There is a surprising lack of even semi-serious books on Taylor Swift.
There are books that examine her life in fashion (one coffee table Taylor Swift Style); letters books; figurine and activity books; slim biographies geared toward young adults, with covers that almost always show her in a princess dress; Little Golden Books that recount his relationship with the NFL star Travis Kelce; books written from the point of view of their cats.
Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music of Rob Sheffielda veteran critic of Rolling Stone and self-proclaimed singer’s biggest fan, is a passionate dissertation on (almost) everything related to her: her story, her method, her craft, her secret life as a pop music scholar and geek, her place in a long line of legends and image builder calculators from Joni Mitchell until Michael Jackson.
Until Swift released her self-titled debut album in 2006, at age 16, few contemporary singer-songwriters had devoted much time to the inner lives of teenage girls. Swift “reinvented pop in the image of the fangirls”Sheffield writes. “In the 2000s, when she started, a young woman writing her own hit songs about her own feelings was rare. Now that’s pop.”
The relationship between Swift and her Swifties – her origin story, her care and feeding – is at the heart of Heartbreak Is the National Anthem. Las SwiftiesOnce formed, they tend to stay, Sheffield points out: “It is not a phase that sensitive youth goes through and then overcomes.”
Sheffield is the author of the best-selling autobiography, Love Is a Mix Tapeabout his relationship with his late wife, and several memoir/pop culture books that place teenage girls’ musical affections at the center of the narrative. Here he treats the enduring relationship between Swift and her audience with the respect it deserves. “She started out as a teenager singing directly to her peers, and even as she conquered the world, she never lost those girls, because she never stopped putting them first, even as they continue to grow into their thirties, forties, fifties,” he writes. “She loves girls who love music, and she changed the world to make room for them.”
Sheffield is himself a swiftieand a well-known semi-distant journalist who has visited his apartment for work to listen to his music before it was released – his own Secret Sessionfor security reasons (she wasn’t there at the time, but still). Like any swiftie reasonable, he got excited. “I was wondering about my corner of the couch: Is this where Karlie sits? Firewood? “Selena?”
Heartbreak has micro chapters dedicated to various aspects of the tradition of Taylor Swift. Considers “Haylor” the extensive romantic but still musically fruitful relationship between her and Harry Styleswhich may be news for swifties newest. Examine your place in the movement New Romanticthe love for Easter eggs, his change of genres, the unpleasant situation with Kanye West in 2016. He breaks the undeclared vote of the fans to never mention the box office failure Cats.
Sheffield makes an argument for the greatness of No. 5 tracks like “All Too Well” (the fifth song on each Swift album is usually the definitive one, or, as he puts it, “the emotional bloodbath”), which which is not difficult, because no one is discussing this.
His claim that the famously poor initial single choices are a strategic deception rather than a rare example of bad judgment is a harder sell: Not even he can defend “ME!” (“So much panic. So much disco. Not much song.”)
Sheffield delights in residing in the star’s petty bickering. She nurtures her many celebrity feuds with the seriousness of a Visigoth: Scooter Brownwho, it seems, bought his catalog. Katy Perrywith whom he may have disputed over the corps of dancers, although they have apparently made peace publicly. And the poor Olivia Rodrigo! A former protégé who may have sealed her fate when she was briefly polite to Kim Kardashian in 2021.
But Swift is also famous for her kindness, Sheffield points out, and her kindness, which is different, and more necessary. In that, he writes, that Bruce Springsteen may be its closest analogue. Like Bruce, we need her to be the person we think she is. In Swift’s case, the genuinely kind person with the endearing but exhausting enthusiasm that criticism of the New Yorker Amanda Petrusich once described as “the energy of ‘You’.”
Doing this in the right amounts, at the right times, is a constant tightrope walk. “Taylor’s arrogance, his excessive energy, his inability to No Ser Taylor for a microsecond – it’s a lot,” Sheffield admits. “It’s totally understandable that it drives people crazy.”
Sheffield approaches Swift with a kind of mocking affection. He’s not so much a scholar as an admirer and fellow music nerd, but few have written about it with such an inside-out understanding. You shouldn’t underestimate anyone who rides the Q line of the New York train for two hours round trip just to be able to play the song “Coney Island” in Coney Island.
Although Heartbreak Is the National Anthem briefly discusses the relationship with Travis Kelce and his subsequent takeover of the NFL, doesn’t have much to say about his latest album, The Tortured Poets Department. Most of it appears to have been written as Swift was cruising toward her current global fame. It’s hard to write about events while they’re in motion, and she’s always in motion. It will be more famous when you finish reading this note than when you started.
“She set out to write herself (and her audience) into a whole long, ostentatious, bloody, messy, crazy history of pop music,” Sheffield writes. “But no one could have predicted how far these songs would travel.”
Fuente: The Washington Post
