This is written by Amanda Hess.
It’s possible that I know too much about Taylor Swift. I know the words to all her and every name on her of . Thanks to her with Travis Kelce, I know about the of his Kansas City Chiefs teammates that I would prefer not to. I listen to her music about as much as the American, which is to say: all of the time. Swift has America’s , her songs the to our Starbucks lines and her life the for our stories.
In Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music, Rob Sheffield charts how Swift, who to fame writing songs for teenage girls (when she was still one herself), — and he makes the that as her cultural dominance can to obscure her , everything always back to her writing.
Sheffield is a at Rolling Stone, where he publishes consistently reviews of Swift’s limitless offerings. Here he steps back to the of her appeal. Swift has “always had a for writing songs in which people hear themselves — her music keeps crossing generational and cultural boundaries, in ways that are often ,” he writes. She makes her “ public , to the point where she makes the world think of her as a .”
Swift’s her music to a collaborative storytelling prompt, one that manages to her critics. As her brand themselves as “Swifties” and build an of analysis and intrigue on media, they recruit her haters into their , them to cast their billionaire idol as a and protagonist.
A more when she has and flaws. “Taylor’s , her , her disguised as more narcissism, her inability to Not Be Taylor for a microsecond — it’s a lot,” Sheffield writes. “You can’t fully her without the of she brings out in people.”
Sheffield’s book, which unfolds over 30 , zooms in on Swift’s albums, and . Each dispatch is a perceptive close read of Swift’s music and persona, from the symbolic of her to her conspicuous of the word “nice.” Along the way, Sheffield drops enough of his own backstage encounters with Swift to hungry for new to incorporate into their own .
Taylor Swift is a pop so big, , prolific and -reigning, she hardly needs at this point. The idea the book’s subtitle, that Swift reinvented pop music, is almost a truism. Sheffield argues that her relentless business has opened new creative doors, too; when Swift responded to an ownership dispute by meticulously rerecording six of her albums, she what he calls a “dumb idea” into a “mastermind’s triumph.”
Sheffield is less in the ways in which Swift’s impulses might negatively the itself. In April, Swift released her new album “The Tortured Poets Department,” with 16 songs and a bonus . Two hours later, she dropped 14 more songs in an album, “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.” That up to 31, a number of great Swiftian brand , as the of weighed down the album as a whole. Given the of her base, what’s the incentive to curate anything anymore? Swift broke Spotify’s for the most album in a day.
Sheffield writes that Swift “reinvented pop in the fangirl’s ,” and while he’s not a fangirl himself, he has cultivated an in the cultural and contributions of girls. In his tender and original 2010 book “Talking to Girls About Duran Duran,” he negotiated his own identity his with the music best loved by his sisters, crushes and girlfriends in their 1980s . (He thanked Swift in that book’s acknowledgments, on behalf of his nieces and nephews who had claimed her as their own generational obsession.)
Sheffield came to Swift at middle age, and I wanted to know more about what this 6-foot-5 dude who is so unrivaled in his decades- that when he went to the bathroom at a 2011 show, he the men’s room “so sparklingly clean, you could eat breakfast out of the .” In “Heartbreak,” we get just of Swift’s specific to his life, and to his as a .
As Swift changed pop music, she changed pop criticism, too. With her songwriting and her hooks, she built a cultural consensus that rockists and poptimists. And with her celebrity , she representative of the kind of artist whose often makes the critic into the villain of their narrative, one where Swift must perpetually be as the .
Now the music critic writes, if not to the fangirl, then with the that she is alert at her phone, ready to on any perceived . (Even as I write this review of a book about Taylor Swift, her fans are on my mind.) In April, a review of “Tortured Poets Department” was published in Paste with no byline, with an ’s note the “threats of ” by the ’s “Lover” review in 2019.
It’s appropriate that the critic’s job description has to an of the , as that is now a defining of the itself. Sheffield is a himself — when he that Swift’s are sometimes “,” he builds their terribleness into another of her .
Inevitably, his book of Swift criticism has been integrated into the Swiftie world-building . One TikToker has already Taylor to the book’s page count and its ISBN number.
I’m about how that all feels from Sheffield’s perspective, this tall man who writes that he must at Swift’s concerts so the kids behind him can see. I that’s confirmation that I’m not a real Swiftie — that there’s another I’m in the woman we know all too .