When I was a kid, the only artist I ever wanted to listen to was Taylor Swift. I had a bright pink iPod Shuffle (remember how they’d click onto your clothes?) and her early hits probably made up more than half of my music library. As a young country singer, she was well respected and well liked for her obvious talents, producing such hits as Tim McGraw and You Belong With Me before the age of 20. When you’re as young as I was– I think around six or seven at my peak of Swifie-ness– you don’t care what’s cool. You don’t care what the news outlets have to say, or the opinions of teenage boys you want to impress. You care about what you like, what makes you happy, what you can listen to while you plaster your forehead against the bus window and pretend you’re in a music video.
As Swift gained traction, so did her dating life, which was a hot topic for tabloids and entertainment news– after all, the men she dated were just as famous as she was, reporting on two celebrities is always better than one, and in writing her own music she gave the public even more opportunity for speculation. Distaste grew from her exes’ fanbases into, quite often, men who were ready to discredit her work. By the time she turned to pop for her album 1989, people began to look down on her lyrical work for being openly emotional or descriptive of love and her past relationships. In 2014, Swift told an interview at 2Day FM how fed up she was with this angle. “You’re going to have people who are going to say, ‘Oh, you know, like, she just writes songs about her ex-boyfriends’. And I think frankly that’s a very sexist angle to take,” she said. “No one says that about Ed Sheeran. No one says that about Bruno Mars. They’re all writing songs about their exes, their current girlfriends, their love life, and no one raises the red flag there.”
We all know what happened at the 2009 VMAs, and we all know what happened after that (the infamous phone call). While this incident was what gave us the iconic snake motif in her 2017 hit music video for “Reputation”, it was also quite traumatic for Swift, as she explains in her documentary film, Miss Americana. She says, “When you’re living for the approval of strangers, and that is where you derive all of your joy and fulfillment, one bad thing can cause everything to crumble”. Cancelled overnight for her requests that, looking back, were completely reasonable, caused her to go dark on all socials for around a year. Cancelled for wanting to be respected and taken seriously as a woman in music. How did we see this as fair?
More than ruthless Twitter users, there’s a different sort of phenomenon we can apply to the career of Taylor Swift: the need teenage girls feel to distance themselves from what is considered “basic”. I, who probably would have poked out my eye at eight years old to meet Swift, at 15 pretended I thought she was overhyped. We feel a need to separate ourselves from what is basic– what is liked by mostly women– because women’s interests aren’t taken seriously. Not only did the media crucify Swift but for the most part so did we, along with many other parts of ourselves left over from our childhood. In Miss Americana, Swift often explores why being feminine is looked at as a con, or as unprofessional. When questioned about speaking up on minority rights before her state’s election in 2018, she wrote it off with a firm “I want to wear pink and tell you how I feel about politics. And I don’t think that those things have to cancel each other out.”
If pop music isn’t your thing, or you felt pressured to distance yourself from Swift after a certain 2016 phone call, I’m going to beg you to listen to Folklore. It’s beautifully written and speaks to a lot of emotions we all felt as teenagers and continue to entertain as young adults. Let’s support strong women in entertainment, but more importantly, let’s support ourselves and the things that make us happy, without trying to impress anyone else– because those people probably aren’t worth your time anyways.