Time magazine recently profiled Taylor Swift as its “Person of the Year.” I’m not a fan of her songs, which I’ve described as un-stimulating, glorified elevator music. Still, I read the comprehensive article, wondering if it might reveal details about her artistic process and impressive self-marketing strategies.
The profile offers a glimpse of Taylor’s intellectual side, like when she discovers supply and demand: “And what has existed since the dawn of time? A patriarchal society. What fuels a patriarchal society? Money, flow of revenue, the economy. So actually, if we’re going to look at this in the most cynical way possible, feminine ideas becoming lucrative means that more female art will get made. It’s extremely heartening.” We all know Swift as a musician, but apparently, she’s also an anthropologist, economist, and historian — but surely someone so enlightened would reason that “money, flow of revenue, [and] the economy” “fuel” most societies, not only those which are supposedly “patriarchal.”
National Review’s Kayla Bartsch has added to Swift’s long list of titles by calling her a “philosopher.” Yet Taylor is plainly illogical, telling TIME, “I’ve also learned there’s no point in actively trying to quote unquote defeat your enemies,” and “trash takes itself out every single time.” Surely, everyone knows that the trash never takes itself out — as much as we might wish otherwise. I suppose that, if you have net worth over $1 billion, then you have staffers who take out the trash for you, and you’re accustomed to seeing an empty bin every morning.
Ultimately, I was unimpressed with Swift’s insights — not because they were unsophisticated, but because they were incomprehensible. She describes her Reputation album as “a goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure,” adding that “I think a lot of people see it and they’re just like, Sick snakes and strobe lights.” I was perplexed. Is the album that I hear while in the CVS check-out line really “goth-punk?” How exactly is “female rage” different from rage? What “entire social structure” has “gaslit” her, and is the same one that made her a billionaire? The characterization of her album is confusing because it doesn’t convey anything at all.
Aside from being unintelligible, Taylor’s rhetoric exposes her maladjustment. I wonder if Taylor asked ChatGPT, “What are some words the youths use?” She says of her relatively new relationship, “This all started when Travis [Kelce] very adorably put me on blast on his podcast, which I thought was metal as hell,” continuing that “we would never be psychotic enough to hard launch a first date.” In response to the attention she gets at football games, she states “I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads.” She promises that upcoming songs will be “fire.” Just as her songs are repetitive, her speech is eerily formulaic; she tries to be the endearing girl-next-door, but outdated internet slang like “metal as hell” portrays her more as that weird cousin you’re forced to chat with during holiday gatherings.
Taylor is like a linguistic refugee who grasps at phrases as lifejackets while she drifts towards the Country of the Cool. She’s in the uncomfortable position of being an untouchable elite while trying to appear as a sociable commoner. There’s something unsocialized about her speech (which is perhaps reasonable, since I doubt she’s had a normal social interaction since she first attracted the spotlight as a teenager). She reminds me of an awkward middle-school teacher who desperately tries to be hip around sixth-grade students. “I’m collecting horcruxes,” she says. “I’m collecting infinity stones. Gandalf’s voice is in my head every time I put out a new one. For me, it is a movie now.” It doesn’t really mean anything, but it does signal something: “Please, accept me!”
I struggle to understand how I am supposed to commend her as a great lyricist — according to Time, “she has been compared to Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Joni Mitchell” — yet she can hardly form a coherent sentence. I am studying linguistics with an emphasis on lexical semantics, and I admit that I cannot decipher what Taylor is trying to say. But perhaps Taylor doesn’t know what she wants to say, she only knows how she wants to sound: relatable.
The Incoherence of Taylor Swift
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09.12.2023
Time magazine recently profiled Taylor Swift as its “Person of the Year.” I’m not a fan of her songs, which I’ve described as un-stimulating, glorified elevator music. Still, I read the comprehensive article, wondering if it might reveal details about her artistic process and impressive self-marketing strategies.
The profile offers a glimpse of Taylor’s intellectual side, like when she discovers supply and demand: “And what has existed since the dawn of time? A patriarchal society. What fuels a patriarchal society? Money, flow of revenue, the economy. So actually, if we’re going to look at this in the most cynical way possible, feminine ideas becoming lucrative means that more female art will get made. It’s extremely heartening.” We all know Swift as a musician, but apparently, she’s also an anthropologist, economist, and historian — but surely someone so enlightened would reason that “money, flow of revenue, [and] the economy” “fuel” most societies, not only those which are supposedly “patriarchal.”
National Review’s Kayla Bartsch has added to Swift’s long list of........
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