The most peaceful people never think about Taylor Swift. For the rest of us, there’s a lot to talk about here in the trenches. We’ve talked about her music, her lyrics, her voice, her metaphors; her private jet, her food bank donations, her feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian and who was right or who was a snake; her remixes and vinyl versions and obsession with record-breaking success; her self-mythologisation, her easter eggs and teasing fans and backing off when they go too far; her dating history, fucking hell her dating history; her impact on the economy, her personal wealth, the loss of her masters and her rerecording project; her joy, her anger, her carelessness, her secrecy; her cats, her dancing, her undeveloped fashion sense; her predictably liberal stance on politics; her lack of charisma, her energy and stamina; her whiteness, her lipstick, her friendships, her feminism; her talent, her luck, her skill.
She got successful enough to have haters, and then she got so successful that she defeated them. Those who are neutral have gradually come to respect her. People are still brave enough to say that she isn’t their thing, but no one can say that her dad paid for her success (?) or that she just plays the victim all the time. Does she look like a victim? Singing to 80,000 screaming fans every night?
And yet, when I told my colleagues I went to the Eras Tour, I emphasised how objectively impressive her performance is (she’s up there for three and a half hours, singing 44 songs and 2 original mashups each night) and it’s extraordinary that she causes mini economic booms wherever she goes. I don’t know why I started commending it according to capitalist values instead of just like, saying it was fun. I’m definitely not embarrassed to like Taylor Swift, but I think that the crazy label she’s largely now shaken off – “you can’t upset her, she’ll write a song about you! She’ll sue you!” – has devolved onto her fans. In the infamous Kanye phone call, he tells her that she’s got “an army… a country of two billion people” who will descend on him if he wrongs their idol. So I guess I just wanted to seem like I was self-aware, and not like, a crazed fan. Even though I did scream pretty loudly at the concert.
Is she emotional and unguarded, or does she know what she’s doing? Let us consider ‘So High School’, a song off her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department. This is where the notorious “you know how to ball, I know Aristotle/Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto” lyric comes from. Instinctively I hate it, because its mix of innocence and vulgarity combines to form the deepest cringe. The counterargument is that this song is meant to be cringe because it’s inspired by her giddy feelings for current boyfriend Travis Kelce. (Compare this to a song Taylor Swift wrote when she was actually a teenager, ‘Fifteen’ (2008), which eviscerates the foolish notions teenagers have about love.)
The narrator of ‘So High School’ is a teenage girl who thinks she’s so smart because she’s heard of Aristotle. Her simple dichotomies and clique-based view of the social order are charmingly immature. She sings later “I’m high from smoking your jokes all damn night”, an amateur metaphor that either comes from someone who has never done drugs, or is seriously in love. Also, she rhymes ‘Aristotle’ with ‘Grand Theft Auto’ which is as good as any anticlimax in Don Juan (1819-24), Lord Byron’s comic masterpiece.
Everybody agrees the song is kinda cringe, but the question is whether or not we want to embrace the cringe, and transform it into passion. And whilst I really admire the metareading outlined above – the worse it is, the more effective it is – I just think it’s hard to keep that in mind when you’re listening to the song. Knowingly performing cringe is still cringe, right?
We’ve talked about this already. In her 2022 NYU Commencement Speech, Taylor Swift advises the audience to “learn to live alongside cringe”. She takes aim at the idea “that people who don’t try are fundamentally more chic than people who do,” and fires off: “I wouldn’t know, because I have been a lot of things, but I’ve never been an expert on ‘chic’.” This is Taylor Swift’s greatest strength: she always has more to say, another dig to make, never really letting go of anything ever because even now it still hurts, and that feeling will be dignified. Someone blessed with an abundance of chic could never have written the masterpiece that is ‘All Too Well (10 Minute Version)’ (2021). But nor would they ever dream of doing ‘So High School’.
And yet Taylor Swift also wrote ‘Blank Space’ (2014). In it, she plays an obsessive, toxic, maneating short-term girlfriend in a fur stole and a tasteful mansion. She was riffing off how the media was presenting her at the time and saying: I’m in on the joke, and I can do it better than you. It relied on the audience understanding the ironic distance between Taylor Swift and the character she plays, and it worked. It shut everyone up. No one would joke that she went through men like Kleenex again.
Cringe is harder to shake off than crazy maneater, so she’s leaning into it. It probably makes her status as the most influential person in the world more palatable, which is a reason to keep it. It’s a relic from our early 2010s Buzzfeed days, when Taylor Swift reigned supreme on Tumblr and we asked that celebrities be relatable, adorkable, just like us. And it’s not an act. Those who really understand Taylor Swift – the fans who like all of her songs, who don’t think that ‘So High School’ is something better kept to yourself – also understand that cringe teenager is not an era she can leave behind.