West’s then-wife Kim Kardashian then released a series of devastating Snapchats that made it look like Swift had lied about all of the above. After roughly two years of being the greatest luminary in pop music, thanks to her planet-conquering album 1989, Swift crashed to earth. Hard. The Ringer asked, “When Did You First Realize Taylor Swift Was Lying to You?” New York magazine wanted to know: “When Did the Media Turn Against Taylor Swift?” In one vinegary piece, Buzzfeed traced “How Taylor Swift Played The Victim For A Decade And Made Her Entire Career.” Over at Elle magazine, noted Swift skeptic Jude Doyle used “The Depressingly Predictable Downfall Of Taylor Swift” as evidence that no woman can remain America’s sweetheart.So, Swift went to ground. “Nobody physically saw me for a year,” she recounted in Miss Americana. “That’s what I thought they wanted.”Both of Swift’s subsequent albums, Reputation and Lover, were sold as the Return of Taylor Swift. Reputation, in 2017, was Swift’s midnight-hued concept album about the fall and rise of Taylor Swift; the singer, perhaps once a little too available, infamously refused to do any interviews about it. Then, in 2019, Swift drenched Lover in rainbows and pastels. She retconned her heel turn and went on the record with journalists to confirm that the score-settling snakes of Reputation were all an act. Swift was back to her ostentatiously earnest self.After years of cataclysmically bad press, two underwhelming albums, and the growing threat of irrelevance, each of the four albums that Swift has put out since 2019—Folklore, Evermore, Fearless (Taylor’s Version), and Red (Taylor’s Version)—have become iconic art of the pandemic era.
Swift’s previous work was so heavily autobiographical that tabloids became essential reading, but Swift made it clear that the stories in Folklore and Evermore were largely imaginary. And while her past albums increasingly leaned into maximalist production, her isolation records are stripped-down affairs, in the style of the male-dominated indie rock that’s always been taken more seriously than pop. The struggles of love and youth—the overarching themes of Swift’s oeuvre—remain top of mind. But even as Swift (or her fictional avatars) turns her past over, reexamining situations and relationships and situationships in a new light, she doesn’t dismiss her old feelings. “When you are young, they assume you know nothing,” Swift sings in “Cardigan,” the lead single off Folklore. During the bridge, she rebukes that adage: “I knew everything when I was young.”“Teenage girls are not taken seriously,” Brown said. “We tell teenagers all the time that the things that are important to them are silly, that you’re not really in love, that one day when you’re older you’ll realize that none of these problems were actually a big deal.”“It’s really hard for any artist to stay relevant for 15 years. How do you do that?”
That attitude can be very influential: As a teenager, Thalia Charles didn’t like Taylor Swift.“Everyone really liked Taylor Swift, everyone really liked her music, so I thought I was being really cool and quirky and contrarian for not liking her,” said Charles, who is now 21. “I think a bit of it was definitely some internalized misogyny.”“I think I was just being influenced by the tastes of those whose tastes I thought were more sophisticated than mine.”
K. had spent much of the pandemic thinking over a past, abusive relationship and “how I let myself stay in it for as long as I did.” After “All Too Well” came out, she listened to it again and again. For her, Rodrigo and Swift are often trying to answer the same question: What does it mean to be treated well?“People think that women are hysterical if they’re complaining about emotional abuse, because they don’t think that that’s a real thing,” K. said. “The recognition that this being a really, really hard thing that was short-term that impacts her maybe 10 years later felt very validating and like I was seen.”Nearly a decade after the release of the original “All Too Well,” the new version soared to the top of the charts, becoming the longest song to ever hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100.“It’s kind of a soundtrack for examining all of the parts of our lives and maybe the past that we didn’t know [was] maybe problematic or hard.”
But while Swift taxonomizes and reevaluates the teenage experience, the singer is also now a kind of physical manifestation of it, since she dominated pop culture for so many young women’s adolescence and early adulthood. When Wilder, who grew up deeply conservative Christian, got her first iPod, Swift’s music was on it.“I was listening to only music about God until I was in middle school-ish,” Wilder said. “She was there at the beginning of my musical independence, and then I didn’t pay attention to her until very recently. So it’s just like jumping back to a much earlier version of myself.”During the pandemic, Wilder moved to a conservative area of Idaho, whose political atmosphere she found off-putting. She started to spend much more time inside her own head, listening to what she called “headphones music.” The “wistful, sad songs” of Evermore perfectly fit her mood. And following along as Swift once again took the music industry by storm became a way for Wilder to still feel like she had a community, regardless of politics and a plague.“I’m only going deeper,” she said. “Next, I’m gonna be on the Reddit threads and shit. Yeah, I’m all in.” Emma Ockerman contributed to this story.“Next, I’m gonna be on the Reddit threads and shit. Yeah, I’m all in.”