Taylor Swift
The Most Prolific Millennial Artist of Any Domain
I was not surprised at where the now-33-year-old Taylor Swift began her reflection in the 2020 Neflix documentary, Miss Americana. In the scene, she is combing through what appears to be a journal. “My entire moral code,” she says, “as a kid and now, is a need to be thought of as good.”
She continues: “It was all I wrote about, it was all I wanted, it was the complete and moral belief system that I subscribed to as a kid. Do the right thing. Do the good thing. And obviously I’m not a perfect person by any stretch, but overall the main thing that I always tried to be was, umm, like, just, like a good girl.”
I say not surprised because it would be difficult to find a celebrity more apt to take on the iconic representation of Millennials and our culture than Swift, and as I have argued on this Substack, I think our experience of trying to line our behavior up in all the good categories and through the perfect hoops typifies what many of us experienced. The result—tiptoeing around, trying not to offend anyone or break anything—is barely living at all, but thankfully it doesn’t have to be the end of the story. After all, it’s an older and wiser Swift in the scene who’s looking back, and that Swift seems to possess such a sincere capacity for this kind of reflection is one of her many virtues.
Suffice it to say that I have not always been a huge Swift fan. I mean, as far back as “Love Story” (2008), I had to admit she was capable of writing a catchy song, and the fact that she really was writing them in the first place has always been noteworthy. Even the whole dating-exploits-and-breakup-songs (“I Knew You Were Trouble,” “We are Never Getting Back Together,” “Look What You Made Me Do,” etc.) act hinted at her creative brilliance, but I can’t imagine that most people didn’t grow tired of it. If you want to hear a “Bad Blood” (2014) that’s worth listening to, go with the Ryan Adams’ version every single time.
Swift laments in the aforementioned film how female artists have to keep reinventing in the hopes of not being discarded when they’re 35, and I’m sure she’s onto something with the observation, and it has been to Swift’s credit that she has reinvented. Most people probably needed her to, but that’s actually beside the point. Swift’s best stuff has been produced recently, and it’s not close. If “Wildest Dreams” (2014) was the first Swift song that I really liked, it was “Exile” (2020)—a collaboration with Bon Iver—that first made me cry. I must have listened to the song thirty times in a row when I first discovered it, and “Lover” (2019) and “Cardigan” (2020) were similar vibes if not quite tear-worthy.
I would pay good money to Swift in concert, but the movie about her—predictably and sadly—underemphasizes the growth of her art or how rare it is that someone who ‘made it’ so early has continued to rise or that she has produced ten studio albums (and who knows how many hits) in sixteen years or how impressive it is that Swift’s mother seems to be both involved and supportive without being exploitative or throwing herself into the center of it all. Instead the film plays up a combination of grievance and her underwhelming flirtation with Progressive politics.
This is the part, though, that seems to go right over the head of the kinds of folks who want so badly for someone like Swift to become a mainstay Progressive without ever getting around to considering that maybe it was just another iteration of her “(needing) to be thought of as good.” We see, in the film, Swift brainstorming and reflecting about her dislike for Senator Marsha Blackburn—who, for all I know really is a kook—and then we see some of her public statements that urge her fans to vote, and then a scene where the entourage is celebrating the empirical evidence that voting registration surged as a result, and then Blackburn wins handily.
For anyone with a shred of thoughtfulness or honesty, this would seem to be an opportunity: oh, maybe that didn’t work? Meaning, no, not that Swift (or anyone) should ‘just shut up and sing’ but rather that maybe everyday human beings who are trying to figure out how to pay for their groceries and their mortgages and their utility bills don’t want to be lectured about politics by, you know, people with net worths in the range of $570 million.
One of Swift’s chief complaints about Blackburn seems to be her lack of care about things like the gender pay gap. In general, it would seem to me that if a political movement would wish to put an issue like the gender pay gap in anything like the center of their platform, they would want the voice leading the way to be waitresses or teachers or principals or even middle managers. Not one percenters like professional women’s soccer players and Taylor Swift.
Now the gender pay gap is a complicated topic that does merit intelligent discussion, which I won’t try to accomplish in a couple sentences—come to think of it, that’s another problem with the cinematic depiction is that if Swift really knows the issues, what we get is ankle-deep, a perpetuation of a kind of perception that Swift is an airy blond. I increasingly think Swift is more likely a genius than a ditz, but the movie unfortunately does not help us see that.
This is not to suggest that Swift (or Megan Rapinoe, net worth of about $5 million) do not or can’t have legitimate grievances. Swift, for example, does appear to have been treated very badly by David Mueller, who the evidence suggests basically groped her in open view, and then when he was fired for it, subsequently sued Swift for $3 million. Well, he lost, as he should have. And if you’re looking for additional early signs of Swift’s artistic mastery, you could do a lot worse than her 2014 song, “Clean” (“Gone was any trace of you”) which is another song I blasted on repeat when I heard it for the first time.
And here’s where I would like to suggest that maybe the subtle beauty of art, which allows for nuance without having to mince words really is every bit as legitimate a platform for someone’s voice to emerge as activism. Maybe music, in other words, really is better than politics—more alive—and we’re allowed to claim and experience it as such. There’s nothing second-rate about singing rather than lecturing.
Bob Dylan seemed to understand this by the end of his career, but if Swift needs a female role model in this respect she could probably do worse than Alanis Morissette. Morissette doesn’t strike me as the kind of person or artist who feels very compelled to hold her tongue on important matters, but nothing she ever said publicly came anywhere close to eclipsing her musical contribution. And Swift, it’s worth pointing out, seems to possess ten times the talent (and work ethic) than that of Morissette (and I like Morissette!).
Oh, and Swift’s most-recent masterpiece, “Anti-Hero”? It says pretty much everything I’ve tried to say here, but in fewer words: I'll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror…/Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism/Like some kind of congressman? (Tale as old as time).