2020 did us one undeniable service; giving us a glance at a world where (to steal an observation from a friend of mine) Taylor Swift writes albums with no possibility — nor desire — of filling stadiums. Incidentally, or maybe not, folklore clarifies for me what makes her a true great*.
It’s the details. Musically, she writes perfectly for her voice, her limpid, graceful phrasing, and even in the relatively subdued surrounds here, the sound is rich and textured and cohesive.
Further, being not just a pop superstar, but a pop superstar who is also a singer-songwriter, requires some ability to convey some understanding of what it is to live a normal life. One of the many reasons Ed Sheeran and John Mayer aren’t great, for example, is that after a certain point they only sounded convincing when singing about getting laid too much, which in turn only clarified how cynical and join-the-dots their love songs always were.
Swift, on the other hand, is an extremely fine writer; capable of piling striking detail on expansive insight until you forget she can’t walk the streets without body guards. So when the general (“if one thing had been different, would everything be different?”) meets the specific (“I thought I saw you at the bus stop, I didn’t though”), I wonder who she’s lost, not whether she’s actually met anyone who had any use for a bus stop since she was 17.
But Swift goes a step further, being personable without seeming to try. Take Blank Space, my favourite pop song of that year or most years: specific to a life very few of us can fathom, but also funny and self-aware and, intentional or not, incredibly poignant.
And so to the last great american dynasty, a song which appears to take place in the Blank Space video, a song only she could write and maybe her best. The Rebekah West Harkness story is that of a daughter of privelige, an extremely rich white lady who qualifies as a feminist troublemaker only by the stratified and staid standards of a world we don’t know, but Taylor seems to.
But it’s told with such pained empathy, not to mention such detail (“The wedding was charming, if a little gauche/There’s only so far new money goes” could have been overheard in a Joan Didion piece) that by the time it ends with our narrator purchasing a 17 million dollar mansion, somehow she and her subject still command our sympathy and even our love.
*I feel I should clarify that I’m saying that genuinely, not out of fear of her loathsome, loathsome fans.
Dancing to Architecture 