Robin:

What should we talk about today?

Agnes:

We're going to talk about Taylor Swift.

Robin:

It's a big topic, I guess. She's a big star.

Agnes:

We're going to focus on five songs. Six songs?

Robin:

Six, I think, yes.

Agnes:

Six songs.

Robin:

Just to set the stage, what is it interesting to talk about or that's interesting about any particular musician that one might want to talk about?

Agnes:

I asked my husband this question and he said, I'm like, why am I interested in Taylor Swift besides the fact that I like her music? And he said that she is somebody who lives the opposite kind of life from you, namely a totally altruistic life. A life that's, your life is basically devoted to like the pursuit of your own knowledge and getting other people to help you in that. And she devotes her life to for fans, and she has this kind of, I mean, this extraordinary thing she's doing with the, you know, ERA's tour, adding event after event of these, like, three-hour-long concerts just because people are crazy to go to it. And she's an entertainer, which is to say she, like, is a, it's a service profession in an important way. And, but she's sort of- They're all entertainers. That's an astonishing number of people. And he said he's puzzled that I would be interested in and attracted to such a person who lives such an opposite life from mine. And I'm like, well, an egoist would be attracted to altruists. It's a perfect combination, right?

Robin:

Are just all entertainers to be framed as altruists or is she somehow unusually altruistic?

Agnes:

I think that all of them are, and she's just kind of an entertainer par excellence. That is, she is, you know, she's a coordination point. All these people who want to identify with some public figure, she supplies them. being the public figure with whom they can identify. And she kind of makes herself into the perfect thing for that role. Like she's, she's given herself over to that job. And so that's, I think many entertainers do some of that. She just does a lot of it.

Robin:

So I've been thinking about culture a lot lately and I can say, I can be interested in Taylor Swift because at least compared to most musicians I'm familiar with, she is taking a cultural stance and letting people identify with her and her stance as a way to affirm certain opinions about culture. That is, I think this is what high culture often does. We expect of it. and we allow it to do more than other things is to influence our culture by letting people embrace some identity and its norm, the associated norms and behavior and say that this is okay or even laudatory. And that's the way culture changes by these icons that we can embrace and model after to some extent. And she is doing that. And so we, the interesting thing I'm, I could find talking about her is to ask, well, what is this identity that she is presenting and that people do so eagerly identify with? And, uh, what does it conflict with? Like she says she has haters. So there's people who think her cultural identity is not what they want and try to understand that conflict.

Agnes:

Right, so we decided to focus on six songs. I'm just going to say which songs they are. I Knew You Were Trouble, You Belong With Me, The Man, Shake It Off, Antihero, and Cruel Summer. That's pretty good distribution over her albums, and they're also chosen from songs that she's going to be singing at the Eris tour, because I'm going to see that performance in like two weeks.

Robin:

Three of them are her top most popular songs, so they aren't random songs.

Agnes:

Yes, they're all pretty popular and a few of them are her most popular songs. Okay, so in like going over these songs, listening to them, watching the videos, reading the lyrics, the first thing that struck me about all of them is that they're all complaints. All of her songs are complaining about something.

Robin:

Although, there are complaints even when she explicitly claims to be taking responsibility for herself, interestingly, so that she still manages to complain, even as she says, it's my fault.

Agnes:

Right, right. So the anti-hero, she says, I'm the problem, it's me. And this becomes really explicit in the video that there's two Taylors, it's like the bad Taylor and the good Taylor. So it's her fault, but the Taylor who she is afflicting can still complain about it. And she can still feel sorry for herself, I mean, anti-hero is a nice, in a way, I'm glad we chose that one because she is, she's saying, it's really hard to be as powerful as I am and you should feel sorry for me. Precisely because when you're this powerful, nobody will ever feel sorry for you. She says like, she's like, she describes herself as a monster, like a giant. And in the video, she's a giant. There's little people who are all scared of her.

Robin:

But she doesn't really mean it. I mean, in the sense that, you know, nobody would say, I'm really like Stalin or Hitler, so you should feel sorry for me, because almost nobody does. I mean, people wouldn't actually feel very willing to be sorry for someone who represents iconically bad personas. So there's a sense in which she can't entirely mean it. that she does, she thinks she deserves and will get sympathy. Now in a complaint, like we could distinguish a complaint where we say, you know, feel sorry for me versus a complaint targeted at someone else. Does she complain about other people versus just feel sorry for me? It seems like she does, but she's not very specific exactly about who they are, but there are these unnamed haters and heartbreakers and fakers and all sorts of people she somewhat complains about.

Agnes:

Right, so in You Belong With Me, she complains about the guy's girlfriend who doesn't deserve him and how he should pick her instead. In The Man, she's complaining about sexism generally. In Shake It Off, she's complaining about her haters. In Cruel Summer and I Knew You Were Trouble, she's complaining about the guy, or I guess Cruel Summer is more like the volatility of romance in general. So it's arraigned, the things that she does.

Robin:

I mean, with respect to the men, she does seem to sit on the line of owning the choice to be with these men, but also pointing out their flaws. And she would like them to be better along certain dimensions, but she still chose them knowing who they were. And it's hinted that who they were was attractive. It's part of what attracted her to them.

Agnes:

Right. So, I mean, and that's in this, in, in any, in, in these two songs, um, there's, there's a self-awareness about going after something that, you know, in advance is going to be painful or short-lived or, you know, uh, bad in certain ways. I don't, I don't think that's true of all of her love songs. Sometimes she's just willing to blame, but, um, uh, But so maybe that's like part of her art form is creating a challenge case for a complaint, right? Describing a scenario where it's gonna be a bit hard to lodge a complaint in that scenario and then managing to lodge it anyway and managing to get it to kind of hit where the listener takes it up, is willing to receive it.

Robin:

Although not all listeners as equally embrace her. So we have this split in the world. Some people don't like her that much and other people like her a lot. And then there's apparently a lot of hostility. Her fans are often sensitive to whether other people like her enough.

Agnes:

Right. So, um, I think, you know, that's sort of the thing I was getting at the beginning is that she is an identity. So you can, and I think it's sort of disproportionately younger women. who will identify themselves as Swifties where that's a really big part of who they are. And then if that's who you are, then if somebody doesn't like Taylor Swift, they're in some sense standing in opposition to your very identity. And that's itself going to incentivize a class of anti-Swifties, right? Because now being against Taylor Swift is also an identity. Yeah.

Robin:

So would it help to maybe summarize what exactly this identity she projects is? who is this stereotypical character that she presents in these songs. Now, we don't have to believe that she personally is these people, these characters, although it does seem like the life that we hear about her somewhat fits the characters in her songs, that there doesn't seem to be a huge difference, at least in public reports of her life. from how she lives her life and these characters. So that's of course helping people embrace this identity. But what would we say is this identity? Well, what sort of a person is she exactly?

Agnes:

I think that the divide is really over the receptivity to her complaints, where the people who like her music, and I am in that category, are people who hear these complaints and are willing to receive them. And I'm in some sense empathetic to her predicament Even like, you know, I got together with this guy. I knew in advance he was going to break my heart. It was going to be a disaster. I did it anyways. I want you to still feel sorry for me. And I'm someone who's like, yeah, I feel sorry for you about that. But I think there's a there's a group of people who don't who don't want to respond to that call for empathy for a variety of reasons. When you look online, people say, oh, well, she's a privileged white woman, which, i.e., she shouldn't be complaining. You could also say she's just one of the most powerful people in the world. What does she have to complain about? Of course, that's what antihero is about. It sucks being one of the most powerful people in the world because people think you have nothing to complain about. And then when I hear that, I'm like, yeah, that makes sense to me. I feel sorry for you. I'm willing to respond empathetically to that complaint about how hard it is to be so powerful. So I guess the divide in terms of this identity is I think whether you respond to this or whether you respond in the opposite way and say, get over yourself.

Robin:

Let's linger longer on what the identity is, though, and what she's asking for sympathy about. She's not mostly asking for sympathy about her power.

Agnes:

And she actually is quite often asking for sympathy about her power. Shake it off is partly about that. But that's the I green up most.

Robin:

Okay, so the way I see the persona, I seen it projected is that she is a woman who wants to live a somewhat wild life. She can, she has the money and popularity and looks, et cetera, to live a wildlife. And her wildlife definitely consists often of meeting a lot of new guys that she's attracted to and having intense relationships with them that have a lot of emotion and disruption and then a lot of pain. And she knows that, and nevertheless, she still wants to continue having these volatile, you know, promiscuous, frequently changing relationships. And she basically gets why it causes the pain it causes her. And she wants to keep doing it. And she, but she wants sympathy for the pain that she's getting through this process. And she feels a little, you know, upset that other people like look down on her lifestyle. And she feels a little negative against the men who don't treat her as well as she would like, although she also admits that that attracts her to them in many ways. And then she also has a bit of a hostility toward men who have a parallel role in the world of music, where they're also presenting a world of their promiscuity. and embracing it, but she, in the song, The Man, tries to highlight the differences between how she is, you know, seen in that role and how the men are seen in that role.

Agnes:

I think all of that is right except the part about the promiscuity. That is, I think that she presents herself as like searching for true love and understanding that that search is going to cause pain. And, you know, maybe it's a really hard search or she has very high standards or whatever, but I don't think it is just, like, I can imagine a male counterpart that's just happy about all his sexual conquests or something. That's very different from her. The reason why she keeps getting so hurt is that she keeps thinking this guy might be the one. So she has a category of the one. that repeatedly.

Robin:

But in none of these six songs does the phrase the one show up. So she has a lot more songs than we're studying here, but I don't see anything in these six songs that indicates that she's looking for the one.

Agnes:

I mean, you belong with me forever.

Robin:

She doesn't say how long he belongs with her. I mean, all these guys, she likes them for a while. There's no one that's a life. I'm the one for now.

Agnes:

I'm the only one who understands you.

Robin:

For now, there's no indication that that's about a long-duration relationship. She wants him now.

Agnes:

It has already been a long-duration relationship.

Robin:

There's been a time they were together.

Agnes:

Why can't you see you belong with me? I definitely think it's very easy to see you belong with me as She gets that guy, she's gonna break up with him in six months or something. That's very consistent with her story, but from the point of view of the song, the idea is, you know, what you're looking for has been here the whole time, and it's me. I'm the one you've been searching for. And it's this fantasy, right, of... Like that the man would have, like the woman, this hunt for the perfect woman. And then she presents herself. I'm the perfect woman who you've been looking for all along. Um, and I, I do think the idea there is of like finding someone and staying with them. And I don't know of any song that she has that glorifies having many promiscuous relationships. No individual song does that. It's just that she has a lot of different songs about a lot of different relationships.

Robin:

Well, I mean, for example, Shake It Off explicitly talks about how when, you know, one guy makes you feel bad, you jump in and find another guy. I mean, there's nothing, no hint there at all about looking for the perfect relationship. It's about, she does feel the pain of the breakup and the jealousy, and the whole story is shake it off, like enjoy yourself. Just suppress these feelings.

Agnes:

Well, yeah, but like you wouldn't feel jealousy. So what happens in the song is that her ex-boyfriend brings his new girlfriend and she sees that and so she like calls some guy over to say, you know, come here and hang out with me so that I don't seem like I'm not with anybody. Uh, where that is, she still cares about her ex-boyfriend and how he sees her, right? So she's not just moving on from one guy to the next. She's pretending to do that in order to, like, uh, you know, not, um, in order to seem, um, less committed than she is.

Robin:

So the standard story about music lyrics, which I think applies to Taylor as well, is that music lyrics need to be designed at a level of ambiguity or abstraction so that they evoke particular emotional responses, but still allow a wide range of interpretations so that different sorts of listeners in different states of mind, et cetera, can still embrace them. And I think we should note here or accept that she is, probably purposely being ambiguous about this point. That is...

Agnes:

Read, but I just don't think that Shake It Off is some kind of anthem to promiscuity. I think that it's about being positive, right? So Shake It Off is the closest to a counterexample to my interpretive point that these are all complaints. I think it's still a complaint because just below the surface is a complaint about these haters, right? That is, she's clearly thinking about the haters because she wrote a song about them.

Robin:

She's not ignoring them, but I think this is probably an ambiguity in the minds of many of the fans of Taylor and it's a key social issue that I just want to point out and we can pursue if we want, but I agree that in her mind at any one moment she feels passionately about these men, and often wants them to be much closer to her, and feels hurt that they distance themselves or leave her, etc. So she's very much focused on, she doesn't obviously, when I say promiscuous, I don't mean that she just wants sex, say. She's looking for many elements of these relationships. Um, but it's, she doesn't really talk about how long she wants the relationships to go. And the observed behavior from her life and clearly from these songs is that she is having many short-term relationships. And in fact, like one of the, the, the beginning of Shake It Off, she says that people complain that she stays up too late, has too many dates and can't make any of them stay. That's explicitly about how short-term relationships tend to be, right? So she acknowledges that that's her pattern.

Agnes:

It's a pretty significant fact about romance as it's presented in her songs that she is Well, that she's a romantic, which is to say she's looking for true love. And that's exactly why when a guy breaks up with her, she's heartbroken because she thought that was true love. If she was just going to go from one guy to another, guy breaks up with her and move on, right? She has to pretend to move on and shake it off.

Robin:

So I can see that you believe that and she may be inviting you for that interpretation, but she doesn't make it clear. So as I said, often singers try to allow a wide range of people to embrace the music. And I would claim here she is just not making it clear what exactly true love is. That is, there's definitely love she enjoys a lot more than other love. And it's not just sex, clearly. It's a full relationship. But she does admit and somewhat accept having many relationships that don't last that long. And she admits that she starts many relationships pretty much based on lust or something. You know, they're not based on an overall view of this person's life and prospects or things like that. I mean, they're relatively... That would not be romantic. Okay.

Agnes:

Like, so what I'm saying is she's a romantic. A romantic doesn't form relationships with a view to finding a husband and having kids. A romantic forms a relationship with a view to true love.

Robin:

There are different concepts of romantic, and that's her stance is that particular kind of romantic, that a romantic just reacts immediately to the person in front of them without thinking about whether he's good for her.

Agnes:

Right, exactly. In fact, in fact, she might think he's bad for me.

Robin:

That's... Right, but her concept of romance is the way to find true love is to keep pursuing whatever men she immediately feels attracted to in the moment, regardless of other consideration. That's what her concept of romance is.

Agnes:

I mean, I even think that's not a great way to, like, live my life, but she feels that she can't do anything else. And that's also romantic.

Robin:

A version of romantic. I'm sorry? It's a version of romantic.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

I mean, the concept of romantic has been, you know, varied over years and contested. And this is part of the cultural fight. She is the person standing for this concept of romantic.

Agnes:

Right, right. But I do think that that is a big part of her appeal, is that people want to hear about romantic trauma. They're interested, they're fascinated by romantic trauma, maybe more than any other topic. And that is, they're not just interested in love, they're interested in when love goes wrong. And they want to be on the inside of that experience. They want to be looking at a person in the moment where they're the most devastated by romance. And then they want to hear the voice that comes out of that experience. And that's where a lot of her songs are coming from. I think that's a big part of her appeal.

Robin:

Sure. Many other people who sing about romance or write stories about romance, they have different visions of what could go wrong in part based on what you would have been doing to avoid the things that went wrong. And many complaints that you would have differently, depending on what your vision of how you should be getting into the right sort of relationship would be. And that directs your complaints and your angst and emotional pain toward the causes that you think are to blame for your situation. And her framing of it makes her choose a different sorts of blame. And so in some sense, she often just blames the fact of romance. without blaming any particular other cause, whereas other people in romance, if it goes wrong, they might blame the person for misleading them. They might blame Romeo and Juliet that the society wouldn't accept them, right?

Agnes:

I think she blames all those things, too. It's not exclusive. That's part of what makes her a good complainer. She can complain about everything. She can complain about the fact that she's complaining at the same time. And it all works. It all fits. I think that... I wanted to say something about... I don't know, I lost my train of thought.

Robin:

Go on. I think, again, it's worth comparing her to the men that she compares herself to. So in the song, The Man, she complains that there are these men who have somewhat similar songs about romance, and they are treated differently than her, and she thinks that's not fair. And I asked Chat GPT sort of to name the sort of men she might have in mind. and gave me a list, and these, they're mostly bragging actually about financial success, but when they brag about romantic success, they are, or, you know, in the same way she might be, they are, or she might hope she could in this song, The Man, they're tending to brag about promiscuity, but they don't tend to complain much about it. And they are in a sort of seductive mode where they're basically as if they were singing to the woman and of course bragging to men that she can't resist him. But not at all complaining about the situation, bragging about it. And so strikingly compared to these men that she compares herself to, she's complaining a lot more while they're bragging more. And they are trying to be seductive and she is not. So it's strikingly that Taylor Swift is sexual in the sense that she's talking about sexual topics, but not at all trying to be seductive in her style of singing and presentation.

Agnes:

Right. I think that that's right. I think that she's not very sexy in her songs. Even in songs where she's presenting herself as a bad girl.

Robin:

So she's mostly not singing to the men, exactly. She's more singing to other women.

Agnes:

That's right. She's not singing to the men. I think so. I think it's it's not just Taylor. I think that a lot. So my husband noticed at one point that he said to me why do so many pop songs by women have them be lying on the floor. He's like. It's just really common that the woman in a pop song is lying on the floor. He's like, why are you lying on the floor? Why don't you sit on a chair somewhere comfortable? They're always on the floor. And that's in, I think there's a line in I Knew You Were Trouble where she's on the floor. She's on the ground in the video. So I think it's like a trope. for, you know, like, women singing about love are often singing about the ways in which they have just been devastated, whereas men are often... I mean, men sometimes sing those songs, too, but the kind of conquest song is more of a male trope, I guess. I don't actually know such songs, but I believe that they exist, and she does seem to be referring to them in The Man, though she's more referring in The Man how the outside world would view her relationship practices. But yeah, I think you're right that the difference between her and a man is not only how the world treats her, but the kind of songs that she writes. She doesn't write the kind of songs that men write. She writes the kind of songs that women write, and they are songs about being laid low by love. They're not braggy songs.

Robin:

Well, now let's pause there. They're kind of bragging about being laid low by love.

Agnes:

Okay, right. So they're not bragging about the ability to attract men.

Robin:

Well, they kind of are. I mean, she is announcing and, you know, very much declaring that she can have lots of men and she wants to keep doing that.

Agnes:

I really don't think that's right. That is, I don't think she's saying she's going to keep having lots of relationships. I think what she's saying is, I'm going to find the one where that might entail having lots of relationships.

Robin:

But she definitely thinks that she's in the club and there's a really attractive guy. She could get it. Like, she's not the sort of person who might say, well, you know, I'll have to pick some guy who is in my league who I might possibly be able to get. And there's all those other people over there and somebody above. There's nobody in her view that she doesn't think she has a shot at. That's her perception.

Agnes:

That's true, but I don't think that that's... That's kind of braggy. I think that that's true about her, but I don't think that a lot of her songs are trying to express that thought.

Robin:

They aren't trying, but they do imply it.

Agnes:

Right. But I, I think that is different from songs that are about that. And from people who that's like what their, their songs are about.

Robin:

Like I could get any woman. And I think that's part of the attraction to being a Taylor fan is to that fact that she is popular and powerful and that she can have her own way, do things her way and get whatever guy she wants. Yeah. I think that's part of the attraction. in the same way that an attraction for a male singer could be that he could get any woman he wants. I mean, that's part of being a fan.

Agnes:

Yeah, I mean, I guess to me there's something about that that doesn't fit, where a huge part of the identification with Taylor is the thought that she is unlucky in love, that love does not work out for her and she can't make it work out the way that she wants it to work out. And that's a big part of what people like about her. Her fans are attracted to her being unlucky and unsuccessful in love. She presents herself as unsuccessful, not as successful.

Robin:

Right, but I think that's also what puts people off about her, is exactly this pretense that we should feel sorry for her because she's unlucky, where it looks plausible that the outcomes she's getting are a result of her behavior.

Agnes:

She's very open about that. She agrees.

Robin:

Well, yes, but then she can't be unlucky if If the outcomes are resulting from her behavior, we can't have it both ways.

Agnes:

I mean... I think that you can if we just imagine that she has really, really high standards. So if you have standard of influencing the future 500 or 1,000 years from now in a kind of really large scale way, that standard, that ambition is actually I think a lot higher than Taylor Swift's. And you could become frustrated by the fact that people are taking up your ideas enough and you're not getting your incredibly hard to achieve goal. And we might be sympathetic about that, even though it's like, yeah, but that goal is really hard to achieve.

Robin:

But I would find it very embarrassing to even be asking for sympathy for such a thing, whereas she's not, obviously, and her fans... I think you have sympathy all the time.

Agnes:

I think you complain on Twitter all the time.

Robin:

Okay.

Agnes:

Not getting the recognition you deserve. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I love complaint, as you know, but I just, I don't think that's true.

Robin:

So if we, I mean, so like in the space of different female personas, stances, she's representing one among many, but a popular one. And there are also various stances men could have. And I do think I will accept that popular stances are often ones that people would like to sort of inhabit, even if they're not that fair or realistic. Men will also be happy to make unfair complaints if they can get away with them.

Agnes:

Is there anything unfair about her complaints?

Robin:

She, you know, like- She has crazy high standards and we should accept that because she's, as you know, she's rich and popular and beautiful.

Agnes:

No, no, there's no should about it. Many, many people simply do accept it. That is, she makes it work. She sings the song and, you know, lots and lots of people are empathetic. And if you're not, one of the haters, whatever, she's going to brush you off. She doesn't need you. She's got a lot of people who respond. to what she's saying. That is, he makes an affective complaint. There's nothing unjust or unfair about it.

Robin:

And I would think part of the attraction is that her fans can then embrace her complaint in their own mental voice, and then they can also feel sympathetic to themselves, even if their objective situation isn't very bad either. They can feel bad about their recent breakup, even if they know it's their own fault, and even if they know they've got a pretty good deal compared to other people, they could still and enjoy her songs, the songs could give them comfort because they're the songs of asking for sympathy for and getting sympathy for their self-complaint.

Agnes:

Right, we all know that all of us have it incredibly good compared to almost everybody in human history, right? And yet we all complain all the time about things. And it's pretty important to us to maintain that structure of complaint and the legitimacy of complaint. And it's a really big part of what it is to be close to someone is that they're receptive to your complaints. And I think this is a big part of why Taylor's listeners feel really close to her because she complains to them and they respond. They're like, oh, Taylor, I feel for you. And that's kind of a big part of what closeness is. And yeah, but this is not a special thing about Taylor. All of us are all the time doing this thing where we pretend like our problems are way bigger than they are.

Robin:

Now, a great many songs by men about romance describe a man in the moment of feeling intensely about some romantic partner. And then typically, he's either happy or sad, depending on if she's rejecting him or rejected him, or whether she is open and, you know, possibly going to be with him, right? So for men, there's this happy because she's accepting me or sad because she's rejecting me distinction of songs. And, you know, it's certainly true that men will present those emotions and listeners will sympathize with them regardless of how deserving those people might be of those reactions, right? I mean, if I just present emotionally very compellingly how I'm sad that she's rejecting me, We might not care that much whether we think you deserved that because we just want to relate to your situation. And the same for the man who is excited by this prospect of a woman who he's really interested in and it might go well. And we can relate to that again, regardless of the prospect of how well it will go. Or how much he deserves it, right? So, I mean, we can make the comparison there with Taylor Swift and just say that in general, songs invite us to identify with a speaker describing the situation and then relate to their reaction to that situation without making that many judgments about the overall context and how well off they are. Right. Um, but typically, um, you know, it's either one or the other for men. So the odd thing relative to that for Taylor Swift is that she's doing both. She's asking for our sympathy for her pain in the relationships and presenting her as basically getting all the men she wants usually.

Agnes:

I don't really think she presents herself as getting all the men she wants. I just think that's a thing you're reading into. I think later after this, ask Shanty PT. And I think this is my bet. Well, we'll defer that. I don't think like, for instance, the Beatles, a lot of their, especially a lot of their earlier songs are just about, I want some girl and I'm what you do. You know, won't you love me? I don't think that they're mostly shunned off about being able to get any girls they want either. So I don't think that's the main, of course they could get any girl they wanted, but I don't think that's what they was coming through in their songs. I think that, so a lot of their songs, their love songs are directed at the girl and be like, I want you to love me. Taylor songs, I think, I mean, maybe there's one that is like that, but it's not occurring to me.

Robin:

I guess the analog for men might be songs where the guy talks about being attracted to someone that he knows isn't good for her.

Agnes:

That he knows isn't good for him.

Robin:

Right. For him. Right. Exactly. Sorry. Right. That would be more analogous because Taylor is more consistently describing being attracted to men where she has contextual cues and even says that, you know, this is probably going to go badly and even calls him a bad boy, but is still attracted. And I guess there must be songs like that for men, but they're more rare, certainly.

Agnes:

So I think that the men often represent themselves as, in some sense, slaves to or beholden to the whim of the woman. And the woman represents herself as slave to or beholden to her own whims, right? So she's like, I know this guy's bad for me, but I can't control myself. So I think they agree. And, um, uh, but it, um, I've been looking up and I'm actually struck by how many Beatles songs are second person address. Help is like that.

Robin:

Right. Right, so women are often wooing. Men are often wooing women by singing to them. That's a stereotype. Right.

Agnes:

Right, exactly. And so Taylor's really not doing that. She's lamenting. She's complaining. It's not second personal address. It's third personal. Right now, even the third personal songs, like I saw her standing there. Oh, I saw a hot girl and I was going to fall in love with her. It's a beautiful song. It's not complaining. It's just like, you know, I was looking forward to when we would get together.

Robin:

Now, You Belong to Me is technically addressed to him.

Agnes:

That's true. You're right. It is. So it's addressed to him, but it's very, very clear that he's not listening. Right.

Robin:

Right. And it's not really trying very hard to attract him.

Agnes:

Right. It's really about, like, it's something that she can't say to him. So she's pretending to talk to him about his girlfriend. She knows it's not appropriate. And so it's second personal, but it's not really. It's really addressed to the audience. I think Taylor is very conscious about speaking to her fans. Her fans are who she's singing to, not the men.

Robin:

Right. But I think it's interesting that the reasons she gives for why he belongs to her are not the reasons she tends to give for why she's attracted to guys. That is, she wants him to choose her for these more traditional, you know, long-life compatibility friendships sorts of features. I mean, but when she's attracted to guys, basically, well, they're just hot and she can't hold herself back. But when she wants him to be attracted to hers, she wants us to have a deep understanding and connection and that it will be comfortable around me.

Agnes:

We have good conversation. He wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts. So she's actually representing herself as chaste.

Robin:

Right. That's an interesting contrast there.

Agnes:

Yeah, that's a good point.

Robin:

I mean, because often, like, if a woman, I mean, there are songs where a woman addresses a man and tries to seduce him, and she's not doing that here. She is saying, I would make good wife material, almost, or good, you know.

Agnes:

Yeah. Right, right. You're just, you know, you're just getting your cheap thrills with that other girl, but, yeah.

Robin:

Right, but if you can imagine a man saying those same lines to her about why they'd be better for, you know, that man would be better for Taylor instead of the men she wants, we don't expect her to be especially sympathetic or especially persuaded. That's not romantic for her, you see. A man singing about how he understands her and, you know, he wears t-shirts, that's just not going to persuade her. It's pretty clear from her descriptions of what attracts her about men.

Agnes:

Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about Paper Rings, which is another song. It's a kind of very happy song about I would marry you with paper rings, i.e. you don't have to get me a fancy diamond ring.

Robin:

Yeah.

Agnes:

And, you know, I think that in that song, There's something close to the way she feels about him. There's something close to the way that she wants the guy in You Belong With Me to feel about her.

Robin:

So a related comment in, say, Cruel Summer, she says, if I bleed, you'll be the last to know. That is, I think that presents herself as trying to be the fun girl and suppressing her emotional attachment. And I think that fits with some of the other songs, that is, she is purposely taking this strategy of instead of being the, you know, person you have a deep relationship with, she is trying to be fun and light and, you know, easy.

Agnes:

I don't think at all she's trying to be smiling like Lisa. That's just a total misreading of the song. The song is about how she wants passionate drama. Not light, not easy. And that's what she's after. But, you know, it's what doesn't kill me makes me want you more. That's not, I'm easygoing.

Robin:

No, but it's about how she's presenting herself to the man. If I bleed, you'll be the last to know, means she is suppressing her bleeding. That is, she is hiding it from him.

Agnes:

Right. She feels she has to hide from him how much she feels for him. Because if she reveals that, like, there's gonna, you know, he'll be cruel to her. So she says, I love you, ain't that the worst thing you ever heard? He looks up, grinning like a devil.

Robin:

Right. So so we're we have a stereotypic description here of a relationship where in order to be popular with these men, she has to suppress her feelings of various sorts.

Agnes:

I don't want to keep secrets just to keep you in line in that song.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

So she she has to not tell him that she's bleeding. She doesn't want to not tell him, but she feels that the drama will be over if she reveals. So there's something. I mean, I agree. That's a really interesting song. Cruel Summer is a really interesting song because it is somehow about the untenability of the picture of romance that she has, which is such that it's striving after something, but if you revealed that you were even getting close to it or getting it, the thing would be over. So it's kind of still...

Robin:

So let's contrast her relationships with say a classic Victorian story of a man wooing a woman, you know, and, uh, from a distance, you know, basically, and they have a chaperone with their meetings and they discuss, you know, their thoughts and feelings before they ever get to kiss. And in that sort of a relationship, right. Um, her feelings will be explained much earlier, uh, that she will be willing to, you know, talk about and admit her, how much, what she feels about him, whether she's like her or not.

Agnes:

Whistle majorly. That's the way it goes in all them stories. And also, all of those stories end when they get married. So, like, it's not that, didn't remember the Taylor Swift thing, it's just that she has to, her life has to keep going. Her life isn't a story, so then she's got another one. But those romances, typically there's no real way to talk about the romance once they're together. It's something where it leads to this, you know, kind of climax, And that would be the, you know, saying I love you. But once you've done that, the game's up.

Robin:

OK, so from the from the point of view of this key ambiguity, is she looking for a long term relationship? We might look for cues in her behavior. You know, where would you go or what would you do if you were looking for a long term relationship as opposed to a sequence of short term relationships?

Agnes:

I don't think she's looking for either. I think this is the wrong way to frame her motivations. She's looking for true love. Whichever that means after the long term or short term. But I think that in Cruel Summer, you get a kind of critique of that as a goal. That is, it's not clear that it makes sense to want true love because it looks like true love in a way is a summer fling where you don't reveal how much you like the person. And then you have to live with the misery of the breakup. That's what true love is. That's really the... And then that's saying to yourself, maybe this is what I've been going for. It's the drama rather than anything like a long-term relationship.

Robin:

So many of us looking at these lyrics will think that surely she must know that the strategies she's taking are more conducive to a series of short-term relationships than a long-term relationship. But you're saying, no, she doesn't know that or won't see it or it's not true.

Agnes:

I think it's not salient to her. That is, I think that it's not strategic. So I think the thing I said earlier is really relevant, which is that the men, like even the Beatles in their Beatles love songs, represent themselves as hostage to the whims of the woman. And the woman also represents herself as hostage to her own whims that drag her around. such that she's not strategizing, she's not in control of this. Anyway, the picture that she gives, right? She doesn't have a plan. There's nothing she's working out. This is what love is. She feels passionate emotions and they drag her around.

Robin:

She is smart enough to notice what's happening when she falls.

Agnes:

And the men are also smart enough to notice what's happening, right? That they're being dragged around by these whims, but it's not a big difference.

Robin:

But we still think they should be able to predict whether this sort of behavior dragged around these sort of whims will end up with a series of short-term relationships or one long-term one. So her latest album, I looked at an article about it and it was counting up which songs were inspired by which boyfriends. And there were apparently four different boyfriends who could plausibly have been the source of inspiration of the songs in her latest album. I mean, that's some degree of showing how many relationships she's has.

Agnes:

Um, each of these is presented as... I don't think she has an above... has had an above average number of relationships for, like, a 35-year-old woman. I think... I mean, like, her relationships last, like, you know, six months, a year, something like that. That's not unusual. That's what my relationships were like when I was, like, you know, before I got married. Um, I just don't actually think she's... she's unusual.

Robin:

You got married before 35, though?

Agnes:

Well, I'm saying before I got married, the pattern of how long I would date people is about how long Taylor dates people. She's not, she doesn't have a new guy every week.

Robin:

I think I would postulate that the identity people feel eager to embrace about her and the hostility or hating that other people have and rejecting that identity are associated with perceptions of promiscuity and the kinds of relationships she's having. That seems to me plausible as the key lightning rod that's attracting or repelling people here. If we're just going to see her as someone who has typical relationships and then has typical breakups, it's hard to see that as a polarizing identity.

Agnes:

I think that part of why women identify with her is that she's having typical experiences. Namely, she gets really into some guy. She might even know it's not going to work out, but she's into him for three months, six months, and then she's heartbroken. That's just not unusual or atypical. A lot of women can relate to it.

Robin:

Well, a lot of women can relate to having had one or maybe two of that, but she's presenting herself as that's the norm for her. And I think that's the polarizing part.

Agnes:

Maybe. I mean, like. I can see that some of her haters hate that about her because in general men have trouble handling the fact that women have multiple relationships. So yes, I can imagine that there are many people, I guess it would be particularly men, who dislike her.

Robin:

In the song The Man, that is her description of why people are hating on her. That is her story about what she sees as polarizing about herself. She says, if I were a man, I could get away with this. But when I'm just presenting myself as having all these relationships, then people hate on me about that unfairly because they would be okay with it if I were a man. So that's her presentation of what makes her distinctive.

Agnes:

I mean, that's her presentation of why, like, that song is about gender inequality. And so she's focusing on the aspects of her life where that, you know, has an impact on her life.

Robin:

But surely most.

Agnes:

Who am I? I think that.

Robin:

She doesn't present this as this complaint could equally be made about any female singer. She's presenting it as a complaint particularly about her as a female singer.

Agnes:

Sure, but I think it's partly, like, the complaint isn't only about her love life. It's also just about her success and, like, the level of, the stature she's reached in society, where then she's subjected to certain forms of criticism that a man wouldn't be, which is probably true. But the criticism is in part- But not a song about herself, really. Like, that is, I think Antihero is much more a song about herself, about what it's like to be Taylor Swift. Um, and, uh, whereas, um, you know, the man is, is more just about sexism as it has, uh, had an impact on her life.

Robin:

So let's talk about anti-hero then, because I think that's similar to the themes in The Man. What does she admit to doing wrong? She says she's the problem, but what specifically does she say she does wrong as a problem? Well, she says she doesn't learn from her mistakes. Older, but never wiser. She says she ghosts people, i.e. once she's no longer interested, she just drops them.

Agnes:

There's no suggestion that's romantic in that, right?

Robin:

I mean, Most of these things are romantic. I mean, come on.

Agnes:

The song goes on to give an example, and it's her daughter-in-law and her children and stuff.

Robin:

Well, that's an example. That's a separate example of imagining a contest about her will or something. That's not about ghosting.

Agnes:

Well, the song is about her connection to the people around her, and she's ghosted many of them. She's ghosted many of the people in her own life. She's detected many of them. Where do you think Antithera- And eventually she gives an example.

Robin:

You think it either has nothing to do with the relationship with men whatsoever. It's all about her family.

Agnes:

I don't. No, I think it may include the men. I just don't think there's any suggestion in the song that it's about the men.

Robin:

But it includes the men.

Agnes:

Sure, it includes the men. OK, well, then we're... This is a song about romance. Right, but it's a song about... It's a song about, like, what it's like to be a celebrity and whether that's compatible with being close to the people around you, including romantically. But it's not fundamentally about romance.

Robin:

I was trying to suggest that the man was about her distinct identity as a singer compared to men she compares herself to, as opposed to just generically all women singers. And so you said, well, anti-hero is more about who she is. So I could point to those things in anti-hero that says who she is and relate that to the man. I hear her reminds, but you're going to resist making the connection between her anti-hero behavior and her behavior to men.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, I think that even in The Man, only some of it is about romance. It's like she would be a fearless leader. Everyone would believe her.

Robin:

Look, the basic issue we have here is to ask whether she is just a generic woman singing about generic female situations in romance that have nothing particular about any particular lifestyle or type of person or anything, or whether she's presenting a distinctive identity that has particular stances toward romance and men, et cetera, and that as that particular identity, she has a particular pattern of behavior and pattern of situations and that she is as a result of that particular person getting people to like her and identify with her on the basis of those particular stances, and then getting haters on the basis of that as well. I'm saying that she seems to be taking a particular stance, and that's exactly why she's polarizing but also attractive identity, as she's not just a generic woman in generic romantic situations.

Agnes:

I mean, I agree that, for instance, in many of these things, she's presenting herself as very powerful and as a celebrity, so that's not just a generic woman. But I think, qua romantic, she is at least telegraphing a very prevalent romantic trope. I'm not saying it's the only one. But it's one that is very, very common. It's very commonplace. It doesn't make her very distinctive. And that's why tons of people identify with it. There may be lots of people who dislike it. And I think she's right that many people dislike it and dislike her for it. But it's not that idiosyncratic.

Robin:

What is your theory about what people don't like, if not for some distinctive stance toward romance? Most of her songs are romances, and it seems to me she has a distinctive stance for romance. She does have haters. What else could they be hating exactly?

Agnes:

I'm not sure. I'm not one of her haters, so I don't have the capability of handling that. And it's quite possible that people hear it for a lot of different reasons.

Robin:

But as we said before, even the fans are often sensitive to other people not being enough of a fan of her. So the fans are therefore seeing in their mind some stance that would be unsympathetic toward their identity? What's that unsympathetic stance that the fans suspect that the non-fans have? Surely there's a distinctive stance here that the fans want people to support and sympathize with that they fear they don't.

Agnes:

So in that Cut article about friends breaking up over Taylor Swift, it is that the fans think that the people who dislike or hate Taylor Swift are misogynist. Not that they have a problem with some particular romantic thing, but that they have a problem with women in general, which is just what people demand, right?

Robin:

But most of the stories are about other women who were, you know, rejected.

Agnes:

Internalized. Yeah, that's why it's internalized misogyny. I'm not saying it's a good theory. I'm saying this is the kind of thing people are putting forward as a theory, and this is the theory that she herself is putting forward in the man. It's misogyny. That is, the things that they dislike about me they'd be fine with in a man.

Robin:

There are different standards for men and for women, and I've seen ways that... Yeah, but some of it must be a particular stance toward what women can or should be doing and how they act that we would be hating about women. That is, that would be... If there are people who are hating women through Taylor Swift's description, there must be something about how Taylor Swift behaves or reacts, et cetera, that they would be hating. So we could still ask, what is it the particular behavior and feelings of Taylor Swift that We postulate the fans think that the haters hate. That's the key question. If you say it's just generic things that all women support everywhere, well, then we can't find that thing that people think they're hating.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, I guess I'm just not sure there is going to be a good answer to the question, what unifies all the haters? Because pretty much any celebrity has lots of haters, and the bigger the celebrity, the more the haters.

Robin:

Okay, but that can't be the thing that's animating the people rejecting their friends because they aren't enough of a fan. They must have a more specific fear in their head other than just generically a thousand different ways somebody could be a hater.

Agnes:

I gave you an analysis earlier, which is that If Taylor Swift is a huge part of your identity, and if you see yourself, you know, who you are, as in some sense, someone who is Taylor Swift, then people around you who are, like, rejecting Taylor, you feel like they're rejecting you.

Robin:

But there would have to be some identity of Taylor that they were rejecting about you, not just... I mean, many people... Like, say you're a fan of a sports team, okay?

Agnes:

And it's the main thing in your life. You're super, super into this person. And they have a known enemy team or something. Right. You can't be friends with someone who's a fan of the enemy team. Not anything specific that they're rejecting about your team. They're not saying your team is bad in some way.

Robin:

What if they just don't care about your sport? Then that would be more odd to reject them rather than they support an opposing team. So my hypothesis here is that, in fact, people are coding and seeing Taylor Swift as being relatively promiscuous. That is having many short, relatively short-term relationships and being kind of okay with that. And being focused on how hot the guy is at her first interaction with them and knowing that he's not going to be that good for her and being willing to still go ahead with the relationships. That's the persona that she embraces that her fans sympathize with and want to identify with that the other people are hostile to.

Agnes:

I guess I think that it's not so much the promiscuity that may be a necessary condition, but it is the

Robin:

And complaining about it, that is. And feeling entitled to complain about it.

Agnes:

Feeling not OK with promiscuity. The fact that she herself doesn't want to be promiscuous. That is, she doesn't want these men to keep rejecting her. She doesn't want to keep going for the bad guys. So that element of it is just as important as the promiscuity is the fact that there's this kind of undercurrent of true love running through what she's doing. And so it's full of, like, passion and drama and emotion, not just, like, fun, serial relationships.

Robin:

And, but that can be part of what people dislike if, or that they've, the fans fear of the dislike is that they will be judgmental about her relationships and her, you know, strategies for choosing partners and, you know, et cetera. That is, that seems plausible to me as something people are very sensitive about and often actually judgmental about. That I would say. People who might not dislike Taylor Swift might be judgmental about her behavior, including her emotional stance and willingness to complain and strategies, and that the fans fear that judgment and they are sensitive about feeling judged that way. And they don't judge Taylor negatively. They think that if they were in the same situation, they would like to be treated the way they treat Taylor, i.e. sympathetically and support it.

Agnes:

I'd just be really surprised if the people who break up with their friends, like for not being sufficiently pro-Taylor, if that's in any way correlated with how supportive those people are when you're breaking up with your boyfriend. Like that, that doesn't seem right to me. I mean, that is, I think that many, like many people just like think she's a bit shallow and her music isn't that good. And I think that would be way more threatening to somebody who's a fan of her than they don't like how many boyfriends she's had.

Robin:

Well, we've used up an hour.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

And I have to admit, I haven't studied Taylor Swift very long, and I don't know that much about all of these worlds, so I'm not very confident in these judgments. But it is interesting to see someone who is so liked by some, and therefore apparently polarizing in the sense at least the people who love her are afraid or believe that other people don't like her unjustly.

Agnes:

I'm just going to quote a line from this cut article about the person who broke up with the person that didn't like Taylor Swift enough. Having a friend who actively critiques her can easily translate into an intimate rejection, especially considering that her music seems to particularly resonate in life's hardest moments. For Turin, this meant listening to Marjorie after her grandmother died and going to concerts with her mom, who's also a fan. So when her best friend scoffed at her interest in Swift, Turin felt like she was scoffing at her heartbreak, grief, and family. Nothing about romantic relationships. And I think this is very typical. That is, people have an emotional connection with Taylor. They feel like it's a deep connection. They feel like their emotions are being validated. And then when somebody else doesn't like Taylor, they feel like that person is rejecting their own emotions and mostly has nothing to do with her.

Robin:

Most of her songs are about romance, at least 80%, so I gotta say it's not plausible that it's completely independent of attitudes about romance if her identity is all about romance.

Agnes:

Not completely independent, but I mean, it's striking that the example in the piece doesn't give, this is the piece about breaking up with your friends. Right. And I don't think there's any suggestion that it has to do with how your friends are gonna respond to your breakups.

Robin:

I think we'll have to remain in disagreement for a little while.

Agnes:

All right.