I’m not saying that just because she’s a girl

Ah, Taylor Swift. A name that strikes either disdain or love in hearts across America everyday. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of people in between those two extremes. Taylor Swift and her career have become synonymous with a lot of other things that really don’t have anything to do with her, to the detriment of everyone. Gaining the kind of obscene success that she has as a woman has made her both a figurehead and a scapegoat for women all across America, which is a problem when you want to have a discussion about her work as an artist. The best way I’ve figured out to sum up my feelings on the matter is that I think Taylor Swift is a bad person who has made good music, and while I don’t like her, I like that women like her.

Now please don’t come for me until you’ve read the rest of the article, okay? I know I’m just saying things here, but if you’re a die-hard Taylor Swift fan, I have no beef with you. In the immortal words of 3OH!3, if you’ve got beef, I’m a vegetarian. I’m also a vegetarian with a lot of opinions.

Allow me to give my Taylor Swift Opinions in a somewhat chronological order. When Fearless came out, I was six years old. By the time I was in middle school, 1989 had just come out, but I grew up in a somewhat isolated Catholic homeschooler community. I was way behind on a lot of pop culture, so by middle school, I was just discovering Fearless. I love Fearless for nostalgia reasons because it was the soundtrack to over half my life, but I also think it’s one of Swift’s best works.

The original album is a no-skip album for me, and it highlights Swift’s biggest strengths as a writer. The ability to hone in on very specific emotions and explain them in a way that makes sense is obviously crucial to good songwriting, but what made Taylor Swift special was that she was doing it about emotions that girls growing up feel. 

Fearless made me feel seen, as a poorly-proportioned, awkward, lonely teenage girl. Taylor Swift told me that all these things were okay, that I wasn’t alone, and even that maybe what boys think of me doesn’t matter all that much. “In your life, you’ll do things greater than/dating the boy on the football team/I didn’t know it at fifteen,” genuinely impacted me so positively growing up.

On an album full of I-like-this-boy-who-doesn’t-like-me-back songs, songs like Fifteen and The Best Day also pulled me out of my own head and reminded me that life at fourteen, while largely comprised of wallowing in feelings for boring boys, was not only about that. Plus, with the addition of Superstar on the platinum edition (which was the CD my childhood best friend had), I had a song for pretty much every feeling I needed to cry about. Life was good. 

Fearless, to me, is a perfect snapshot of what it’s like to grow up in a very specific time as a suburban, middle-class, white girl who feels overlooked. Is it a universal experience? Not even close. But it is a remarkably accurate, beautifully crafted depiction of this one experience, and it resonates with me a lot for that reason. Musically, it also just goes hard. Every red-blooded American knows the words to “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me.”

Her previous self-titled debut album also has songs that I love, but Fearless is the one that I see as the sort of essential Taylor Swift. This is a perfect example of an artist who found their footing with their debut, and then applied that with full force to make an incredible second album. Dolly Parton said to “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” Taylor Swift was Taylor finding out who she was, and Fearless proceeded to do it all on purpose.

Speak Now was pretty similar to Fearless musically, but it didn’t feel like dragging out Fearless’s reanimated corpse just because Fearless was so good in the first place. Speak Now is a great album, but not a very new direction for Swift. Then, we have Red. I think Red is Taylor Swift’s magnum opus. There isn’t a single skip and hasn’t been since the first time I listened to the album. I could talk about this for a very long time, but suffice it to say that while retaining the lyrical prowess developed in earlier work, Swift’s musical skills had improved to a point where Red was a perfect meeting of the two.

Plus, she provided a soundtrack for all the fans who had gotten a little bit older. This isn’t always true, but I would dare to say that most women under 25 can either related to Fifteen or 22. Red covers the next set of feelings you encounter growing up, and I cannot stress enough how unbelievable this album is just from a music standpoint. It goes hard and that’s all I can say, which means words are escaping me.

Red was the peak of Taylor Swift’s music in my opinion, and she hasn’t has a no-skip album since then. This is for a couple reasons, and now we get to the part where I talk about all the things I don’t like about this woman. When you reach a certain level of fame, your experiences cease to be relatable to normal people. While the strength of Swift’s earlier lyrics was the specificity and the relatability that came with it, your average 20 year old girl has no use for a catalog of songs about your billionaire boyfriend dissing you on live TV. 

With later albums like folklore and evermore, Swift branched out more into storytelling that wasn’t based on her own experiences, which had mixed results. “betty” is an incredible song that echoes the feelings of Fearless, but it’s a standout on an album of songs that – please don’t kill me – don’t have a ton of sonic variation. It’s an outlier. folklore just isn’t as good as Fearless, and it’s because the personal aspect of Swift’s writing that made her early work so good is no longer here. Her life isn’t relatable to women who aren’t unfathomably rich anymore, and her songwriting suffered for it.

Plus, Swift tries to write songs about experiences she isn’t close enough to to portray well. “epiphany” is another track on folklore that I think kind of sucks. Her attempt at discussing the horrors of war and the medical field come across trite and bland because she has absolutely no experience with these things. You can totally write good music about things that never happened to you, and Taylor Swift even does this on other songs, but “epiphany” is not one of them.

As an “essential worker” during the pandemic, my view of seeing horrible things during the day – as bad as they get as a food-service worker, that is; I can’t even imagine what that was like for people in healthcare – is a million miles away from that of someone with a net worth of $365 million at the time (now $740 million, according to Forbes).

Taylor Swift’s music isn’t good anymore because she’s out of touch. And not only is she out of touch with just everyday life, but her lifestyle as a millionaire is actively harming our lives. Her private jet usage made her the celebrity with the highest CO2 emissions in the world last year. This year, on the Eras tour, she’s flown back to her Nashville home immediately after every show to sleep in her own bed before flying out to the next location. (Insider, 2023) Maybe I’m being an asshole, but I think that touring musicians should tour, not make a couple dozen day trips on their private jets. (Yes, plural. She has two.) 

Unfortunately, because of the popularity of her music and the amount of men who dislike her for – I don’t know, not being a man? – it’s hard to levy any criticism against Swift that isn’t all-or-nothing. I don’t think she’s a scourge upon the earth. I think she has an impressive career, incredible music, and less care for the people around her than she should have. I didn’t go to the Eras tour. It wasn’t my cup of tea, and that’s fine. I did, however, love seeing other people go.

I love women.

I love us, our media, the way we interact with each other, and the way we see the world, and seeing millions of women dress up to love something together every night for months has been one of the most delightful experiences of my life. I love love. I love that people love all her music as much as I love Fearless, and the way Taylor Swift brings people together – particularly women, but men too – is one of the more heartening aspects of modern life. 

folklore just isn’t as good as Fearless, and it’s because the personal aspect of Swift’s writing that made her early work so good is no longer here. Her life isn’t relatable to women who aren’t unfathomably rich anymore, and her songwriting suffered for it.

She’s gotten a lot of criticism for really stupid things, like suing someone who sexually assaulted her during a photo op. This isn’t genuine criticism, it’s just misogyny, and I don’t want my criticism to be lumped in with all of that. I don’t dislike Harry Styles’s clothes because he wears skirts, I dislike them because he wears ugly skirts. But that’s another topic for another time.

All this to say that in a polarized, chronically online world, everything is treated as black-and-white. This isn’t true. Two things can be true at once, and Taylor Swift is neither the Second Coming nor Satan. She’s a rich person who does bad things sometimes and makes incredible music. Plus, I think Swift would receive a lot less attention and criticism if she weren’t a woman.

Next week I’ll air all my grievances toward a male celebrity just to keep things fair (and because I have more to say), but I want to be clear that Taylor Swift’s femininity has nothing to do with my dislike for her. It’s actually one of the things I love about her, and Fearless and Red put her in my top Spotify artists every single year. It’s just that she also is killing the earth and isn’t making as good of music anymore. This is all true at once, and both people who discredit her entirely or refuse to acknowledge her real human flaws do a disservice to Swift and women everywhere.