When the average person thinks of Taylor Swift, they think of her more well-known songs like “Blank Space” and “Cruel Summer.” Most people don’t bat an eye at her albums like Folklore and Evermore.
People hate Taylor because they envy her success. Not only is she the most successful artist in America, making billions of dollars each year, but she also graduated from New York University, where she earned her Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts degree. Along with that, she delivered the Commencement Address to the graduating class of 2022, and she was recognized for her significant contribution to the arts.
Most of her haters consist of teenage boys, old men who cannot stand seeing her on their televisions on Sunday nights, and people who are not intelligent enough to understand her lyrics. Her critics tend to claim that her music “sucks” because “all she writes about is breakups,” and they cannot relate to her songs. They have obviously never listened to “Ronan,” “The Best Day,” or “Mirrorball.” Try listening to the entire Folklore album she released in 2020 and tell me you cannot relate to a single song. I will know you are lying.
Taylor Swift is a lyrical genius. She creates emotional depth and vulnerability in her lines like, “when I was drowning, that’s when I could finally breathe” from the song “Clean” and “you call me up again just to break me like a promise” from the song “All Too Well.” She also creates poetic imagery in her lines, “you drew stars around my scars but now I’m bleeding” from the song “Cardigan,” and “the flowers that we’d grown together died of thirst” from the song “Clean.”
In a lot of her other lyrics, she has lines that reclaim power and identity, as well as lines that create a sense of connection between her and her listeners.
People hate when others are smarter or more creative than they are, and Taylor Swift is exactly that. Some of her lyrics are hard to understand because of her broad vocabulary. For instance, in her song “But Daddy I Love Him,” one of her lines is “sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see.” This basically is meant to mean others are making dramatic, moralizing speeches about her relationships and acting as if they’re on stage, declaring their opinions but none of it is actually said to her face, and she is not interested in watching or hearing what they have to say anyways.
Another instance of Taylor Swift’s broad vocabulary can be heard in her song “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys.” In this song, she says that “rivulets descend my plastic smile” where her message she is trying to convey is basically that she is crying and trying to hide it with a fake smile. You do not only hate her because she is successful or because all she writes about is breakups, but you also hate her because you do not understand her.