The New Taylor

Media has always been espoused to culture and culture to media.  Ever since writing and cave drawings existed, the way we entertain ourselves and others has directly influenced the way we live and what we believe in.  While rarely one movie or one painting changes the whole dynamic of the way we live our lives and the culture we are engrained in, in today’s day and age, some celebrities manage to make quite an indelible imprint.  One of those celebrities is Taylor Swift.

I first heard about Taylor Swift in my cousins’ basement in the small farm town of Hartlyville in Southern Alberta.  I was eleven or so and wasn’t too interested in country music sung by an up and coming teenage girl.  She came to dominate the country music scene in the next few years, writing her own music and lyrics.  I firmly resisted as others, boys and girls around me, jumped on her bandwagon.  I finally succumbed after my sister would blast T-Swift’s then recently released album Speak Now on our early morning drives to LDS seminary my sophomore year.

Are you sure that is the same person?

Before I had graduated high school, she turned to pop, subsequently setting numerous records and garnering major rewards with her albums Red and 1989.  Over the past decade, Taylor Swift has become a cultural icon.  Her love life is laboriously detailed in the press and discussed at high school lunch tables, her fans flock to her worldwide tours and grab her merchandise off the shelves, and her music videos are dissected frame by frame to discover hidden meanings and Easter eggs.  In short, Taylor Swift is one of the most influential humans on the planet, especially with the younger female population.  That is why her recent reputation is a bit alarming.

After a three-year lapse between her previous album, Taylor Swift has released three singles from her new album Reputation.  Highly anticipated, these singles, Look What You Made Me Do, Ready for It, and Gorgeous, garnered mixed reviews from critics and fans alike, not the typical reaction Swift’s music receives.  Despite this reaction, Look What You Made Me Do broke not only the radio billboard records but her chilling and assailant music video racked up 43.2 million views in its first 24 hours, shattering the record set by Adele’s Hello music video which had 27.7 million views in its first day.   So far, Taylor Swift’s new album has built upon the formula of her previous album 1989 by furthering distancing herself from her early country days and using synthesizers and pumping up the bass.  The best way to describe this new direction is best said by herself, “the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now.  Why?  Oh, ‘cause she’s dead!”.

At the beginning of the decade, following Swift’s release of Speak Now, no one would have foreseen this change coming.  After experimenting with various musical genres in Red and almost entirely foregoing the inclusion of any country songs in 1989, this shift wasn’t as surprising.  The type of music wasn’t the only thing that Swift has changed and developed.  The tone has shifted far from the original innocent country lover that permeated her early albums.

Star-crossed young lovers (“Love Story”) have turned into adults engaging in extramarital affairs (“Wildest Dreams”).  Couples working to overcome their personal weaknesses to keep their relationship strong (“Mine”) have turned into girls that play the game to “be that girl for a month” (“Blank Space”).  Independent women telling a man no (“We Are Never Getting Back Together”) have turned into ones that that can’t control their own actions (“Look What You Made Me Do”).  1989 marked Taylor Swift’s departure not only from country music but also the beginnings of a pessimistic view on romantic relationships and femininity.

Taylor Swift somewhere has lost a vision of what really matters in relationships and what love truly means.  What brought her to fame was her ability to capture the everyman and woman’s feelings in a wide array of romantic situations.  When she first cried on her guitar, we remembered all the times that we had felt shaded in love.  When she sat down in the café on a Wednesday, all the feelings of an early romance came back to us.  When she screams “we’re never getting back together”, we turn up the radio dial and scream in frustration at all the dead-end relationships we’ve been in.  Not only did Taylor Swift create a unique style and nostalgic feel in her first few albums, she has also managed to create an imprint on the way we view relationships.  Many girls in my high school would drool when watching the music video for “You Belong With Me” and hoped and dreamed for the day they would find a man that could meet their needs and love them for who they are.

New Taylor’s viewpoint is bleak and uninspiring.  Instead of hoping for ideal relationships built on love, trust, and hard work, she not only condones but praises one-night stands, extramarital affairs, and changing who you are in order to get a man.  In effect, she has become the very type of person whose pictures she used to burn.  Maybe a long string of crappy celebrity relationships, breakups, and heartbreaks have brought her to this conclusion that the love she once sang about will never become a lasting reality for her.  Maybe the culture and the times have influenced her to lower her standards on love and to instead celebrate instant sexual gratification because that is what sells more records.  There definitely isn’t anything gorgeous about that.

Am I on to something or should I just "stumble on home to my cats"? What do you think?

Her new perspective won’t just affect her.  That is why this change is so disturbing.  Taylor Swift’s global impact can and will affect the way we look at love.  Young girls listening to Taylor Swift’s music and attending her concerts are now being told that they need to care more about other peoples’ opinions and their outward appearance than who they really are.  They are learning from their ‘role model’ Taylor that playing to men’s expectations and aiming for instant sexual gratification is much better than working towards being the person that can sustain and enjoy a lifelong lasting romantic relationship.  New Taylor seems to argue that men are after your body instead of you and love is something that can’t be achieved in this complicated day and age.

Taylor Swift’s uplifting brand of music made her a cultural icon but in a sick twist, the prize of fame and glory has motivated her to change her music to echo the already so prevalent attitude of loose morals and an uninspiring view of romance.  Once a positive role model that cried with us in our breakups and that gave us hope that our relationships could succeed and last, now Taylor has just joined the already incessant crowd that convinces us that there is no place for that in our world today.  Let’s hope Taylor Swift cleans up her act and that her new reputation doesn’t catch hold.  If not, when society’s outlook on romance, sex, and womanhood is negatively affected by Swift’s new album, we can give her a taste of her own medicine: look what you made us do.