I don’t hate Taylor Swift, I just hate talking about Taylor Swift. Specifically, I hate talking about Taylor Swift with Taylor Swift fans to whom she is the closest to God as a suburban white girl can get without dying. Like an atheist, I cannot stop talking about the absence of God; much like churches in the South, Swifties are plentiful.
Swift was tangentially related to every aspect of my adolescence: Wattpad, polaroids, twee, white Converse, and being chronically online before chronically online had a name. Her Red album was all over my music library; most of my girl peers lived by her 1989 album. My cohort of Tumblr users witnessed the rise, fall, and redemption of Swift when we all realized that hating her for dating Tom Hiddleston was moronic, so I’ve been on the pro-Swift side of the spectrum for most of my life. When her music comes on the radio, as long as it’s not from Reputation, I am content. Taylor Swift has cemented herself in the music industry and pop culture.
As far as social capital goes, she’s mostly untouchable. She’s Miss Americana. White, blonde, tall, blue-eyed, insanely beautiful, just down-to-earth enough to not seem cocky, and for most of her career, non-political. In her 2020 documentary, “Miss Americana,” Swift says that she grows with her fanbase; she writes about her romantic woes, and her music is relatable because her fans are going through similar struggles. Relatability goes a long way for the modern-song. No one is immune to hearing a song post-break-up and thinking, “yeah, this person gets me.” Yet she is still a white woman writing about her white woman experience; she wears her brand of relatableness, also known as vulnerability, as a cloak.
(WordPress is making me post my first blog post before making my site live; I fully intend to update this essay once I finish it.)
Savanna Bader 