Why Taylor Swift made herself the villain

Even with 38 ways to buy it, Taylor Swift’s fans aren’t living for The Life of a Showgirl.

When Swift dropped her 12th studio album earlier this month, people were already primed to hate it. As part of her rollout, she released a concerning amount of products around the release. From “The Shiny Bug Vinyl Collection” to the “Showgirl Cardigan Boxed Set,” many people weren’t excited to fork over more money for an exclusive version of her album.

Then came the music.

The 12-track record got mixed reviews; it was divisive even among her biggest fans. Some critics said it was cringey, disappointing, and that her music has “never been less compelling.” Upon this reception, Swift said, “I have a lot of respect for people’s subjective opinions on art. I’m not the art police.”

Ann Powers, a music critic at NPR, says this is all part of the Taylor Swift agenda. Powers makes the case that at the height of her success, Swift is now playing a villain on purpose. We spoke with her about Swift’s showgirl mentality, hyper-personal lyrics, and why she’ll likely come out stronger on the other end of this record’s hate train.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

The Life of a Showgirl was released three weeks ago. Has your thinking evolved at all?

I found it really interesting to observe the backlash against Taylor Swift, which is more intense this year and with this release than it was with her previous release. I’m most interested in how both critics and the general public are now responding to Taylor in a very different way than they did even about the Eras Tour. I imagine her clinging to a giant pendulum as it swings back and forth.

And this is possibly inevitable with anyone of her stature. But I really think we’re seeing it play out that Taylor Swift has become the avatar for so many of our anxieties, so many of our dissatisfactions.

But two things happened with his album. The first is that there are so many variants: There’s a Target exclusive, “Crowd Is Your King” vinyl; there’s the hairbrush that falls apart; there’s a “Tiny Bubbles in Champagne” collection. 

And then there’s the fact that a lot of people, when the album first dropped, decided they didn’t really like it. How do we square those two things? Do those two facts depend on one another?

They’re in a relationship with one another. I’m not sure if they depend on one another. What’s interesting about the backlash [to] the album itself is that it seems to have been triggered by the leak of the lyrics for a particular song, “Actually Romantic,” which is the song that allegedly is aimed at the pop star Charli XCX. And I think the timing of that leak was a big negative for the reception of this album.

But it’s not like: and then we realized that Taylor Swift is rich. How did everyone become so irritated about the same thing?

This has been building for a while. After The Tortured Poets Department came out, I’ve started to see more and more online chatter about Taylor Swift’s wealth, her social status, and her choice to continue to write songs in which she is the “underdog,” even though she is so on top of the world. Not coincidentally, this was going on as a larger backlash has been brewing against very wealthy Americans in general.

And Taylor’s response is what exactly?

Well, Swift did a small number of interviews upon the release of the record, and in one of them, on The Zane Lowe Show on Apple Music, she basically said, “I’m not the art police. I am okay with how anyone responds to this album.”

And that has been a notable part of this backlash. It’s not only professional critics, it’s not only online trolls who never liked Taylor Swift anyway. A lot of very diehard Taylor fans are also publicly raising doubts about their hero.

A lot of people have asked whether a person can create great art when they are rich and happy. I remember when Cowboy Carter came out, and there was this line in one of the songs where Beyoncé talked about being overworked and overwhelmed. And that line really triggered people. This is a similar type of pushback. 

Beyoncé did something very smart and very deft. She did it out of conviction, which is that at a certain point in her career, she stopped speaking so much personally as representatively. She started connecting her personal stories with the history of racism and oppression. She’s continued to do that. Also uplifting her family, uplifting her community, as she’s defined it. She has managed to sort of make her music bigger than herself — make her art bigger than herself.

Consider that next to Taylor Swift. She has very much clung to autobiography as the center of what she does. And it’s harder to kind of figure out how exactly she would have consciously and righteously made herself representative of anything or anyone besides herself.

Beyoncé is, you’re arguing, very clearly evolving. What do you make of the critique that this album is an example — not that Taylor Swift isn’t a great artist, but that she’s not growing?

I find it strange that being a pop star and producing albums is sort of being talked about as if it is a life journey of self-improvement. Did we ask that of Mick Jagger? I don’t necessarily think we did. Another thing is: I don’t have any problem with someone writing songs about adolescence for their whole life. That’s fine with me.

Now do you want to hear my theory about the record?

You’re damn right I do.

I don’t think Taylor Swift made this record to make more money. Does she need the money? Obviously not. She’s a capitalist. I do think, however, that she’s very interested in controlling her public narrative and controlling the narrative that she’s building through her albums. She’s very focused on her music being the center of everything.

And I think she made this record because she is now in a happier place in her life. She needed a marker on the highway that said, “Hey, I’m happy now. I’m in control. I have power. I no longer feel the way I felt when I was wallowing in my own misery.”

So do I blame her for that? No, I don’t blame her for that. I get it completely. But let’s recognize it for what it is. It’s a marker on her highway. She’s going to go somewhere else pretty soon.