Taylor Swift has released another album that reveals her private life. “I had written so much tortured poetry over the past two years and I wanted to share it all with you,” she says. His fans love The Department of Tortured Poetsbut her detractors say smearing her ex-boyfriends isn’t fair.
Swift is famous for two things: being so successful that a musical tour from her can increase a country’s GDP, and for writing sarcastic songs about her exes. There’s something very appealing about the extremes at play here; the first if adult and the second if adolescent.
Why do people never stop being surprised by what Swift’s songs are about?
Swift is above all bold, and her album title is a particularly cheeky joke; it’s not tortured poetry when it makes you the richest lyricist in the world, or when your forte is playing with abandoned men like a particularly elegant and confident cat. (What she looks like.) No one really believes that songs like I can fix it (not really I can) And The smallest man who ever lived are the end result of copious tears shed on a lonely pillow.
But why do people never stop being surprised by what Swift’s songs are about? It shouldn’t come as such a shock when an artist digs into his private life for inspiration; Singer-songwriters in the pop and rock scene in particular have done it, from the Rolling Stones to One Direction. The reaction must be because she is a woman; even though I’m not too attached to his voice or his music (too white for me – there, I said it!), I am extremely attached to his writing. There is something subversive about seeing a young woman of the type who would usually have been a simple muse turn the tables; rejected women are expected to let go and change the sheets for their successor and if they don’t, they will be accused of being “rabbit boilers”. Swift gets the lion’s share.
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” goes the old phrase, but Swift makes no fury; she displays cold contempt and joyous mockery. Seeing her without clothes surely more than made up for Joe Jonas (“Mr. Perfectly Fine – How’s Your Heart After Breaking Mine?”), John Mayer (“Dear John/Don’t You Think I Was Too Young to Be messed with?/Don’t you think nineteen is too young?/To be played by your dark, twisted games?’) and Jake Gyllenhaal (“You’re calling me again/Just to break me like a promise/So carelessly cruel in the name of being honest’) for a bit of sniggering from the Swifties? I’m wary of people who make fun of how many people showbiz stars “date”; they do it simply because they are more attractive and have more opportunities. Which of us could know for sure that we would behave with the decorum of a Victorian girl if we were in their place?
Teenage girls play a sad role in pop history; crying fans, abandoned groupies – even when they’re stars, they crash and burn like Britney. But Swift always had control of her life, convincing her parents to move from Pennsylvania to Nashville when she was just 13 years old. Unusually for a female pop star (whose role was sadly summed up by another broken teenage singer, Marianne Faithfull, as “I’m pretty – please buy me”), she appeals even more to women than men. There’s something about the fervor of her fans that implies they need her more than they want her, and that may be a sign of the times in which we live.
Always objectified and mocked, desired and belittled, teenage girls never had the easiest life growing up; In this day and age, where social media causes many to overthink and second-guess themselves, into a stupor of anxiety and low self-esteem, it’s much worse. Swift is a diamond, but not in the sentimental Cockney sense; it is glittery, hard and sharp. In her refusal to #BeKind, she serves as an example to a generation of girls who have been trained to give up their hard-earned rights to everything from single-sex bathrooms to athletic triumph, who can see by her example that being tough pays its fruits. . She represents all the repressed feminine fury that has seen the population that worships her become the most successful and socially liberal, but also the most plagued by anxiety and self-loathing in history. Swift is their Ripley, their Plath, their Final Girl.
Let’s hope her incisors never dull, because #BeKind is the enemy of creativity as well as femininity. She’s the heir to John Updike in his ruthless microblading of the war of the sexes – but she’s not an avenging angel, as many of her fans seek to see her, but rather a classic rotten writer. In the Daily MailTim de Lisle noted: “Swift is all about the lyrics…the forces of fame have turned her into Madonna and Adele rolled into one, when she’s really closer to Zadie Smith.”
That a good writer is a lousy one is nothing new. In 1975, Squire The magazine published part of a short story by Truman Capote called “The Basque Side, 1965” in which a group of New York high society women gather for lunch at the eponymous restaurant and discuss the scandalous behavior of their friends. It later appeared as part of his unfinished novel Answered prayers, and is now the subject of a new TV show, Feud: Capote Vs. the Swans. I remember reading the book in 1994, when I had already been a writer for more than half my life – and far from being scandalized that Capote had gossiped in this way about his friends, I only wished that my friends are interesting enough for me to do the same work. same thing. I totally identified with his reaction when his “swans” dumped him: “What did they expect from me? I’m a writer!’
I have been a published writer since I was 17; now I am 64 years old. I know my species: we are rotten. Look at the way all the great novelists, from Dickens to Tolstoy to Amis, treated their wives. Think of what Graham Greene said – “There is a shard of ice in a writer’s heart” – or what John le Carré said about his adulterous affairs, often with his friends’ wives:
“They have produced in my life a duality and a tension which have become almost a drug necessary for my writing, a sort of dangerous edge… they therefore do not constitute a “dark part” of my life, distinct from the “high literary vocation “. so to speak, but, alas, which is an integral and inseparable part of it.
I’m sure there must be good writers somewhere, but if we’re talking about great writers, they’re definitely way outnumbered by the bad guys. This goes hand in hand with being unsentimental enough to see the human condition clearly and being hard-hearted enough to use whatever comes your way as part of the creative process.
Taylor Swift learned the same lesson
Nora Ephron said of her writer mother – who raised four daughters to be writers – “We all grew up with this thing that my mother told us over and over and over and over again, which is ‘Everything is a copy.’ You would come home to something that you thought was the tragedy of your life – someone hadn’t asked you to dance, or the hem of your dress had fallen off, or whatever it was that you thought was the worst something that can happen to a human being – and my mother said: “Everything is a copy… writers are cannibals, they are predators”. Taylor Swift learned the same lesson.
Last week, Swift described her latest record as “an anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and feelings from a fleeting and fatalistic moment – a moment both sensational and painful in equal measure.” This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and closed. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once the wounds have healed. And upon reflection, many of them turned out to be self-inflicted.
Pop stars don’t talk like that, but writers do. Every aspect of good writing, from criticism to comedy, requires an element of cruelty, including to oneself. Rather than trying to cut them down to size with trigger warnings and sensitive readers, let’s just accept that writers – whether critics or songwriters – are more morally deficient (or “morally diverse” in the vernacular modern) than many of them who are attracted to more altruistic professions. Let writers, including Swift, be scumbags – because the alternative, that they be sober and responsible citizens, is the surest way to create a boring, moribund culture fit only for whiners, tormented poets and others boring.
