Taylor Swift, queen of the ‘unwashed masses’
The critics have to admit they’re living in her narrative now
“There is one thing I’ve learned: My response to anything that happens, good or bad, is to keep making things. Keep making art.”
Taylor Swift describes one of her past eras—2014’s 1989-departure-from-country era—as “imperial.” If that’s how she saw herself a decade ago, what descriptor could accurately express her status today? “Person of the Year” seems lacking for an artist who has recreated the Super Bowl, in attendance and economic impact, dozens of times during the past year.
How about her gutsiness? Re-releasing old albums and breaking records she set herself? Enviable.
Her business empire? Now worth $1 billion.
Her fans’ undying loyalty? Priceless.
She’s been compared to Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson for sheer cultural impact. In college courses this year, her words will be studied alongside those of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
“She’s the last monoculture left in our stratified world,” TIME’s feature proclaims.1 Yet, with great responsibility and tremendous popularity come great degrees of detraction. While Taylor Swift’s fans are legion, her critics are also many.
burning flames or paradise
Many consider it feeble and uncool to like Taylor Swift. Some of these people are simply haters; others have an understandable aversion to anything uber-popular. But some of Swift’s critics have justified concerns, and writer and editor Mark Hemingway articulates some of those in an essay titled Taylor Swift’s Popularity Is A Sign Of Societal Decline.
He refers to everyone who doesn’t dislike Swift as “the unwashed masses,” so I don’t think he’s deluded himself into thinking he’ll turn Swifties into anti-Swifties. But once you get past his chagrin about a man incarcerated for murder finding “something intuitively pleasant and genuine and good” in Swift’s voice,2 you’ll find he has some fair criticisms, summarized as follows. (And these criticisms aren’t unique to Hemingway; I’ve heard them before.)
First, Swift’s music, according to Hemingway, is “utterly defined by self-obsession rather than introspection.”
Second, her catalog is repetitive. (He thinks there should be limits to songs that are basically “bellyaching about boyfriends.”)
Third, her lyrics and music are actually bad on a technical level.
On the first point, Hemingway says, “…it seems like every Taylor Swift album is a Festivus record devoted to the airing of grievances and feats of artistic strength.” Okay, but Swift isn’t required to do anything else with her skill. She’s telling her story and people want to keep hearing it. Her stories aren’t any less because they are her own or because she can tell them well again and again. Besides, I can’t foresee a time when there won’t be a market for “bellyaching” about a significant other.
To the second point, I shrug. Swift’s music isn’t repetitive—neither in content nor style. I recently listened to a song from her very first album, and as a vocalist and lyricist, she’s a far cry today from the girl she was back then. She’s moved from country to pop and played around with folk, rock, alternative, dance, and electronic styles. And if Swift’s music is objectively repetitive, does that make it bad? Does that require some sort of change? The market will tell artists when it’s tired of the same old thing. And the market, if you haven’t noticed, is far from tired of Taylor Swift. Her career started in 2006. Another massive present-day cultural phenomenon, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, launched in 2008. The MCU is showing undisputed signs of decline. On the other hand, Swift seems to be sprinting ever upward and onward to greater glory.
Hemingway’s third criticism probably holds the most weight. Are Swift’s lyrics and music objectively bad? He gets a bit technical, knocking Swift’s use of the “same trite and overused chord progressions” which engage “the broadest, most appealing (and shallowest) tranche” of “the human condition.” Um, okay, but if it works, why change it?
Hemingway gets hung up on sophistication and Swift’s lack of it, drawing comparisons between her songs and The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.”
[In “Eleanor Rigby,”] there are counter melodies, staccato strings, and it’s notable for its repeated use of “plagal cadences” where the IV chord resolves to the I, or root chord in the key.
I’m sure music nerds3 will appreciate all that, but my eyes glaze over. I couldn’t tell a plagal cadence from purgatory.
Paul McCartney’s lyrics and ‘instinctual hymnody’ are “a thousand times more sophisticated than anything Swift has ever done,” Hemingway continues. “Swift is very, very good at serving an audience that has been conditioned to accept less in terms of musical and lyrical sophistication.”
I’m struggling to decipher a point here.4 There’s plenty of sophisticated and technically complex music that is also bad. And there’s plenty of simple and unsophisticated music that is good. But sophistication is no fair measure of art or the artist—that rule goes to the work’s ability to reach people and give them identity and voice (whether for themselves or before others). No one would mistake “Rich Men North of Richmond” for a sophisticated ballad, but the song certainly struck a chord—and a nerve.
another day another drama
Obviously, we wouldn’t be having this conversation if Taylor Swift weren’t as wildly popular as she is—if she couldn’t take millions along with her on her journey. Some say she’s too young to speak of herself as having “eras.” But one thing that can’t be denied is her strong sense of narrativity—her belief (or pretension) that everything that happens to her is part of a story. That every triumph and breakup contributes to a larger arc. And if she isn’t wholly the master of the tale, she’s at least the shaper of it.
…she has harnessed the power of the media, both traditional and new, to create something wholly unique—a narrative world, in which her music is just one piece in an interactive, shape-shifting story. Swift is that story’s architect and hero, protagonist and narrator.5
Her concerts have been described as religious experiences, which isn’t hard to imagine: anything that brings people together, including the large sporting events her Eras Tour rivals, has been described as such. And like those sporting events, the concerts are the product of Swift’s devotion and discipline. She gave up drinking six months before the tour began and underwent rigorous strength training (treadmilling while singing the entire 180-minute setlist aloud) and three months of choreography rehearsals. “I wanted to get it in my bones,” she says.
She’s modeling radical self-acceptance on the world’s largest stage, giving the audience a space to revisit their own joy or pain, once dismissed or forgotten.6
And this is what Hemingway misses. To understand Taylor Swift, you have to get it in your bones. That doesn’t mean we must uncritically embrace all her music. It does mean that one must surrender to the story and go along for the narrative ride. The fact that Swift’s discography is the equivalent of a sometimes introspective but mostly brash personal essay doesn’t make it less than the work of an austere, outwardly focused essayist who centers the experiences of those who are strangers to his audience.7 I can tell you that the former is far more challenging to do well.
Still, the artist’s experience is always personal, as is the experience of the audience receiving the artist’s work. This is why Swift’s self-reflectiveness (or lack thereof) doesn’t bother me as much as it seems to bother Hemingway. “Art is the communication of an experience or sensation, real or imagined.”8 Artists are always talking about themselves, communicating their experiences. Even when I’m talking about Taylor Swift, I am talking about myself. The demand that the artist be distant is insincere.
One fan interviewed for TIME’s profile said, “She’s so good at making her personal experience relate to millions of people. When I listen to her songs, I think about what I’ve been through—not what she’s been through.”
Joe Garcia, the incarcerated man referenced above,9 says Taylor Swift’s problems “must be champagne problems compared with mine, but I still see myself in them.” Which is the point. The artist isn’t her audience—except, in the ways that matter most, she might as well be.
only self-indulgent takers
Save me the bellyaching about sophistication, self-obsession, and sameyness, Mr. Hemingway. In this day of inattentiveness and stunted self-expression, if the art isn’t reaching the “unwashed masses,” what good is it? Beethoven and opera, often seen as high art now, were pop culture back in their day. Incredible sophistication isn’t what makes better art; connection does. And connection is found in story.
Swift is excellent at story. The fact that it’s her story, and sometimes her fantasy, makes her even better at it. Authentic, one might say. (Remember when that was the quality we looked for in art?) Authenticity involves the acknowledgment that art must also be interesting, a diversion in some way, a pleasure to partake in. Dare I say it? It must be entertaining—for both the artist and the audience.
Swift tells her TIME interviewer:
This is the proudest and happiest I’ve ever felt, and the most creatively fulfilled and free I’ve ever been. Ultimately, we can convolute it all we want, or try to overcomplicate it, but there’s only one question. [Here, she adopts a booming voice.] Are you not entertained?
Yes, Taylor Swift, I am entertained. Thank you for your honesty.
Declaring that her upcoming releases will be “fire,” Swift waxes metaphorical about her future work:
I’m collecting horcruxes. I’m collecting infinity stones. Gandalf’s voice is in my head every time I put out a new one. For me, it is a movie now.
Now she’s speaking my language—our language as secret keepers—the language of the unwashed masses who find meaning and significance in tales that are truer than life.10 It’s old news that many frown on fantasies like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and the MCU: they’re seen as childish entertainment for boys who refuse to become men. Some might call these stories mundane and repetitive, lacking in sophistication, the pastime of folks who prefer to hide from reality. But these stories are really soul-mirrors, and when they’re held up, they reflect the latent mysticism and wanton spiritual tendencies of the people who receive them. They satisfy our desire to stare at the sun more than we stare in the mirror. They are stories of the people in the truest sense.
Every song, every story is, in some way, autobiographical. And “haven’t we all become selective autobiographers in the digital age as we curate our lives for our own audiences of any size—cutting away from the raw fabric of our lived experience to reveal the shape of the story we most want to tell, whether it’s on our own feeds or the world’s stage?”11
You see, Taylor Swift is a Swiftie herself. She’s both captive and queen of this culture—this culture of autobiographical cutting and clipping and story-shaping. Of slipping half-truths into white lies and deceiving ourselves until we have to admit we, in fact, are the problem.
To the critics, I say: let the unwashed masses have this indulgence. A better place to turn your energy would be to develop range in your musical taste—to experience a variety of genres across different art forms. To explore. To live within the stories of others, no matter how unsophisticated and repetitive they might be. (People aren’t that different after all.)
“Eleanor Rigby” and “Lavender Haze” aren’t as disparate as one might think. We can embrace the different experiences enshrined in each when we recognize that they both belong to the family of story. And if you’ve lost this thread, maybe go sit quietly and listen to some music until the story finds you again.
asides + signal boosts
Speaking of Taylor Swift, here’s some interesting stuff I’ve encountered over the past few months while planning to write this piece.
Taylor Swift at Harvard: Why the pop superstar’s work is worthy of study, by Stephanie Burt (The Atlantic)
Taylor Swift’s Midnights Is the Right Kind of Concept Album, by Carl Wilson (Slate)
Welcome to the Era of Unapologetic Bad Taste, by Judy Berman (TIME) [a re-read from several months prior]
And speaking of range in musical taste: producer Metro Boomin really stormed up my personal charts this past year, primarily because of the Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse album—an artistic stunner in every sense of the word. (Hemingway might even consider it “sophisticated.”) I love his subtly dark trap/hip-hop beats, and his recent concert combined that talent with symphonic orchestra—my first musical love. I thoroughly enjoyed this marvelous blend, and seeing someone who’s typically behind the scenes in the world of music take the stage. (Content warning.)
I recently finished reading
’s Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. I know some people who won’t read it because they think it’s just more bellyaching about American evangelicalism—and aren’t we all tired of that? I get it—I really do. But the book is worth a read, especially if you grew up in or bought into the evangelical mythos somewhere in the past few decades. It shows that the whole thing didn’t spring full-grown out of Zeus’ head. The final chapter is the best because it addresses the most potent (and most recent?) contribution to the evangelical social imaginary—the apocalyptic and fantastic ones, Left Behind and Frank Peretti, Lewis and Barfield and Tolkien.A lion, a ring, and Sauron are symbols writ large. They are billboards on the highway of a disenchanted world, pointing us, with bold letters and bright lights, to the forgotten places on the side roads of the modern soul…
Such stories meet a hunger caused by the general absence of myth and mystery in the modern world—that much-discussed disenchantment—and that modern world includes evangelicals, whether we realize it or not.
Finally, why would I write all this without sharing my own (current) favorite Taylor Swift songs? So here’s a playlist in no particular order.
Sam Lanksy, “2023 Person of the Year: Taylor Swift,” TIME, https://time.com/6342806/person-of-the-year-2023-taylor-swift/
Joe Garcia, “Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison,” The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/listening-to-taylor-swift-in-prison
I use the term nerd respectfully. I am a nerd of other things, just not music.
I’ll admit to a bit of handwaving here—I’m not unpacking the term “sophisticated” as much as it probably deserves to be unpacked. But as someone who is incredibly exploratory when it comes to music—my Liked Songs will shuffle from Mykola Leontovych to Twenty One Pilots to The Gray Havens—I don’t think technical complexity is as much of a marker of good songcraft as Hemingway seems to think it is. Art must connect on a deeper level than appreciation of the artist’s cleverness. In art, awe must come before appreciation.
Sam Lanksy, “2023 Person of the Year: Taylor Swift,” TIME, https://time.com/6342806/person-of-the-year-2023-taylor-swift/
Sam Lanksy, “2023 Person of the Year: Taylor Swift,” TIME, https://time.com/6342806/person-of-the-year-2023-taylor-swift/
The pretention of the outwardly focused commentator who centers the experiences of others is that he or she is largely centering their own feelings about their subject matter which isn’t themselves.
N.D. Wilson, Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl
Joe Garcia, “Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison,” The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/listening-to-taylor-swift-in-prison
Is there a pie chart showing where Swifties overlap with fans of the MCU?
Sam Lanksy, “2023 Person of the Year: Taylor Swift,” TIME, https://time.com/6342806/person-of-the-year-2023-taylor-swift/
I’ll definitely be listening to that playlist! Also, anyone who thinks TS is too young to have eras never had a quarter life crisis! This article is gold and and excellent rebuttal to some of the criticisms I’ve heard of TS and her music.