Taylor Swift: the rise, fall and re-invention of America's sweetheart
At 27, Taylor Swift is one of the most powerful women in the world. A combination of girl-next-door charm, ineffable pop alchemy and steely business sense have seen her acquire 10 Grammys, 18 Top 10 singles and a fortune of $300 million – all since she was just 14. For years she has been America’s most untouchable pop sweetheart. She has a social media following of $264 million. But Swift, on the brink of releasing her sixth album, Reputation, has returned a changed woman: no longer a national darling, but something darker, dangerous and possibly self-destructive.
The first hint that Swift had undergone a dramatic transformation was the video teaser she released for her comeback single, depicting a writhing snake. In that song, Look What You Made Me Do, released in September, she announced “the Old Taylor [is] dead”, before proclaiming “I don’t trust nobody and nobody trusts me”. This was Swift scrubbing away the wholesome image that made her a millionaire in favour of a brash new sound and a more vengeful persona – the end result of three years in which the world has turned against her.
So what has made Swift break bad? And what does it say about our attitude to wildly successful pop musicians that they are unable to maintain the very identity that made us fall in love with them? Perhaps there is more truth in the title of Swift’s comeback single, Look What You Made Me Do, than we realise. Maybe Swift’s inability to retain the persona we cherished her for says more about us – a public so uneasy with a young woman’s stratospheric success that we pick her apart – than her.
This isn’t Swift’s first reinvention. She started out as a country singer, having uprooted her family to Nashville as a teenager so she could pursue a music career. Back then, her close relationship with her mother was as integral to her homely, innocent image as the fact her family ran a Pennsylvanian Christmas tree farm. After the release of Red in 2012 (her fourth album), she repeatedly insisted that her future was so banal, she would become a crazy old cat lady.
Yet in 2014, she straightened her ringlets and went pop. 1989, her fifth album, was the biggest selling album of the year, but ended up as an accessory to what became an even greater phenomenon: Swift herself. With the record, Swift blossomed from a teen superstar – whose lyrics toyed with fairytales, kissing in the rain and her virginity – into a formidable adult, and cemented her status as the perfect female pop icon for our times: sexy but not sexualised; feminist but not divisive; powerful but not threatening.
That same year Swift wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal criticising streaming services that offered music for free, and removed her back catalogue from Spotify. She was embraced for standing up for artists’ rights; for her self-deprecating humour and for producing hits so solid we drove them to number one over and over again.
But then came the backlash. Her now infamous “girl squad”, a group of supermodel, actress and pop star friends whose glossy hair and beaming smiles filled up Swift’s Instagram feed, at first was talked about as a powerful expression of female solidarity on Swift’s part, but the perception of it soon soured; filled as it was with impossibly beautiful women flaunting impossibly perfect lives, it felt less feminist than elitist. When Swift invited her squad on her 1989 tour, one member, the Girls creator Lena Dunham, said the experience made her feel “chubby”. For a star whose image had been built so carefully on being every fan’s best friend, Swift was starting to look calculating and aloof.
Then came Hiddleswift her much-documented relationship with British actor Tom Hiddleston in the summer of 2016. The pair announced their relationship with a perfectly composed image of them kissing near her home in Rhode Island. At the time Swift was embroiled in an ugly spat with Kim Kardashian over a song by Kanye West in which he had bragged about having made Swift famous. Swift had called him out on the lyric – but Kardashian released a recording of a telephone call between West and Swift that suggested the two had spoken about the song. Swift’s romance with Hiddleston was seen as a Machiavellian PR stunt to distract attention from a damaging row. Her Instagram feed was bombarded by so many snake emojis – that most potent symbol of social media condemnation – that the app changed its filter system. Hiddleswift ended two months later.
After that, Swift withdrew from the public eye. Her social media accounts, once a chirruping insight into her aspirational lifestyle, slowed down, then stopped. Before the Reputation campaign, they were cleared completely, along with every trace of the image she’d been working on since she was 11.
That this supposedly attention-seeking star’s retreat from the public eye drew criticism is testament to the many, almost-contradictory expectations placed on a figure like Swift. She had always stayed quiet on politics for fear of exerting undue influence. But her silence ahead of the 2016 US election saw her branded as calculating in her neutrality. Swift, an artist who has always stressed her universality, was being forced to choose sides. She could be forgiven for thinking that, whatever she does, she is damned either way.
With her latest iteration, Swift has styled herself as a bad-girl warped by the world’s judgement. Aside from those ocean-blue eyes, she is almost unrecognisable from the 1989-era Swift. Even her trademark red cupid’s bow has turned black. She appeared nude in her most recent music video and the latest single from the album, Gorgeous, tells the unedifying story of picking up her new boyfriend while her old one was in a nightclub, unawares. The monochrome album artwork, meanwhile, features headlines spelling out her name. As an artist, Swift has always been both savvy and self aware, but here these qualities have congealed into an embittered cynicism.
If the word of mouth chatter around Reputation is anything to go by, the album could prove Swift’s most divisive act yet. Where her previous albums have had a clear, and unique, musical identity, the first three singles on Reputation revel in the generic, thudding dance-floor beats found smattered across the charts. Her songwriting, once nuanced and emotive, feels consumed by a suffocating narcissism. There is the distinct feeling of a pop campaign in trouble. Her repeated lyrical insistence on Look What You Made Me Do that just about everyone else is responsible for her actions only underlines what many have been accusing Swift of for years: she only cares about herself, and she refuses to see herself as the problem. Or, as the American journalist Mark Harris wrote recently, the song marks “the first pure, truly emblematic, undeniable piece of pop art of the Trump era” for the way it “finds a new way to commercialise self exoneration”.
What has regrettably got lost in this sorry tale are Swift’s genuinely laudable achievements as a woman of influence. Her decision to take on Spotify displayed real strength. Earlier this year, she received praise – but not enough – for taking to the stand against former DJ David Mueller. She took Mueller to court for groping her in 2013 and won a symbolic $1 in damages; this presaged the current sexual harrassment earthquake reverberating through public life.
Reputation will, inevitably, top the charts and add to Swift’s millions, but unless it matches the success of 1989, it will be seen as a comparative failure. But if that’s the case, it won’t be entirely Swift’s fault. Pop culture is littered with precociously talented stars that grew up in the public eye before spectacularly imploding. When women put themselves on pedestals and the scale of their ambition is shown, the public can be cruel. Female pop stars have to tread a tricky line between who they are and what the public want them to be, between being relatable and aspirational, and the more successful they are, the harder it becomes.
But perhaps no one should be writing off Swift just yet. As she sings on Look What You Made Me Do: “Honey, I rise up from the dead, I do it all the time”.