I’ve been teaching my class on Taylor Swift and Literature this week. The first week is focused on practising close reading: paying attention to how a text works, how it says the things it says and how the way it says those things changes them.
Like last year, I assigned as the first reading for the class a tabloid article called “Taylor Swift Lost Her Virginity to Jake Gyllenhaal, Probably?” The article explains Swift’s work by revealing biographical information about her (as the title suggests!). And specifically, the article explains the song “The Moment I Knew” as being about Jake Gyllenhaal failing to turn up to Swift’s birthday party.
We talked about what kinds of meanings are available if we focus on using biographical information about Taylor Swift to understand this song: that she is talking about a particular party, on a particular date, and that this tells us something about a romantic relationship she was in at the time. This reading left us with the idea of Swift as an artist hyperfocused on her romantic relationships and what went wrong within them. In this reading, it was easy to see her as - as the tabloid article put it - a writer of “mundanely observational songs about a twenty-something woman's aggressively teenage emotions.”
But then we tried bracketing all that biographical information and just reading the lyrics, not assuming we knew anything about who the speaker was and who they were addressing. This led to a much more nuanced and interesting reading of the text. My students noted that there is no information about who is being waited for or spoken to in the song. In fact, there is some ambiguity about who is being addressed at different moments. We talked about whether “your” friends meant “one’s” friends or the friends of the addressee, and how this changed our reading. We talked about the speaker’s relationship to the people around her, the fact that they seemed to ignore or not see her pain, and even “laugh” when she was suffering most deeply. We talked about the song as being about trying to put up barriers between what you feel and how people see you (the speaker notes that she has put on red lipstick and a dress to “impress” the person she is waiting for, to manage his perception of her). We don’t even know what the speaker “knew,” what realization she came to in the titular “moment.” Are we ourselves being guarded against, being blocked from accessing the full story?
Close reading the song reveals it to be a lot more carefully constructed and cagy than you might think if you assign identities to the “you” and “I” in the song and see it as completely ripped from Swift’s own life. This kind of reading allows us to see Swift as an artist carefully and deliberately crafting her material - even when the situations she describes seem close to ones she has lived through.
Further viewing
Speaking of feeling like you’re not getting the full story, I watched Taylor Swift vs. Scooter Braun: Bad Blood (streaming on Discovery+ in the UK). There were things I liked about it. I didn’t know much about the contractual details of the feud between Swift and Braun and the documentary explained these details clearly. But I wasn’t a big fan of its central conceit, which was that it divided the story into two “Versions,” Swift’s and Braun’s, each of which presented the facts - sometimes different facts, which was the issue - in such a way as to make the case for that person’s side. I felt like I was getting two biased sides of a story rather than a real explanation of this conflict.
An example of this was the documentary’s treatment of the full leaked version of Swift’s call with Kanye West (the feud with Kanye West was presented in this documentary as being part of the explanation for the feud with Braun, as Swift allegedly perceived him as siding with West, whose manager he was). In this tape, Swift not only (to me) seems reluctant to endorse the lyrics West does tell her about, she actually says something about being glad he didn’t call her a “bitch” - which he eventually does do in the song. Bits of this recording were played in the documentary and this point was made in the “Taylor’s Version” segment of it, but in the “Scooter’s Version” section Swift was described as enthusiastically agreeing to the lyrics, which is just not my understanding of the clip - so if you only watched that episode, you would get a partial and idiosyncratic understanding of the facts. They also cut out a bit in which West mentioned Swift’s fans and how much power they had in “Taylor’s Version” and only showed it in “Scooter’s Version.” A single, non-broken-up telling of the story might have handled the nuances of this interaction a lot better, shown the whole clip, and analyzed it with more care. It felt like this documentary was so driven to have a point, to identify a villain, that it somehow created two villains out of its subjects and made a point of blaming each of them separately for the dispute. It could, I think, more usefully have told this story as a complicated one in which you could see both sides at the same time, and be aware that you were also not seeing sides of the story that were being concealed by each of these very famous and very wealthy individuals (again, this is something the documentary acknowledges - but why then give each person’s “version” or spin, when you could take a tack of trying to find the truth within the competing versions?).
It felt like we were just supposed to accept the ultimate unknowability of the truth, that these were two different realities that you could choose to live in and there was no way of getting at a rational and coherent understanding of what actually happened. Okay, fine, I guess postmodernism would tell us that we live in a world that is inherently fragmented and all our explanatory attempts will inevitably be fragmented as well, but it’s hard to imagine there’s actually some kind of existential mystery preventing a documentary from telling us a story in which Swift made some good points about the music business but also kind of blew other things out of proportion, and Braun made some questionable business decisions. There are things that are genuinely hard to understand out there in the world, but I feel like a celebrity feud is not one of them.
The V&A has announced a free “Taylor Swift Songbook Trail” through its galleries, exhibiting costumes and other objects from her career. One suspects it has been labelled a “trail” because they don’t have enough stuff to call this a full exhibition and charge money for it. Anyway, I’ll go to it when it opens in late July and report back!
I took my students to an exhibition, Beyond the Bassline, about Black British music at the British Library. This was a really well-put-together exhibition that made great use of multimedia elements like sound and video installations in addition to material objects. It’s well worth a visit if you’re in London.