Taylor Swift and Literature Newsletter 7
Taylor Swift song rankings (41-50) and honestly not much else
As far as I can tell, the week in Swift news consists of her going on vacation to the Bahamas, which is fair enough. My week has consisted of whining about how lecturing on Paradise Lost is distracting me from writing my book on Taylor Swift.
“American glory faded before me / Now I'm feeling hopeless, ripped up my prom dress.” “Miss Americana” refracts the Trump presidency through the momentary hopelessness of a girl who no longer wants to go to prom. America becomes a high school full of voices whispering about how “bad” Taylor Swift is, while saying that “boys will be boys.” But when they vote, they vote on how likely Swift’s speaker is to run away with the “Heartbreak Prince:” “We're so sad, we paint the town blue / Voted most likely to run away with you.” Though it’s tempting to read this “blue” as the Democratic color, it’s also the color Swift associates with romance in the album Lover as a whole (as in “Paper Rings” - “I'm with you even if it makes me blue”). This is a rare political song in Swift’s oeuvre, but it mainly mentions politics in order to repudiate it, to run away from it. After all, “You play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.” In this song, American football is the “stupid game” par excellence. It will be interesting to see whether she revisits this depiction of the game in future songs, now that she is dating a football player.
“Mean” and “Better than Revenge” feel akin to me, even though they take very different tacks. “Mean,” inspired by bad reviews, imagines a future in which its speaker is “big enough” to be untouched by criticism. Meanwhile, the aggressor will be “in a bar / Talking over a football game / With that same big, loud opinion, but nobody's listening.” (Football here is a kind of art akin to Swift’s, unfolding at a distance, on a screen, untouched by the critic’s “big, loud opinion.”) (Or is the fact that the critic is watching a football game a sign of his bad taste?)
“There is nothing I do better than revenge,” Swift proclaims in the song of that name. And indeed, the song is gleefully vengeful, and not quite suited to today’s mores or Swift’s current feminist persona (she removed its most cruel lines, “She's better known for the things that she does / On the mattress,” in her rerecording).
“Anti-Hero” and “The Man” address how Swift is perceived. “The Man” argues that Swift would be seen as an “alpha type” if she were a man. Its chorus reframes this argument as something she “wonder[s]” about: “I'm so sick of running as fast as I can / Wondering if I'd get there quicker / If I was a man.” “Anti-Hero,” on the other hand, seems to agree with the public’s perception of her: “It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me / At tea time, everybody agrees.” But “Anti-Hero” too is framed as a series of fears, feelings, and depression-induced visions: “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby / And I'm a monster on the hill.” But to what extent do these feelings correspond to reality? Part of the tragedy of the song is that Swift can’t know for sure, as she is unable to look “in the mirror” and see herself clearly.
“Welcome to New York” is the first song on 1989, celebrating New York City as “a new soundtrack” that you can dance to (and where queer relationships are possible). The song promises new beginnings for Swift, a wider expanse of possibilities.
“I Bet You Think About Me” and “Mr Perfectly Fine” are two fantastic Vault songs, both representing Swift at her best and most vindictive. “Mr Perfectly Fine” is notable for using the phrase “casually cruel,” a phrase now well known from its inclusion in “All Too Well.” “I Bet You Think About Me” is just delightful, positing that the boyfriend who dumped her to chase “make-believe status” still thinks about her. In the music video, she takes over his wedding - if only in his mind - as he (finally) regrets giving up the girl who wrote a song about him.
I listened to “Forever and Always” and “Love Story” a lot as a teenager, walking up and down the dirt road outside my house in Vermont. The interesting thing about writing about Swift as someone who’s only a few years younger than she is is that I have had such a lifelong relationship with her lyrics. I remember pondering these lines from “Forever and Always” as a fifteen-year-old, lines that I think are in different ways utterly incoherent and perfectly formed - who is the “you” whose bedroom it is? Is it the same “you” who doesn’t affect the rainfall?:
Oh, and it rains in your bedroom
Everything is wrong
It rains when you're here and it rains when you're gone
'Cause I was there when you said, "Forever and always"
Whether or not the above makes any sense at all, I think the line “It rains when you're here and it rains when you're gone” is my favorite line that Swift has written.
41. Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince
42. Mean
43. Better than Revenge
44. Anti-Hero
45. The Man
46. Welcome to New York
47. I Bet You Think About Me
48. Forever & Always
49. Mr Perfectly Fine
50. Love Story
I feel like we’re in the calm before the storm Swift-wise, now that the new album is only three weeks away. There isn’t much new to report, except personal news: my paper “Murdering to Dissect: online discussions of Swift’s Wordsworth and the discipline of English Literature” has, despite its unwieldy title (I can’t resist a colon) been accepted by a conference this May at the University of Kent on Swift’s feminism. I am looking forward to meeting other people working on Swift. In fact, I’m looking forward to actually working on Swift soon, once the semester finally wraps up.