How You Get the World: Reflections on Taylor Swift, Postscript 2

PS 2: How you lose the girl

To fulfill your dreams, you tried to get rid of me

All installments: Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3 || Part 4 || Part 5 || Part 6 || PS 1 || PS 2

Ed note: We are in our periodic month-long window of insufferable Taylor Swift album reactions. I hate to wade in so soon, but the iron’s hot and I do want people to read my other stuff. Remember if you’re here for Taylor Swift, you should really check out the A-POP SERIES.

I hesitated to publish this one so quickly, but then I thought: you know who else would do a quick pass on a hodgepodge collection with a few heaters tucked into it and then just launch it in the name of content?

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The reason that people get mad about Taylor Swift most frequently nowadays is because, as Tom Breihan points out in his first listen review of her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, she is a “giant freak” who “presents as a normal human being.” But the most deranged takes on Taylor Swift I remember reading in the first few years of her career were inordinately resentful because she was normal, as budding pop megastars go. Fearless, her big breakthrough, technically has one song that post-dates her rapid ascent to an international spotlight—the one ostensibly about Joe Jonas—but mostly she wrote songs about her life before she was famous, and these stories are the ones that her fanbase, which now powers record-breaking sales figures every time out, first fell in love with.

I was struck by the many allusions to Fearless on the new album. I’m not much of a Swiftologist, so there may be many other things happening in it that I’m missing. I’m always listening for Fearless, the album that made good on the promise of the teen confessional era, which hooked me when I needed it most (in my twenties). I think that in some ways, Taylor Swift is always listening for Fearless, too, pointing back to that period even as it gets harder to keep front of mind in the long dulling expanse of Just Being Like This (adulthood).¹

The emotional centerpiece of Showgirl is “Ruin the Friendship,” a bittersweet recounting of a platonic relationship hinting at something more that ended in the untimely death of her friend after high school. It’s a classic Swiftian Hallmark Channel romcom as immersive IMAX experience, eliding cinematic tropes and flashpoint memory, which she pinpointed way back on the title track of Fearless: “now capture it, remember it.”

There they are, dancing at prom to 50 Cent, and she’s wondering if she should take this moment to spontaneously reveal her true feelings and kiss the boy, like the protagonist in a teen movie at its climax, give or take some light gender reversal. We know they’re really listening to “Candy Shop,” but Swift soundtracks the film with extradiegetic lilting coffee shop acoustic guitar, held over from the confessional era, and just a dash of the ensuing era’s cloudy synths. Flash forward a few years and there’s Abigail sharing more sad news (“and we both cried”).

It almost feels like the whole album is burying this little wound in its center. My own nostalgia makes me hear the project as commenting on her early career, the original life of the showgirl who really was a girl, but from the perspective of someone far out beyond it who can’t stop thinking about it, always just beyond reach. The young man’s real death, in 2010, happens to demarcate the period where Taylor Swift shook off the last vestiges of meaningful songwriting collaboration—and, I would add, of doing literally anything that wasn’t exactly what she wanted to do—and became Taylor Swift, monomaniacal songwriter who makes all savvy and bewildering choices in a whirlwind of indiscriminate productivity.²

Taylor Swift really didn’t have the sort of child stardom experience that you so often hear recounted bitterly in celebrity memoirs or, worse, captured in tabloid casualties. From what I can tell, she wanted all of this more than anyone else in her life. You can decide how deep into the biographical rabbit hole you’d like to go to see for yourself, from early interviews to old MySpace pages to court documents, but what you get out of it is someone who had a very definite idea of her strengths at a startlingly young age and fought for her own idiosyncratic vision the whole time, pushing back on stifling label straitjackets at 14 years old. I can’t think of many comparable young stars who weren’t either manipulated by ghoulish parents and svengalis or else cosseted by some children’s media mega-corporation (provided they weren’t housing still more abusive creeps).

That means that any early traumas in her life are mundane ones, a seemingly inexhaustible well of relatable feeling she can return to even when she’s writing about people who have probably vomited on her private jet. The big shocks happened later: you can almost hear her trapped like a deer in the headlights of her rollercoaster ‘10s, ruminating on a previous era’s internet trolls and spitting outdated slang like bile in the throat on “Eldest Daughter” and “Cancelled!”

But she has always written about childhood and adolescence with great sensitivity and feeling, like the sepia documentary vignettes of “The Best Day”: she’s five, falling asleep in the backseat after the pumpkin patch; she’s thirteen, her mom helping her through the vagaries of middle school cruelty with an impromptu trip to the mall; she’s three, and Dad’s a superhero and Mom’s a movie star. There’s the charming sequel song, “Never Grow Up,” where she can dimly imagine herself as the mother figure tucking in her child as a framing device before retracing her own mistakes and embarrassments—fourteen and mortified.

There are other echoes of Fearless on the new one. It opens with what I think is her second direct rewrite of Shakespeare, one even more muddled than her audacious radio edit of Romeo and Juliet in “Love Story” as far as Shakespeare allusions go, but it sets the tone. In “The Fate of Ophelia,” this time the grand tragedy that’s been repackaged with a Hollywood happy ending is a woman on the brink of suicidal madness, a new beau swooping in with no clear referent in the source material, like she spliced in Superman. In her paranoid and internet-hater-directed “Eldest Daughter,” she quotes the melody from “White Horse” then flashes back to childhood again, but this time she can’t remember exactly how old she was—was it eight or nine when she broke her arm laughing so hard on the trampoline? You get the sense she wants to go back there, but she can’t quite remember where or when “there” was.

At times, Swift casts herself with some humor as the symbol of an older generation thickened with scar tissue, a precocious Norma Desmond. You can hear the retrospective anxiety in the friction between Swift and producer Max Martin, who have always clashed in their incompatible forms of pop genius: Swift with her constant hum of conversational syllables and intimate settings, Martin the phonetic genius and mad architect of industrial chromium carnivals. The words—uncharacteristically slapdash but always impeccably conveyed—aren’t always doing what they need to, and neither is the music, which offers a series of half-remembered pop hooks, less a mixtape than a randomly automated Pop Classics playlist that you don’t mind in the background.

But the resulting tension, sour words in saccharine trappings, fits the approach: the character on this one, let’s call her Taylor, dreams of an escape from a lonely life at the top that seems like it might finally come to pass. (Her last one was all lonely and no escape, and sounded like it.) Even when she’s singing about her boyfriend’s ample redwood, she’s chafing against the ironies of her curse: the genie who slipped up and granted her more wishes.

To be normal: it’s a funny wish for a Norma Desmond. Taylor Swift’s version of normal emerges in the limply satirical “Wi$h Li$t,” in which she can’t decide whether she is disgusted by or simply too rich to care about the gauche dreams of mere multimillionaires. She longs for the stuff of middle class suburbia, kids that look like your husband and a basketball hoop on the garage.

It is in fact the kind of normal that Taylor Swift just inhabits naturally—or rather, unnaturally, or maybe preternaturally. As my friend Isabel says, Taylor Swift may have appalling taste, but her taste is the world’s taste. Like Oprah, all the things she is naturally drawn to have purchase with—and are purchased by—an enormous number of people.

I’ve been waiting for an excuse to make a direct link between Taylor Swift and the Bo Burnham song “White Woman’s Instagram,” a song whose structure has always reminded me obliquely of Swift. It’s a caustic flood of social media-tailored images so trite that Burnham oversells nearly all of them in the video montage with a mugging grimace. “Latte foam art, tiny pumpkins, fuzzy, comfy socks, coffee table made out of driftwood, a bobblehead of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a needlepoint of a fox.” But structurally, he does the same thing that Taylor Swift so often does and pivots in the bridge, introducing a new perspective that deepens or complicates everything you’ve heard so far:

Her favorite photo of her mom
The caption says, “I can’t believe it
It’s been a decade since you’ve been gone
Mama, I miss you, I miss sitting with you in the front yard
Still figuring out how to keep living without ya
It’s got a little better but it’s still hard
Mama, I got a job I love and my own apartment
Mama, I got a boyfriend and I’m crazy about him
Your little girl didn’t do too bad
Mama, I love you, give a hug and kiss to dad”

Taylor Swift can do “White Woman’s Instagram” simultaneously as a goof and as deadly serious, and may not distinguish much between the two. It’s all very serious, she seems to say, with an unconvincing wink afterward. You can imagine Taylor Swift decorating one of her many homes with everything listed in “White Woman’s Instagram” and then laughing about it with you when you call it corny—I know, right?—but then being deeply hurt afterward and writing a song about the experience, including the bridge that knocks the wind out of you.

“Wi$h Li$t” is, like many songs on Showgirl, sketchy and underwritten, and Swift gives us a rare bridge to nowhere: “please, God, bring me a best friend who I think is hot.” That’s not to say this idea isn’t necessarily deep—the heart wants what the heart wants.³ She hangs most of the song’s genuine yearning instead on a single word: the most plaintive delivery of the word “hoop” ever recorded.

What does it mean to want normal things when you’ve captured the life-altering excitement and erotic desire and romantic sublime hiding in normality so well that you’ve long since conquered the world with it? (At this point we are in year 17 of Taylor Swift’s 2008.) You certainly can’t, as a real person in the real world, live much of a normal life afterward, even if you wanted to—which, to be clear, I am not certain Taylor Swift, also a real person in the real world, does. But the Taylor Swift of her albums sounds fixated on the impossibility of squaring the big dreams of her girlhood with the quieter needs for a less incandescent adulthood, like an X-Men mutant who can’t shut off her powers even with the couple million bucks that it would cost for specialty sunglasses.

It’s just too many damn wishes—when you believe in magic you have to believe in curses, too, even if it can be hard to tell the difference. This is the central idea in Amanda Petrusich’s curious review of Showgirl for the New Yorker, which included this line that I had to reread multiple times to make sure I understood it correctly:

“There is no curse on you, Taylor Swift! You are simply . . . alive on Earth.”

I can think of few human beings currently in existence for whom this could possibly be less applicable. The only people I can think of who are more famous than Taylor Swift are world-historical monsters. Imagine: to be simply…alive on Earth!

“What if I were simply alive on Earth?” is something like the thesis of the album, if it can be said to have one (arguable). It’s like “Earth Song” by Michael Jackson, where the questions he asks about an ailing planet amount to, what if the Earth were as damaged as I am?

Michael Jackson used the internalized and external social assault against his corporeality as a way to empathize with the desecration of the planet. The Earth was like his body; catastrophe closes in on the planet as celebrity engulfs the singer. Global fandom and ecological collapse bear a family resemblance as fellow autoimmune diseases, the respective hosts lashing out in an ugly rage, becoming monsters, leaving no one unscarred.

To which Taylor Swift has always seemed to respond: “skill issue.”

Taylor Swift went supernova during the nadir of a bloodthirsty tabloid culture that fell apart afterward, as celebrities became their own paparazzi in the social media age and worried far more about the amateurs than the professionals. 2007, Britney’s Bad Year, was Taylor Swift’s good year. So maybe fame was a devil’s bargain for Taylor Swift, but it’s not always clear which side of the bargain she sees herself on.

She’s big enough to pop in for a chat and level with the devil, like Michael Jackson did with God on “Earth Song.” “What about all the peace that you pledged your only son?”—like he’s imploring his esteemed colleague to look at what’s going on down there. In “Father Figure,” Swift sings in character as the devil and sounds like she’s having a blast. It’s a song inspired by a slimy producer/mentor type, of which she has a few to choose from, but I can’t help but also hear as an older Taylor Swift talking to her past self. “You know, you remind me of a younger me.” Someone ought to go back and save that poor girl. And if anyone can save Taylor Swift, it’s Taylor Swift.

So the girl is cursed, yes, but she did OK. Her [clean edit] check really is bigger. Her Faustian bargain amounted to less of a tragedy than a chronic condition like eczema. It’s manageable. The character “Taylor Swift” has always wanted the promise of the romantic sublime in a way that collapses small-R and capital-R romantic, daring to reach the unreachable. Getting married to her hot best friend is her final boss.

This all seems both true and unsatisfying as far as analysis goes. What Taylor Swift is really good at is telling the story of Taylor Swift (character), usually in hindsight—this was even true on Fearless when she wrote about things that likely happened only a few years prior as if she’d had a lifetime of reflection on them.

There is a humming realist core in all of Swift’s music, represented literally this time out in a way that is usually more evenly distributed—one in harmony with the real emotional journeys of its listeners, the sorts of journeys that so often get expressed by girls and young women but end up connecting with anyone desperate to be seen, your real life becoming the movie and the movie becoming real life. Someone has to capture it so that you remember it. On Showgirl, she’s doing a bunch of other stuff, too. Not all of it works. It’s fine.

Taylor Swift is…fine.

Maybe “normal” only works on the far ends of the gigantic freak spectrum, and all of us losers stuck in the dip in the middle need to get with the program. Normal is the dream of peace and quiet outside while the inside rages; that is what it means to be alive on Earth, to be cursed comma blessed—something so obvious that you’d think you wouldn’t need a Taylor Swift to constantly spell it out for you (but spelling is fun). And maybe you personally don’t really need this from her—I don’t anymore. But maybe you do, and that’s OK, too. Taylor will be there for you. She will always be there for you. That is a promise, if it isn’t a threat.

1. If she ever decides to take the parenthood plunge, maybe she’ll discover, as I did, that retrospective clarity comes back around with a vengeance, the second time either as farce or tragedy, depending on how you experienced everything the first time.

2. I originally started this post talking about Weezer, the band that I compare Swift to the most, since about 2012. To my mind, Speak Now was Taylor Swift’s Green Album, the formalist kaleidoscope proving that she’s just going to keep writing songs for-fucking-ever, and Red was her Maladroit, the moment her whole “deal” clicked for me, and has continued more or less apace ever since. Funnily enough, she actually makes something of a Weezer song this time out, in an ill-advised but perfectly competent Charli XCX diss track, “Actually Romantic.” And hey, as long as I’m putting cut material in a footnote, you know what other absurdly prolific megastar self-consciously aped Weezer in a return to form album that everyone else hated this year? Lil Wayne!

3. I also don’t want to indulge in Taylor Swift lyrical snipe hunting. One of her great skills is massaging syllables to scan even when they look horrendous on paper, as she does to an almost awe-inspiring degree with some abysmal-on-paper lyrics in “Actually Romantic.”