What Is Taylor Swift Without a Breakup?
“The Swifties of the world don’t want a marriage plot. They want the story to keep going, and going,” writes Kat Rosenfield. (Screengrab via YouTube.com)
The secret of her stratospheric success is in her ability to make music out of misery. Now that she’s happy, she’s made a superficial album.
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The career trajectory of Taylor Swift has always reminded me of Tolstoy’s famous opening line from Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The secret of Swift’s stratospheric success is in her ability to make music out of misery, every album doubling as a lyrical autopsy of some doomed love affair, b…
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Well written piece! This is much better than the NYT Swift album review I also read.
“Joel, then 44, has since turned his life around—and at 76, now remarried, sober, and a father to two more children, he continues to perform from his old catalog. But his songwriting days are over; instead of a muse, he has a wife. It’s almost as though the Piano Man had to die so that the stable, loving, financially responsible husband and father could live.
And so it goes too, perhaps, for the showgirl.”
I think this paragraph is essentially describing growing up. Many of us can remember when we had to give up our old ways of heartbreak and self-destruction if we wanted an adult life worth anything.
It’s just Taylor Swift was able to turn a billion dollar profit on her immaturity so she was less incentivized to leave it behind.
Interesting though, that for even for her it seems the “high wasn’t worth the pain”. And it will be even more interesting to see if it lasts.