To quote her arch-nemesis Kanye West, Taylor Swift just popped a wheelie on the zeitgeist. At a time when the music industry is in free fall, her latest record 1989 is slated to have the biggest sales week for an LP since the heady pre-Spotify days of 2002. Taylor Swift is a colossal rock star when rock is supposedly dead, a blockbuster artist when blockbuster artists don’t exist, intensely privacy-conscious when oversharing reigns supreme, and a self-described songwriter when DJs dominate the festival circuit. More than anything else, she and her art are a fascinating mess of contradictions. Regardless of the musical merits of the record (I happen to like a lot of it), Taylor Swift’s superficially straightforward love songs speak profoundly about a generation’s politics and what it’s like to navigate increasingly complicated social interactions.
Much like with the similarly monolithic Beyoncé, it’s hard to read an article about Taylor Swift without running into an examination of her credentials as a feminist. Asked in 2012 if she identified with the term, she responded, “I don’t really think about things as guys versus girls. I never have. I was raised by parents who brought me up to think if you work as hard as guys, you can go far in life.” Her music before “Red” also often reflected her internalization of sexist notions of relationships. In the lyrics of the massive “Love Story,” Swift sings about a female character who is only able to find fulfillment through a messianic Romeo figure with her father’s approval for a proposal. On 1989, however, Taylor Swift takes shots at critics who attack her willingness to date multiple people on “Shake It Off,” celebrates cosmopolitan notions of sexuality on “Welcome to New York,” and dismisses men who would blame her exclusively for failed relationships in “Blank Space.”
As tempting as it is to place Taylor Swift (and her newly minted best friend Lena Dunham) into a narrative of ascendant feminism, the reality is somewhat more complicated. The kind of feminism that Swift represents, while inspirational in its message of letting women define their own sexualities, remains frustratingly limited in its political scope. Rather than looking at women’s inequality as something systemic and resulting from patriarchal institutions, Swift and her pop cultural feminist contemporaries often define women’s rights within the narrow context of their individual interactions and relationships. Asked in an NPR interview why she refrains from “sending a broader message” in writing songs that may help young women “turn away from themselves in a different way,” Swift responded that she prefers to compartmentalize her politics into her media appearances instead of in her records. Does Taylor Swift owe the world a protest anthem about sexism in the American political economy? Absolutely not. That said, Taylor Swift’s feminist awakening remains unsatisfyingly incomplete until it makes a stronger appearance in her art. As writer Ann Powers observed about Taylor Swift’s earlier single “We Are Never Getting Back Together,” in absence of a sense of community with other women, “What's usually left is a focus on self-fulfillment that only goes so far in realizing real freedom from sexism's traps.”
Though it’s hard to know for sure the roots of our present pop disconnect between the personal and the political, the answer might lie in the $20 million that Taylor Swift recently dropped on two Manhattan lofts. Memorably comparing 1989 to a banana-quinoa muffin, Grantland music critic Steven Hyden argues that the fantastic world Swift describes on the album reflects a newfound desire to make a “soundtrack for upwardly mobile urbanites” instead of truly populist pop music. Intended as a callback to a time when Prince and Fine Young Cannibals ruled the charts, it’s fitting that the album title also recalls a decade of “greed is good” politics. As much as I enjoy the Chvrches and Grimes-influenced soundscapes on her album, I can’t help but dwell on Taylor Swift’s rejection of the Nashville sound that once defined her as symbolic of the gradual marginalization of Middle America by pop tastemakers. The Australian Lorde may have told pop listeners they’d never be royals, but Taylor Swift is still embracing a distinctly American fantasy of Gatsby-esque splendor.
Whatever the implications of Swift’s narratives, 1989 is essential listening not only for its retro-futurist musical aesthetic but also for its glimpse into our new cultural frontiers. To paraphrase her latest number one single, we can get down about complicated gender politics and societal polarization, but Taylor Swift will still be there with her sick beat.
Gray Whisnant is an Opinion Columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at g.whisnant@cavalierdaily.com.
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