The Princess with a Thousand Enemies

(This is (not) a music review.)

A new Taylor Swift album came out last month. This happens a lot, and people don’t shut up about it when it does. I am not going to shut up about it either.

The question isn’t whether the new album is good, exactly; that is never the point with these things, not when Swift is involved. She is a generational songwriting talent, and her musicianship is serviceable, but she is also prolific, with all that being prolific tends to imply for consistency. The Tortured Poets Department has a lot of pretty good songs on it (although they tend towards the “over-written”), a few standout ones, and one or two that are some of the most emotionally immature dreck you’ve ever heard in your life. The same, however, can be said about a lot of albums, by both Taylor Swift and other artists. What makes “TTPD” different? This question is more broadly social, cultural, and even economic and political in its way.

To understand Swift’s current cultural totipresence, we have to understand the tour. The Eras Tour, even in its attenuated movie form, is an almost premodernly ludic experience, a carnival in the original sense that included a sacral quality. I went to a showing of the movie last year in Saratoga Springs, a town I dislike for a lot of reasons, and at points it was like being at one of those Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight showings, if Rocky Horror were monocultural rather than countercultural. I qualify it this way, and yet there is something oddly non-monocultural and non-mainstream about the serious Swift fandom. The showing I went to was full of teenaged girls yelling things like “FUCK SCOTT BORCHETTA” and “FUCK SCOTT SWIFT” and “FUCK SCOOTER BRAUN” and “FUCK KIM KARDASHIAN” and “FUCK JAKE GYLLENHAAL”—the Land of Swift has a princess with a thousand enemies—as well as an almost gematria-like occultic treatment of the numbers 5, 13, and, of course, 1,989. Almost everybody in the world has heard at least one or two Taylor Swift songs, and probably most Millennials and in particular most Millennial women have a decent generalized understanding of her career, but it is still distinctly specialized knowledge what the fuck half this stuff means. This sort of thing is why my housemate and I have an inside joke about a semi-near-future eternal recurrence of the rise of Constantine where the “sign” in which “Swiftie Constantine” conquers is a snake emoji, and instead of Arian Germanic tribes there’s a Canticle for Leibowitz-style Great Plains culture that thinks the house from “The Last Great American Dynasty” was in Rapid City.

Now there’s an extended Eras Tour movie on streaming, because Swift likes money, and also there’s the new album. A lot of the album is about Matty Healy, the extremely racist, sexist, and religiously bigoted front man of a shitty boy band whom Swift dated for about a month last year. “But, daddy, I love him!” Swift protests in one of the album’s set-piece songs—indeed, this is the title of said song—which is compelling in The Little Mermaid, where the line originates, but here seems almost intended to be a Trojan horse to make the old-school familialist understanding of marriage look good by comparison. Swift, like most people, has yet to learn the trick of keeping a gun by her brain’s pleasure receptors so that she can shoot them if they look at her funny.

Speaking of Swift’s neurology, the album release has unleashed not only the usual flood of strange sexism that is directed at her as a matter of course but also a dismaying variety of terrible attitudes about psychology, depression, madness. Basic moral and political observations about Swift—she is wealthy; she is hypocritical; her private jet use has caused a truly unconscionable amount of terrible Pollution—mushroom into a dogged insistence that she must not have real problems, that she must just be a whiner who is appropriating the aesthetic of real emotional and spiritual struggle. This is, of course, bullshit. Swift has publicly protested too much about her own sanity for at least a decade. The sorts of things that people have made fun of her for the most consistently over the years—mood swings; embarrassing self-reinventions; almost unbelievably short and intense relationships; an increasingly obvious inability to keep it in her pants—are themselves oftener than not warning signs of serious problems in someone’s inmost depths. Nobody accuses Lord Byron of having been a poser, even though the “lord” in his name does mean what it usually means and even though his behavior was at least as calculated to present a particular aesthetic as Swift’s is. I’m not sure I would call Byron a tortured poet, exactly, but that is because I am still not sure “tortured poet” is a real set phrase; were people saying this six months ago? It’s become difficult to remember.

Even with someone like, say, Charles Bukowski, the torture came at least much from ways in which he had it better than other people as from ways in which he had it worse; it’s impossible to honestly think about Bukowski’s virulent misogyny as something of which he was the real victim, although various dishonest defenders of his have certainly tried to. It’s possible that Taylor Swift’s problems are about as self-inflicted as Charles Bukowski’s were, or at least an argument to that effect can be made that isn’t transparently and cartoonishly sexist. Can an argument be made that her problems are more self-inflicted than his were? No, not really, and this argument cannot really be made about Byron or Dylan Thomas (name-dropped in a strange context in the album’s title track, which sounds like it might be about Phoebe Bridgers rather than Healy) or François Villon (a poet who was almost certainly literally tortured on more than one occasion) either.

Even Ursula K. Le Guin’s Gethen-cold writing on Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, which is so bad that it permanently altered my opinion of her even though I don’t like Hemingway either, does not go as far as some of the anti-Swiftian commentary on the princess’s supposed mental haleness does. In fairness, it cannot. “I’m not saying that Hemingway wasn’t really suicidally depressed; that he was is beyond denial. I’m just saying he was suicidally depressed because he was a bad person.” That at least is connected to the reality of suffering, which Le Guin, to her credit, never denied; denying that reality would have vitiated her artistic, intellectual, and moral project much more thoroughly than did any of the specific topics on which she tended towards hypocrisy or self-righteousness. Le Guin is better and more honest than, for example, “Taylor Swift will succumb to depression if not for her emotional support private jet,” a real remark that someone on the bird app made. (If he by some chance reads this and wants to be credited by name, or wants someone else quoted instead, he can feel free to email me—but if I were him I would, in this context, prefer to go nameless.)

So it’s not even that Taylor Swift is above criticism or necessarily a particularly admirable person. It’s that her releases, for whatever reason, have a way of attracting unhinged attacks and unduly savage criticism from people who have even worse understandings of what the world is really like than she has herself. Swift, like an Athenian philosopher or a “populist” political leader, is remarkably good at exposing holes in her detractors’ worldviews by existing. Sometimes she exposes holes in their moral standards too, as with the Le Guin-Hemingway comparison that I just made. Taylor Swift the gadfly is an important contributor to the public sphere in ways that hold good regardless of the output of Taylor Swift the singer-songwriter.