“I’m addicted to the ‘if only’”
In this Blog I have had occasion, tentatively, to raise questions about Beyoncé – sure, leaning into a howling gale in the opposite direction. I have pointed to her astounding self-regard (presenting herself as a pregnant Madonna); referring to her followers as “Bees” (drones?) with the equally astounding self-coronation as “Queen”; and, of course, her encouragement to young women and girls to sexualise themselves to flaunt “butts” and “boobs”. Well, okay. I’ll concede royalty. Beyoncé is the queen of self-indulgence, the monarch of self-engineering, the tsarina of kitch.
So now to Taylor Swift. The $2bn songster-tortured-poet.
Her sexualising tendencies are slight. Even strutting her stuff in leotard and scarlet lips, she struggles to achieve sexuality – anything beyond the wholesome girl-next-door look. It can look a tad incongruous, even, as the girl-next-door sweetly arrives for tea dressed provocatively. And she clearly is not so self-indulgent as Queen Bey, who forces her branded imagery down our throats. And let me say assuredly that I admire her for her decision to come out (eventually) against madcap Trump. I like her for that.
But...
...what about her relation to her numerous followers – her Swifties? What about her music?
Well, read the lyrics. It is like a rhinestone necklace of defensive reactions to dysfunctional relationships. These are songs that relentlessly replay self-disappointment, disappointment with others, disappointment that a relationship didn’t work out – or that it did!
"And I guess we fell apart in the usual way, and the story's got dust on every page"
If we were to assume that her songs corresponded with her lived experience we would have to say that her emotional control is flaky at best – she is cast as the perpetual victim of endless dysfuntion. The world seems forever to be letting her down, a place for serial recovery from her failure or the failures of others. Taylor is always at one remove from satisfaction, though satisfaction is an ever-receding standard, defined not by reality, but by hopeless dreams.
“I wanna be defined by the things that I love"
The closest Taylor comes to joy is in moments of redemption, and even these are saturated with the memory of why redemption was necessary in the first place. Each song is like an anaemic torchlight on a dark world.
"Seems the only one who doesn't see your beauty is the face in the mirror looking back at you"
What I read in Taylor Swift’s songs – this is my own, idiosyncratic view – is, as it were, an echo of the era of austerity that she lived through, but, perhaps, did not experience as such. For the past however many years we – certainly us progressives, radicals and liberal-minded – have been on the rebound from hope. The world has been a fairground of sparkling possibilities, but from which we exit with the drooping resignation of a serial loser who will, nonetheless, return to lose once more.
“This is me praying that
This was the very first page
Not where the story line ends”
The political narrative of austerity is that disappointment is an ever-present reality, ruthless in its afflictions, but not relentless. We are condemned to wander, hapless, in dark valleys, but hope drives us on. There is an end – the so-called ”sunny uplands”. Of course, ‘uplands’ were never part of the plan of the austerity-pushers. Their goal was to diminish the State, erode the public sector. The sense of ennui that saturates most of Taylor Swift’s songs is, in fact, future’s prognosis. Disappointment and its dismal cousin, desolation, are, in fact, as relentless and unending as the serial washouts in her lyrics.
Her songs do, actually, border on self-determination – self-empowerment, even. But they do not cross that border. The terrain through which she drags these bleak thoughts is a land defined by victims and the chosen.
Let it once be me
Who do I have to speak to
Except that Taylor is, of course, one of the chosen. Her $multi-millions provide something of a buffer against disenchantment. But that is not in the real world. That is in the synthetic world where the contrast between her life of glitz, surprise and luxury is too sharply contrasted with the daily grind of Swifties’ lives between the lyrics. No, what is real is the Swiftie ‘Me’ who rocks along with the glamour of the let-down.
So the message to her followers – her ‘Swifties’? Life is defined by disappointed hopes, a place where you have to struggle for love, where self-determination is a strategy of retreat, and ‘Oh baby, baby – it’s a wild world...’ – but, then, we’re ‘all in this together’. Get over it. Where Beyoncé was the queen of escapism from the dreary, Taylor Swift is the queen of confronting austere reality with iron-clad resignation.
"When I was drowning, that's when I could finally breathe"