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.