Everyone's Anti-Hero

Taylor Swift talks to the media

Photo: Getty Images

For the first time in many months, Taylor Swift spoke at length to a print publication. It was Time Magazine, which has named her their Person of the Year. It was as apt a selection as any, since Swift is, along with Donald Trump, the most famous human being on Earth. Her Eras tour has been the most lucrative in history and she has been the most dominant pop act since the Beatles crossed the ocean in 1964. Her concert movie gave AMC its highest ever single-day ticket sales. On the cusp of thirty-four, she has no mountains left to scale. Whereas, once upon a time, a popular subject would crave the approval of a media organ like Time to cement their place in the culture, it’s Time that needs Swift, Time that must grasp for relevancy. There will be thousands, if not millions, of individuals who will buy this print publication solely because Swift is on the cover. It will probably be the last time they ever think about Time Magazine.

What did Swift say to the reporter, Sam Lansky? “I’ve been raised up and down the flagpole of public opinion so many times in the last 20 years. I’ve been given a tiara, then had it taken away.” Lansky, who collaborated with Britney Spears on her best-selling memoir, is a sympathetic interviewer, as most journalists who secure access to pop stars genuinely are. “This is her story—even if she’s now so high that it’s hard to believe she was ever low,” Lansky writes. A Harvard professor tells him that, in her course, she is comparing Swift’s lyrics to the poetry of William Wordsworth. Swift, who maintains a grueling touring schedule and seems earnest in her desire to repay the fans for the thousands they’ve spent to see her, is valedictory. And yet she ruminates on two “horrendous things” that happened to her. “The first was getting canceled within an inch of my life and sanity,” she says. “The second was having my life’s work taken away from me by someone who hates me.”

Swift was never particularly close to being canceled. Every studio album she has released since 2008, shortly after Barack Obama was elected, has reached the top of the Billboard charts. They have all, with the exception of Evermore, moved more than one million copies in the United States. She has told more than 114 million album units worldwide; assuming she continues to perform and release music for the next several decades, she will be the best-selling artist of all-time. The two events Swift refers to in the interview are the legal dispute over the ownership of her back catalog and her feuds with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. The former conflict has been overcome as Swift, to resounding success, re-records her Big Machine albums and releases them as “Taylor’s” versions, which radio stations dutifully play and fans devour in all forms, physical and digital. The West episode is the closest someone in Swift’s charmed position has come to trauma. The famed rapper, who has struggled with mental illness, interrupted a 19-year-old Swift onstage at the 2009 VMAs while she was accepting an award, declaring that Beyoncé, instead, deserved the honor. Obama, then president, called West a “jackass” and various celebrities rallied to Swift’s defense. Later on, West wrote a song with vulgar lyrics about Swift, and claimed that Swift had consented to it, which she denied. Kardashian, then West’s wife, released a video of a conversation between West and Swift that seemed to indicate that Swift had been on board with all of it. Swift was called a snake. This was, in Swift’s words to Lansky, “career death,” and she goes on to declare that “my career was taken away from me.”

Lansky doesn’t correct the record because that’s not his job, profiling Time’s Person of the Year. Reputation, the snake-themed album, went to no. 1 in the U.S. and sold two million copies worldwide within one week of release. Before then, Swift recounts moving to a foreign country and not leaving her rental house “for a year.” When Swift refers to Reputation, a electropop album with some R&B elements, as a “goth-punk moment,” Lansky doesn’t ask if Swift knows what punk or goth music actually sounds like. Nor does he wonder why there were “conspiracy theories” about Swift’s politics. “I had all the hyenas climb on and take their shots,” she laments. If anyone took shots, it was because Swift said nothing about the 2016 presidential election. It was a time of a burgeoning hyper-politics and visceral fear of a fascistic takeover of the United States. Swift’s silence was notable when Katy Perry was something of the bard for Hillary Clinton’s doomed campaign. Pop stars should not be forced to make political statements, but the public will ponder a star’s politics in the absence of any. Speculation will forever a fill a vacuum. When Swift had nothing to say about Trump in 2015, 2016, or 2017, fans and critics rightly wondered whether she was a shadow Republican or, like Michael Jordan, put her business first; Republicans buy sneakers too, et cetera. Since then, Swift has revealed herself to be a garden variety affluent liberal, stepping out on social causes but declining to weigh in on anything class-related or nigh polarizing. This isn’t surprising and Swift is savvy enough to say absolutely nothing about Israel or Gaza. Why should she? She has merchandise to move.

The anti-hero narrative, in the meantime, cannot be shook; it’s how, despite everything, Swift still sees herself. We are all the heroes of our own lives and we tend to believe we are misunderstood. We live, one hundred percent of the time, within our own beating consciousnesses that will not cease until death. It takes effort to transcend all of that, to form a greater awareness of how others might think, act, or feel, to imagine what it is like to be the other. And it must be imagination, because we can never escape who we are. Swift cannot escape. She is the rarest of human beings, ascending to a level of fame that was, historically, only reserved for emperors, pharaohs, and popes. What happens when the events of a life validate every last delusion one might hold? Swift is at a point in her career where no wrong can be done, where millions will follow her no matter what she does, what she decrees. Which makes her laments, to Time, all the more notable.

Swift does think she is a person who has overcome obstacles. The child of a stockbroker, Swift grew up comfortably and had a full-fledged music career by sixteen. She lived on a Christmas tree farm her father had bought from one of his clients. To help her break into the country music scene, her father transferred to Merrill Lynch’s Nashville office. Her rise to power has been as seamless as any in music history. Unlike other pop stars, she has never known poverty, psychological abuse, or a hostile critical establishment. Unlike Justin Bieber, she never grew up with a single mother in low-income housing. Unlike Mariah Carey, she never knew what it was like to live in a suburb where neighbors were hostile to a mixed-race family. And unlike, say, some of the rock superstars of the 1960s, she has never battled against newspaper editors, television anchors, and magisterial tastemakers who wanted nothing to do with her music. The New York Times did not review a Beatles album until 1967. Their records were burned throughout America when John Lennon declared, almost accurately, the Beatles were now bigger than Jesus. Conservative forces in both the U.K. and U.S. very much wanted to squelch rock music. It was deviant. It was a subversion. Time, then at its imperial peak, hitting millions of mailboxes each week, would never have dreamed of making John, Paul, George, and Ringo their People of the Year. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, rather, notched two selections apiece.

Swift’s apotheosis has not come on the strength of any particular album or cultural upheaval. There are few arguing that Midnights, her latest, is better than 1989 or even Red, that Swift has, entering her mid-thirties, made sonic advancements that were not plausible for her a decade ago. The music is all enjoyed simultaneously, which fits our flattened age, when artistic revolutions no longer arrive or are even, with any particular ambition, promised. Michael Jackson, at his height, seemed like a missionary from the future, as did Madonna; they were reimagining what dance, fashion, and pop could be. They were challenging and mutable, a warning for the middle-aged who didn’t understand, yet, what was barreling toward them. Swift, in her own time, has erased the generation gap. Mothers and fathers bop along to the hits with their children, and can joyously helicopter them at concerts. Swift’s greatness, described in the terms of her own fans, is deeply personal and forever opaque. She is vulnerable, she writes about heartbreak, she understands us. But so did Stevie Nicks—a Swift favorite—and no song off Midnights or any other record can match “Landslide” or “Rhiannon” or “Dreams” for their haunting intensity. What is it, then? Why Swift for world-historical icon and not Miley Cyrus or Lady Gaga or Ariana Grande or Meghan Trainor or Katy Perry? Swift’s longevity is to be commended. She can probably turn out no. 1 albums for the next two decades if she chooses. She has outlasted her old rivals and can thrash the next generation, which will never saturate the culture so.

Something unsettles. It’s a nag, a darker realization that is occasionally explained away in prestige periodicals. Nothing quite turns over anymore. We are a retread era, drowning in sequels and spinoffs and reappropriations. The old intellectual properties imprison us. Mass culture, in the last half century at least, has never been so lacking, as the major record labels and Hollywood studios and book publishers struggle to imagine a future that doesn’t resemble yesterday. There are no insurgents coming for Swift. There will be no revolution to displace her, no disco to battle back hard rock or psychedelia to supplant the doo wop-inflected. Pop music, until the twenty-first century, knew churn. It knew uncertainty and reinvention. It would be redundant, even facile, to call Swift “corporate” because all pop music, to some degree, becomes that way, a titanic business that must be properly managed. Corporate music can be wonderful music. Swift looms over our physical and psychic landscapes like a Walmart or Amazon, equally impregnable and impervious. Amazon will sell through pandemics, terrorist attacks, and Trump elections. Swift will do the same. She knows this.

And she comprehends, too, this is a rather rotten narrative for our time. It’s not a hero’s arc or an anti-hero’s arc. It does not have a rising and falling action, an extended moment of doubt, a conflict that must be confronted and eventually resolved. It is not Luke going against the Empire or any other trite cultural touchstone that can be trotted out for anyone who thinks that, this time, they are really up against it. It is, simply, the story of a very talented and lucky person born into wealth who became, through her own hard work and luck, extraordinarily successful and wealthy. Swift did not socially reproduce because she broke free of the bounds of the conventional upper class—she is now a billionaire—but it is not hard to fathom what she might have been if she never turned to music. Had Elvis Presley not found rock, he would have likely toiled, like his father, at various odd jobs, living off government assistance in rural Mississippi. Scott Swift’s daughter would have graduated from a very expensive college and entered the world of high finance and hummed along well there. Perhaps, with time, she would have bought her own Christmas tree farm. It would still be, in its own way, a very American story.