Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

by Rob Sheffield

“Sometimes you need a song that says how you feel.”

Ten years from now, my favorite music will be coming from these girls. The ones who saw this show or heard these songs on the radio, heard this voice tell them, “Drop everything now.” They heard her and decided they needed to do it themselves.

She will change how pop music is made, heard, experienced. She will bait. She will switch. She will be a terrible role model for anyone trying to lead a calm and sensible emotional life. She will jump into every feeling with the certainty that it’s the last one she’ll ever have.

The moment when Taylor gets to the almost-hidden line “when I’m screaming at the sky”—and she really does scream it at the sky—was cathartic.

Like Madonna, she’s the kind of star whose flops are part of her legend.

Her liner notes for her first album: “To all the boys who thought they would be cool and break my heart, guess what? Here are 14 songs written about you. HA.” It’s like Andy Warhol said in the Sixties, “If there’s ever a problem, I film it and it’s no longer a problem. It’s a film.”

“A young pop singer is fourteen years old. A young country singer is twenty-nine years old.”

An eternal law of pop music: anything halfway cool that’s ever happened is because teenage girls made it happen.

but women—if they feel like screaming, they do it.”