Run Away Fast As You Can

But, like: Taylor Swift is “Twilight.” It’s this totally idealized romantic narrative that fourteen-year-olds can project themselves into which is unrelated to the realities of relationships. Like: I have never broken up with someone and been like, “clearly, I can see who the villain was here, and ascertain my own innocence entirely!” And I can see why fourteen-year-olds think that getting up on stage and singing the words “you’re gay” about an ex is what empowerment looks like, or find that “Better Than Revenge” song, with ACTUAL BACKING VOCALS singing “she deserved it,” to be a means of rising above adversity. My problem is, if we as adults agree that demeaning the most people the most effectively in the quest for boys is what adolescent girls should be doing to “empower” themselves, then the problems of female adolescence — nay, female existence ITSELF! — just got a whole lot more Exactly The Same.

The Tiger Beatdown post I quoted above does a pretty good job of getting at the Taylor Swift Problem.

The Taylor Swift Problem is pretty similar to the Twilight Problem, actually. Both of them get at something that – to my mind – is deeply true of adolescent experience, of longing, of self-centredness, of naivete. When Taylor says “she doesn’t get your humour like I do” we can all hear ourselves in our teenage journals writing about how if he only could see the way that we understood us – well, maybe that’s just me. (For the record, I would have probably liked Taylor when I was about 13-14 (“the Jewel years”) but hated her when I was actually in high school.) It’s not that I think everything she has to say is commendable, but it is definitely believable. If you listen to the song “You Belong With Me” and don’t watch the (terrible, irony-free Lavigne-rehashing) video, it isn’t even clear that the guy in question picks “Taylor.”

Also, I can never really hate “White Horse.”

She’s so sad! She’s so sad her sweatshirt’s fallen off her shoulder. This ain’t no fairytale. She’s just so cute!

Her power is in her earnestness and total lack of irony.

The problem, is, of course, that nostalgia and irony and taking things lightly are all very well and good. Until you have to admit that the things themselves aren’t intended lightly.

This is tricky – total lack of irony is fine when you can conceivably sell yourself as a kid just writing down her unfiltered feelings, but when you’re a veteran of tabloid breakups and SNL and award shows and you are obviously a pro at handling all this attention and sending the right message… it stops being believable. You can’t go back to just being a reasonably popular country singer, just sitting in her room and crying tear drops onto her guitar, so you have to figure out a way to make it new.

But, Speak Now. I still don’t really care about how feminist Taylor is – but the problem isn’t so much that she is being honest or real or stripped-down and saying what’s on her mind – it’s that a lot of what’s on her mind is boring and awful. She comes off mopey and joyless – she seems to feel sorry for herself a lot – and hasn’t particularly figured out a way to be convincingly authentic and relatable while at the centre of a series of tabloid scandals. You can sing a song about stealing a man at the altar on the same album that you sing about how your ex’s new girlfriend is a whore, but you should probably figure out a way to do it with some sense of the moral ambivalence of your position.

I don’t write about music a lot because I’m not that great at it, but when people talk about Taylor Swift they are mostly not talking about her music. They are talking about her persona and the ways she uses her songs to create it. And that “Taylor Swift” is something people respond to emotionally. On Tiger Beatdown, Sady (who has made a lot of completely valid intellectual arguments about why Taylor Swift is the worst¹) associates Taylor Swift with a certain class of semi-evil teenage girl who evidently made life pretty hard for Sady. I’m not saying that this invalidates or somehow lessens Sady’s widely disseminated intellectual arguments with regard to Taylor Swift’s awfulness. I think the best intellectual work comes from emotional response. Mine does, anyway. There’s not necessarily a clear metric that explains why cultural things are good and bad and the different ways they’re good and bad – so you have to trust your emotional responses, and think about where that response came from and whether your emotional response comes from a place of being comforted by things that reinforce the status quo or whether they are healthy responses to things that are expressing something you feel is true.

For me, I never had Sady’s instinctive reaction to Taylor Swift, sweet teenage girl, because the people who were meanest to me when I was a teenager were not the sweet, well-adjusted achievers. Those girls were almost always pretty nice to me – the meanest ones were fellow outsiders. One of the hardest lessons I learned was that being nerdy didn’t automatically mean being a better or deeper or nobler person. (This applied to me too.) So I always looked at Taylor fondly – because my feeling about her was basically that, she is kind of cutely teenagely clueless about the real world, and well, aw. “She wears high heels, I wear sneakers.” I remember watching her perform on SNL and laughing about her one “rock” move, where she kind of juts her hip out. “You be the prince and I’ll be the princess.” Aw.

But then, Taylor started buying her own hype. I’m not sure exactly when it happened because I haven’t actually followed all Taylor Swift news breathlessly (though you can see the change between the “Love Story” video where she’s the yearning dork and the “Fifteen” video where she’s become this creepy wise fairy-angel-figure), but when she transitioned from teen star to adult star, her music didn’t really grow up.

Then, “Innocent” happened.

This is just a disproportionate reaction to someone interrupting an awards show speech. (If you are ever asking yourself, if something is a disproportionate reaction to someone interrupting an awards show speech, I think the main test is “Is a wind machine involved?” If so, yes.)

At this point, it became clear to me that Taylor Swift is awful. She wrote this epic thing about how Kanye West is still a good person even though he interrupted her one time. This is just gross and ungracious. When someone does something bad to you, yes, you have been wronged, but after a year in which you’ve won Grammies and Kanye had the president of America call him a jackass. You’ve won, and you’re coming back to gloat and magnanimously offer forgiveness. This is the point where aesthetic judgments and emotional judgments collide – I don’t think her music has changed all that much, but the other side of the naive and unironic coin is a total lack of self-awareness or insight. Really, Taylor hasn’t changed – she’s still singing about rainbows and ponies and stuff. But my response to her sure has. Was my first response to her “wrong”? No, the things I liked about her are still there – unfettered feelings in songwriting and a throb in her voice, her totally unapologetic personification of girliness. Liking Taylor Swift was my way of “reclaiming” all the ridiculous butterfly/rainbow earnestness of my teen years – of acknowledging that there is a positivity in all that and of not getting embarrassed by strong feelings. But Taylor isn’t doing this out of a sense of radical girl-forward truth telling that owns all the ridiculous ways we are influenced by our culture. She thinks that this is a good way for things to be. She is proud of it.

This is why she is the worst.