After Folklore — the breakout genre-shift in her oeuvre, Taylor Swift had two roads branching out ahead of her. One was a path down lyrical and literary stardom, joining a canon of female performance artists who turned women’s pain into an artistic paradigm shift. The other was the hit machine, guaranteeing worldwide superstardom the likes of which we’ve never seen; greatness, but in scale and not kind. Swift recently announced that the billion-dollar Eras Tour will end in December this year, and it’s safe to say she chose the latter.
Taylor Swift has impact, and there’s no denying it. She’s sold over 115 million albums worldwide, won 14 Grammys, and has a plentiful checklist of achievements over a 20 year career. There is a fine balance between being a successful artist, and one who challenges the masculinist definitions of Greatness in art. The Eras Tour arguably tipped the scales toward the former.
Swift already carved a substantial space for herself within a long lineage of women artists who challenge masculinist thinking. She, with all those who came before her, spoke from a distinctly feminine subjectivity. From the choice of words to the melody, her voice as a carrier of emotions – normally relegated to the frivolities of girlhood – all locate her within the larger framework of writers and artists who reclaim their ‘self’ through an articulation that insists on its own importance. The culture theorist Helene Cixous called this Écriture féminine: a theoretical framework which proposes a mode of writing that disrupts conventional linguistic structures and embraces fluidity, ambiguity, and multiplicity. This framework rejects the notion that language is neutral and instead asserts that it is deeply intertwined with power dynamics and gender hierarchies.
Taylor Swift is widely regarded as an artist who speaks this language and confronts these hierarchies of language. And she is also deeply self-aware. In the song ‘Clara Bow’ from The Tortured Poets Department, Swift tracks the artists who made the jump from one cultural paradigm to another and survived with a legacy against odds: Clara Bow’s survival through Hollywood’s “talking” movies era, Stevie Nicks through the rock n’ roll era, and finally, Taylor Swift herself, through late stage capitalism in music that demands commodifying beauty, femininity, and girlhood. And Swift obeys, ensuring her success: “Beauty is a beast that roars / Down on all fours / Demanding “more” / Only when your girlish glow / Flickers just so / Do they let you know /It’s hell on earth to be heavenly.”
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This Faustian bargain with the money-minting machine that Swift made with the Eras Tour and her endless artistic merchandising, however, comes at the cost of undermining this self-awareness, and by extension, her legacy as an artist who fought to stay true. In May, Swift continued on her Eras Tour in Europe, calling this segment “Female Rage — The Musical” and trademarked “Female Rage.” This, arguably, is the point of no return: the one which solidly marks Taylor Swift’s legacy as one that commodifies women’s experiences, where others have tried so hard to democratise, expand, and complicate them. The Taylor Swift experience is collective, but one-sided: Swift bestows her wisdom and pain upon her fans, who project, mould, and shape it into their own lives. She is a monolithic merchant of feminine expression to millions of eager buyers.
Could it have been any other way? Consider French visual artist Sophie Calle, who introduced an artistic tradition that is participatory; a dialogue that leaves her word elastic to different interpretations. In 2007, Calle explored the end of a relationship in the body of work titled ‘Take Care of Yourself’. What started out as an act of interpreting a break-up email she received from her ‘X’, became a larger work that looked at the complexities of what happens when grieving is made public. She invited 107 women with different professional expertise – from lexicographers, to sexologists, to UN women’s rights activists – to analyse, dissect, comprehend and interpret the letter through several mediums, including text, drawings, cartoons, children’s books, braille, cipher, song, performance and theatre. In an effort to make visible the gendered labour of heteronormative relationships, Calle has created a space for the ‘manic’ within feminist art practices. The letter ends with the phrase ‘Take Care of Yourself’, which is exactly what Calle sets out to do, as she serialised, indexed and transformed the personal into a collective experience. It is through the active participation of each woman, and the performance of their roles, their jobs and their individual deductions of the letter (a response to what the internet would perhaps call her ‘receipts’) that the work begins to reject the demand to take care of oneself.
“To keep her place at the top, Taylor Swift must compromise: her pain must look good.”
In Swift’s world, this participatory approach comes by way of the Easter Eggs in her lyrics and the occasional invitations to superfans to intimate listening sessions. But that’s where the similarity ends, because it is a one-sided artistic relationship, geared toward consumerism. Then, it’s worth asking: is Swift entirely honest? Does she have the wherewithal to show us the unsavoury, the ugly, in how we go through wrenching pain? Arguably not. To keep her place at the top, Taylor Swift must compromise: her pain must look good. Whatever vulnerability creeps through in her albums is washed over by a tidal wave of glitter and glamour; as necessitates a woman trying to communicate pain to a stadium packed with 90,000-size crowds every single time. The sorrow must be palatable, even available for easy mass consumption by evading the mess. In I Can Do It With A Broken Heart from her latest The Tortured Poets Department, for instance, Swift describes the experience of pushing through pain that breaks: but in the black and white video she dazzles, performs drama, hugs her dancers, holds power stances through different moments of the Eras Tour. She kisses her biceps, as she sings “Cause I’m a real tough kid, I can handle my shit”. As the lyrics “Lights, camera, bitch smile, even when you wanna die, He said he’d love me all his life” appear in frame, the camera pans to a closeup of her face, as she attempts to smile, while seemingly heartbroken. It is too clean. It is too perfect.
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In contrast, take Tracy Emin’s autobiographical work titled ‘My Bed’ in 1998, which investigates heartbreak through the material form. Emin created an installation of her actual bed, overflowing with cigarettes, ashtrays, a pregnancy test, bedsheets rumpled and tossed around, while condoms, menstrual blood stained underwear, alcohol, razors and tampons are strewn by the bedside floor of the Tate Britain. Emin has described this monument as a portrait of a young woman, who experienced heartache and depression as a consequence of a relationship breakdown. “Emin’s oeuvre has only ever orbited one thing: herself, in her many mournful, voluptuous, warty, wild and furious incarnations.” the New York Times said. Emin insists on referring to the ‘self’ even during a crisis, as the objects carry with them the emotional weight of the relationship, and convey where words fall short. In this way, the objects become evidence of an intimate life suddenly coming to a standstill, and an attempt of the artist to air her dirty laundry, literally.
In this era of the Internet (read: Instagram’s corner of the Internet), where influencer break-ups ‘drop’ as public announcements in synchronic yin-yang aesthetics on the Instagram feed, Swift’s performance of heartbreak was approaching the cusp of falling into this tradition of gutting, refreshing honesty. But with countries fighting to secure the Eras Tour – the ultimate package of all this heartbreak and female subjectivity – exclusively for themselves, it tells us something of how capital defangs what could have been subversive, into what ultimately ends up as conformist. The Eras Tour is a reminder of what could have been, and what we lose, when a woman with a life like no other chooses to remain unknowable by manufacturing and selling her artistic expression, rather than sharing it.
“By choosing to enclose and sell the feeling, Taylor Swift flattens the political lineage and deracinates the feminine body and voice.”
It isn’t inevitable that musicians at the height of their fame hide the uncomfortable parts. There were some, like punk artist and feminist Courtney Love, who represents the ghost that haunts Taylor Swift – a ghost she runs from – in some ways: White, demonised by the public, ahead of her time, unappreciated, unfairly living in the shadow of a Great Man. Love recently received backlash for saying that Swift is “not interesting” as an artist. But she’s right. Love’s music, and subsequently her performance, were an intentional deviation from doe-eyed, pretty, white feminism’s unholy alliance with heroin chic in the 90s. As an artist, Courtney Love’s lyrics employed raw, unfiltered and brutal honesty. Her punk-rock aesthetic was subversive because it loudly embraced ugliness, and unabashedly owned the trajectory that her life took during the years of Hole, her relationship with Kurt Cobain and the public media trial she was subject to after his death by suicide. In one of Love’s first live performances after Cobain’s death, she’s seen throwing things at the audience, barefoot, crying through her set, while screaming ‘Kurt’ over and over again. The Guardian called her a “grieving widow, [who] expels the pain.” Professor and researcher Karina A. Elieraas refers to this as the “intentional uglification as a strategy to resist the establishment”. Love’s voice as a carrier of pain, whether it’s the screaming, shrieking, or wailing, then becomes a cathartic release of pain, in a culture that actively contributes to the silencing of women’s voices, thus further shaping the canon of “female” language.
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Take also the era of Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks, performing a heartbreak ballad while singing ‘Silver Springs’ — a song she wrote about her turbulent relationship and break up with band member Lindsay Buckingham, to Lindsay Buckhingam. In the 1997 performance of the song, 20 years after she supposedly wrote it, Nicks, with anger and rage points and sings impassionedly at Buckingham, the lyrics “I’ll follow you down ’til the sound of my voice will haunt you.” The guttural pain of heartbreak then lives through these different expressions and modes of language employed. While the dominating presence of the man is at the centre of the work, a concerted effort to erase him is also at play, as the scale of their voices drown the centre, with the intention to actively decenter the masculine, patriarchal voice. It embraces language as something spoken through the body and the voice.
Though her work is similar, the raw emotions Swift performs are cloaked behind a carefully manufactured competition to outdo other artists’ expressions of their own experiences. Her performance of heartbreak is an exercise in image building, one that strategically controls how the world sees her, and only her, as the authentic purveyor of love and loss. By trademarking “Female Rage,” Taylor Swift committed a fatal flaw: in keeping with the masculinist tradition of art, she took a universal experience, and sought to own it as exclusively her own. And what about female rage is hers to trademark, as a White woman? Especially when viewed through the lens of centuries of colonial, imperial and gendered violence? As Ketu Katrak discusses in The Politics of the Female Body, the postcolonial female body is, simultaneously, the site of oppression and resistance. In 1993, Chavela Vargas performed La Llorona, a Latin folklore about unrequited love, anger, and deep loss. As she weeps and sings, her voice embodies devastation and grief. The relationship between sound, image, body and voice is an essential praxis to ascertain the way music is ‘watched’. By choosing to enclose and sell the feeling, Taylor Swift flattens the political lineage and deracinates the feminine body and voice. Instead, she locates it at the heart of White feminism, in its isolated and exclusionary form.
“To put it plainly, Swift’s insistence on universalizing her experience – so much that it turns into a for-profit industry – is her undoing as an artist.”
What makes it worse is that the commercialised Taylor Swift machine also seeks to exclusively monopolise the feeling. On May 17, Billie Eilish released her third studio album, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT. Swift simultaneously released first draft phone memos of three songs from TTPD available for a limited duration. What this does is actively impact streaming numbers between musicians, and also saw Eilish’s fans calling Swift out for being a ‘capitalist queen.’ Between the Taylor’s Version, Extended Album, The Anthology, the Midnight Version, the 3 AM version and the Phone memos, Swift’s PR game not only leans heavily into actively occupying the most space in pop music, but also ensures that it is timed to when musicians like Eilish, and even Charli XCX released their much awaited and critically acclaimed albums.
To put it plainly, Swift’s insistence on universalizing her experience – so much that it turns into a for-profit industry – is her undoing as an artist. Today, many Swifties have even begun to question her silence on politics – despite her industrial-scale Eras Tour impacting countries’ GDPs. The end of the Eras Tour is a litmus test for how we will remember Taylor Swift: is she the greatest artist of the 21st century, or the greatest businessperson?
In Linda Nochlin’s essay, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists, she questions the idea of the ‘great’ and ‘genius’ artist, looking at these words as inherently, masculine. The idea that Art made by men is somehow universal, while women’s art –an expression of the personal, largely self-servient and emotional – is somehow less worthy. The Eras Tour is, in many ways, a memorial to Taylor Swift’s promise as a Great Artist. Millions of women still deconstruct, speculate and assume the grief that Swift has experienced. Her PR game is strategic, the easter eggs plenty, the language is cryptic, legitimising anguish; and extends to the ways in which we, the audience, adopt her lyrics as a conduit to our own emotions. In that context, Swift ‘writes her self’, she writes about other women and she writes for other women. But while others have blurred the lines between art and life, Swift simply romanticises, packages, and ultimately sells the pain. The neverending PR machine, the manufactured spectacle, the cleanness, the distance, the inability to take creative risks in furtherance of her truth.
Sisterhood, as bell hooks defines it, transcends mere solidarity among women; it embodies a deep understanding of shared experiences and the challenges under patriarchy. Despite Taylor Swift’s fandom finding sisterhood in her work, it’s worth asking: is the Swiftie sisterhood as it stands today because of Swift, or despite her?
