The same woman who sang “take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die”, can – from the depths of her artificial heart – sing of sex with her fiancé, “The red tree, it’s not hard to see / His love was the key that opened my thighs”. And yet, these are the major upgrades that Taylor Swift contains. A broken and torn woman who once anxiously asked her muse, “Would it be enough if I could never give you peace?” and now he’s marrying another at Madison Square Garden, the most visible place in all of Manhattan.
Such is the Swiftian Gestalt. So deeply eager to please (“I’m still trying everything to keep you looking at me”) and so full of rage (“I catch fire every time I talk”). Swift heard that old cliché about people containing mobs one day and said, “You wanna bet?” I’ve spent more than half my life in Swift’s musical universe and every day I go back and find someone new. So how do you evaluate someone with no stable sense of self, no sonic, emotional, or aesthetic coherence, who is “happy, free, confused, and lonely all at once” (and that’s not even the half of it)?
The listener must assume that Taylor Swift studied Democracy in America. You know, de Tocqueville’s treatise on America’s republican destiny—that the United States as we now know it was destined to become the egalitarian, democratic country that Reagan so confidently spoke of, 140 years later. The composite forces of history were simply too strong for any other outcome. And how else are we to understand Swift’s theory of the self? The arc of the universe is long and winding – but it would always wait here.
A 4th of July wedding at the great baseball arena, Madison Square Garden? Hell, why not. “You’re going to do bigger things in your life than marry the guy on the football team” (2008), she says, with stark inevitability. And well, she is the most commercially successful artist of all time and possibly the most famous woman in the world. Her Eras Tour (2023-2024) broke every record imaginable, and she’s won album of the year at the Grammys four times — which matters to some people. But what about all that and marrying the guy on the football team?
She always knew – she knew everything when she was young. “I’ll find someone who’ll treat me right someday,” consoles Taylor, 16, on the same album and with the same sense of historical determinism. And, well – there it is. True American love story: a blonde pop star, surrounded by love, burned out, broken and lost, meets the champion football player. There have been false starts and broken promises in between (“you know I want a London boy,” she declared, so he would leave her alone in the house they shared on the heath). But there goes that arch of the universe again.
In fact, when she sings in Ophelia’s Fate (2025) that divine intervention saved her from suicide, Ophelia-style (“And if you had never come for me / I might have drowned in melancholy”) those “proving facts” of de Tocqueville’s imagination must rattle around. No, this was clearly fate. The gods willed it. And only now, she can “see it all” – end of story – with someone, one day, ring on her finger. Expressed in indicators.
And that preternatural sense of self-assurance (soooo American!) comes through with incredible force in her 2010 ballad “Long Live” (she would have been 20). Anticipating, or wanting, the future, Swift sings to her fans, “When you point at the pictures, please point to my name.” And then she astral projects ten years into the future, when she’s no longer an ingenue, when there will be new stars nipping at her heels (Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo?). “Bring on all the pretenders,” she says, a decade too early. “Ah, try and come for my job,” she says somewhat more defensively in 2023. Superstardom was never an ambition for Taylor. Nothing so soft and fleshy. No, it was written in the stars. Composite forces of history and all.
many Things have been written about the singer’s predatory capitalism, her manipulation of the charts, her expensive tickets and bundles of battered merchandise for willing fans, and how it distracts her from her greatest appeal: the lyrical intimacy, the forced closeness, the whole “I’m just like you” thing. And maybe that’s true, but it’s not really interesting. Swift can fly anywhere in a private jet, but I also resent the older men I’ve dated, and we both really want our health. Intimacy, forced or not, real or fake, still convinces the listener.
No. Being rich Swift means nothing to the grandest space project (sorry!). However, much more needs to be said about her sustained argument for that imperial expansion. When American settlers planned to expand westward in the 19th century, they forced the belief that it was a necessary and inevitable fact of history. Swift invokes a clear destiny of her own: the colonization of the music industry would happen (through her superior talent – “Taylor Swift is the music industry” Barbara Walters then enthused about the 24-year-old) and morally ordained (who else speaks so sweetly of the experience of female adolescence, “Maylor Swift is really a teenager? in New York Timess, “knowing girls as people to commemorate”).
Settlers ruled the West, Swift conquered the world. From bold banjo to synth pop through indie folk and R&B adventures, over 12 studio albums, record-breaking tours and total colonization of the teenage female mind. And then she married the guy on the football team. This is America at 250: no more kings! But a royal wedding is allowed.
When Swift finishes the opening track of the Eras Tour, she looks out into the audience, a face stunned and compelled by the size and volume of the crowd. “Hi, I’m Taylor” she waves (of course they know who you are Taylor, they pay $150 to be here!). “Who, me?” the bad act doesn’t work. It never happened – not for someone who always knew that selling out ten nights at Wembley was an inevitability and not the product of a lucky break.
“When you’re young, they say you don’t know anything,” she says in “Cardigan” (2020), but “I knew everything when I was young.” And there it is – Taylor Swift’s source code and capstone. She can be angry and confused, sweet and uncomplaining, powerful and vulnerable, America’s master manipulator. But she knew she would be all those things, standing on a pile of money and waving to an enthralled crowd. That everyone knows by name and much more than that.
(Further reading: Degradation of Independence)
