Shadows of an icon

Taylor Swift is the most important female popstar of the new millennium, with commercial numbers comparable only to those of Adele, though she has released far more albums than her (fifteen against four).

Such an impact has, however, created a climate of silence around her: it's extremely difficult to find critical analyses of her work, and the American entertainment industry rewards her no matter what she puts out. Just consider the four Grammys she's won for Album of the Year, an all-time record (surpassing Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder, both stuck at three).

This amounts to a genuine soft power, which puts anyone who criticizes her in an extremely difficult position. Even many alternative critical publications have capitulated on the matter.

This article will examine all the controversial aspects of her persona, showing how her mythology rests on contradictory behavior, hardly in line with the positive icon that the artist and her entourage promote.

1. The war with Spotify

In November 2014 Swift pulled her catalogue from Spotify, only to announce her return in June 2017. At the time, rumours suggested she had managed to strike a favourable deal with the Swedish company, but whatever the real reason behind her comeback, it simply isn't true that the music industry benefited from it, as was widely reported. If anything, streaming services have since focused their efforts even more heavily on top-tier artists, leaving most musicians without major-label backing with little more than scraps. There was no Taylor Swift crusade on behalf of less fortunate musicians — in essence, as soon as she found the arrangement that best suited her, she simply reversed course.

Clearly, she was under no obligation to act as an advocate for less fortunate musicians, but the fact remains that she put herself in that position through her own statements — about the rarity of music as an art form, about artists needing to set their own prices, and above all through her famous open letter to Apple Music, "To Apple, Love Taylor", in which she openly addresses the struggles of emerging artists.

Kaitlyn Tiffany of The Verge dedicated an article to how Swift was only able to act the way she did because of her position, pointing out that independent artists don't have anywhere near the same leverage. As a result, her boycotts essentially only worked because she was the one leading them, and she backed down as soon as she got what she wanted for herself — and, at best, for her inner circle — but certainly not for independent musicians as a whole. The whole affair fits squarely into what's commonly known as "virtue signalling": a symbolic stance that mainly serves one's own image.

2. Dynamic pricing

The 2023-24 "The Eras Tour" was Taylor Swift's biggest triumph yet. Shows across the United States sold out, with an average ticket price of $254 — more than double what her 2018 tour tickets cost, while the rest of the US music industry saw prices rise by 37% over the same period (still notable, but far more contained). Swift is therefore front and centre when it comes to the phenomenon of runaway ticket price increases, as pointed out by Ryan Hogg on Business Insider.

It's worth pointing this out because the news that the singer had rejected Ticketmaster's dynamic pricing got a great deal of coverage, and she herself, in an Instagram post, framed it as a fight on behalf of her fans.

However, that didn't stop the price increase mentioned above, because dynamic pricing isn't the only speculative practice made possible by Ticketmaster's dominant position: artists who genuinely fought to make tickets more affordable, such as Robert Smith of the Cure, also demanded strict control over scalping and achieved far more convincing results, as explained by Ethan Millman on Rolling Stone.

Once again, the impression is that Swift is a savvy businesswoman who knows how to maximise profit while still coming across as generous and even-handed.

3. Rights to other people's songs

Another episode that raises ethical questions is the way Swift secured the rights to use "I'm Too Sexy" by Right Said Fred, interpolated into her hit "Look What You Made Me Do". According to the English band, Swift's representatives approached them for permission just a week before the single's release, without revealing who the artist was or how their song would be used. They were only told that it was a major contemporary star and that they'd need to approve the deal in advance.

Even though Right Said Fred haven't expressed any frustration about it — in fact, they've spoken very positively about Swift — the lack of transparency in the negotiating process highlights a broader problem within the music industry.

When lesser-known artists — or one-hit wonders like Right Said Fred — are approached to license their songs, they often have very little room to negotiate. The way Swift's team handled the matter suggests a calculated strategy: by withholding key information, they made sure the band would agree to the deal without being able to later challenge how their work was used.

This is a legal practice that complies with industry standards, but it reflects a clear power imbalance: bigger artists can dictate the terms, while smaller ones are left with no choice but to accept, since similar opportunities may never come their way again.

4. Playing the victim

In December 2019, B.D. McClay published an article for The Outline, titled "Sore Winners: The Decade" — "The outsiders who are the leaders, the arrivistes who are the establishment: these people refused to admit they had any power at all, when in fact they had plenty": unsurprisingly, the figure the article focuses on most is Taylor Swift, the perfect embodiment of this mindset.

No matter how much she's achieved (hundreds of awards won, record-breaking sales), a sense of injustice keeps surfacing in her songs and in her attitude, as if she were constantly betrayed, undervalued or misunderstood. She sings about enemies, obstacles, personal battles to be fought, even when it's hard to tell who or what is still supposedly holding her back. This doesn't mean sexism in the music industry doesn't exist, but the real victims are probably several orders of magnitude below Swift. It's natural to wonder: for one of the most powerful people in her field, does it still make sense to feel like she's in a perpetual struggle to be recognized?

Not to mention the reactions to attacks that are essentially nonexistent: just think of the case of Damon Albarn's interview for the Los Angeles Times, in which he said he didn't consider Swift a songwriter because she used a lot of co-writers, while also stressing that the result could be just as excellent, and that Ella Fitzgerald, whom he considers one of the greatest singers of all time, never wrote a song. It's an opinion one can agree or disagree with (the singer has solely written about a third of her own catalogue, without even needing to point out that Albarn himself has had co-writers for almost his entire career), but it's ultimately harmless and mostly a matter of philosophical approach to music (after all, in Italy people have been asking for half a century whether Lucio Battisti was a singer-songwriter or not, given that he didn't write his own lyrics).

The fact remains that Swift responded with an aggressive Twitter post against Albarn (with an opening line that was frankly childish: "I was such a big fan of yours until I read this"), over something he hadn't actually said, or that could in any case have been rebutted in a far calmer way. On top of that, her various producers immediately weighed in, from Aaron Dessner to Jack Antonoff, both of them instantly in battle mode. At that point Albarn, probably realizing what a mess he'd gotten himself into, quickly backpedaled and apologized.

The real question, though, is: how many people would have actually read that Albarn interview in the first place, aside from his fans? Left alone, that article would probably have been forgotten within a few hours, and Swift wouldn't have suffered any damage from it. But the mechanism that sustains her doesn't work that way: her mythology relies almost entirely on her enemies, on those presumed to wish the worst for her (whether or not that's true doesn't seem to matter), against whom she therefore has to defend herself. This feud with Albarn was a golden opportunity to reinforce her image: it was covered by every newspaper and every social network, complete with a humiliated enemy forced to beg for forgiveness outside the fortress of Canossa.

5. Intimidation

When complaining isn't enough, Swift and her entourage move on to direct attacks.

In 2015 she sent a cease-and-desist letter to blogger Meghan Herning, who had written an article for PopFront titled "Swiftly to the alt-right: Taylor subtly gets the lower case kkk in formation". The opening adverb obviously plays on the singer's surname, but the more interesting reference is to the "lower case kkk", an expression borrowed from comedian Aziz Ansari, used to describe the normalization of racism and intolerance that occurred with the rise of Donald Trump.

The indirect relationship between Swift and the American far right will be discussed further ahead: in this specific case, what stands out is that Swift used her position of power to intimidate an independent blogger.

To defend herself, Meghan Herning turned to the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), whose lawyers described Swift's action as a "baseless attempt to suppress constitutionally protected free speech" and went on to state that "intimidation tactics like this are unacceptable".

Following the ACLU's intervention, Swift's legal team dropped all claims against Herning, likely fearing the matter could backfire on her.

A less publicized episode, but with similar dynamics, took place in 2022, when TV writer Eric Eidelstein revealed on Twitter that "when I was in journalism, Taylor's team would threaten to blacklist outlets that wrote anything negative about her".

The site Pop Tingz reported the story, and curiously, within a few hours, both Eidelstein's original post and Pop Tingz's article on the matter had vanished (source).

Finally, there was the lawsuit threatened by Swift's lawyers against student Jack Sweeney, guilty of having tracked the carbon emissions of Swift's private jets, using data that was nonetheless already public (the irony? Much of it was made public in the first place by the singer's own fans, obsessed with tracking her movements).

6. The aggressiveness of the fans

Taylor Swift's fans can be among the most toxic out there, period. Not that the problem applies to all of them, but with numbers this large, even a strictly minority percentage can generate massive online hate campaigns.

It should be noted that the singer has never explicitly asked her followers to behave this way; however, it's clear that she's aware of the mechanism, that she feeds it, and that she knows all it takes is to shine a spotlight on what she perceives as a problem for the most extreme fringe of her fanbase to take up the cause on her behalf. In substance, she bears no direct responsibility, but she does bear what, in other fields and on other scales, would be called political responsibility.

There are numerous examples of this. Journalist Chris Panella, of Business Insider, received death threats, had personal information about his family illegally leaked, and was accused, obviously without any basis, of being a pedophile: all because he wrote that "The Eras Tour" was fantastic, but not as good as Beyoncé's Renaissance World Tour. Not only are negative reviews or veiled criticism off-limits, but apparently even failing to consider Swift the greatest artist on the planet is read as an insult.

The Guardian devoted an article to this attitude, written by Ben Beaumont-Thomas: "Diehard pop fans are abusing critics – and putting adulation before art".

The problem, however, isn't limited to journalists. Singer John Mayer received insults and threats on social media for years, without having done anything at all, simply because Swift's fans consider him the subject of the song "Dear John", released in 2010.

Even though she was aware of the situation (Mayer's persecution has been the subject of numerous news articles over the years), she let it slide for years, until June 2023, on the eve of the re-recorded version of the album that originally featured the song. During a concert, she then asked that people stop persecuting him, albeit indirectly (since the song never named him explicitly): "I'm not releasing this album so you guys go and try and figure out who this song is about and start dragging them on the internet." Note the manipulative use of language: there's no mention of the fact that Mayer was insulted and threatened, since the fans were merely "defending" her.

Even the Damon Albarn case, already recounted earlier, generated thousands of hate-filled comments across the web. The most absurd case, though, remains the one involving Tool, guilty in 2019 of reaching number 1 on the US charts with their album "Fear Inoculum", knocking Swift's "Lover" off the top spot and triggering an avalanche of scornful comments from her fans (who obviously had no idea who Tool even were).

7. The squad and feminism

Particularly between 2014 and 2016, Swift was often seen in the company of a prestigious circle of friends that the media dubbed "the squad". Among the most recurring and prominent names in the squad were Karlie Kloss, Gigi Hadid, Selena Gomez, Cara Delevingne, Lena Dunham and Hailee Steinfeld, all leading figures in various corners of the American jet set.

In a 2015 interview with Vanity Fair, which crowned her squad leader, Swift described the circle as a "group of girls who need each other as much as we [women] need each other, in this climate, where it's so hard to be understood and portrayed the right way by the media". In essence, she framed it as a tool for her own empowerment and self-determination – a view consistent with what she told Maxim around the same time: "Misogyny is ingrained in people from the time they are born, so I think it's most important thing for me is to be a feminist, because that's basically another way to say equality."

Several feminists, however, took issue with this. Besides being almost entirely white, the women in the squad were young, wielded considerable media and economic clout, and had looks that fit society's standards of attractiveness. In short, it was a club that was anything but inclusive.

Jessa Crispin, in her book "Why I Am Not A Feminist" (Melville House, 2017), while never openly naming Swift, attacks what she calls "squad feminism" (that is, celebrity squad feminism), calling it "bland and exclusionary".

In the book "We Were Feminists Once" (Public Affairs, 2016), Andi Zeisler describes Swift's brand as "marketplace feminism", expressing concern that the phenomenon sells an image of female unity that doesn't actually translate into structural change.

The most well-known critical voice on the matter, though, was that of pop star Demi Lovato, who, in a remarkable act of courage, said of the squad to Entertainment Tonight: "I don't see anybody in there that has a normal body. It's kind of like this false image of what people should look like. I think making a song and video to rip apart Katy Perry isn't exactly female empowerment" (a reference to the 2015 track "Bad Blood", whose video features all the squad members listed above; although Perry is never named explicitly, it's widely believed the song was aimed at her – the two nonetheless made peace three years later).

Starting in 2016 the squad began to fall apart, and now only her closest friends still hang around Swift, who, in a 2019 interview for Rolling Stone, nonetheless placed the blame entirely on patriarchy for the negative image that circle projected, taking no responsibility for it herself and saying nothing about the fact that some of the harshest criticism on the matter had come from feminists and activists.

8. Political silence and awakening

Many have criticized Taylor Swift for never taking a political stance until October 2018, when she broke her silence on the matter, endorsing Democratic candidates during the Tennessee midterm elections, citing among her reasons support for the LGBT community and the need to curb systemic racism.

Swift debuted on the music market in June 2006, at the age of sixteen. No one expected her to take a stand at that age: not that teenagers don't deserve consideration when they voice their views on such matters, but since it's a formative stage of life, it's understandable that they might feel insecure and reluctant to expose themselves. The problem is that twelve years passed from that point before her voice was finally heard, the last two of which fell squarely within the Trump era, with all its accompanying baggage of legislation against minorities, institutionalized misogyny, the spread of hate speech, negligence during humanitarian crises, and tolerance - if not outright winking approval - toward extremist and/or subversive political groups.

A silence so long that it bred deep distrust even once it was finally broken. There's no doubt that Swift genuinely does support the Democrats, but that doesn't make her immune to calculation and opportunism: she is, after all, a pop star, and it's hard not to notice that her silence ended right around the time her contract with Big Machine Records, the label that built her fortune, was about to expire. A far more thorough study than this brief reflection, and one well worth reading, is Simone Driessen's from the University of Rotterdam: "Campaign Problems: How Fans Respond to Taylor Swift's Controversial Political Awakening" (Sage Journals, 2022).

9. The far-right's intrusion

The other major problem stemming from Taylor Swift's endless political silence is that it allowed far-right conspiracy theorists, mostly American but not exclusively, to worship her as the perfect representative of their ideology. Mitchell Sunderland explained this well back in 2016, writing for Vice in an article titled "Can't Shake It Off: How Taylor Swift Became a Nazi Idol" (the first part of the title is an obvious pun on "Shake It Off", one of Swift's biggest hits). Since a link has been provided to read the article, out of decency we'll refrain here from giving further space to the disgusting statements made by the neo-Nazi bloggers quoted in it.

The key point is that the phenomenon began on Pinterest and BuzzFeed in 2013, quickly going viral, and for a full five years she had nothing to say about it (aside from having a lawyer privately write to one Emily Pattinson, the girl believed to be behind the images - allegedly meant as irony - pairing photos of Swift with quotes from Adolf Hitler).

Even without taking a stance on American elections, she could at least have distanced herself from such a harmful phenomenon instead of letting it flourish. The matter was, in any case, finally put to rest after her political coming-out in 2018, which turned her into persona non grata within extremist circles... but what a long road it took to set things right!

10. A couple of problematic videos

The clumsy videos for two of her biggest hits, "Shake It Off" and "Wildest Dreams", both from 2014, may well have given a decisive boost to the neo-Nazis' beliefs mentioned above.

In the first one, Swift is surrounded by dancers of different styles: the classical ballet corps - a style considered, by definition, refined and delicate - is made up almost exclusively of white performers, while the girls twerking, a style seen as quintessentially vulgar and objectifying, are almost exclusively Black.

This didn't go unnoticed, so much so that rapper Earl Sweatshirt stated: "I haven't seen the Taylor Swift video and I don't need to see it to say it is inherently offensive and misappropriates black culture. The stereotypes portrayed in her video are ones that need to be excised period. This isn't about her, but I think it's worth pointing out that this video is one of the many where race is being appropriated and that's the frustrating thing."

The second video, on the other hand, is set in colonial Africa in the 1950s and features an almost entirely white cast. Activists Viviane Rutabingwa and James Kassaga Arinaitwe wrote a piece for NPR titled "Taylor Swift Is Dreaming Of A Very White Africa", in which they break down all the issues with such a portrayal of one of the most traumatic periods in the continent's history.

Conclusion

One could dig even deeper, looking for instance at all the problems arising from the imbalances of power and attention that Swift's fame creates - issues not attributable to her as a person, but tied to the broader phenomenon surrounding her. Saving Country Music, currently the best site covering country music, published an article titled "The Dilemma Of The Dedicated Taylor Swift Reporter", about the effects this kind of personality-driven obsession has on journalistic independence and the reliability of music criticism. It's highly recommended reading.

This same territory also includes the image of a self-made star who built an empire entirely through her own efforts, an image heavily pushed by outlets like Forbes, Rolling Stone and Billboard. The reality, however, is quite different: Swift comes from a wealthy family - suffice it to say that when she signed her first contract with Big Machine Records, her father, a banker, invested a full $300,000 in the label. There's an article by Scott Timberg for Salon that, despite a somewhat sensationalist headline ("Taylor Swift is not an underdog: The real story about her 1% upbringing that the New York Times won't tell you"), nails the point.

This deep dive comes to an end here. Its purpose is obviously not to discredit Swift's art, which each listener will love or reject according to their own sensibility (OndaRock is, moreover, above suspicion, hosting a monograph that extensively celebrates her music), but rather to offer food for thought on how the artist is the mirror of a capitalist society that is pressing hard on the accelerator and that loves to celebrate privileged people, even excusing behavior that is sometimes starkly at odds with the interests of those lower down the social ladder (and yet it is on their shoulders that the fortunes of those above them rest).

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