In her 1968 song from Song to a Seagull, “Cactus Tree“, Joni Mitchell predicted her life’s path: “One will ask her for eternity / While she’s so busy being free.” Mitchell prioritized artistic freedom over relationships that threatened to stifle her. In 1965, at 21, she gave up a daughter for adoption and wrote a song about it titled “Little Green” (from 1971’s Blue).
Freedom is defined relative to oppressive forces; it does not exist in a vacuum. Maintaining it involves finding a self-evident medium of expression. Twisting someone’s story can function as censorship.
Modern celebrity advertises itself as freedom despite the constraints inherent in its marketing. Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, about a man who doesn’t know his life is a staged production, predicted social media-era fame. Platforms such as Instagram enable a constant stream of shared information, meaning any moment of privacy can shatter the fourth wall of celebrity. The Truman Show portrayed a normal life; Truman’s existence became a spectacle when people watched.
In International Relations, a school of thought called cultural relativism asserts that performing an anthropological study on a culture contaminates the results. The study subjects will always act differently around outsiders than in isolation. Taylor Swift’s career is a study of relativism in pop culture. Does opening the box of her private life to share with the public tarnish it? Swift’s work embodies the tension between commercialism and artistry, creating a symbiotic relationship: she pays dues as a pop star, writes radio hits, and is rewarded with a platform for deep cuts that are the foundation of her enterprise.
Taylor Swift is also a case study of the American Dream. Before I explain why, I must acknowledge her privilege: her father was a stockbroker at Meryl Lynch, and she was raised on a Christmas Tree Farm in Reading, Pennsylvania. In the song “The Best Day” (Fearless, 2008) she wrote, “I grew up in a pretty house with lots of space to run.” It sounds like Swift had a pretty good childhood.
However, in terms of music, she isn’t a nepotism baby. At 13, Swift and her family moved from Pennsylvania to a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, to situate the aspiring musician closer to the country music industry. (Her father transferred to Meryl Lynch’s Nashville location.) The means of Swift’s family put her in the right position to propell her budding career. From that point forward, however, Swift’s upward trajectory represents a combination of free-market economics and musical talent.
At 13, Swift signed a development deal with RCA Records but left the label one year later because it required her to record songs she didn’t write. At 14, she signed with Universal Music’s Scott Borchetta. The catch: Borchetta was leaving Universal to start an indie label, Big Machine Records. Swift became one of the three original artists to sign on. Her fourth single, 2007’s “Our Song”, hit the top spot on the country charts. Swift’s second album, 2008’s Fearless, won Album of the Year at the Grammys. It was uphill from there.
The Business of Pop
In a 2019 interview with Rolling Stone, Taylor Swift discussed her relationship with Big Machine Records: “A lot of the best things I ever did creatively, I had to…aggressively fight to have happen.”
Perhaps she was referring to her decision to transition from country to pop on her fifth album, 2014’s 1989. Upon hearing of Swift’s imminent departure from Nashville, Borchetta “went into a state of semi-panic.” According to a 2014 Billboard interview, he asked her, “Can you just give me three country songs?” Additionally, Swift said other heavyweights in the music industry believed her ambition to undergo a complete pop makeover was “overly optimistic”.
According to data from Nielsen SoundScan, in 24 hours, 1989 matched its first-week sales predictions, moving 600,000 units. In seven days, it sold 1.287 million copies, a shock to an industry headed toward streaming dominance. A report from the RIAA stated that growth in streaming revenue offset the decline in permanent downloads. While the market switched from one digital platform to another, Swift sold 480,000 physical copies of 1989. “All of the sudden, I didn’t look so naive anymore,” she said to Billboard.
After 1989’s release, Swift removed her catalog from Spotify, citing unfair compensation rates for artists. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about streaming’s rise, she frankly stated, “Valuable things should be paid for.” It’s a simple enough concept, something that could be distilled into the hook of a pop song. 1989’s removal from Spotify, a streaming platform, boosted its sales. Swift also capitalized on merchandising. Each physical copy of 1989 included one of five sets of polaroids from the album’s cover photoshoot. Theoretically, a fan could buy an infinite number of CDs before obtaining all five Polaroid sets because the packaging does not specify which set is included. (I say this was money well spent.)
In subsequent years, Swift continued to pair albums with merchandise. Magazines released alongside 2017’s reputation included Swift’s personal photos, poems, and handwritten lyrics. With 2019’s Lover, she shared pages from her diary, each excerpt including a CD. Streaming’s low royalties have compelled musicians to find alternative revenue sources. “The financial structure [of the music industry] hasn’t caught up with streaming,” Swift told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. As an example, she cited that many producers require co-writing credits for collaborations. Additionally, in 2023, Billboard restructured its charting formula to account for the artists who bundle albums with t-shirts or concert tickets.
Swift’s 2014 decision to remove her catalog from Spotify, effectively raising 1989’s sales, was something only an artist of her stature could do. Although 1989 prolonged the era of purchasing albums, its creator couldn’t fend off the rising tide of streaming forever. In 2015, when Apple announced its streaming service, Apple Music, Swift threatened to withhold 1989 from the platform unless the company compensated artists during a three-month trial period that would be free to users. Within 24 hours, Apple changed its terms, and Swift’s music became available on its service.
Although Swift’s “To Apple, Love Taylor” statement prevented a blatant injustice, it didn’t change the direction of the industry. In 2023, the average payout per stream on Spotify was $0.000318 and $0.0008 on Apple Music.
Because Taylor Swift’s streaming reluctance increased sales, many saw her activism as opportunistic. Twitter users called her “money-hungry” and “greedy”. Former One Direction band member Zayn Malik retweeted an info-graphic that praised Miley Cyrus’ decision to release an album for free and criticized Swift’s streaming stance.
In the music video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” Swift fought against this portrayal. In a scene, she breaks into a bank and burns cash inside of a vault. Above her a sign reads “Streaming Co.” By turning the claims made against her into a cartoonish charade, she points out their sensationalism.
Portraying Taylor Swift’s altruism as selfishness because of its economic benefits undermines the premise of celebrity. With a massive platform, anything Swift does generates money, even selfless things. Does that mean she shouldn’t do them?
In 2016, her falling out with the public exemplified cognitive dissonance on a massive scale. If one could claim the nature of fame condemned her embodiment of it, redemption becomes theoretically impossible. Swift became a representation of celebrity’s pitfalls despite her global platform ensuring those flaws are contained in their own representation. Her self-caricatures in “Look What You Made Me Do” resuscitated her persona by reminding viewers that celebrity is a performance. Destroying Swift’s past selves, as the #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty had sought to do, was futile because those selves functioned on the level of fiction to begin with.
Fame is the delicate balance of fantasy and reality. A problem occurs when an intermediary between the consumer and the product—the press—decides which aspects of the product are real and which are not.
The New Landscape of Streaming
In the decade since 1989, Taylor Swift has conquered streaming without jeopardizing sales. The Tortured Poets Department (20240 sold 2.61 million units in its first week – more than double the first-week total of 1989. Additionally, at 891.37 million streams, The Tortured Poets Department broke Drake’s record for an album’s biggest streaming week ever. (Drake’s Scorpion, with 745.92 streams, held this title since 2018.)
Swift’s business strategy of aligning a product’s marketing with the autobiographical storyline at its core translated from sales to streaming. folklore (2020) made Swift’s Spotify dominance clear, as it amassed 80 million streams in 24 hours, breaking Arianna Grande’s record of 70.2 million. folklore’s surprise release mirrored the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a sudden phenomenon that forced people into isolation. Following 2019’s Lover, an album of straightforward pop, folklore reminded listeners of Swift’s songwriting gifts.
In 2017, Swift returned her catalog to Spotify, another business and personal narrative combination. Her albums impacted the platform the same day Katy Perry released her fourth album Witness, which included a diss track aimed at Swift titled “Swish Swish”. According to Consequence of Sound, Swift’s old material outperformed Perry’s new.
In an interview with the Recording Academy, Swift explained her choice to pursue “blatant pop music” on her album, 1989. It stemmed from the failure of its predecessor, 2012’s Red, to win Album of the Year at the Grammys, prompting her to realize she had not been making “sonically cohesive” albums. Although commercially successful, Red received critical backlash for its mix of country, soft rock, and dubstep.
Each song on 1989 sounds like a radio single, meaning its actual singles had double blockbuster potential. On these songs, Swift trimmed her verbose writing style and recruited heavyweight producers Max Martin (Brittany Spears, Katy Perry), Ryan Tedder (One Republic), and Jack Antonoff (Fun.). Like any good pop album, 1989 uses familiarity and consistency to innovate.
In a 2014 interview with ABC news, Swift said, “My fans were afraid I would make pop music and stop writing smart lyrics…emotional lyrics.” Unlike Speak Now and Red, which feature “Dear John” and “All Too Well”, 1989 lacks a five-minute ballad. However, Rolling Stone credited Swift’s choice to trim her writing: “As every Eighties pop star knew, you don’t follow one epic with another.”
The second single on 1989, “Blank Space”, topped the Billboard Hot 100 for eight consecutive weeks. In an interview accompanying The 1989 World Tour Live, Taylor Swift described the song as written from the perspective of the “jet-setting, tragic mess I apparently am.” Snare drums and quotability made the hit a radio success and conversation piece. By embracing her reputation, she broadened her listener base while entertaining fans who remained in on the joke. In the “Blank Space” music video, she uses an apple to perform voodoo on a love interest, evoking Snow White by embodying a princess and a witch: the poles of her persona.
The song’s title comes from the line, “I’ve got a blank space baby/ and I’ll write your name.” During a pause, Swift clicks a pen: a production flourish that acknowledges a common criticism levied at her, which she summarized in a 2019 interview with Vogue: “She’ll write a song about you…Don’t stand near her.” By implying the inevitability of her songwriting, Swift diminishes the media’s ability to portray it as a flaw.
Social critic Camille Paglia described Taylor Swift’s peer group of actresses and models as “fascist blondes” and “performance props.” Later, in the “Look What You Made Me Do” music video, Swift acknowledges this criticism by portraying herself as the cult-like leader of a Barbie doll army.
In the poem “If You’re Anything Like Me”, Swift wrote, “No amount of friends at 25/ will fill the lunch tables of your past.” The “squad”, Swift’s famous friend group, manifested a childhood insecurity. Celebrities are out of touch. Their reality yields friendships that violate normality. Swift and model Karlie Kloss were the joint cover stars of Vogue in March 2015 after meeting at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. While the impetus for Swift’s friendships may have been genuine, her platform causes them to appear unattainable.
The first single from 1989, “Shake It Off”, has a sense of humor about itself. Country music provided space for Swift’s earnestness, but pop stardom required her to transform the landscape around her. “Shake It Off” infiltrated a new genre by admitting that a crossover requires costuming. In the song’s video, Swift trips and falls trying to match her backup dancers.
She continues to play with her image in 2017’s “I Did Something Bad”, stating, “I never trust a narcissist, but they love me.” The contradiction: breakup ballads indicate Swift does trust narcissists, and it hasn’t always worked out. In the 2021 short film All Too Well, she portrays a relationship between a 20-year-old woman and a man in his 30s where gaslighting is the fabric of the couple’s discussions. “You’re holding me hostage to something I don’t remember,” the man says. Memory is subjective.
When necessary, Taylor Swift sacrifices hooks to tell a story. On the folklore track “seven”, a tale of lost childhood innocence, she asks the listener to “Picture me in the weeds/ before I learned civility.” Even as her fame reaches new peaks, she expresses a desire to be perceived as normal. Removed from its machinations in pandemic isolation, on folklore, Swift contemplates fame. In Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions, Swift said she wrote “mirrorball” after the COVID-related cancellation of her live shows. “I’m still trying everything to keep you looking at me,” she sings. In the song, a disco ball serves as a metaphor for celebrity. “They hang there and every time they break it entertains us,” Swift added in Long Pond. However, according to its writer, this tale of fame also has an everyday application: “You have to be different versions of yourself for different people.”
This flexibility works itself into Taylor Swift’s music. Although steadfast in its commitment to 1980s-driven pop, 1989 was about change. The varied sonic palettes of its predecessors, Speak Now and Red, sparked discussion about whether Swift was a country or pop star. Her inclination towards a certain sound notwithstanding, the ability to define herself as one thing, should she choose to do so, is a worthwhile need to assert. Writing a pop album proved Swift controlled her business.
While penning songs, Taylor Swift undertakes a process reserved for critics: distinguishing a public entity from a private person. The sharpness of her observations penetrates the fame of their creator. In The Truman Show, when the titular character discovers his world to be a fabrication, he asks its maker, “Was any of it real?” That presence replies, “You were real.” Swift is the designer and star of her own Truman Show.
Pop Culture’s Distorted Reality
In July 2016, Kim Kardashian toppled Taylor Swift’s castle. By sharing edited footage of a phone call recorded without Swift’s knowledge, Kardashian reduced Swift to a means of communication and then rendered that communication invalid. In a poem titled “Why She Disappeared”, Swift described the backlash she faced: “Your pain is manipulative.” When Kardashian shared an edited clip that appeared to catch Swift in a lie, she triggered a public reckoning with celebrity, diverting attention from her weaponization of the same enterprise. Swift became a scapegoat for the exploitative aspects of fame at the hands of someone famous for being famous.
No person can distort reality. However, someone who controls the definition of the word “reality” has the power to manipulate others. As a term, “reality” contains its definition and its means of application. All words have a meaning, but people can apply them differently and disagree with others’ interpretations. “Reality” can remove itself from this dialogue because its definition asserts it should be taken at face value.
In the novel 1984, George Orwell wrote, “If the past and the present exist only in the mind of the listener, and the past can be altered, what then?” Essentially, if we credit an entity as embodying truth, we allow them to change what we think we know. The Kardashian family has become billionaires by altering what is perceived as “reality”,
In 2014, on The Ellen Show, Taylor Swift described a recurring dream about being arrested for a crime she didn’t commit. Two years later, Kim Kardashian subsumed Swift’s public image into a one-sided dialogue that amounted to framing Swift for a deed of Kardashian’s invention. Because Kardashian controlled the portrayal of Swift’s alleged crime, she could dictate its punishment. Anything Swift said would ensure this eventuality.
For a living, the Kardashians edit near-constant footage of their lives to tell a story. The components of their narrative are real, but the result might not reflect the truth.
Taylor Swift reclaimed her throne by making the assassination of her character into a cartoon. In “Look What You Made Me Do”, she sings, “The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now…’cause she’s dead!” She reanimates her persona on her terms with a playful reference to the phone call that triggered her demise.
Even a confessional songwriter knows the parts of her story listeners do not want to hear. Yet, Swift cannot completely divorce the public’s rejection of her enterprise from her narrative. She must embody the hero and villain of her own story to prove that adversity exists. As a celebrity, Swift lives in a glass castle: wealthy and famous but transparent. A mob outside the fortress maintains the ability to shatter the glass at will. When the mess they create becomes clear, they use the castle’s transparency to argue it never existed, even when its inhabitant is still banging her head against the wall.
“You caged me then you called me crazy,” Swift sings on the 2024 song “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” As an entertainer, Swift shields the public from its contradictions. A pop album accomplishes this because easy listening disguises economic goals. Although her least lyrically detailed album, 1989, best embodies her ethos because the act of making it tells a real story. Writing breakup songs in a new form that insulated them from criticism conveyed themes of personal freedom.
The Intersection of Life and Art
Taylor Swift expounded on this message of independence on the promotional single “Welcome to New York”, announcing her post-Nashville relocation. Moving to a new city mirrored Swift’s genre shift. The singer had become so famous that the details of her life existed in media beyond songwriting, which allowed for 1989’s lyrical universality.
Adulthood is about more than financial independence. It is the ability to set the terms of your life without using childhood accomplishments to argue for your remaining in the circumstances of their creation. Swift’s pop makeover spoke to fans because it denoted personal catharsis without explicitly stating its cause. The business decision that birthed 1989 was also its emotional argument.
When this album was released, I was 17, and I can testify to the allure of its mythology. I bought the physical CD, and sifting through polaroids depicting Swift in various New York locales, including Greenwich Village and the Staten Island Ferry, I thought, Wouldn’t it be cool to move to the city? Get out of the suburbs? I did not achieve this. In the decade since this album’s release, I realized that a metaphorical record label restricting my decision-making capabilities existed inside of me. I did attend college in a city, but physical relocation did not solve my problem. I unknowingly suppressed my thoughts. Writing, what I am doing now, freed me.
“People are a lot smarter than marketing executives give them credit for,” Taylor Swift told Billboard. Linking business and personal narrative can be an asset and liability. A public life can advertise a business, but doing so means business success hinges on something highly subjective. The stakes for making sure that the two pillars, business and personal, reflect each other are high.
In the “Look What You Made Me Do” video, Swift stands on an airplane with “TS6” printed on its wing. She cuts off those wings and spray paints “reputation” over “TS6”. Reputation is Swift’s sixth album. Fans speculate this scene represents Swift leaving a planned sixth record on the cutting room floor after the eruption of her feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. This incident necessitated a new album that would address the controversy. Listeners will never know what the original “TS6” sounded like. The relationship between celebrities and the public is one of mutually assured censorship.
In the song “Amelia”, Joni Mitchell sang, “Maybe I’ve never really loved…I’ve spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes.” Celebrity relationships are often accused of being publicity stunts. However, this criticism is a truism. Celebrities win when the public derides something with a built-in level of performance as a spectacle. Their existence becomes a discussion that generates income.
Taylor Swift lives in a glass castle, but she can tell her story from there. Is it a worthwhile sacrifice? In 2023, she and actor Joe Alwyn ended their six-year relationship. Sources told People they split due to different approaches to fame. Their relationship had grown during Swift’s 2016 hiatus from public life and, subsequently, the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a 2012 interview with Vogue, Swift said, “If we need to dig a tunnel under a restaurant so that we can leave…I can’t do that.”
Swift’s body of work communicates that a person’s sense of self should not hinge on the success of love affairs, even if one remains in pursuit of them. In 2022’s “You’re on Your Own, Kid”, she sings, “I hosted parties and starved my body like I’d be saved by a perfect kiss.” Love is Swift’s muse, not her salvation.
In a 2009 Rolling Stone interview, Swift described the need to withhold personal details from the media as “self-preservation”. She would later learn to translate this instinctive restraint from her career to her personal life. Romantic relationships can become a two-way mirror of codependency: each person uses the other’s contrived focus on positive qualities to justify their own. Meanwhile, two separate storms are brewing.
It can become possible, out of a desire to ignore one’s flaws, to inhabit the version of oneself that a partner sees. You become the living embodiment of their reality, which leaves you vulnerable to exploitation. Is your partner at fault for holding you hostage to a self-image you willingly project? The act of writing a song by trimming emotions into a storyline reflects the sacrifice of maintaining a meaningful personal life. The media’s focus on Swift’s preoccupation with penning love songs misses their point. To say, She writes too much about ex-boyfriends, invalidates the means of Swift’s product after its ends have already been achieved.
In a review of Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream, critic Ann Powers wrote, “Though her lyrics generally recount familiar scenarios on the road to romantic fulfillment, her real subject is consumerism.” Similarly, 1989 tells the story of a romantic relationship but also hides a covert subject: the struggle between the self and forces acting upon it, including public opinion, indecisive ex-boyfriends, and stubborn record label executives. 1989 foresaw the tides swelling against Swift and placated them. Speak Now and Red, through their hyper-specificity, elicited strong backlash. “It was a really lousy thing of her to do,” John Mayer said of Swift writing “Dear John” about him. Conversely, by cleansing 1989 of direct allusions, Swift recentered herself as the main character of her work.
In “Imbroglio”, an episode from Netflix’s The Crown, Prince Charles argues with his mother about his desire to voice his political opinions. Queen Elizabeth says, “Let me let you into a secret. No one wants to hear [your voice].”
Pop stardom is like royalty. People are intrigued by the lives of famous people, yet the impetus for that intrigue is filtered through layers of media training. What the public ends up consuming is its own appetite for escapism. If Taylor Swift’s appeal is heartbreak, what are the pillars of her fantasy?
Swift conceals from the public the same thing every person keeps from themselves: the messy parts of human nature. Her life is like The Truman Show because her humanity becomes a spectacle. The engine that drives it is the rapt attention of viewers. Any job requires a person to compartmentalize certain emotions. Modern life has yielded a fascination with reality TV because a work-obsessed culture makes living for its own sake a novel idea.
The Freedom of Storytelling
When I first heard 1989, it inspired me to write a poem, part of which I will share here: “I shed my cocoon/ but my new wings soon broke/ just like they used to.” When I saw Taylor Swift transition from country to pop, I realized I needed to make changes in my life. A decade has gone by. Have I succeeded? The short answer is yes. In this article, I quoted the essay that inspired me to write music criticism: Rob Sheffield’s review of 1989 in Rolling Stone. Because a facet of my adulthood centers on my passions, I accomplished what mattered to me: self-preservation. Now, I just need to move out of my parent’s house. I used to be a high school English teacher. I recently had a third-round interview for an office job a few days ago. Leaving education was not an easy choice. I liken it to Swift’s decision to leave country music. It was an ecosystem in which she could be happy but not totally understood.
In Lana Wilson’s 2020 documentary Miss Americana, Swift recounts label executives convincing her to remain mum on politics, using the Dixie Chicks as an example of activism gone wrong. “I became the person everyone wanted me to be,” Swift said. It was good for business for Swift to believe her own mythology. Waking up from such a dream can feel like self-destruction. “In the death of her reputation, she felt truly alive,” she said.
As a music critic, I am drawn to artists undergoing a coming-of-age because I am going through my own. As Ann Powers noted, Katy Perry writes about love, but her real subject is consumerism. Swift also writes about love, but her real subject is the self. I write about pop music, but my real subject is me.
Freedom is a blank space. If you try to negotiate with it, you kill it. It is possible to compromise with the platform for your voice: one genre of music or another. Still, the story being told cannot be disputed. The ability to write the next chapter is the engine that drives a person’s life.
“Rebellion is what you make of it,” Swift said. She challenged the machine around her by embracing genre defined by structure. Being heard can provide enough fulfillment that a person fails to see they remain in an enclosure. Writing essays such as this was the final step of escaping mine. When my work is published, my voice is heard. But I suppose I must tend to other things in my life.
On the cover of 1989, Swift wears a sweater emblazoned with seagulls crisscrossing the sky. The cover of a reissue reprises this imagery. Seagulls evoke the end of a journey: reaching a shore after years in the woods but recognizing a certain type of freedom remains out of reach. I live by the ocean and often kayak to a nearby island inhabited only by birds. They scatter in a swarm above me when I reach the edge of the beach, reminding me of the 1989 album cover. In the distance, I can see a city skyline. I feel the tug of the past and the future. By labeling them as separate entities, I am free. But unlike Taylor Swift, I don’t know which direction to go.
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