AS AMBASSADOR
These days, music & personal criticism aside, Taylor Swift is best known for her fans & friends & for the fervor, the devotion, the gratitude that she has inspired in them. Vogue Magazine just gave Taylor Swift & her best friend, Karlie Kloss, a cover, photoshoot, video and full-length article to confirm for us all that Taylor Swift is the best best friend, our best friend. I am a tiny part of a very large group of people that has surely digested the cover, its story & its message, part of the faction that spends excessive amounts of time watching live performances, treating song lyrics with unselfconscious seriousness (including those about driving a Maserati down a dead end street), refining impersonations, analyzing interviews, reading articles, singing along & spending hours in conversation with best friends via email, text, voice about Taylor Swift.
My best friend, Sarah, and I are two 24 year-olds with an unrelenting eagerness to please, conversational skills, symmetrical faces, white skin, blonde hair, thin bodies, reputations of “good girls,” tendencies towards perfectionism and a deep & mysterious interest in Taylor Swift. Our bond is founded on being & sharing all that while seeking and savoring complications that aren’t included in the prototype, & believing that complications are in fact enhancements. Taylor Swift appears also to be white, blonde, attractive & into that, a good girl, a people pleaser, working towards her personal conception of perfection and 25 years old. The overlap seems significant to me, but I can’t believe that I’m the only young female who is certain that they have something important in common with Taylor Swift.
I had an entirely normal non-preoccupation with Taylor Swift until “22” came out when Sarah & I were 22, & it was the perfect song to sing & dance to in our kitchen while pretending to be beyond middle-aged women in a Lady’s Choir. So I took interest. Taylor Swift is not the first person I’ve studied intently, but is the first who I often don’t like or respect. What’s more exceptional (& worth paying attention to) is the period of disturbed reflection that always comes after I watch the “Shake It Off” video or see a picture of her going to or from the gym in one of her outfits when I become increasingly neurotic, self-loathing, confused and convinced that she’s showing me her bones because she wants to make me feel I'm not skinny enough. I end up short of breath & working to turn my brain off which means that Taylor Swift quite literally induces panic in me.
So this is all, in fact, kind of serious, so serious that I wrote Sarah to tell her that,
“i went on a really long walk today, & taylor swift (red & 1989) was my soundtrack. as usual, i was feeling her/her music. i also had a moment of clarity when i got really specific & succinct about what i don’t like about her public persona/publicity game: she has made the decision that she wants to pursue a public image of perfection, & her version of perfection is based on perpetual non controversy, mass appeal & being in the right which necessitates her playing victim & taking astonishingly little ownership of points of friction in her life/relationships (this was obvious to me in listening to the red lyrics).”
I actually intended to stop there, but went on (& on) with a version of what follows.
AS BRAND
Taylor Swift built her career on descriptions of her teenaged fantasies, fantasies that she & others have likened to fairytales, fantasies that are familiar, conventional and palatable to mainstream America, fantasies that draw criticism for their normative realities (“talked to your dad/go pick out a white dress”) & eye rolls for their earnestness. She defined herself as innocuous, safe and inoffensive, & impressively, she has rarely deviated from her public persona. There’s a predictability about Taylor Swift that is charming, impressive or irritating depending on the person or (for me) the day. In the early days, we got ringlets in a ponytail and the open-mouthed shock that came with each new award she won. Now, we see the same section of her stomach in a huge variety of crop-top ensembles and instagram posts with famous friends. And even her consistencies (guessing games to announce albums, unsubtle clues to reveal the identities of song subjects in her liner notes, extravagant generosity towards her fans, red lips, love songs) are remarkable for their consistency. She either actually is her public image or is mechanically precise in her execution of it.
I am convinced that her brand, or her public self, is an insight into her definition of perfection. By my logic, a demonstration of public identity is an attempt at the particular perfection that an individual is most capable of pulling off. Taylor Swift is a great study because as a self-professed confessional songwriter cum pop star, her public identity is her profession and her platform is enormous. Victimhood is the signature of her brand. Taylor Swift has been called a victim by plenty of people other than me in a host of contexts, so I find it necessary to clarify that I consider her take on victimhood strategic. I emphatically do not mean that she is a victim to romance or a victim of the men she has dated, though she does like to depict them as being perpetrators of hurt and herself as being frequently & torturously hurt. Rather, she has crafted an image reliant on her being a “target” in world where everybody else, every critic, every nonfan, is “mean” and she profits from the juxtaposition by turning it into a binary system. If she is not hardened, she is innocent. If she is not cruel, she is kind. If she is neither promiscuous nor scandalous, she is pure and praise-worthy, and if she is none of the above then she is perfect & protected. She names her enemies, implies that she is everything that they are not and thereby inscribes herself in the safety of approval.
Her songs are perhaps the best example of how deftly and conveniently she displaces ownership of conflict or turmoil. Songs on each record enumerate the wrongs committed against her by a music critic in Mean, Joe Jonas in Forever and Always, John Mayer in Dear John, Jake Gyllenhaal in All Too Well, Katy Perry in Bad Blood, the world in Shake It Off. That’s fine enough in her early albums, but with age & with power, claiming grievances rubs the wrong way. Perhaps it’s a public persona or media trick. Perhaps it’s also how she conducts her personal life. I don’t really care. Either way, it matters that she be honest & take responsibility & move beyond putting herself in the best possible light if confessional songwriting and connecting with her fans is in fact her priority.
We know much of her heartaches, disappointments, and betrayals and little of her contributions to them (an exception: Back to December, an apology to onetime boyfriend Taylor Lautner). She seems to forget (or ignore) that we also know much of her successes. Unacknowledged privilege doesn’t sit well with me, and so, Taylor Swift, by implicitly denying her role as beneficiary and perpetuator of the status quo as she continues to reiterate her victimhood, disturbs me greatly. She threatens my self-image because she's not so far from me and she too seems to measure herself by her likability, generosity, inclusiveness. But beneath that, she undermines my whole endeavor. She operates within conventions of femininity and privilege that I find embarrassing and limiting, and again, some combination of offensive and threatening - though even the sum of the traits and conventions that are Taylor Swift (the outfits, the famous friends, the cats, the makeup, the baking, the adamant belly-buttonlessness, the instagram reveal of her bellybutton on a yacht in Hawaii, the insistence on “dancing like no one’s watching” at awards shows) and even its (literally) unbelievable flatness would be okay were she to indicate some awareness of the social structures within which she operates and of their complexity. Until then, she looks to me to be milking our shared, unearned favors (those of being a media-friendly, white, rich, pretty, skinny, good girl) and still seeking refuge.
This quality of wanting and having it both ways extends to her presentation of her sexuality, appearance and body, and again, she takes the blonde, pretty, good girl routine to a place that is personally offensive. In her newest incarnation as a pop star, she more or less operates as the version of a "tease" who trades on appearance & throws around sexual innuendo and pretends not to know the power she wields. Her on stage facial expressions and hip movements are awkward, yes, but still plays at sexuality. Her ensembles reveal no belly buttons but ample leg & (allegedly silicone enhanced) cleavage. As a female and moreover one who also spent a long time being thoroughly uncomfortable with sexuality, I can muster a considerable empathy for her and her situation. I imagine that for a majority of women desirability, especially when recently discovered, is something exciting and powerful to the point of being intoxicating. Plus, pop stars are supposed to be sexy. Reconciling that with personal and/or societal, familial, fan-based reservations inevitably leads to behavioral inconsistencies, and Taylor Swift, like the rest of us, deserves a grace period when working through it all. Still, I can’t get behind a lack of ownership.
As a person of extreme privilege, the extent of which I likely cannot fully grasp, I’ve already been through my fair share of identity crises centered around what I have and what I am allowed to enjoy, take pride in and take advantage of while still being a sensitive, informed and thoughtful person. Among the bad parts about who I was born and where I come from is that I feel a distinct sense of displacement, a lack of identity that comes with feeling qualms about embracing an identity predicated on privilege, the mainstream and a heritage that affords me more than I could list at the expense of strangers and friends. Straight person culture, white person culture, pretty girl culture, rich person culture are hard to stand behind with banner. The mainstream doesn’t need any more representatives, and oppressors don’t need any representatives in the first place (and I couldn’t recover for being mistaken for proudly and willingly upholding exclusionary customs). I am disappointed in Taylor Swift for proceeding as a kind of ambassador for all of the above, for reaching for the very center of the power structure and seemingly applying for admission to the numerous privileged pockets she has access to (Kennedy pedigree, Victoria’s Secret fashion shows, Billboard charts, TriBeCa real estate), and only ever portraying deep, embedded and damaging systems as hindering her. If this is ambition or the pursuit of perfection, it’s separated by a hair from power and status hunger, and is irrefutably irresponsible. There is a believable - but decreasingly so - self-consciousness about Taylor Swift that makes me certain that she appeals to the top dogs out of insecurity, and I don’t know how you blame an individual person (and a female at that) for trying for confirmation, but when she hits us with the pop culture’s most marketable & one dimensional persona, it reads as a ploy with social implications that she does not & will never own.
She is so pleased with herself, and seems so pleased by how well she thinks she’s fooling us all that sometimes I think I hate her. Then of course I feel very badly, as I feel badly now for having written this in case she might read it and misunderstand, in case I might not have accurately chronicled my hang-ups, or in case I’ve forgotten entirely the fact that seeing a billboard with her face on it gives me a thrill, that sometimes I think she’s cool, lovely, funny, and that I am in no uncertain terms a very big fan. On my generous days, my thoughts are literally as corny, compassionate and condescending as “It’s too bad. I just want her to be herself all the time.” But really it's more than too bad (we could call it a societal disservice) that she continues to propagate a marketable image of perfection that could be updated to general advantage. I think it's fair to judge a person for the image that they present, the ideals that they pursue. I respect Taylor Swift for many of hers (for her treatment of her fans, her donations to the New York City public school system, her self-direction, her pride in her work, her ambition), & the remains are hard for me.