Taylor Swift and Literature Newsletter 3
Swift song rankings (1-10), the V&A (I guess), some tumblrs
I’m halfway through the spring semester and starting to plan the intensive work on my book that will take up the next several months. Half as procrastination and half as “research,” I decided to rank my top one hundred Taylor Swift songs, based both on how much I like them and how important I think they are for Taylor Swift studies. The fact that these are very different metrics did not get in my way.
I’ll share the resulting list in ten-song increments (from one to one hundred) as we approach the release of the new album in April.
So here are my top ten:
1. All Too Well (10 Minute Version)
2. Dear John
3. You Belong With Me
4. Red
5. All Too Well
6. Mine
7. Clean
8. You’re on Your Own, Kid
9. Long Live
10. Shake it Off
“All Too Well” was already Swift’s masterpiece. The original version felt fragmented and partial - fittingly, for a song about being fragmented, in pieces, and generally “not fine at all.” But the longer version is more cutting, more finely detailed: “You said if we had been closer in age maybe it would have been fine / And that made me want to die.” “Red” is here in part because Swift keeps coming back to this ur-text, writing footnotes to it in the form of, for example, “Daylight” and “Maroon.” This is a really, really dark song (“Loving him is like trying to change your mind / Once you're already flying through the free fall”) that demonstrates Swift’s lyrical complexity, her interest in imagery, and her ability to find the right word.
Some of the songs in the top ten are there not just because they are independently great, but because they serve as perfect representatives of the type of thing Swift does best. “Dear John” is probably the quintessential Taylor Swift song, a wonderfully vindictive text that sums itself up in its final line: “You should’ve known.” “You Belong With Me” is a remarkable example of Swift’s ability to put forward an argument in lyric form in a way that feels as “easy” as “laughing on a park bench.” And its music video is absolutely classic, not least as an example of how Swift complicates her own texts, in this case by playing her own romantic rival. “Mine” is also a classic of a particular type of Taylor Swift love song, the kind that explains how everything is finally ending happily while also acknowledging that this kind of thing “never lasts.” As much as she urges the addressee of the song to “make it last,” she knows no one can.
“Clean” and “You’re on Your Own, Kid” find Swift in a more meditative mood. “Clean” accepts, even welcomes, the inevitability of all things passing away. But it nonetheless possesses a strange optimism - a sense not that everything will be fine, but that life is more interesting for everything not having been fine. Its lyrics about butterflies turning to dust and punching a hole through the roof hover lightly between the mundane and the poetic. “You’re on Your Own, Kid” is a love song to Swift’s own talent, which allows her to escape her small town but places her in a new world of unfunny jokes, perfect bodies, and a blood-stained gown. She’s “on [her] own.” Her singularity is both a curse and a blessing, but, she assures herself, no cause for concern.
“Long Live” is the song that she most clearly sees as being about her relationship to her fans (hence its place playing over the credits of the Eras tour movie, granting each of us some credit too). But, and I say this with all the love in the world, it’s incoherent. The line "Long live the walls we crashed through” wishes the walls, already dismantled in the rise to power of the “band of thieves,” to still, in some way, be in place. “Long Live” is a song about revolution but it’s spoken from the vantage point of one of the “rule[rs]” of the “world,” which is fitting, given Swift’s huge following and cultural reach. To be a Swiftie is to be part of a very, very large band of thieves - and when a band of thieves gets large enough, maybe it just becomes a country, a civilization, a dominant paradigm.
But “Just think, while you've been gettin' down and out about the liars / And the dirty, dirty cheats of the world / You could've been gettin' down to this sick beat:” “Shake it Off” rounds off the top ten because it’s really, really fun.
My top ten doesn’t include any Lover, Reputation, folklore, evermore, or debut album songs. They’re coming!
The V&A attempted to recruit some collectors of Crocs, emojis, and - yes - Taylor Swift memorabilia, and the press acted like this was a big deal.
A recent college graduate wrote a piece about writing their undergraduate dissertation on Swift. I thought this was a very thoughtful and well argued piece - even though you’ll unfortunately have to sign up for an account to read it, and you have to call to cancel your account (I hate making phone calls). The argument put forward here is not precisely the argument I’d make for studying Swift as literature (“Wordsworth said poetry was the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. By this measure, Swift’s lyrics are indisputably poetry.”) But the thoughtfulness of the piece itself is a good argument for encouraging students to research and write about whatever they feel most passionate about. I really appreciate the distinction made here between being a fan and studying Swift as literature, and also the reminder that you can do both: “I did my Swift dissertation as a fan but also as an appraisal of a young woman whose work I believed the world should appreciate for its literary weight.” I’ve supervised three undergraduate dissertations wholly or partly on Taylor Swift and they all approach the topic very differently. Writing about Taylor Swift is an amazing opportunity for students to engage with a brand new and rapidly growing field in a way that reflects their interests. In all three cases the students were thinking about Swift’s relationship to the literature of the past. I’ve started thinking that it might be useful to frame the study of Swift in part as reception studies because conversations about her work are almost always conversations about other, older works as well and how they are read and understood today.
This concordance to Taylor Swift is awesome and will be very useful as I write the book.
Speaking of useful, this “Taylor Swift song sorter” would have been handy in ranking my top one hundred songs - too bad I found it too late!
And Laura Snapes at The Guardian has started a newsletter called Swift Notes, with roundups of news on Swift. Only the first one has come out so far but it seems to be a mix of Guardian articles and selected ones from other publications. Might be useful if you (for some reason) require a second newsletter on Taylor Swift.