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I’ve been listening to Taylor Swift’s “Guilty as Sin” off her latest album, Tortured Poets Department, on repeat. Like quite a few of the songs on the album, this one is full of religious imagery juxtaposed with burning female desire. This section, in particular, conjures up waves of building desire that crash in a climax that she has self-generated based solely on her imagination and memory:
My bedsheets are ablaze
I've screamed his name
Building up like waves
Crashing over my grave
Without ever touching his skin
How can I be guilty as sin?
It’s certainly not the image many of Taylor Swift’s detractors think of when they say that her music is just for children or is simplistic and simply about glitter and unicorns.
I’ve been giving this some thought to Swift’s enduring popularity lately, and I think it’s because Swift, though she started off very young, has never sold her youth as sexuality. What she wrote about and what she sold to her legions of fans was her life experience as a complete and fully realized human being. And as such, the topics of her songs have matured as she has matured.
Think back to her hit song “Our Song” from her very first album, Taylor Swift. She writes a song to remedy the fact that she and her beau don’t have a song. Here, love is young and searching and learning. It’s about breaking rules, but gently (“sneakin’ out late”) and missed opportunities ("Man, I didn't kiss him and I should have”).
As we get to Swift’s breakout pop album, 1989, though filled with catchy, light-hearted pop beats like “Welcome to New York” and “Shake It Off,” we do see her mature in her lyric topics. See not so subtly indicates her LGBTQ+ allyship in the second verse of “Welcome to New York,”
And you can want who you want
Boys and boys and girls and girls
This is not the songwriting of a conservative country girl. This is the songwriting of a young woman throwing off her country music genre shackles and glorying in the freedom of living life on her own terms.
In “Wildest Dreams,” Swift moves into more mature territory, singing about a passionate memory sure to brand the temporary lover forever as she sings that the following memories will follow them around:
Tangled up with you all night
Burnin' (Burnin') it (It) down (Down)
In Reputation, Swift’s album full of rage and revenge and power, she gets right down to unapologetic desire in “Dress”:
Carve your name into my bedpost
'Cause I don't want you like a best friend
Only bought this dress so you could take it off
Now in her mid-30s, Swift has written one of her most searing and personal albums to date. It’s full of longing, regret, pain, desire, and love. But it’s not just about sexual love or romantic love, or the darker sides of those emotions, despair and misery. It’s also about identity and performing for fans, for friends, for family, all while living her life under never-ending public scrutiny.
I grew up listening to artists like Madonna who pushed the boundaries of acceptable displays of sexual desire. That powerful period felt fresh and taboo and thrilling. It morphed into a constant pressure to have female artists focus only on their sexuality (especially if they were very young) to sell music. It felt disempowering and sad and forlorn.
But watching Swift’s musical prowess grow through her powerful ability to tell universal truths through a very personal lens has been absolutely empowering for me. She lets her fans and audience into all aspects of her life from a precocious teenager through a wondering young adult to finally a powerful woman able to sell out hundreds of stadiums and raise the economies of entire countries.
In the documentary, Miss Americana, Swift opines about wanting to savor her success. Female artists, she noted, had a sell-by date and she thought that her’s was approaching, if it hadn’t already passed. Of course, the documentary, released in January of 2020, was before she released Folklore, Evermore, Midnights, had her Eras tour, won a history-making fourth Album of the Year Grammy, and then finally released The Tortured Poets Department double album. She’s at the height of her musical powers, and because she never sold and commodified her youth, I don’t see her stopping anytime soon.
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