Plinth

As it has become increasingly impossible to exist online without encountering Swift-related content (we are collectively living in what could be dubbed ‘the Eras era’), the discourse around her has also become increasingly polarised. You’re either in or you’re out, the general narrative goes: Lover or Hater; Swiftie or cynic. Yet, in reality, one of the most common responses to Swift’s ubiquity is confusion. ‘I don’t really get Taylor Swift’ goes the familiar refrain, and clearly what is being referred to is not only her music but her status at the pinnacle of pop culture – her outsized celebrity.

Certainly, despite hundreds of thousands of words being written about her, as a cultural object Swift still seems strangely slippery. It’s hard to get a grip on her. Is she a Republican wet dream, a corporate prop, or just a girl crying in her bedroom? Frequently rendered a cipher for broader discussions about the state of contemporary Western culture at large, whether Swift is looked at through the lens of performative victimhood, white feminism, contemporary confessionals, climate destruction, or the flows of global capital, she herself seems almost to disappear into a vacuum. Blank space (which the internet is more than happy to fill up with its detective work.)

Perversely, this dematerialisation has only intensified as Swift’s star power has risen. The more familiar she becomes, the more she seems to vanish into the realm of pure image and idea. Take, for instance, her first solo Rolling Stone cover in 2009, and her most recent, published a decade later. In the first image, shot the same year as the Kanye West VMAs debacle that would go on to define so much of Swift’s career, her hair is the colour of straw and ripples over her face in soft waves. Her lips are pink, and she peeps out coyly from under-lined eyes. She’s wearing white and holding a guitar. In case anyone hadn’t got the message, the headline reads, ‘Taylor Swift: Secrets of a Good Girl’. In the second cover image, Swift is instantly recognisable, but also barely there at all. Her hair is pulled back and the high-contrast flashes out her feline features to portray a cartoonish vision of white skin, red lips and blue eyes. With her hands held to her cheeks, it looks as if an unseen shop assistant is reaching up to adjust the head of a mannequin. The enigmatic good girl, spilling her secrets with a knowing smile, has been erased. In her place is a blindingly white surface, onto which a multitude of projections may be cast. It is a striking image – reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s iconic silkscreen paintings that depicted Marilyn Monroe as a product on a par with a Campbell’s soup can, and a prescient sign of Swift’s overexposure. ‘The more you look at the same exact thing,’ Warhol said of his repetitions, ‘the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.’

Taylor Swift hasn’t been entirely emptied out yet though. Because, despite outwardly appearing as stereotypically all-American as a baseball or a cowboy boot, there is also something a bit off about her. Perhaps then, rather than blank space, it makes more sense to think of Swift as negative space – defined more by what she is not, than what she is. She’s blonde, but not in an old Hollywood way like Monroe, or in a postmodern burlesque way like Madonna, or an internet starlet way like Paris Hilton. She was a teen star, but not in a Disney way like Miley or Selena. She has the slim, elongated figure of a catwalk model, but enough gawkiness to prevent her from being a fashion-industry muse. Like a smooth-crotched plastic doll, she is oddly sexless. Her voice is nice, but not knock-your-socks-off. She dances a bit like Theresa May. Instead of a turbo-charged, jet-fuelled superstar residing in the celebrity stratosphere, Swift often resembles a normal millennial white woman, trying hard to look her best. Type A older sister. Good girl, grown up. In other words, she seems to sit most comfortably between the poles of ‘basic’ and ‘cringe’ – in the same spot as Breton striped tops, prairie dresses, frappuccinos, pouty peace signs and bottomless brunch.

For the neutral observer then, it can be strangely jarring to scroll past videos of Swift playing to vast crowds of screaming, sobbing devotees. The fervour of Swift’s fandom simply does not seem to fit with her ‘normal millennial’ persona. ‘Taylor is not important,’ Courtney Love recently proclaimed. ‘She might be a safe space for girls, and she’s probably the Madonna of now,’ she continued, ‘but she’s not interesting as an artist.’ What Love, and all those who ‘don’t get’ Swift are really saying is, Taylor is not special. But, of course, for her fans, this is precisely her appeal. Listen to any Swiftie explain their fandom for a few seconds and the issue of ‘relatability’ will rear its head. Whether Swift is the ‘everywoman’ that Swifties imagine her as is, to put it mildly, debatable. Nevertheless, this is what Swift’s brand is built on: authenticity, intimacy and relatability – buzzwords that are by now as overexposed as Swift’s 2019 cover image.

But it is also here that the true split at the heart of Taylor Swift™ lumbers into view. For how can Swift be both relatable and pure image? ‘Everywoman’ and globally branded product? It is this tension that provokes confusion and derangement in non-partisan bystanders to Swift’s ascent.

To grapple with this conflict, it helps to look back on Swift’s adoption of the Cinderella story at 2009’s VMAs, where she arrived in an ornate horse-drawn carriage (only to have the Prince of the music industry at the time tear away her crown right at the moment). ‘I have a castle complex,’ Swift told MTV. ‘I really like fairy tales.’ The choice of fairy tale is revealing though, with Swift embodying the role of the put-upon girl, the underdog, who finds her life transformed to one of remarkable fortune, through a potent blend of love and magic. As in the Cinderella story, the question of who Taylor Swift is, is a question of normality versus enchantment.

Often the split at the core of her public image is conceived as a more simplistic one: victim or villain; heroine or anti-hero. But the real division is between relatability and celebrity; instinct and cunning; intimacy and control. The ‘normal millennial white woman’ and the best-selling artist of the contemporary age. Eras Tour billionaire versus bedroom sad girl. Or, to put this in Swiftie terms: the insecure, anxious, painfully self-aware voice in Anti-Hero, or the successful schemer and arrogant architect of Mastermind.

In the music video for Anti-Hero, which Swift directed, she personifies this disunity. Viewers meet Taylor Swift the woman and Taylor Swift the phenomenon, who arrives in the middle of the night decked in jewels, ready for a stage-show. Taylor Swift™ torments, cajoles and befriends her less glossy counterpart by turns. This wasn’t the first time Swift had played with doppelgangers. In the video for Ready For It, Swift faces off against a robot version of herself, who is naked and locked in a cage. Is the first, dark-hooded Swift holding this reproduction captive, or training her up? In any case, the glass cage shatters, and, by the end, the hooded Taylor is dead while automaton-Taylor walks free. This vision of a harder, better, faster, stronger Swift emerging, having killed off her old self plays into the dominant narrative around her ‘reputation era’ – that the bad press surrounding the Kimye phone call tore her apart, detaching the easily categorisable ‘good girl’ from the snake, the liar, the schemer, the man-eater. In this light, the video tells a story of reclamation and renewal. However, as in Anti-Hero, the doubling act also emphasises the uncanniness of celebrity – portraying fame as an intrinsically alienating process of splitting, splintering, fracturing.

For a while, a few eras back, Swift was adept at holding it together. ‘If this is Swift’s game face, it must be tattooed on,’ Vanessa Grigoriadis wrote in 2009, for that first Rolling Stone cover story. Since then though, her game face seems to have hardened to the point of cracking. ‘I'm a mirrorball,’ she sings in a track on the critically-acclaimed 2020 album folklore. ‘I'll show you every version of yourself tonight.’ Swift’s selling point – relatability – slips into blankness again. She’s a surface you only see yourself in. She’s anything you want her to be – ‘I can change everything about me to fit in,’ she sings – but she’s also hard at work: ‘I've never been a natural / All I do is try, try, try.’ And, she may be ‘shimmering beautiful’ but fame’s alienation comes at a cost: ‘And when I break it's in a million pieces.’

@ionlyseetaylight She really said “I’m a mirrorball” with this outfit ✨ <a title="swifttok" target="blank" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/swifttok?refer=embed">#swifttok #taylorswift #swift #swiftie #parati #viral #taylorr #tay #taylor #taylorsvids ♬ original sound - Ana 😸

Reflective imagery takes on a more defiant slant in Midnight’s Bejeweled. ‘I polish up real, I polish up real nice,’ she shout-sings from the back of Jack Antonoff’s shimmering production, before playfully referencing her old persona: ‘I think I've been too good of a girl.’ Both mirrorball and Bejeweled are presumed to stem from her relationship with Joe Alwyn, but each tells a sharper story about Swift’s relationship to her own celebrity – her doppelganger, Taylor Swift™ – than any romantic relationship. ‘When I walk in the room / I can still make the whole place shimmer,’ she croons in Bejeweled, apparently yearning for the approval of the ‘masquerade revellers’ she referred to in mirrorball, ‘drunk as they watch my shattered edges glisten.’ Here, the work is worth it; the glistening surface is alluring: ‘I miss sparkling,’ Swift sings. Notably, Bejeweled’s music video brings Swift’s Cinderella roleplay back from the depths of a decade prior. In this cleverly calculated move, it’s Swift’s own multiverse that is reflected back to her fans. Enchantment wins the face-off against normality, to the Swifties delight, many of whom scrape every corner of the internet, binding disparate Taylor-related dates, lyrics, numbers and clues, to weave elaborate theories that Swift is secretly gay, or secretly releasing a book, or secretly doing something. It’s all connected, they insist, and Swift plays into the sleuthing game enough to keep it interesting and keep them hooked – the mastermind Taylor Swift™ leading fans along with a trail of breadcrumbs, dropped to make them think they are approaching the truth of Taylor Swift the girl’s inner life.

What if the truth is Swift has been playing them all this time, letting them see just what they want to see? It might not have pleased many critics, but The Tortured Poet’s Department may yet be seen as Swift’s most interesting work yet, because it spins on the idea that her fans actually don’t know anything. Since its release, the Swiftie sleuths have been hard at work, rereading her songs in retrospect, following the breadcrumb hints that they were all about Matty Healy all along. But this may itself prove to be a false trail, a shimmering deflection. For more than anything, TTPD reveals the Faustian bargain Swift has made between normality and enchantment, and between ‘sparkling’ and cracking up again. This engagement with her own celebrity is most explicit on I Can Do It With A Broken Heart, where the emotional woman is put to work by the performer, but it is more compellingly traced on Clara Bow, named after the original ‘It girl’ whose life story has become a cautionary tale about the price of fame. ‘You're the new god we're worshipping,’ Swift mouths in the guise of an industry big-wig offering up the fairy tale of fame and fortune: ‘Promise to be dazzling.’ The glittering imagery of mirrorball and Bejeweled returns, with a distinctly darker bent: ‘Only when your girlish glow / Flickers just so / Do they let you know / It's hell on earth to be heavenly.’ And then, in the song’s closing lines, Swift breaks the fourth wall and utters her own name, as if spoken to the next dazzling ‘good girl’ / ‘It girl’. ‘You look like Taylor Swift in this light,’ she sings like a jump scare: ‘You’ve got edge, she never did.’ The song ends on its refrain, ‘The future's bright... Dazzling,’ leaving an afterglow image of total estrangement – Swift holding up her own face to be obliterated and smoothed out by blindingly white light. The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away.

Meanwhile, another story is set in motion, neutralising the discomfort Swift’s recent fling with Healy — and the depressive, 'tortured' tracks it provoked — might prompt in her fandom. She’s ditched the British blokes, the indie sad boys, for another all-American symbol: the Super Bowl star. Whether, as some have speculated, her relationship with Travis Kelce is a carefully managed PR campaign is almost insignificant. Girl in love or global brand stage-managing a publicity wobble, the result is the same. The good girl gets the football player; the crowd goes wild. At the peak of her career, Swift is living out one of her own early music videos (her first to play with doppelgangers, and the one that won her the scandal-drenched, career-defining 2009 VMA, no less). We’re back to the beginning. What a fairytale.

When Swift first became famous, she installed in her Nashville apartment a gold birdcage at human scale. It’s not surprising that a number of profiles of Swift open by describing this interior design choice, for it is too perfect an image to resist – whimsical and escapist, cringe and a little bit tragic all at once. Evidence of her ‘castle complex’, and a sign that the self-mythologising started early. In any case, listening to Swift’s excoriations of her own celebrity can feel like joining her in her old Nashville apartment, stepping into the gilded cage of her own design. All that glitters… But, ultimately, that is Taylor Swift. The fairy tale is a cage is a fairy tale. The girl next door is a billionaire is the girl next door. Picking at her skin, the snake feeds on itself, caught in an ouroboric loop. There is no outside. The relatability is the celebrity. The person is the product. More than the dazzling diamonds and glistening mirrorballs scattering Swift’s song writing, what should linger is the line that sneaks in almost unawares, before becoming something more agreeable: ‘I polish up real.’ In the Swiftiverse, that’s as real as it gets.

By Eloise Hendy