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

by Rob Sheffield

She will be so many different Taylors, way too many, and they’ll all want the microphone all the damn time. She will make brilliant moves—or catastrophic gaffes, because that’s what rock stars do, giving us facepalm concussions. She’ll break up with country music, then get back together. She will break up with being single, then get back together. She will get judged, denounced, laughed at, condemned. (Ignored? That one’s not really in the cards.) She will have great ideas and terrible ideas. She will turn some of these terrible ideas into great songs, or vice versa. She will find the drama in any situation, no matter how trivial or ordinary it might seem. 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.

One of the central paradoxes of Taylor Swift—and this woman is nothing BUT paradoxes—is how she writes songs about the tiniest, most secretive agonies, the kind you wouldn’t even confess to your friends, except the only way she knows how to process these moments is turning them into louder-than-life stadium scream-alongs.

I wanted to tell that story, about girlhood calcifying into this bruised adulthood.”

But as even Joe must have realized, these songs aren’t really about boys at all. They’re about girls, the topic Taylor has pursued more relentlessly than any other pop artist in history. She’s written more songs about girls than anyone, even Paul McCartney, and like Paul, she has nearly no interest in male characters. The boy in a Swift song is usually just a mirror for a girl’s experience of self-discovery and self-figuration. He’s the blank space where she writes her name. Fearless is full of these vibrant girls she’s spent her life creating.

TAYLOR WILL ALWAYS BE A TOTAL CONTROL FREAK WHO needs to tweak every detail yet hide it all behind a charm-bomb smile. Except when she doesn’t. She takes the bait like candy. Unforced errors are a house specialty. She’ll air grievances that nobody wants to hear, even when they’re totally understandable. She loses arguments she could have won by ignoring them. She delivers comebacks for insults nobody else notices. She will hang a lantern on a nonstory that would blow over in minutes if she just turned off her phone. In 2010, she makes a music-industry journalist named Bob Lefsetz eternally famous with her song “Mean,” replying to a negative review in his newsletter, a review that about twelve people would have read if Taylor hadn’t given it the oxygen of publicity.

She’s the archetypal cool Eighties friend who comes out to friends who had no idea she was in the closet but try to guess how supportively surprised they should act.