If the hunt for hidden information has gotten out of control, on the other hand, it has become too easy to denigrate Swift’s fans for being curious about the history of her songs. The term “parasocial,” like “toxic” before it, has drifted semantically into an amorphous term, inspired by TikTok, to criticize all the supposedly bad ways in which people interact with others. But we are social animals, whose brains are equipped with sophisticated pattern-matching apparatus and wild imagination machines. Most of us, when we meet people, wonder what their story might be. When we sense a rumor, we want to hunt it down. People don’t like to talk about it, because it’s a step or two away from justifying truly invasive behavior, but when people speculate about other people, sometimes they’re right. (A recent musical example: Rumors swirled in the ’90s that two of the Spice Girls were in a relationship, which seemed like wild and unfounded speculation until Scary Spice claimed, decades later, that they were true.)
Swifties love this speculation, a phenomenon Swift calls “empathetic hunger” (pejorative). So there is a tendency to portray them as unusually deranged, with a generational sense of parasocial entitlement, and Taylor Swift as particularly willing to please them. It’s simply ahistorical. Of course, it’s pretty invasive for fans to call Matty Healy a racist asshole they’d rather hear less about. But that’s nothing compared to the things said to pop stars and pop star lovers in the early 2000s, which ended up on dozens of Tripod or Angelfire hate sites suggesting that listeners were “putting razors in her red lips” or “were just knocking that bitch out”. for the crime of dating their favorites or even just existing. (No ties, no names.) Yes, Taylor Swift invited a group of fans to her house a few years ago. It was a promotional gimmick. Artists do that. Rihanna hung out with a crowd of journalists on a wild plane for days, an arguably worse shit show in terms of borders.
For people exhausted by all the talk, it’s tempting to imagine a parallel universe in which Taylor Swift’s music exists without tainting Taylor Swift’s headlines. (I wonder if Swift was a little relieved that her big 2023 hit, “Cruel Summer,” was from an older album era and therefore safe from speculation.) “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” could simply be a 1989 successor about getting into girlbossing, in true millennial form. (I’ve seen it before on Hiring TikTok.) “Florida!!!” might be the adult Disney song of all time. But this would also constitute overcompensation. You can’t separate The Department of Tortured Poets of the speech. It’s there in the promotion, the visual presentation and the music. Like many of Swift’s previous albums, the liner notes invite fans to speculate about the music’s actual inspirations. The lyric video for “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” mimics the experience of clicking on spoiler tags to reveal a story.
And the album is largely told through the tropes of fandom: tales of true crime, fictional tales consumed from the outside. “The Department of Tortured Poets” is about a real relationship (when someone leaves their typewriter at your house, the situation is no longer parasocial). Swift writes about this relationship as if she’s less a participant than a fan, watching a TV show or reading a book and being the only person who really understands: “Who else is decoding you?” The Manuscript” uses a similar metaphor; the same goes for part of “The Prophecy”. “Guilty as sin?” » This is a real flirtation that becomes the prelude to a non-parasocial emotional affair. But it is also a unilateral, totally imagined, and therefore parasocial affair, which exists in parallel. There’s a song called, as obviously thematic as a title can be, “I Look In People’s Windows”: a distant and lonely act.
Swift explores all the nuances of this fame-induced alienation and all the ways it disconnects her from her own feelings. This is the album’s greatest achievement, but also its ultimate downfall: a record that is often about emotional flattening is an album that is often emotionally flat. Besides all the other things, “Guilty as sin?” is a Taylor Swift song about drowning your sorrows in songs by people other than Taylor Swift. Has there been any romantic speculation about the Blue Nile? For some reason I never thought to check.
