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Why it's time to stop hating Taylor Swift.
So let me walk you down Memory Lane, although probably not the one you remember ever having been down.
13 years ago, a young girl from a Christmas Tree Farm in Pennsylvania released her first album, ‘debut’ as it is dubbed in the Swiftie community. It was an album which featured only songs Taylor herself helped write and create, an album that won her the title of Top New Female Vocalist at the AMAs in 2008 at only 18 years old, an album that introduced the world to the amazing songwriting capabilities unique only to Taylor Swift. As a current 18 year old, I am constantly in awe of the amount of hard work, sheer talent and self-belief that kind of accolade requires. ‘Our Song’ has become an anthem for a whole generation, it’s spot at No.16 on the Billboard Top 100 and No.1 on country radio. All that in itself is pretty remarkable, yet it was just the beginning of Taylor’s supernova of a career.
After 'Debut' came ‘Fearless’, the album that really introduced to the world the immense talent for storytelling and songwriting Taylor has.
If Our Song is an anthem for Millennials & Gen-Zers, Love Story is the National Anthem of our childhood & teenage years. To this day whenever I’m around other people when Love Story comes on, I watch as everyone around me sings along, even those who are on Team Kimye. On a personal level, I remember being 9 years old and belting out Love Story in the back of a rented mini-van as my family toured around Ireland tracing our ancient ancestry (possibly one of the most boring and painful holidays of my childhood save for Taylor’s songs). Fearless, alongside Miley Cyrus’, ‘Breakout’ and P!nk’s Funhouse, were the first albums I ever knew inside out. I knew the words to You Belong With Me before I understood the pain of unrequited pining. I sang along to The Way I Loved You as if my heart had just been irrevocably broken. 2009 was the year I discovered Taylor’s magic but I wasn’t a Swiftie, not yet anyway. I think it’s important to note here one thing: I grew up in Sydney, Australia and the fact Taylor’s songs played on the radio there, the fact she had reached with only her second album International acclaim is extraordinary and in the days before the iPhone took off or Instagram was even in existence, the more incredible. That power of Taylor’s music touching tens of millions of lives yet feeling as though she’s talking directly to you is part of what makes her, in my opinion, the greatest artist in a generation. Fearless is an album that highlights that magic with people a lot older and younger than Fifteen relating to red-headed Abigail’s heartache and forgetting how to Breathe as they remember the ones that got away be it a love, a friend or a dream. It was such a magical album that it won two Grammys, making Taylor the youngest artist ever to win Album of the Year (an accolade she would win again making her the first female artist in history to do so). Perhaps most infamously in the Fearless era, Kanye West took to the stage in ‘outrage’ over Taylor’s VMA win for You Belong With Me. Imma let y’all finish but Kanye did not make Tay famous, she did that lol by herself and if you don’t believe me let me remind you that in his almost 3-decade long career Kanye has won 252 awards, Taylor has won 324 in less than half the time, just saying.
There are some Swifties who will totally agree with me, (Although a lot who don’t will probably come for me), that Taylor’s most underrated and spectacular album is, in fact, the underrated gem that is Speak Now.
Her 2010 solo endeavor that gave the world bops such as Mean and Sparks Fly alongside ballads like Enchanted and Last Kiss and of course, theme song for us Swifties, Long Live (which will forever make me cry). The reason Speak Now is paid dust is because unlike Fearless or Debut there wasn’t one mainstream song that overtook the public sphere, but for those who go below the surface, it is one of Taylor’s most lyrically telling and sonically cohesive (insert wink emoji) albums that does deserve more credit than it gets. Taylor is remembered in the Speak Now era for three things: 1) hand-written sharpie lyrics on her arms and 13s in green eyeshadow on her hand, 2) sparkly dresses and 3) an epic tour that many Swifties (myself included) wish we could’ve attended (luckily though we virtually can by listening to the Speak Now Live Album which includes two of Taylor’s best covers: Drops of Jupiter & Bette Davis Eyes). God, I wish I could’ve seen her perform back then! Let me say it again for those of y'all up the back who are still letting bias and misunderstanding block the facts out: ANY 19 YEAR OLD WHO WRITES AN ALBUM BY THEMSELVES AND SELLS 1MILLION COPIES IN THE FIRST WEEK DESERVES RESPECT AND TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY. Whether you like Taylor or not, you have to admit that's an achievement.
Rrrrrrr-emeber when Random Access Memories by Daft Punk won Album of The Year at the Grammys in 2014? Yeah, well that really should’ve been ‘Red’.
It wasn’t, and as a result it forced Taylor to refocus for 1989 (an album that DID win AOTY), but that loss stung for Swifties and Swifts alike, it is still known as the greatest Grammy snub, it’s also when I realised I was more than just a casual Taylor Swift fan (I cried over that Grammy loss for two days). But despite what the highest music judge in the land said, Red is perhaps Taylor’s greatest lyrical achievement, her most honest and vulnerable storytelling. It is an album that is all about emotion and intelligence, experience and innocence, expectations and illusions. Almost right off the bat of Red’s release in 2012, the media turned Taylor into a superstar and super-slut all in one swift swoop (no pun intended). Apparently, Taylor dated any man she stood within 3 feet of and they ALL had a song on Red about them (despite Taylor never confirming that AND the lack of anything resembling reasonable supporting evidence existing). Even if Red was all about those men, it shouldn’t matter because literally every male artist in history, whether he be a singer or author or painter, has used their sexual relationships to inspire their art: look at Manet who used his lover Victorine, or F.Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, or Drake and Rihanna. Writing and creating out of personal experience does not open up an artist’s life to be violated, poked and prodded until all is revealed, and it certainly isn’t something we should judge them for. The best art is the art that is born from the moments in life we simultaneously desperately and never want to forget.
Taylor Swift was born in 1989 but for a LOT of Swifties 1989 was the era where she became THE Taylor Swift rather than our friend Tay, also known as Becky #rip.
It was an era where all that vulnerability on Red was transformed into a magical mix of electropop and catchy melodies. As an album, it is loud, unashamed, brave and bold. All words I’d use to describe Taylor that era too. 1989 was the second one of Taylor’s albums to win AOTY at the Grammy’s and made HER-story as the first time a female artist had won the award twice. To date, 1989 has sold over 10 million copies, making it without a doubt one of the best-selling albums of the decade; the 1989 World Tour was the highest grossing tour of all time for a while there too. Yet, again the media turned their attention to all the boys she maybe loved before and to her so-called anti-feminist group of girl power and women supporting women. In 2014-15, it seemed Taylor in the eyes of the media could do NOTHING right, but it didn’t really matter because she proved she could. Literally, time and time again Taylor proved why she was worthy of her fame, proved she was a talented musician and businesswoman, proved she was more than just another cog in a big machine. So whilst the media threw rocks her way, Taylor kept on climbing up the charts and record books because she, like many other wise women in this world, knows that sometimes when the haters gonna hate you just gotta rise above.
Most recently, our ears and hearts have been blessed with Reputation;
an album that is ‘legitimately about finding love throughout the noise’ of the lies and the rumors, an album with a linear timeline of figuring out that #taylorswiftisNOToverparty, an album that really is a delicate balance of resentment and relief. If you were a Swiftie on Tumblr during most of 2017, you would’ve been 113% sure that Taylor had been kidnapped by aliens or had lost her Tumblr password. There was a drought that made many of us doubt Taylor would ever make a comeback, ever release more music… and it was heartbreaking. But she did come back, of course, she did, and we were gifted with a completely new Taylor, one who had shed her own skin and had decided it was time to fearlessly tell her side of the story. The reputation the media gave Taylor preceded her, but here’s the thing, when you take back the microphone from those who robbed you of it in the first place, when you take back the narrative of gossips and tabloids to tell the reali-TAY (or is reali-TEA better?) of what happened, when you no longer give the thing that is suffocating you any power, you prove that you’re not dead or irrelevant but in fact better than you ever were, and that is truly getting the best revenge.
Taylor deserves better this era.
Maybe you’ll have noticed, maybe not, that I have not once mentioned any of Taylor’s alleged boyfriends or muses by name. They don’t have a place here because quite frankly who gives a damn? Taylor Swift is not some punchline - she’s not the girl with a revolving door of boyfriends who serve as a hook in a catchy melody or who should’ve known they’d get a song written about them. Taylor famously pointed out how sexist the double standard of judging her music based on its recurring ~romantic~ theme is when her pal Ed Sheeran who writes sappy loves songs almost exclusively has never had an interviewer ask him which girl he’ll take home with him next. In 2019, the amount of people who still think that all there is to Taylor Swift is being serial-dater who has a ‘few’ great hits is insane. Most of all because a ‘few’ in this case means dozens - want receipts? Taylor is the only artist to EVER sell over a million units in the first week of release for FOUR albums, even in an era of streaming and illegal downloads. Yet Taylor’s achievements, as I hope I’ve highlighted, aren’t what the world knows her for, at least not completely. Her reputaytion (as I like to call it) amongst the general public is far from the Taylor we Swifties know and love. A few years ago, Taylor met a pregnant and homeless fan, she didn’t fake a smile and say “that’s too bad”, she bought them a house. At a meet and greet (which unlike other artists are FREE and also traditionally have had the most adorkable names like the T-Party, Club Red, Loft 89 and Rep-Room) after a reputation show where a fan was alone, Taylor personally gave her enough money for a cab and made one of her security team walk her out. And perhaps most astonishingly, for her past two albums (and most likely TS7 - I know y’all are out there) Taylor has hosted listening parties, known as the secret sessions, for fans free and a month in advance of its release. I was one of the 100 people piled into a living room in London to experience reputation in 2017, and I can tell you there is nothing on this planet that comes close to the privilege of being trusted, wanted and loved enough to be in that room, that Taylor personally picked me to be there. Honestly how many fandoms or fans can say that when they met their idol it was because they were hand chosen by that idol? How many fans have their fave literally flock over to them no matter how much of a hurry they’re in? How many fans of musicians who are as big as Taylor have them "cryptically plan for months" a massive mural surprise that makes them feel less like Boo Boo the Fool? How many fans can say that they casually spend their nights on Tumblr making jokes with the person they stan? Not many, actually, not more than one that I can think of.
To answer my original question:
Why Taylor? Why did the media choose to turn a talented and hopeful country superstar into an archaic and sexist cliché? I don’t know. I really do not. And why do so many people choose to believe that side of the narrative? Why did they torment and bully her as if they had the right to? I will never understand why any one could do that to another person. And finally, why is Taylor the one I’ve stuck by all these years? Why I have I spent hours writing this out in hopes of changing just one view of her? Why is Taylor’s voice the one that I listen to? Well, that I do know; because of everything Taylor has done for me, for the community of Swifties in the world millions deep, for the world in general whether through her songs or kindness means that I will happily spend my time defending her and supporting her, because I trust her voice even when she’s made mistakes (like we all do) or when she has been made to seem shady and untrustworthy, because at the end of the day, in the words of her BFF Karlie Kloss, “Taylor has always had my back and I’ll always have hers.” TS7 is an era for the fans, but it’s also an era for Taylor. An era where maybe, finally, as she should’ve all along, Taylor Swift will be given the respect and admiration she so firmly deserves.
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