Who Is Taylor Swift?

A serious examination...

Taylor Swift performing her rock version of We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together

I was sitting in a local movie theatre here in Georgia a month after Taylor Swift's filmed record of her Eras Tour had opened to sell out crowds. The audience was more than half full of girls dancing around in their seats and down in the front near the screen. Let me clarify what I am saying. I live in Tbilisi, Georgia, not the American state, but the rather obscure country in the Caucasus Mountains on the borderlands between Europe and Asia. Tbilisi is the capital. And Taylor's movie has been the biggest hit of October 2023. I had wanted to see it earlier, but two things stood in the way; one was the fact that I had several visitors who came to this city to think with me about the future of culture in this over mediated age; and secondly, nearly every performance in every theatre was sold out for the entire month, so I didn't end up seeing it until early November after the last of my friends had returned to their respective countries. It is now December 11^th as I write, and it is still going strongly for one showing per day.

When I stepped out of the theatre I thought to myself, 'What is going on? Ten years ago no such thing would have been such a hit here in this country, still in many ways recovering from civil war and poverty. Yet here we were, sitting on the edge of Russia, during the time of another war, a hundred thousand Russian exiles here, along with Ukrainian refugees, and Taylor Swift is the biggest thing in town?'

Being an American with a serious interest in music, I have, of course, been aware of Taylor Swift for at least 15 years. And yet something is happening at this moment that is hard to grasp. Back in the late summer my reading had convinced me that I needed to see the Eras Tour film. As a student of music and film history, I knew something was in the air. And while I kept one eye on Taylor's journey, noting several of the inescapable highlights of her career that I have been unable to shake off, I had never considered her someone worthy of that much of my time. I paid more attention to Ke$ha, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Adele, even Billie Eilish, than to Taylor. But Taylor Swift had done something incredible, like her victorious stance atop the other competing Taylors in her Look What You Made Me Do video, she held herself triumphant on the heap of competing 21^st Century divas. (Witness the lack of similar hype over her nearest competitor Beyoncé, who also had a major tour and a concert film released in 2023.) Thusly the need to take another look at this pop star phenom.

Yet there was one moment when I was suddenly taken aback by what she was, and that caused me to consider her very seriously indeed. But patience my friends, we must unwrap what we can of this soul, before we wander down the path of speculations.

It was that moment which sparked the question lodged in the title of this essay, so who, exactly, is this Taylor Swift? And why this her moment? Why the intense loyalty? Why the devotion? Why the fanaticism? What I discovered took me on a careening range of emotions from sympathy to suspicion, from sorrow to respect, and a mixture of despair and hope for our times. And without a doubt Time magazine had got it right, for once, when they named her person of the year. (Although I do wonder what happened to the word 'woman'? Never mind. I know. Then again I gave up on Time magazine eons ago.)

So who indeed is Taylor Swift? The biographical details are often repeated, if strangely sketchy at the same time, especially considering how deeply her Swifties obsess over her. Then again maybe it is precisely those blank spaces that draw people into her story. On the surface of it, she seems to have led a fairly normal life, if on the well-heeled side. By her own nostalgic reckoning she grew up contentedly on a Christmas tree farm for in a rural zone near Reading, Pennsylvania. Her parents Scott and Andrea both worked in finances. Scott was absolutely focused of his work for Merrill Lynch as a stockbroker. And Andrea gave up her own lucrative financial career to stay home and raise her children. Taylor seems to have seen her father as, what she once called him, 'pie in the sky' and her mother was more a nuts and bolts no nonsense person. So influenced by her parents chosen fields of expertise was she that, although she really had no idea what they actually did, Taylor would often say that she wanted to be a financial advisor when asked as a child.

Yet music was always there as well. Andrea's mother Marjorie, was by all accounts a serious opera singer. And Taylor was certainly influenced by her own relationship with her grandmother, and by her mother's stories of living the fascinating life of a singer's child living in the wings. This relationship is most likely one of the serious keys to Taylor's choice of music as a mode of expression.

There is another factor at work here, of which few seem to notice the full implications. Taylor famously, mythologically, was born in 1989. (1989 can be seen as perhaps the one truly hopeful year in the whole 20th Century.) That means she grew up as a child during her most formative years, absorbing the many princesses of the 1990's Disney animation Renaissance. What most people below the age of 40 today don't seem to realize is that the era that began with The Little Mermaid, also conveniently in 1989, and petered out in the Aughts, was killed off by lackluster straight to video sequel cash grabs, digital animation, and endless lashings of postmodern irony. With woke culture finally transforming it into a cracked mirror version of itself. Before the Disney Renaissance you didn't have girls obsessed in the same way with musicals and animation. I am old enough to remember a time when young girls may have been attracted to genuine fairytale princesses, but this specific model of Disney Princess girls did not exist yet. There is a generation roughly Taylor's age who all share the same touchstones. Parents considered Disney products a safe harbor amidst the more ferocious pop culture of the 1990s and early Aughts. I remember visiting a friend in 2009 in the Los Angeles area who had a daughter who regaled us with all the Disney songs from the DVDs she had stored in a large colorful plastic chest. These young princesses more and more often became vehicles for a commercialized self-empowerment the feminist message 90's style. And dear Taylor caught the music bug around the same time, even auditioning for musicals in New York City. That very peculiar time and that entertainment milieu had an exceedingly strong influence on Taylor, who was indeed a sweet little Disney princess girl.

Another unexplored influence on Taylor is her time spent in churches, listening to contemporary Christian music, and picking up the Christian vibe of the 90s and early Aughts. The information on this front is even patchier, yet it clearly had a big effect upon her in several different ways. And one thing is very clear, Taylor Swift, the 15 year old singer was certainly influenced by her Christian faith, and references God quite feature often in her earlier songs. Listen to her strange use of the praise hallelujah in the song Change. But we'll deal with Taylor's relationship to religion in more depth in the second part of this essay.

One thing we can say with confidence is that as Taylor mutates through her different phases, by the time she reaches the Miss Americana documentary, she quite clearly has seen that she was only living to be the ‘good girl’. That one of the main motivations in her life was to be seen as good. And here is where the conundrum starts. Her notion of being good seems to revolve around being seen. That is, being 'the good girl' is mostly a question of appearances. And not a question of moral essence. There is little in her lyrics to suggest that she has yet taken seriously questions about what being good, ontologically, truly means. And so in her life and musical career, being seen, period, ultimately ends up becoming a central aspect to her identity, one she is certainly not going to ever escape, unless she hits a serious brick wall: sickness, the death of loved ones, accidents, or even the insanity of her fans.

Now there is one thing I'd like to say before I continue. One thing that is clear from my Swiftian research; Taylor breeds extremely polarizing reactions, both positive and negative. I've come across Swifties who praised her out of all relationship to reality, likewise there are others who literally demonize her, accusing her of being a psyop for the Democratic Party, or worse a Satanic Illuminati conspiracy. I have a rule in life, never to talk about someone in a way that I wouldn't to their face. Some may say that this restricts my freedom to be honest; but I'd disagree. Even the idea of actually talking face to face with Taylor someday, while extraordinarily unlikely, is not an impossibility. Especially considering that we share one friend in common with whom she has actually worked in a substantial way. Unlike the more intense lovers and the haters, for whom Taylor Swift is some unimaginably inhuman abstraction, I hold myself accountable for everything I say. Even when I am raising serious issues, which is my intent.

Now when I consider it, this idea of being seen gets to even closer to her core than her music, which strikes me as an incredible means to this end. From a young age her desire to be noticed dominates her dreams. (She made a book for practicing her autograph.) Not just being seen, but more importantly being liked. On her early MySpace page she is practically begging to be liked. She writes “All you need to do to be my friend is like me.” And she doesn't mean 'like' in the FaceBook sense of the word. This craving to be liked is fascinating when seen through the lens of her concert spectacles. Here you have a devoted audience, in every religious sense of the word; crying, screaming, spending endlessly on tickets, lodging, product, merch, and more! For true Swifties a pilgrimage to a Taylor Swift concert is like a trip to Lourdes. They 'like her', all essentially saying 'We love you Taylor.' 'See me Taylor!' and yet really it's clear that they don't really know her at all. Because if Taylor Swift, the giant from Anti-Hero, opened the flood gates to give them everything they want, she, the small, very human Taylor, would be crushed.

And yet. And yet. She feeds that hunger to be known and liked expertly. She gives clues, special editions, journal samples, special invitations to listening parties, bestowed upon rather unsuspecting Swifties, chosen seemingly at random by the all seeing presence of the Taylor the Giant. And it is in these moments, where she chooses to grant a moment of favor, the hallmark of her relationship to her fans, that is the essential building block that creates the illusion that they know her. No one has ever been as good at doing that as Taylor is. And this creates the fanaticism with which she has to live with daily. When she arrives at her Tribeca home they are there. When they have even the slightest inkling of where she might be they will flock together. They feast on the most minute clues, symbols left behind on albums covers, in videos. Clues speculate of the Gnostic secrets left by their demiurge. And as she points out, she knows this thing surrounding her isn't normal. But it is her creation. It is the vision of a young girl sitting alone on her bed strumming the guitar writing songs, because she hasn't got friends... but one thing she does have in spades is ambition.

It is often said that Taylor was rejected in school for being weird. It is far too easy to form a picture of the young girl who never fit in. Alone with her music. And indeed, she was rejected in middle school in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, another satellite of Reading. The school was split between the wealthier kids and the one's who came from a more economically depressed area. Taylor could not possibly be accepted there. Her family was indeed what would have been considered rich in most of the world. However in contrast to the wealth Taylor has since acquired I think the phrase upper middle class fits her upbringing better. And it was moving into this world that seems to have upended the young girl who just wanted to heard and liked. And it is here that she really sharpens her desire to write the songs which will be her ticket out of rejection and anonymity. The intense longing to be seen as likable is already present. But then, perhaps seriously for the first time in her life (though I suspect there is something else that even she can't see), she was indeed rejected as an upper class heart on sleeve princess. Yet this picture misses a crucial element to her story. She actually seemed well adjusted to school and friendships in her primary school days, back when she lived on the Christmas tree farm, when she used to spend summers living above the beach in New Jersey, when she lamented that her young school friends from Pennsylvania weren't with her. She romanticizes this period in her songs.

There is one facet to Taylor's personality that I do find utterly mysterious. And it's not her music; which for the record I find to be extremely well crafted far more often than I had any expectation of, almost impossible to forget; so many unremovable earworms, quite a few meaningful lyrics. But what are the origins of her desire to be seen? This isn't the usual attention seeking of a girl being abandoned by her family. Clearly Taylor loves her parents. While watching the Eras Tour Concert film I was struck by how intensely she bathes in the adulation of the massive crowd. You can see her receiving her power directly from their adoration, as though the tumultuous audience approbation was a cosmic ray being shot straight into her. As far back as we can go this aspect seems to be present; to be seen and liked, to be the good girl. Has there ever been anyone who so deeply relished this attention?

Now this brings us precisely to the door she has jealously guarded from our prying eyes. And for good reason. It is her relationship to her family, which has too often been painted in glowing, almost halcyon terms, particularly when singing Christmas Tree Farm. Now it is clear that not everything was warm and fuzzy in the Swift family. But most things related to her family are strangely shrouded in a kind of mythology. When she breaks out of the chrysalis of country music there is a noticeable change in many of her attitudes and approaches to life. This coincides with her move to New York City. Curiously her song Welcome to New York focuses upon the LGBT community more than, say, the various ethnic enclaves, the vast cultural life, or the business world, of which I am quite sure, with a stockbroker father, she was more than conscious of. Having once lived in NYC for some 16 years myself, I can tell you with confidence that the LGBT world, while prominent was not central to the New York plot, the way it is to San Francisco. Yet Taylor focuses on the one aspect of the city that would mark her out as no longer living by the same standards as middle America, her more conservative country audience.

2011 is another clouded time in Taylor's life. Most observers point out that sometime during this period her parents divorced, yet they both remained active in Taylor Swift, daughter and corporation. Or rather we should say that Scott Swift stayed active, because Andrea never leaves Taylor's side. Finding out any information about this divorce is extremely difficult. Indeed ChatGPT says her parents divorced, back in 1990s. (!) But what to believe? All we can say for sure is that there was a break and 2011 was a pivotal moment. And here is the point, the big change comes with her album Red. Prior to that we are right to call Taylor Swift a country pop singer, after that point she starts carving off the country image. It would pretty much be impossible that her parents separation didn't have a major effect on every part of her life.

We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together is a very different kind of song from anything on Speak Now. Likewise I Knew You Were Trouble. I purposely over emphasized the 'ever' in We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, because it is the inclusion of that one word that contributes so much to both the meaning of the song and her ability to stretch that 'ever' out multiple in performance. I find that song weirdly, contradictorily, joyful. I hate myself if I sing along with it, because it seems to be born out a worldview that savors the cleverness of the putdown of an irredeemable soul. And yet when she sang a rock version of that very same song on her 1989 tour, I marveled at it. It is actually my favorite performance of hers. Because she did something in that one performance that I have never heard from her since. She honestly opened up the song's truly dark painful content with a blistering attack and with a much more menacing and fearful guitar and a darker rhythm, reminiscent for a moment of Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps concerts. The audience doesn’t know how to react, or what song this even is. Her voice, running through a haunting, somewhat familiar, line of vocables, is genuinely intense in a way she never demonstrates again. Proving that had Taylor chosen to be a rocker, and not a pop star, she would have been among the very best. (This also gives rise to the theory that there are many other Taylor songs in this mode that were locked away in the vaults.) And why do I find the rock version so superior to the irrepressible pop version? Because a woman who can admit she is in real pain and anger, is stronger than a woman who hides her pain in jokey asides to her sarcastic friends, which is how the pop version comes across. The hit version of the song, along with its attendant video, is like girls giggling about boys at a slumber party. A teasing cynical nyah, nyah nyah. But there is hope in Taylor's true anger. There is no redemption in the catchy joy of, again, one more ironic failed relationship. And yet here is why Taylor won't pursue that course... Though I wish she would. It's because a rocker cares a whole lot less about being liked, or making people happy. A great rocker seeks a much earthier transcendence. And that's not really Taylor's style... ever.

Now one thing I plan to avoid like the plague is the constant speculation her songs invite concerning whom they are about. This is the age of technologically turbocharged socially mediated gossip, shade, rumor, insinuendo, drama, ad nauseum. Of all the aspects of Taylor's music and life, I find this the most pointless. And I also find her reaction to it all strangely naive and overblown, if understandable from the perspective of that young ostracized 11 year old. More than once she has defended herself against against the 'sin' of 'slut-shaming'. When, in fact, her serial monogamous habits are more products of an age, than anything specific to her. Once upon a time, in my living memory, younger people were supposed to look for a true mate and commit themselves to their desired soulmate. Now in the post-sexual revolution chaos of whatever remains of the classic notion of courtship, Taylor Swift, while definitely among the lost children of her time, is no worse, and I suspect in some ways better, than the way most of her younger peers, male or female, conduct themselves. I also suspect that the generations of the later 21^st Century will revert to more variations on the traditional pattern, especially since the current standards seem to lead nowhere except into a hall of vanity mirrors where each potential 'partner' stares deeply into their own dreams for a bellwether pointing down the road to something resembling themselves resembling contentment. It certainly doesn't surprise me in the least that Taylor has made her chief subject matter herself. That is is the only subject most people have been left with in this troubling age. We are all selfies now, seeking likes from other selfies. It is my fervent hope that Taylor finds her way out of this hallway, and takes as many of her fans with her as she can. But that more on them later.

One of the bitterest ironies of the savior/musicians that began to populate our entertainment landscape from the mid-20^th Century and up to today, with Taylor being perhaps the final iteration of the same, is that most of the musicians that fans idolized were themselves kids who felt awkward and alone, sitting at home obsessively learning their instruments, while their ‘cooler’ schoolmates carried on with what appeared to be active social lives. Bruce Springsteen once said that it was strange how you go from being the outsider to being this big insider, and yet you really haven't changed. Taylor Swift is an absolute mirror of this archetype.

As the story goes, Taylor is rejected by her peers, sitting at home alone making music, wanting the approval of the crowd, the very teens who rejected her. And there is a vindictive streak buried in this pattern. An I'll-show-them quality to this type. And one of the strangest aspects of this archetypal creature is that they will then write songs about their human relationships and failures. Then like Taylor Swift, or John Lennon, or Kurt Cobain, people will genuinely gravitate to them, and finally they then will idolize them.

However there are two massive points of contradictions here.

Firstly, the musician we have assigned to sing to us, who will unfurl all their romantic hopes and failures, actually is one of the least qualified to tell us anything about love, at least in their usual state. I mean if you know anything about the lives of John Lennon, Michael Jackson, or Kurt Cobain, do you really think they understood the nature of love? What does a person know about love who does not know how to find nor wed themselves to another, who demonstrates no deep sense of commitment to another soul? Instead the audience finds in these legendary figures a reaffirmation of their own lostness. The more relationships they have, the less qualified they are to talk.

The pnes who really do understand are rarely the ones who write our songs. It is the couple who stays together through the most difficult of times and do not give up, the ones who had some idea of what a good match might be, they are the ones we should be listening to. Sadly there are too few of those folks in music. (Later period Johnny Cash.) Much of the current crop of songwriters and musicians strike me, when it comes to possessing knowledge about how to identify a mate, as being seeing impaired; to simply be a solid judge of character. Typically they use visual cues, more than moral ones. Alas there are too few musicians like Nick Cave, who upon hitting a series of dense walls, then slowly open up to challenge their own youthful blindness. I am still hoping that Taylor finds more than merely a fierce isolating self-reliance.

Secondly, another thing happens to these musicians who carry these mirrors for us. They become sacrificial offerings to the deity of repetitious romantic hopes and desires with which the rest of us suffer, all the while simultaneously becoming rich and famous for their ability to mirror their own experiences back to us. And Taylor Swift might be one of the most extreme examples of this all the way around. And in becoming notoriously famed, these souls also find themselves being increasingly cutoff from much of what would be considered normal experience. The content of their songs becomes more abstracted from life. As Joni Mitchell, one of Taylor's biggest influences, once sang in a brilliant song called For Free, when she passes a street musician playing for free she opines,

'Now me, I play for fortunes

And those velvet curtain calls

I've got a black limousine and two gentlemen

Escorting me to the halls'

'And I play if you have the money

Or if you're a friend to me'

But this street musician was playing 'real good, for free'. And then hauntingly there is a musician playing at the end of the song, and I've always hoped that she invited that street musician to close out that song, and then gave him a paycheck. I suspect that in Taylor's Version she would do exactly that. And yet it is the kind of thing that reveals the yawning gulf between musician and audience. A gulf that Taylor has multiplied by the Grand Canyon. Thus incongruously turning herself back into a variation on the same lonely figure she had hoped to escape through music.

I think Taylor likes to bake cookies for her friends and visitors precisely because it is one of the few ways she has left to connect with normal life, since so much of that has been removed from her. She is not quite at Princess Diana level of fame, but she is getting very close. Thus a walk down the street pretty much anywhere there is access to a smartphone, would produce some sort self-conscious reaction from the locals. Consider what I said before about the Georgian girls at the movie theatre. Ten years ago there were very few people from the west who would have produced the kind of Taylormania these young girls would obviously be inflicted with if they saw her walking down Rustaveli Avenue. And I know that the country would be abuzz by such a benediction of St, Taylor of the Swiftness. (They rolled out the red carpet a few years back for Dolph Lundgren.) (?) And Georgia is a place most people don't even know is part of Europe and can't locate on a map. (Though truthfully I do suspect that most Georgian girls and young women don't live for Taylor, the way the Swifties in the West do. Geek culture and fandoms are not yet a normal feature here. Thankfully!)

There have been others who produced this kind of extreme devotion. The Beatles instantly come to mind. But the Beatles hated it. They looked at Beatlemania as a curse to their musicianship. They quit concert tours as a result. They had no idea how to control it. Not so with Taylor Swift. She knows exactly how to control the intense emotion of the crowd. Her performances are so rehearsed, it doesn't take a football coach to realize that Taylor has studied her own movements more than a sports superstar. She knows exactly how to turn her head to produce the desired effect. (There is a fascinating video of her singing Change at an Australian concert many years ago, where she is just beginning to feel her power, yet can’t quite apply it.) Very few artists have the crowd control she does. She could easily get have entire stadium to look upwards and then produce an elephant on stage as if by magic. She can reduce an audience, without a word, to a cataclysm of religious emotion.

The reason I knew I had to write this essay wasn't simply because I witnessed this spectacle inside a church, excuse me I mean movie theatre, far away from everything in the Republic of Georgia. I had decided to write about Taylor earlier August as I soon began to grasp the significance of Taylor Swift to the year 2023. I conceded that I had been wrong about her, and so I decided it was time to take my not inconsiderable musical knowledge and shine it on this seemingly normal, yet absolute singularity of a young woman. It was time to get on the diving board and take the YouTube plunge.

One video I found stopped me in my tracks. It was her speech accepting an honorary doctorate at New York University. It started off by with sentiments any famous singer might make, but by the time it was done I had one thought. An unsettling thought. This woman could easily become president of the United States. She is far more poised and intelligent than the majority of candidates out there, in this or any other year. And I am certainly not expecting this possibility to occur, at least not until she has made 13 albums. (Swifties will understand this reference.) I noted soberly 'Who could possibly beat her?'

And then I said to myself, Who is Taylor Swift? Really.

To be continued soon in part 2 “Taylor Swift: Goddess, Witch or Christian?