Like millions of people, I’ve been listening to Taylor Swift’s new release. Is it a double? A triple? How many songs has this wunderkind generated in the years while the rest of the world got confused and Covided? Taylor went within, and got very still.
I’m generally quite cautious of 7 foot tall Valkyries with flashing ice blue eyes. I like the way she has systematically softened and played with her public persona, like the childhood plasticine product we called play doh, shape shifting herself, and attuning to her responsive audience with some sincerity and great finesse.
I have listened with great amusement to the opinions of someone called Candace Owens who continually criticises Tay Tay for playing at being a perpetual child, a little girl playing at being a princess, and glorifying her puerile little dramas, finding ready sympathy from her global teenage girl audience, even now when she is in her mid thirties. I’m amused because Taylor Swift is not the first person who has been criticized for this. Tori Amos, whose work I adore, was asked why she continually wrote intense and angst-ridden songs. She said, if I recall correctly, ‘Because I’m not a cartoon’.
Women artists are continually criticized for making personal relationships the subject of their work. Jane Austen’s novels, for example, admired for their moral intelligence, vivid characterisation, and superb syntax, are also often dismissively described as ‘mere love stories’. As if relationships are somehow not as significant as going to war or making a killing on the stock market floor, or the football stadium, the cricket pitch, the law courts: the forums where men are geared and groomed to win.
I find it fascinating that, as the global number of incels grows, and misogyny is still part of so many entrenched values and unquestioned beliefs which shape our society, Taylor Swift’s trenchant critiques of men and boys she has felt for over the 20 years of her career have also gained such powerful traction.
I especially turn a glad eye on the number of relationships she references in her songs. She never names the lovers she challenges, and leaves space thereby for her listeners to insert their own Romeos and those who have fallen short of their dreams and ambitions of romantic love. This guessing game prompted by her reticence has hugely fuelled her fame.
Taylor understands that relationships are an arena, and the challenge of face to face, skin to skin, and hand to hand combat is one of the most exciting and interesting skirmishes we as human beings can undertake. It encompasses military strife, epiphanies, shame, pride, shyness and outrage. All the big feelings in the human lexicon.
Some may accuse her of promiscuity or being unable to maintain a long term, committed relationship. In conservative South Asia, the first line of the chorus of ‘Cruel Summer’ (‘I’m drunk, in the back of your car’) would have her cancelled as a candidate for eligible sons from Madurai and Mumbai to Myanmar and The Maldives - and even Manhattan. It is liberating to see a woman who sees herself as a whole person, undefiled and untarnished by her capacity to feel and act on her romantic and sexual feelings. Who is not confined to them, or defined by them.
Her lyrics speak not of a person notching up body counts, or boasting of sexual conquests. But rather, of a person seeking a high ideal in a shallow and superficial world. And who clearly feels all the feelings, in engaging with significant others. A person, moreover, who places a high internal value on herself, and has done from the start of her career. Who does not accept second or third rate treatment from anyone, and who does not seem to expect others to do so from her as a twisted sign of her own ‘status’, the way that celebrities and public figures often do.
Her net worth now finally reflects the person she has always known herself to be.
Taylor Swift is dating some very high profile men. And these are likely to be very narcissistic and proud individuals, who have their own challenges in facing and mastering their egoistic ‘master of the universe’ compulsions, and who have left their own trails of broken hearted camp followers behind in their quest for personal glory.
I like that Taylor Swift generally does not oversexualise herself - with the exception of her recent new album cover. On stage, her shiny leotards allow freedom of movement in an energetic show. And her flowing dresses do not put any voluptuousness on display. She has a sense of humour, and a smart take on the constructions and reductions imposed on performers and artists by the media, and thus, like Madonna and Tori Amos, can celebrate her personal diversity and depth through exploring a range of personae across an evolving and interesting career.
Her focus is on the complexity of human feelings. And her lyrics show that, for her, thought as well as intense emotion are invested in personal relationships, whether friends, lovers, foes or faux. The songs are poetic because they process sonically and verbally the journey of these relationships, and many allow us to emerge at the close of the song with her, as a form of release, through confrontation, penance and realisation.
I believe that when Taylor Swift becomes a grand old lady she will look like the character Diane Lockhart in ‘The Good Fight’. Grandmother will be grandmothering, beaming on us and urging us to grow past our pain, into the best, bejewelled, versions of ourselves that we can be. Adding value to our own lives, as well as hers. Intense, and never submitting to reduction or redaction.
