Power User — Taylor Swift Discussion
Host: It does show that she can’t speak on things that actually matter with all of her wealth and all of her power and alleged goodwill. Like, she can’t do anything in this case that actually helps anyone in the world besides her.
Host: Over the past two decades, Taylor Swift has dominated the pop charts and risen to the pinnacle of mainstream fame. She has amassed a fortune estimated at over $1.6 billion, won 14 Grammy Awards, including a record-breaking four Album of the Year wins, sold more than 100 million albums worldwide, headlined the highest-grossing concert tour in history, and built a vast real estate and music catalog empire.
Swift has always had her detractors, but lately the backlash is getting louder. She has been criticized for her silence on the genocide in Gaza, for palling around with Trump supporters like Britney Mahomes, and climate activists have attacked her extensive air travel and carbon footprint. And now many are calling her latest album a flop.
flop
(informal) a film/movie, play, party, etc. that is not successful （电影、戏剧、聚会等）失败，不成功 OPP hit
All of this raises the question: has Taylor Swift peaked? Not just in popularity, but in cultural authority? Or is this just yet another cynical reinvention that she’ll use to amass even more money and power?
To discuss all of this, I have Kat Tenbarge here, author of Spitfire News, a newsletter covering internet culture. Kat, welcome to Power User.
Kat: Thank you so much for having me.
Host: Okay, so I want to start off by asking: do you consider yourself a Swifty?
Kat: I do consider myself a Swifty. I feel like it would be lying if I said that I wasn’t, but I also think that she is just so popular that most people either fall into the category of casual listener or full-on Swifty.
Truly, I would argue she is the most popular musician on the planet right now. I don’t know if that’s true in terms of exact music streams or not, but certainly, I mean, her concert tour sold out records. And I think if you look at the rise of her career over the past 20 years, it’s sort of just been up and up and up.
Host: Yes. And I feel like by the numbers, and if you look at that extensive period of time that she has been such a huge mega pop star, it’s like she certainly is the most consistently popular musician over the past 10 years.
Because even 10 years ago, she was the most popular musician. She was in the 1989 era, and that era was so humongous and so culturally dominating. And still to this day she’s culturally dominating.
So she’s had a generational, never-before-seen run, I feel like, in a lot of ways, but especially in the modern era.
I want to run through her eras super quickly for people that might need a refresher or kind of aren’t as familiar with her rise.
So Taylor Swift really comes onto the scene in 2006 with her debut album, Taylor Swift. She follows it up with Fearless and then Speak Now. This is sort of her early country days. She’s coming out of Nashville, she’s got the curly hair, and I feel like it’s when we were first introduced to this young girl known as Taylor.
Taylor Swift’s pop career really rose in the 2010s alongside the rise of social media. She used platforms like MySpace and then Tumblr, of course, to cultivate this huge fandom.
She had listening parties where she would have people from Tumblr over to her house. And Tumblr undeniably gave her that boost. But I feel like by the mid-2010s, we’re talking 2014, 2015, 2016, she’s also leaning into Instagram. Her Twitter account’s getting big, and she’s just developing this mass parasocial fandom all across the internet where it’s not confined to just Tumblr.
And this is when you start to see people really criticize her about using her platform effectively.
I feel like one big moment was in 2016 when she didn’t endorse Hillary Clinton.
Kat: Yes. It was also juxtaposed with the fact that in this era of her life, she was in her mid-20s. She had moved from Nashville to New York City, and that was reflected in her music.
For the first time, she referenced being gay in a positive way. When she was a country star, she talked about being gay as an insult, but then when she released 1989, she identified as a feminist. She started to identify as more socially liberal.
And so there was a lot of criticism around her and a lot of scrutiny of, okay, she’s leveraging these things that were working really well on social media at the time.
On Tumblr, being a feminist, that was popular. And so she was glomming onto that identity, but she was not going so far as to actually take an overt political stance.
She’s doing what she’s always done very well, which is playing all sides at once and not alienating anyone too much, but also not actually substantively getting involved in politics.
Host: I mean, this is the time when you also started to see these other micro-controversies. There was a lot of conversation about her weight, her appearance, her fashion, and then also who she was dating, of course. Her relationship status has always been a big fixation.
And she started to lean on a lot of that feminist rhetoric of, like, why so much hate for a woman? Why can’t women date around when men can date around? Da da da da.
2016, Trump is elected, and I feel like very quickly there was this criticism of her that really started to take hold of, okay, had you endorsed Hillary Clinton, maybe she would have won, right? They always say this because she has such a huge platform.
In her movie Miss Americana, she talks about her decision to ultimately endorse this Democratic political candidate in Tennessee. In 2020, she eventually endorses Joe Biden for president.
And amidst all of this, in 2017, she also releases Reputation, where she’s sort of clapping back at some of these perceived haters.
I feel like at this point and throughout her whole career, whenever Taylor Swift has leveraged politics, it has always been in a way that’s just going to help her grow and become more popular.
Like, in this case, she’s only taking these steps when it’s safe to do so. She was not acknowledging any of this stuff at a time when it was genuinely divisive or unpopular.
Someone made a joke recently that she’s always four years behind. And the reason for that—it’s not that she’s not aware. She’s very, very savvy. She is waiting to do things at the point when they have already become acceptable because she doesn’t ever want to be the one who’s getting the most heat for something.
So retroactively she’s talking about how anti-Trump she was after he had already been elected.
And then this whole era of feminism that she embraces, which I was very enthralled by at the time as a college student listening to Reputation—and I still enjoy that album a lot—but I don’t think that it should be controversial to say that it’s the epitome of white feminism.
Because she only started to embrace so-called feminist themes specifically when she could use them to deflect from media criticism.
And some of that was legitimate. Like, the fixation on her and her relationships and the rhetoric her whole career was obviously very sexist. And later she’ll lean into this more as her aesthetic identity.
Host: Yeah, I feel like she definitely—I think Reputation—took advantage of that Trump resistance movement throughout Trump 1.0.
Then you have her sort of indie shift. She releases Lover in 2019. COVID hits, she goes into the woods, releases Folklore, Evermore, these sort of moody albums.
Midnights in 2022. This is very much, I would say, her billionaire era. You just start to see the Taylor Swift machine.
Like, 2022 on, then you had The Tortured Poets Department, of course, in 2024. She goes on this Eras Tour, which just becomes massively popular and global, becomes this global phenomenon.
And of course now we have The Life of a Showgirl.
And in this album, which she announced on Travis Kelce, her fiancé’s, podcast, she talks about how she produced it with Max Martin in the 2010s. And she recorded and produced this entire album also while on the Eras Tour, which is crazy to me.
So the album comes out, it’s hotly anticipated, and the reviews are not like what I think she would have probably wanted.
Like, in one sense it is successful. It is still one of her highest-grossing albums of all time, but it is also her lowest-rated album.
And I feel like the discourse around this album and the launch is so radically different from previous Taylor Swift album releases.
Like, this was an album where I saw people—normally you’re so scared to even say Taylor Swift or talk about her in a negative light—and here I saw people that were even self-identified Swifties talking about, “Okay, I can no longer defend her.”
So I want to sort of walk through some of the backlash to the album.
First, tell me that as a Swifty: when did you listen to the album and what were your first impressions?
Kat: Every time Taylor Swift releases an album, it inevitably gets leaked the day before. So I saw people discussing the lyrics, and I heard a taste of this album on Thursday, the day before the release.
And my first impression was not good.
I didn’t really have super high expectations for this album just because I feel like she has been releasing music so quickly over the past few years that it has been consistently hit or miss.
And that is also my take on The Life of a Showgirl. I don’t think it is as disastrously bad as some people’s takes would have it seem.
I think that there are a couple, a few good tracks on this 12-track album. But there should be like eight good songs on this album. Like, she’s Taylor Swift.
She’s allowed to have a dud here and there, but she should really be making top-form pop music. She can make that kind of pop music.
And I think at this point my reaction, and a lot of fans’ reaction, is that she seems to be almost phoning it in because I don’t think she has to make good music anymore to be successful.
And you see Swifties have this take—even the ones who are defending her.
Host: Yeah, I think one thing that this album seemed like so much to me is just a naked cash grab.
She started immediately releasing all these different acoustic versions, whatever remix versions, all of these different versions that people would have to buy the album multiple times to make it chart and make her even more money.
Like, I saw people tweeting, “It gets to a point.”
And maybe it’s just off the Eras Tour, too, and just the merch that she’s selling for 125 fake-fur mint Taylor Swift jacket or something.
I think the naked consumerism and the money-making aspect of her music is just sort of more and more overt, maybe, and it seems to come through in this album, maybe because the album isn’t as artful.
It might be easier to appreciate some of these pop songs if we knew that it wasn’t this giant money-making scheme, I guess, which of course pop has always been.
But, like you said, she’s such a global pop superstar, she’s asking for so much of our money—whether it’s touring, merch, buying this album five times over in five different ways—like, she needs to deliver, and she didn’t deliver.
It just feels like hyper-consumerist content.
So, a lot of my good friends are also Swifties, and so whether I liked the album or not, I knew I was going to go to that movie, that listening premiere launch thing at AMC Theatres.
I ended up going twice because I have so many Swifty friends that I ended up going twice, and both times I was just like, “She really has got me. I am in the trap.”
Knowing my own [transcription unclear], why am I watching these horrible lyric videos?
And this is not even a hot take. Swifties agree.
The lyric videos that she put out as this movie that was like $13 at AMC—they’re not even good-quality lyric videos.
You end up watching the “Fate of Ophelia” music video twice. They just play it two times at this thing that you’ve paid money to go to.
So, it’s like, being a billionaire, being an artist, she could have done a Beyoncé Lemonade-style thing, like, “I made 12 music videos, and that’s what you’re watching,” but she didn’t do that.
It felt so lazy and so cheap.
And meanwhile, not only is she a billionaire—the first person to become a billionaire through music alone—not only is she a billionaire, she doubled her net worth over the past couple of years.
She went from a billionaire to a 2.1 billionaire.
Like, she’s made such an enormous amount of money from this merch, which is not high quality but is so overpriced, from selling these movies and doing all of this cash-grabby stuff.
And I think that that is so worthy of critique in a way that people will often say, “Oh, well, everyone does variants now, and everyone is trying to sort of hop on the Taylor Swift train, and everyone’s merch is bad quality now.”
Even if that is true—and I think it is to some extent—Taylor Swift does stand alone because of just the fact that she is not even comparable to these other pop girls in terms of net worth or the amount of money that she’s making from all of this.
There’s also—I saw some promotional videos, too, that potentially used AI, or they were poorly done graphics.
Like, the whole thing just seems sort of sloppy.
And it also just made me feel like, “God, this thing is such a machine, right?”
Like, she cannot go a year or so without releasing new music, and I feel like she has to sort of constantly feed this beast.
And we’ll get into all this later, like whether she should go away for a while or not.
But I want to talk about the lyrics and the actual sort of content of the album as well.
Like, I feel like Taylor Swift is always known for her lyrics. She’s considered a poet by her fans and also considered one of the best lyricists of our time.
But these lyrics are kind of bad.
I mean, I was listening to the album, and I know the song “Wood” is so corny, but there’s a bunch of them that are just really corny lyrics.
And I feel like people on TikTok were tearing it apart. They were like, “These lyrics are almost parody-level,” essentially.
And especially the content of the lyrics also seems kind of incongruous with her current life.
Like, she sings about small-town living or settling down and having a basketball hoop in the driveway and stuff.
Again, when she’s this multi-billionaire with properties all across America.
So, I guess, what are your thoughts on the lyrics of this album in contrast to the lyricism on some of the previous albums? And do you think it’s just poor writing, or is it the actual themes being discussed in these songs that sort of fall flat?
Kat: I think it’s a little bit of both.
And I think that, theme-wise, she has consistently over the course of her career conjured up images that speak to kind of what she’s talking about now.
But I think that she’s done this sort of heel turn.
If you go back to the very beginning of her career—and a lot of people have been doing this in the wake of the album—she was singing about getting married and having 10 kids at some point in her life back when she was making country music, which is a very conservative genre, and her persona at the time certainly leaned conservatively.
But as she got older and did this whole “I’m embracing feminism” thing, she would do lyrics that were like, “He wanted a bride, but I was making my own name,” and “They want this like 1950s [transcription unclear] from me. They want me to be a wife, but I’m not.”
She did this as recently as Midnights,