The Underestimation of Taylor Swift
By: The Black Swiftie
Tags: Christian, Queer, Taylor Swift, Autism, Ocd

The first week of February I was draped over the couch, mentally and physically sliding into the doom of debilitating menstrual cramps, alone in a house on a hill on a dead end street near a park by a river in Wisconsin, where I was house sitting for snowbirds. I opened Netflix and was faced with another version of the “Taylor Swift: Miss Americana” documentary banner across the home page. I’d been avoiding it since hitting thumbs down without so much as watching the trailer, hoping the algorithms would offer something more in line with my taste, though I am certain all interpretations of my data are wrong as far as assigning an identity to the consumer. I considered the power the documentary could have over me if I kept rejecting it: I would wonder why I had such a strong aversion to it without knowing any details but I would also be annoyed by my knowledge that Taylor Swift has been instrumental in the normalization of white appropriation of Black culture, and no matter what, I would be haunted by my heightened awareness that yet again a small fortune had been spent to tell a wealthy able-bodied cisgender heterosexual white American’s story — I would spend more time with these thoughts than the duration of the film.

“FINE!” I shouted at the TV, and slouched extra hard for my hate-watch session. The best thing about hate-watching is you can tell yourself, the whole otherwise wasted time, that at least now you can delineate why you’re being such a hater. I scoffed at blatant attempts to win us over: Swift’s gentle intimate opening monologue intercut with shots of her loving her adorable kitten, humbling home videos from her childhood, plenty of proof of an earnest rise to fame, and a straightforward articulation of her lifelong commitment to doing the right thing. She made it clear she has always been hard on herself, painfully self-aware. Still not sorry for you, I thought, I’ll never feel sorry for you, Taylor Swift. As she stood center stage, blue eyes glistening to match her glittery dress and pearly white teeth, I was posed and ready to turn it off. I don’t need to know you, Taylor Swift. Did that cross your pretty little mind?

Little did I know, Taylor Swift is a mirrorball, and she would show me every version of myself over the next six months. Taylor Swift caused me to reflect upon things I had been struggling to communicate for years. I am still unpacking my internalized misogyny, which survived Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I did not expect this to be true but here we are. I did expect Taylor Swift to be without substance, I did not have good reason, and let me tell you, everyone was surprised to hear she was friends with Lena Dunham. We all need to reassess our belief in misogyny. Like racism this unlearning is an ongoing process that will eventually become a healthier mindset with new pathways. For me it started with remembering a quote by AOC as I was being critical of the particular way Taylor Swift said, “I have to deprogram the misogyny in my own brain.”

Many have been introduced (most likely re-introduced) to Taylor via her folklore album, released this summer. If these new listeners had preconceived notions of her music, they were pleasantly surprised. Rolling Stone introduced its review on Twitter by stating, “Some of us have spent years dreaming Taylor Swift would do a whole album like #Folklore, but nobody really dreamed it would turn out this great.” In the best sense, this widespread sentiment was a compliment, and I might’ve thought that was the case had I not spent the past five months being laughed at by family and friends as I shared my newfound respect for her as a serious artist. Most had still not taken my “Miss Americana” recommendation when folklore arrived in July, and they put off listening to the album for weeks only to respond with condescending praise, however mixed with genuine enchantment. Then they mentioned she should work with those guys again, or other artists like them. Ah, yes, that explains it. How else could she have done it?

“Are you serious?” was a common reaction to my mention of Taylor Swift, despite the fact the same people would say I’m serious to a fault. My college students could not hide their dismay, their shock, even outrage, when I recommended they watch the documentary, which I made sure to tell them premiered at Sundance, saying I found it relevant to our class on making art informed by identity. Until I pledged allegiance to Taylor Nation, my students thought their professor was ahead of the curve. A Black nonbinary lesbian artist holds the promise of a unique perspective and this bizarre declaration was a harsh reality, a crude unmasking, a reminder that I was adopted by white people. It would take weeks to regain their respect, and for some it never returned. “It’s just so surprising,” one student said with a frown. “Can she even sing?” another asked.

“In the middle of the night, in my dreams,” Taylor belts out backstage after the “Miss Americana” title card, likely to quell the a cappella skepticism. “You should see the things we do, baby…” Swift paces comfortably, alone backstage, warming up her voice. But as I lay with the remote outstretched, it was the lyrics that gave me pause. The documentary went on as I went over: “In the middle of the night, in my dreams / You should see the things we do, baby…” I’ve been conditioned to chastise myself for trying too hard to queer things, but I freeze when I hear the echo of lesbian longing in the heteronormative woods. My assessment was interrupted when, five minutes into the documentary, there was a look in Taylor’s eyes I recognized only from the time I stared down the guards at Amalienborg. You don’t know shit about Taylor Swift — you cannot.

Believe it or not it was possible to exist without her in your life for nearly eight years prior to 2020, however even for the solipsist, she was in the background. I wish I could’ve avoided “Shake It Off” during my second year of grad school, when the song played in every café for months; trying to discuss David Foster Wallace over your morning coffee with a side of raging bubbly white noise is maddening. These irritating hits were songs I knew generally as pop music, usually without titles or distinct lyrics (that these lyrics could be narrative was not on the table, and I chuckled when Taylor talked about the importance of her “storytelling” in the opening of “Miss Americana”). As I navigated downtown Chicago 2014–2015, Taylor Swift was pop music so completely that the essence of “pop” superseded the author altogether, her sound blending with a few other big plastic names of the genre. I had a separate, somewhat distant memory of Taylor Swift, the unusually popular country music star, America’s shining example of wholesome fairytale-loving cishet white girlhood.

I did bask in the romance of “Love Story” at the age of twenty. In college I flew from Boston to Los Angeles to Sydney to propose, even though gay marriage was not yet legal in any of the countries that were tied to us. The song played in my headphones on the plane. The music video for “Love Story” passes for white cishet propaganda but by the power of my queer resilience, I waited for, “Marry me, Juliet, you’ll never have to be alone, I love you and that’s all I really know.” So we’ll call her Juliet. I hadn’t talked to her dad, but I was confident. When I got to Sydney, we ran through the streets holding hands, we sat on a bench at Circular Quay. We went to the night market where she would buy a pocket watch for me, one with an illustration of The White Rabbit on the front. We went to the Annie Leibovitz retrospective A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005 at the Museum of Contemporary Art. We went to Sarah Ruhl’s “The Vibrator Play” at the Sydney Opera House. On the fourth day, Juliet took me to a non-denominational Christian church and told me we couldn’t be together because what we wanted was not what God wanted for us. 2011 Anno Domini. I had liked that she believed in God, but we didn’t talk about it much — I thought “non-denominational” meant less conservative; I was wrong. I had flown to her for the week around Valentine’s Day, and we went to church on the 13th. The next day, the streets of Potts Point were lined with flowers and red balloons and cishet couples. A poster for the movie “Valentine’s Day” hung in the window as I sobbed past the video rental store.

Some of us, those who originally dared to embrace the cliché, frilly, unbridled happiness of believing your life could be like a romcom — something like being carried by the cadence of a Taylor Swift tune—cut ties with that world and declared it stupid when we first got our hearts broken. We were disenchanted. And then there are people who have reclaimed this joy. Turns out there are a lot of secret Swifties among us. I’m talking about people who have rationalized keeping their love for “Fearless” to themselves, surely to protect it. They love to bop to “Blank Space” in the car on the freeway, though they’d never tell. I’m not one of those, but they work with you, they teach your kids, they deliver your news, they — well you get the point. I decided not to hide my Swiftie identity, mostly because when I hide things about myself I am quite certain I will spontaneously combust.

I came out as a Swiftie in an Instagram post mid-March wearing Taylor Swift merch, a sweatshirt with text under a rainbow gradient with hearts that reads: I LOVE YOU AIN’T THAT THE WORST THING YOU EVER HEARD? I’m gonna take a leap and say people don’t generally know this is a Taylor Swift lyric. In the caption, I wrote, “For your entertainment during these trying times, I’ve decided to come out as a Swiftie. Stay clean everybody.” It might have been less shocking if I’d come out as a Christian. Everyone thought I was joking. “That would be a long-awaited, seventy-dollar joke,” I told a friend over the phone, “I bought that sweatshirt online from the Taylor Swift store, it took several weeks.” Laughter abounded in the comments and my inboxes. I had said, “For your entertainment,” but I did not foresee having to try so hard to convince people I was serious. As they accepted I wasn’t kidding, they needed to rationalize on their own terms (rather than listen to my actual words), and it was easiest to do that by assuming I just thought Taylor Swift was really hot — that’s why I couldn’t see how superficial and dumb she was. Give us both more credit than that, but there are also our actual words to consider. Regarding the underestimation of Taylor Swift, the difference between hearing, “Gotta love my Starbucks lovers,” and the literal words, “Got a long list of ex lovers,” comes to mind. Either way, they always get the next lyric right.

Someone would say something in conversation and I would respond, “Taylor Swift said that.” By this point these friends knew I was obsessed; this point was several conversations in, and I had passively stored hours of footage from her interviews and other content in my mind (the door to this detailed memory bank tends to shut with the end of an obsession, though I still know some Kristen Stewart lines from a decade ago). Like using tools in an adventure game, anything relevant would pop into my mind to provide affirmation in a conversation, but my friends were not impressed by the news that Taylor Swift had put out a call for the inclusion of trans and nonbinary people on the U.S. Census. These were people who couldn’t get past the problem of Taylor Swift takes up too much space, which I could see, but my thoughts had been: if Taylor Swift said it, a considerable fraction of the world had heard it, meaning we were making progress. Instead, I observed: if these friends accepted that Taylor was capable of making the same thoughtful, progressive statements, their next move was, “Well, who cares what Taylor Swift says?” Before they knew Taylor Swift said it, they said it with confidence, but now the statement had been devalued and should be revised to be more profound than the words of Taylor Swift. My initial response was always, “200 million people care what Taylor Swift says, and they’re all over the world.” Determined not to back down, they would return, “Oh yeah, what kind of people?” A move to discredit all who associate, but then they’d realize they were left with me, of all people, attempting to sway them. Most were compelled to verbalize their mental constipation with, “I just can’t believe this is coming from YOU!”

“Miss Americana” builds up to the moment Swift used her platform to speak out against now Senator Marsha Blackburn during the 2018 midterm elections. In the realtime space of the film, Swift is also explicitly anti-fascist, loudly anti-Trump, responding to the threat of his imminent backlash with, “Yeah f*ck that I don’t care,” and basically hosting a queer pride parade. And yet, her language fell short of the expectations of progressive, informed members of Generations X, Y, and Z. Even my mom, a Baby Boomer born in 1950, rolled her eyes at the promise of wearing pink while talking about politics, as if that’s inherently oxymoronic and also revolutionary in America in 2020, or 1989. It had been several months since my first viewing of the documentary when I watched it with my mom, and by then I was dancing in my socks to Reputation on the border of giving Taylor way too much credit, but I told her it is possible Taylor said what she said the way she said it because she was speaking to the willfully ignorant, the hardest to reach, those people who won’t listen to an activist but will hear out Taylor Swift. Mom was skeptical.

A December 2019 article in The Crimson went after Swift for her failure to grasp the subjunctive, something I noticed in the documentary during her songwriting session for “The Man” (2019). If anything, I thought, she should have known the correct use from Beyoncé’s “If I Were A Boy” (2008). Sometimes music lyrics break these rules because singing them differently is more sonically pleasing, but the documentary revealed further evidence of Taylor’s was/were mixup in her acceptance speech for Artist of the Year at the American Music Awards, when she said “were” where she should have said “was” about this award, and every award given out that night, for which the people voted. She misspoke in her narration toward the end when she said, “I wanna stand up for the double standards that exist in our society.” She should’ve said, “…stand up against double standards,” but again I invoke AOC. Why do these blips discount her knowledgeability? Did we not get the message she intended to send? When cishet white men make these mistakes, they just keep doing it until the language changes to accommodate them, or they have the power to literally change the official usage rules. But even when the term applies, misogyny will keep us from fully recognizing it: when I learned each of Taylor Swift’s albums was referred to as an “era”, I saw her usage as a threat to the integrity of the term.

During Taylor’s narration I also heard the kind of insight found in a masterclass:

“…Constantly finding new facets of yourself that people find to be shiny, ‘Be new to us, be young to us. But, only in a new way and only the way we want, and reinvent yourself but only a way that we find to be equally comforting but also a challenge for you. Live out a narrative that we find to be interesting enough to entertain us, but not so crazy that it makes us uncomfortable.”

Here she’s talking about higher demands for female performing artists, for whom the spectacle is the main force driving the career in a world where objectification still determines a woman’s worth. While men also have brands with aesthetics to consider, the content of their work is studied, their brilliant words are praised, and they are credited by assumption. Taylor Swift has been speaking up about misogynistic double standards for years, but a lot of us didn’t hear those words from her until 2020, and some didn’t give her the benefit of the doubt then, either.

I turned to my tiny following on Instagram and shared my review of “Miss Americana” through the impermanence of a “story” post, still embarrassed to admit I watched the documentary that night in February. The nasally, effeminate, uncertain inflection I used when I began, “Watching… Miss Americana…” was meant to mock a ditzy white girl, though in reality I got it from Hilary Banks; later I would see a young Taylor doing a similar voice to mock women who wore “sexy” fill-in-the-costume for Halloween before showing that instead she and her friend each went as Chewbacca. It’s a problem that we sometimes drag each other down, but it’s a bigger problem that we believe there’s something to be gained from it. At the end of my 30-second documentary review, I said, “I see you Taylor, you’re a good human,” in my own voice. “You’re just not that deep. And that’s okay, not everyone has to be deep…” It got a lot of laughs, and no one cared that I didn’t know who I was talking about. Binge-watching Taylor Swift’s live performances was the only way I could allow myself to believe she was really playing guitar that well (I now stan “Wildest Dreams” at the Grammy Museum, and there’s a special place in my heart for “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” live in Sydney). My internalized misogyny gave me a false sense of superiority as I critiqued her. The fact that I’m a mediocre guitar player didn’t humble me, and in the weeks that followed I became a better guitarist with the belief that if a veritable Barbie could handle the pain of acoustic guitar strings, I could definitely do it.