You Don’t Have to Care About Taylor Swift

It was the Winter of 2021. My partner and I were in Cincinnati visiting one of my good friends, and we all decided to take a trip downtown to check out a Christmas market there. It was a really lovely afternoon – cold and blustery, but not so cold that we couldn’t enjoy checking out the booths selling mostly locally-made art, clothing, food, and other treasures.

One such booth we visited had a ton of shirts with prints made by a local artist. I rifled through them, admiring each design, when I came across one that featured the distinctive face of one of my favorite musicians, Orville Peck. He’s a lesser known queer country artist with a distinctive habit of wearing a leather face mask in all of his appearances, and the shirt was a stylized rendition of his face with lyrics from one of his songs written in red.

I was thrilled. Orville Peck is not super well known now, but he was even less known back then, and this was the first time I ever encountered anything referencing him out in the wild, much less a cool T-shirt like this. I knew I had to get it for myself.

I brought the shirt up to the artist running the booth, and as they rang me up I couldn’t help but strike up a conversation.

“I love this design!” I said.

“Thank you,” the artist said.

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen anything Orville Peck related. I’m such a huge fan,” I continued.

“Me too,” they said. “He was my number-one artist on Spotify Wrapped this year!”

“He was number two for me. Taylor Swift was number one.”

I laughed at this – I meant it as sort of a self-disparaging joke. It’s a commonly understood fact that Swifties are a pretty over-enthusiastic group, so I figured it was a compliment of the highest honor to Orville Peck that he managed to even get close to touching the ferocity with which I listened to Taylor.

Clearly, though, the artist took it a little differently. Their tone shifted away from the friendly casualty it had before. “Oh, I’m not a fan of hers.”

“That’s okay. I wasn’t always a fan of hers, either. But my good friend finally convinced me and now I’m hooked.”

I didn’t really need this conversation to be about Taylor Swift. I would have happily gone back to talking about Orville Peck, the musician we had in common. But the artist, still working on the transaction, had clearly seized on this topic and wasn’t wanting to let go.

“I’m sick of her,” they said. “I hear about her constantly. I just can’t stand her. I wish she would just take her money and leave.”

I laughed awkwardly. What was I supposed to say to that? They were still holding my debit card.

In my memory, the conversation went on like that for several excruciating minutes. Me, trapped, waiting to finish a monetary transaction as this stranger I didn’t know went on and on about how much they hated a musician I loved. And all because I dared mention Taylor Swift.

That was in 2021, just after the release of Red Taylor’s Version, and yeah, Taylor was a pretty big figure back then. But since then, she’s released Midnights, two more rerecordings, THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT, and is headlining a tour that is constantly attracting media attention. Not to mention her extremely publicized relationship with Chiefs football player Travis Kelce. If they were sick of her then, how must they feel about her now?

I reflect on this experience now because I feel like it’s a strange sort of microcosm for what’s happening right now across the internet in the wake of Taylor Swift’s newest album, THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT (TTPD).

In some ways, I saw this coming. It is hard to argue that Taylor Swift isn’t the most talked about figure right now and has been for basically an entire year at this point. As a fan, this is a ton of fun – I love Taylor Swift. I obviously love talking about her and her music. But I can imagine that if you’re not a fan, it’s kind of annoying.

I get it. I’m not going to stand here and argue that you have to like Taylor Swift, or you have to be pleased and happy to hear about her all the time. Believe me, I’ve felt neutral-to-negative about her for a longer portion of my life than I’ve been a fan. But I think that perspective also leads me to the following argument – if you don’t like Taylor Swift, you don’t have to care about her.

I absolve you. You’re allowed to not post about her social media. You can change the channel on the radio when one of her songs come on. You can blacklist her name on the platforms that allow you to do so. You can even refrain from tracking down her fans to call them stupid for liking her, even.

You do not need to have a take on her.

I say this because, quite honestly, I have been sick to death at the discussion I’ve seen from the general public surrounding TTPD. I have never before in my life seen so many people be so loudly wrong about a piece of art. And honestly, I think it comes from a really disingenuous place. I think a lot of the people posting about this album decided long before hearing it that it was trash (if they’ve even heard it at all).

How can I tell? Well, it’s because a lot of the popular arguments I’ve seen against the album fundamentally misunderstand it. Case in point, the most popular talking point I’ve seen – the lyrics are so stupid!

Now, again, I don’t mean to say that you are required to like every lyric Taylor has ever written. I certainly can think of a line or two that makes me shrug a little. But it comes down to the way these lyrics are being talked about – with a clear misunderstanding for their intention and a disregard for context.

For example, take the oft-made-fun-of line from “So High School”, “Touch me while your boys play Grand Theft Auto.” How stupid! How dumb! How cringe! Aren’t you embarrassed to be a fan? Is this really the songwriter of our generation?

Now, you’re right, that is a silly lyric. Wouldn’t it be weird if there was a reason for that?

Well, in this song, Taylor writes about a romance that brings her back to her high school years. As you might be able to pick up from the title, it’s a song about feeling giddy and youthful and all those silly emotions that teenagers feel when in love. The song features a lot of images that call back to this particular symbol of teenage love. For example, she uses the “marry, kiss, or kill” game to talk about the all-encompassing feeling of this romance (“I’m betting on all three for us two”), a game commonly played by immature teenagers just on the cusp of understanding these concepts in their own lives.

So, perhaps, that silliness and immaturity may in fact be the point. Maybe.

Or, take the line from “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me”, “You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me”. Didn’t Taylor Swift grow up on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania? Eye roll!

But hold on, what’s the rest of that song even about? Perhaps it’s about the alienation of fame, the way celebrities are demonized and made out to be monsters by the people seeking to take advantage of them. Considering that, it makes a lot less sense that Taylor would be speaking about her actual hometown, but instead the experience she had growing up famous. “The asylum” is fame, not a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania.

The thing about these examples and others is that I’m not exactly doing extremely in-depth analysis of these songs to come to these conclusions. The fact that “So High School” uses teenage imagery and “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me” is a song about the perils of fame feel like fairly surface-level understandings of each song. And again, I don’t point these out to say that either song is perfect and above criticism. But it’s obvious to me that people are dunking on these lyrics with absolutely no intention of actually understanding the music. And of course, right? They’re just posting these lines no-context for cheap laughs and controversy from the Swifties.

And that’s fine, except that this is the highest amount of engagement a lot of people will bother with with this album before they decide that TTPD is a cringe, immature, hack piece of art with no depth. And then, they’ll go ahead and confront anyone actually trying to understand and engage with this art on a deeper level with this assumption.

I know this happens because it happened to me. I posted my review of the album on my Tumblr (the main place where I post things about this blog) and I got a lot more traction and attention on it than I usually do. Most of the comments I received were positive, don’t get me wrong, but I had one extremely weird interaction.

Under ordinary circumstances, the initial comment is one I maybe wouldn’t have interacted with. But, it was such a strange comment to receive on a review where I mostly engaged with the themes of the work. I hadn’t really put forth a strong stance on the album’s “perfection”. And even if I had, it was clearly one fan’s review of an album on her own blog, so I wasn’t sure why it mattered why “a lot of critics and even Swifties” hadn’t liked it – this was my opinion. I was not under oath to report on anyone else’s opinion but my own.

With full honesty, at the time, I hadn’t really clarified much of my opinion on TTPD‘s overall quality. I just knew that it had moved me and intrigued me on a thematic level, which is why that was the focus of the review. But along came this person, who stated themselves that “none of it” was for them, who felt the need to tell me that I was wrong for enjoying the album because other people hadn’t.

I don’t know anything about this person. I don’t know if they really did take the time to listen to the album and draw their conclusion on it, but I kind of doubt it. If they had, they’d be able to articulate exactly what imperfections I had overlooked, and not lean on the supposed chorus of people who already decided that the album wasn’t worth engaging with thematically.

But no matter what was the truth, how am I supposed to have a conversation with this kind of attitude? I’m sorry, but I find the idea of someone who hasn’t done the work to understand a piece of art tracking down someone who has just to scold them about how they’re wrong… obnoxious. Is there any more of a thought killer than “this piece of work is stupid and you’re stupid for engaging with it”? It’s just made every conversation I’ve had with non-Swifties about this album a dreadful chore, as I try to explain to someone who has already made up their mind that the album isn’t even worth thinking about that, actually, I found a lot to poke at and analyze and even, god forbid, enjoy about it.

I will never say that I am some sort of perfect, objective perspective on Taylor Swift. I mean, obviously. I am a huge fan of hers, and I cannot be trusted to not let that factor into my assessment of her work. But also, I talk about her work with a deep and really passionate understanding of it, and I find it obnoxious trying to have a conversation with others with a similar understanding over the din of people who just want to dunk on the album shallowly for internet points.

And this is why I am saying today, in no uncertain terms. You don’t have to care about Taylor Swift. You don’t have to listen to her music. You don’t have to pay attention to her lyrics. You don’t have to be a part of a conversation about a piece of work when you haven’t really engaged with it. If someone brings up Taylor Swift in front of you, you can shrug and say “I don’t care for her,” and continue the conversation about something else. It’s okay! I’m giving you permission. I think it would make everyone happier.

I really think a lot of the people who hate Taylor Swift so much do way more thinking about her than I think is really advisable for their own peace of mind. What other artist is inspiring people who despise them to drop everything and discuss their album on release week? Take Drake, for example. I don’t really like Drake all that much. I don’t have this opinion based on anything really deep – I’ve just seen things here and there that just don’t make me like him all that much. However, he is one of the biggest artists in the world, and every time he drops new music, I see a ton of people stop to talk about it.

Do you know how much Drake music I’ve sought out in these moments? None.

Do you know how many times I’ve found a positive review of Drake music and commented on how it’s wrong? 0.

I just don’t really care about him all that much. And honestly, I think my life is better for it. I get to spend my energy delving into art I do care about, positively or negatively. I can spend my energy discussing art with other people who have also thought about that art enough to do more than shallowly dunk on it.

I hope I’m not coming off flippant of those who didn’t like TTPD. I think it’s likely going to go down in history as a divisive piece of art. But I think there’s a difference between giving the album an honest chance and coming out disappointed and waving it off with nothing more than an eyeroll and thinking that that’s an informed opinion.

Perhaps this is unavoidable, though. After all, Taylor Swift is probably the most talked-about person in the world. Literally anything she does (and doesn’t do) gets talked to death by just about everyone. Maybe I’m hoping for something that will never happen.

But I just want to be free of the stupid takes. I am tired of hearing about Taylor Swift from people who haven’t really thought all that hard about her. I’m sick of it.

Next time: Hopefully something non-Taylor Swift related. I promise.