to marry music as both art and business better than Taylor Swift.
On the Tortured Poets Department track “The Prophecy,” Swift sings that she “Don’t want money/Just someone who wants my company.” Maybe money is meaningless to her, but status is clearly important. Otherwise, why else would she keep up the relentless grind? From the 3-hour-a-night 150+ date Eras Tour to recording a 30+ track album to selling endless variants, she never stops hustling in order to stay on top of the charts and on top of the pop pyramid. When her pedestal briefly wobbled in 2016, Swift treated it as a full career death; she has built her life around being the best of the best (and for her, perhaps, that’s associated with being universally beloved).
The present tense is the important part of Del Rey’s quote—not that Swift wanted it more than anyone else and got it, but that she still wants it more than anyone else and will fight to keep it. Success seems to be Swift’s core obsession, and she’s really, really good at it. If she wanted to retire and spend the rest of her life quietly with someone who just wants her company, she could do so right now and never have to work again a day in her life. But more than anyone else, Swift wants it: the success, the acclaim, the fans, the fame. “And how amazing—she’s getting exactly what she wants.”
