The Anti-Hero? Taylor Swift’s Titanic Rise To A Pop Culture Phenomenon and...How It Could Lead To Her Downfall?

The Anti-Hero? Taylor Swift’s Titanic Rise To A Pop Culture Phenomenon and...How It Could Lead To Her Downfall?

This is the second of the two assignments that I’ll be publishing to my blog from my music class. This was a final paper where I was allowed to write on any topic as long as it was related to popular music in some way. So, I did mine on Taylor Swift to process my admittedly complicated feelings I’ve felt on her this year. With that in mind, I have a disclaimer: This paper is not a critique of Swift’s artistry; it’s simply an observational piece on her titanic rise to fame and how this could harm her career in the end. Swift is obviously one of the most talented artists alive right now. There is a reason she’s so huge. I’m not trying to discredit her accomplishments in any way. Again, this is just me making observations on her overexposure and how this might spell doom for her career long-term. With that, let’s get this thing started with my abstract.

Abstract:

Taylor Swift wrote “Our Song” for a talent show in ninth grade, rocketing her to #1 on the Hot Country Songs chart and making her the youngest artist to write and sing a #1 Country song.

This track accurately sums up how she built up her initial appeal as an earnest, heartfelt “girl next door” who wrote all her lyrics genuinely. This innocent, relatable songwriting made Taylor’s music connect quickly with younger girls. In her song “Teardrops on my Guitar”, Taylor sings it so earnestly that you can tell that she IS the narrator who has an unrequited crush on this boy. This genuineness is what made Taylor really connect with her audience.

“[...]Taylor Swift embarked upon a world tour to promote her album Reputation, and the tour swiftly became one of the highest-grossing of all time” (Frankenberg 2018, qtd. Arnold 27-28). In an era where streaming makes it virtually impossible to have generation-defining superstars, Taylor Swift has managed to break through this boundary and build up a strong empire. In this paper, I’ll examine how Taylor reached such a monumentally huge height of fame, including how she embarked on two record-shattering tours. I’ll discuss her use of social media and how it helped make her a cultural phenomenon. Additionally, I will be aiming to answer this main research question:

Will Taylor’s tremendous success ultimately be her downfall?

To answer this question, I’ll be analyzing ratings for Swift’s albums over time to see if I can discern trends between points where she faced backlash for her public image and how her albums during those periods were received, as well as examining other artists whose tremendous successes were ultimately their downfall.

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If you have turned on the radio or watched the news even once in the last year, you have likely heard the name Taylor Swift. We are living predominantly in the era of streaming, which has made music (and almost every form of entertainment) incredibly decentralized, making it difficult  to determine which artist(s) or song(s) defined the 2010s or even 2020s since everyone is free to listen to whatever music they want to. If you do not want to listen to the radio to get your music, you do not have to. For example, in the 2000s, you could probably make a credible argument for Usher’s “Yeah!” defining that decade. In the 2020s, it is fairly safe to assume that the defining/biggest artist of the decade so far is Taylor Swift, who, as recently as 2023, embarked on the Eras Tour, a tour that completely broke Ticketmaster: According to an article from Variety, “Ticketmaster has canceled the public ticket on-sale for Taylor Swift’s ‘The Eras Tour’ that was set to take place Friday, Nov. 18. The company cited both ‘extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems’ and ‘insufficient remaining ticket inventory’ as the reasons it was pulling the plug on the general sale.” (Aswad et al. 2022). On that, you could safely say Taylor Swift might be “too big” right now, but it was not until I watched The Eras Tour concert film on Disney+ when it hit me that “Wow, I am really getting tired of Taylor Swift being in my face all the time”. I found myself recalling the numerous times my aunt called me exclaiming about the next big thing Taylor was seen doing. I will be analyzing Taylor’s actions that led her to become such a defining superstar and how that could also lead to her downfall.

I: How did Taylor Swift become so huge in the first place?

“Teardrops On My Guitar” was Taylor’s breakthrough single, peaking at #2 on the Hot Country Songs chart. The song effectively sums up how Taylor Swift built up her initial core appeal - being an earnest, heartfelt “girl next door” who wrote all her lyrics genuinely. This innocent, relatable approach to her songwriting made Taylor’s music connect very quickly with younger girls. In the song, Taylor sings so earnestly that you can tell that she IS the narrator in this song who has an unrequited crush on a boy. This sense of genuineness is what made Taylor really connect with an audience. This later enabled Taylor to rocket to #1 with “Our Song”, making her the youngest artist to write and sing a #1 country song. When listening to “Our Song”, what I find striking are Taylor’s very peppy, youthful, and almost innocent country/southern vocal timbre and the lyrics. The song is about how Taylor and her boyfriend do not have a special song they share, only to realize that their “song” is the experiences they share. You can tell that she is deeply in love with her boyfriend which makes this set of lyrics in particular so charming:

Our song is the slamming screen door

Sneakin' out late, tapping on your window

When we're on the phone, and you talk real slow

'Cause it's late, and your mama don't know

Our song is the way you laugh

The first date, "Man, I didn't kiss her, and I should have"

The instrumentation consists of a banjo adding a chord progression to serve as the song’s foundation. There are also electric guitar touches to be heard that add to that foundation. Most prominently, throughout the song, a fiddle can be heard, supplying the main chorus melody. All of these elements combined give this a very innocent and youthful energy that made it resonate heavily with young girls at the time. 

This initial energy gave Taylor an appeal of relatability, underscoring a connection to her fans that she has utilized for her continued success, as recently as her Reputation era. Linda Ryan Bengtsson and Jessica Edlom posit that “By strategically using social media platforms and streaming services, the music industry has developed sophisticated methods and strategies to increase engagement by using fans and fandom as marketing devices” (Bengtsson, et al. 67, qtd. Baym, 2018; Gamble et al., 2019). When promoting Reputation, Taylor utilized social media strategically and consistently to connect with her fans. Taylor would later repeat her record-shattering tour phenomenon in 2022 with the announcement of The Eras Tour. According to a Variety article, “‘The Eras Tour’ ended up breaking a Ticketmaster record as over two million tickets were sold on Nov. 15[, 2022] for Swift’s shows, the most tickets ever sold for an artist in a single day.” (Sharf, Aswad 2022). The Eras Tour was arguably the moment that cemented Taylor as a legend. There is not further evidence you can look at than when Taylor went to Brazil for The Eras Tour. According to an article by AP News, “On social media, Swifties asked Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes to project onto the statue a likeness of the ‘Junior Jewels’ shirt from Swift’s ‘You Belong with Me’ music video. Their plea went viral. Paes, who once called the singer the ‘Madonna of our times,’ said he’d take the matter to the Rev. Omar Raposo, the rector of the sanctuary.” (Jeantet, et al. 2023). The Swifties crowdfunded the money for the project and within only one day, the now Taylor Swift-decorated Christ Redeemer statue was lit up. Essentially, in just a day, Brazil, a country where most people are non-Native English speakers, heard that Taylor Swift was going to perform in the city and quickly crowdfunded enough money to decorate an iconic statue in her style for her to see when she flew in. That alone should exemplify how huge of a star Taylor had become, and that’s before I mention from anecdotal experience, when I lived down in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the days leading up to The Eras Tour, The city of Santa Clara made Taylor the mayor for a day and additionally renamed the city “Swiftie Clara” for the day.

II: Is there precedent to overexposure killing artists’ careers to begin with?

When one thinks of overexposure in music, they might think of a particular song being overplayed on the radio or talked about too much. Obviously, this is very relative and how overexposed a song or artist might be can vary from person to person. For the sake of having one consistent definition, let us just call overexposure in the context of my argument the point where an artist or song has been in the spotlight or talked about so much that they start receiving overwhelming backlash. We can look as recently as 2013 for an example of overexposure killing an artist’s career, with Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”. An article by Cracked draws parallels between singer Thicke and rapper Vanilla Ice, most notably that their careers were destroyed by the same song that made them successful. “In the months after ‘Blurred Lines’ took off, though, a few cracks in the ‘I'm a ladies' man to one lady only’ facade started to appear, and the women who bought his albums and his image have been leaving in droves ever since.” (Brown 2014). The overplay of “Blurred Lines”, combined with the plagiarism lawsuit and the sexual assault charges Thicke was faced with ultimately meant he was in the news so much that people started getting sick of him, eventually killing his career. After “Blurred Lines” was big, Robin Thicke’s biggest hit on the Billboard Hot 100 was a measly #25 peak. Likewise, the plagiarism lawsuit for Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” ultimately led him to completely disappear after only two more songs charting on the Billboard Hot 100.

III: Is Taylor Swift overexposed right now?

I have talked a lot in this paper already about Taylor being in a dangerous position for overexposure, but I think the question we should be pondering is: Is Taylor already overexposed? Let us see what fans might think...

This image is a screenshot taken from RateYourMusic, a rating site that has a vast history of music cataloged for users to rate on a 0.5-5 star scale; these are the average ratings for all of Taylor Swift’s albums on the site. We can see that the average ratings for her albums steadily climbed up to about the 3 star average until a slight dip for Reputation, arguably one of the first moments in which we saw Taylor’s overexposure; I remember seeing the reactions from people when she released that album - it was almost like she was lashing back at the backlash she was receiving for her public image; her “reputation” was taking a hit if you will. We can also see another instance of overexposure between Red and Speak Now, her pivot from country music to pop music - it is not a huge slip in average rating between them, but it is definitely almost like you can see the points where Taylor was “too big” and the backlash to her cultural ubiquity really started to set in. Nowhere else though do we see such a clearer and sharper dropoff than between her rerecorded edition of 1989 and her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department. It’s by a sizable margin her lowest rated album to date, while still an improvement from the 1.83/5 average rating it had upon release, it is still a huge drop that looks concerning. You can see some evidence of some of Taylor’s overexposure resulting in backlash with even some of Taylor’s diehard fans not liking The Tortured Poet’s Department. This article from Pedestrian reports on some of the fan’s reactions to The Tortured Poet’s Department: “‘Listen, I love Taylor Swift but a lot of those songs should have had more time in the draft folder,’ a comment with more than 15,000 likes said in a discussion about Swift’s lyrics. ‘I love her so much but it’s SO BAD,’ said a different fan. Another said they ‘wanted to like this album’ but ‘it’s giving me nothing.’ [The author has] seen Swift be accused of publishing her unedited diary entries, or even of accidentally writing satire. Others have [labeled] the album inoffensive, but not a banger like her usual stuff.” (Iqbal 2024). It probably makes sense that a lot of the backlash might have come from her overexposure. 

IV: Conclusion: Is Taylor’s career in danger? What should she do?

In this paper, I’ve highlighted several troubling aspects of Taylor’s stardom as of now that could ultimately lead to her career’s demise. This begs the question: What should she even do then to prevent this from happening? Well, the public at large would probably answer with a simple “Take a break from music”. Yes, this could prolong her career, but it should not go unnoted that Taylor’s career is not going to last forever. Even the biggest stars eventually fade out. Pop stars are like fireworks; they are a brief splash of fire that catches your eye, but they do not last very long. Given that Taylor is a billionaire now and she has already cemented her legacy, I doubt that she is very concerned about the prospect of one day no longer having hits. At this stage in her career, Taylor has nothing left to prove, she will easily go down in history as one of the biggest, if not the biggest, pop stars of our time, whether or not she is overexposed right now. So ultimately, even if it is exhausting always rooting for the “anti-hero”, maybe she will not ever “go out of style” after all.

Works Cited:

Aswad, Zack Sharf,Jem, et al. “Ticketmaster Cancels Taylor Swift Tour’s Public Tickets Sale due to “High Demand” and “Insufficient Inventory.”” Variety, 17 Nov. 2022, variety.com/2022/music/news/ticketmaster-cancels-taylor-swift-public-ticket-sales-eras-tour-1235435965/. 

Bengtsson, Linda Ryan, and Jessica Edlom. “Commodifying Participation through Choreographed Engagement: The Taylor Swift Case.” Arts and the Market, 5 July 2022, www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/AAM-07-2022-0034/full/html. 

Brown, Adam Tod. “Why Robin Thicke Is the New Vanilla Ice.” Cracked.com, 10 July 2014, www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/why-robin-thicke-new-vanilla-ice. 

Iqbal, Soaliha. “I’m Not a Swiftie but I’m Fascinated by How the Sentiment towards Taylor Has Changed with TTPD.” PEDESTRIAN.TV, 22 Apr. 2024, www.pedestrian.tv/entertainment/taylor-swift-the-tortured-poets-department-tiktok-reactions/. 

 Jeantet, Diane and Henao, Luis Andres “Rio’s Iconic Christ Statue Welcomes Taylor Swift with Open Arms Thanks to Swifties and a Priest.” AP News, 17 Nov. 2023, apnews.com/article/taylor-swift-brazil-christ-redeemer-statue-097dcffa307e7b80bda2c522a52d4337. 

Swift, Taylor. Our Song. 10 Sept. 2007, open.spotify.com/track/15DeqWWQB4dcEWzJg15VrN?si=18ea06d3b76348f9.  Accessed 31 May 2024.

 “Taylor Swift Albums: Songs, Discography, Biography, and Listening Guide - Rate Your Music.” RateYourMusic, rateyourmusic.com/artist/taylor-swift.  Accessed 27 Apr. 2024.

“Robin Thicke | Biography, Music & News.” Billboard, www.billboard.com/artist/robin-thicke/chart-history/hsi/.  Accessed 29 May 2024.

‌Well, if you've gotten here thanks for reading all the way down here! My next article probably won't be my 2020 best list redux but it is probably gonna be a new style of articles I'll be trialing! So stay tuned until then! Keep it Fire!!