Barbara Amiel: My sudden Taylor Swift crush, with reservations

The email came from The Editor. “Good morning Barbara,” it said cheerily. “We were doing some planning for the coverage of the upcoming Taylor Swift concerts in Toronto and Vancouver and your name came up …. Might you be interested in writing something?”

I did not know that by agreeing to this (I agree to anything that forces me to exercise my writing muscle) I would be buried by thousands upon thousands of videos, lyrics, articles and columns worldwide. Never mind the inevitable university courses and theses.

I neglected my dog. My husband, who knew more about Taylor than I did because she has the shortest of skirts and the most gorgeous legs of any 5’10” young woman (or perhaps 5’11”, there is some dispute) — the research on her legs alone is enormous and contradictory — was so enthused about the project that he actually stopped watching Fox, thank God. Or rather thank Taylor, who is a god in her own right with a church that has texts to be deciphered, as well as special outfits so congregants can recognize each other, like Advent T-shirts and friendship bracelets.

Swifties will spot my errors but I write with goodwill. I started with a superior attitude about hundreds of millions of teenage girls (a vision which by itself is a nightmarish concept), all of them devouring her songs about bad dates, difficult nights and weltschmerz depression.  I had attitude about vapid popular music because I’m really a Wagner fan and think the Ring Cycle is the greatest music ever. But now, while I can’t say that I can hum any song because melody is not the point of Taylor Swift, I am totally 100% in awe of this woman and I think my favourite song is “Me” or “I can do it with a broken heart,” although in my early love life trauma I simply couldn’t do it which is perhaps why her songs become something of a “Shake it off” anthem.

Never mind her business acumen, which is considerable, she is extremely witty, clever and, surprise to me, her comic timing is impeccable. Think of a modern version of Lisa Kudrow. Best moments include the shows she did on U.K. television with Graham Norton. Take a look at her on the sofa with Richard Gere and John Cleese.  It’s all about body language, inflection and that spot-on timing but with her gifts, if singing ever bores her she could be a stand-up comedian.

No point either in reciting the statistics on her awards — I think the number of big ones is 51 including Grammys, Country Music Association Awards, MTV Video Music Awards, American Music Awards and probably another handful this week. Her first one came when she was 17 singing country music. Frankly, I think it shows great forbearance that Beyonce hasn’t got a hit on her, although Swift’s public fight against streaming with no royalties and her example of come-uppance to greedy money men encouraged everyone in the pop business: Taylor re-recorded all her hits in what’s known as “Taylor’s version,” to wipe out profits of those who sold her tapes without first asking her to bid.

Her songs are exclusively about the tremulous ups and downs of first love, second love, third and so on — she’s a serial monogamist herself — and they recapture the scent of a teenage summer night with the boy you ached for. And the grey drizzle when he dumped you. Fab to be able to write a song about the boy that hurt you and have the world recognize that he’s a selfish bastard.

She’s her own songwriter, so lyrics are the strong point, although they go from inspired to pretty dreadful:  “Now I’m down bad, crying at the gym”; “ I scratch your head, you fall asleep, like a tattooed golden retriever.”  Her voice, a pretty mezzo soprano, doesn’t have the power of a Whitney Houston nor her performances the dancing skill of Beyonce. But she doesn’t need to be more than competent in those areas: her audiences love the strength she exudes, her determined and seemingly accessible personality, the sequins and dazzle,  her ability to make every one of her billions of listeners feel they know her and she loves them. It’s nothing short of extraordinary: she should be giving tutorials to beleaguered politicians and grumpy receptionists.

After days of watching videos and documentaries, I still can’t grasp who Taylor is. Real or fake? A manufactured product of her (divorced) parents plan for their talented money-machine prodigy? In one of her appearances, she’s about to be interviewed for a Rolling Stone cover and she tells us she wants to be “real real” but not “calculated” real.

I get this: while my experiences giving interviews and being dissed in the press are about one/one billionth of hers, I’ve grappled with them. Writing a book of memoirs, I went half mad trying to be “honest” about myself. Then when interviewed I wanted to answer honestly except I knew even as I spoke that somehow I was manufacturing a persona outside myself and I didn’t know who was who — me or the person answering the questions. Honesty is a slippery commodity when you are trying to capture it out there in front of a camera. I don’t expect Taylor is quite sure who she is, or at least as she grows into late middle age, she’ll wonder. Or perhaps write a “Mommie and Daddie Dearest” book.

It hasn’t been golden money all the way.  The storm came on Taylor Swift around 2017 when, as she puts it, the press fell “out of love with me.” The truly nasty headlines would be difficult for any young woman in her twenties. Till then, she was by her own account “fulfilled by approval” via her enthusiastically clapping audiences, by “being a nice … good girl.”   Unlike 99.9% of us, she had thought long and hard as a pre-teen about where she was going and worked to extremes to get there. “I had been trained to be happy,” she says.   “To do the right thing. Those pats on the head were all I lived for.”  Were her parents somewhat overbearing in their etiquette lessons or rigorous training sessions?

It’s not clear what sparked this turnaround in her media coverage. She was in fights but not of the serious kind — sort of a he-said she-said thing with rapper Kanye West and his then-wife Kim Kardashian, as well as a DJ who very unpleasantly put his hand up her skirt to pat her bottom.

Now we have reached a key point in her life. She wants to take off the muzzle of non-controversy and take a stand on something other than the boy that made you cry.  After all, what do you do when you’ve reached your mid-thirties — you’ve climbed every mountain in your biz and when female glam celebrities get put in the “elephant graveyard,” as she says. Reinventing yourself gets harder.  Can you go on pleasing those millions of Swifties and their devouring devotion which reminds me of the horrible scene in the film “Suddenly Last Summer” when Elizabeth Taylor’s cousin Sebastian is literally cannibalized after playing up to the young boys he has courted.

She has been a flawless piece of machinery.  All skirts clean. After 18 years of impeccable career moves she has decided to plunge into the dirty world of politics and risk jeopardizing her fandom.

It’s hard to live on Mount Olympus and talk about the problems of the plebs.  Her well-off family sheltered and guided her through the cut-throat music world and remain very much in the picture even today.  But, “I have no friends to talk to,” she once said rather plaintively and I believed her.  Still, the friends she worked to make her current posse can’t be much help on her new political journey — model Gigi Hadid and actor/singer Selena Gomez, for example. They are all paid-up members of the celebrity caucus which bows to sacred cows of the left. Deep think not their style. Probably that works for now: If like Taylor you’re white and rich it’s increasingly difficult to go on being liked in the polarized world of identity politics. You need an insurance policy, a bit of kowtowing to the left.

Speaking out politically is a godsend to someone who has never said anything much more publicly than “Wow,” “I love you,” and similar Hallmark sentiments.   “I feel 200 pounds lighter,” said Taylor.  And “I’m doing my [political] research.” But American politics are complicated, demand compromise and choices, and Taylor has at this point a rather simplistic view of the world. Not her fault when you are so removed from it.  So far she has rejoiced in the 65,000 extra registrations her endorsement of Tennessee Democrat Phil Bredesen in his 2018 race for the Senate brought in during one day. Damn impressive. But he still lost to Republican Marsha Blackburn.

Taylor responded with a catchy optimistic song about the future belonging to the young. This is where her naivety about the real world catches up with her: Six years later in the 2024 election, with more young voters than ever included, and over 400,000 hits on Taylor’s link to voter registration, Blackburn won by a substantially increased majority of nearly 900,000 votes.

It was the tax policies of Trump’s first term as president that got businesses to locate in deprived areas and give Blacks and the underprivileged jobs and a higher standard of living. Young Blacks don’t like crime — on streets Taylor has never seen — nor illegal immigrants, some bringing gang violence and working for low wages.

Next, Taylor endorsed Kamala Harris because, she says, of the LGBTQ policies of her running mate Tim Waltz.  Caution here — yellow light. As governor of Minnesota, Tim Waltz installed a policy allowing children to be temporarily taken from custody of their parents in order for the guardian state to give them gender affirming care.  I’m certainly not against affirmative gender surgery when a human being is deeply distressed by their birth sex.  But at the right time.

Does Taylor believe that a 13-year-old girl, for example, unattractive as many adolescents can be, bullied at school and wanting to become a boy, should at 13 get puberty blockers, hormones and “top” surgery OK’d by people who barely know her?  Cases of grown-up trans women regretting what they did in adolescence are now surfacing and while you can have cosmetic surgery to get back breasts it’s very unlikely you can regain fertility once the hormones have done their job.

So be a Democrat or Republican — or Independent, Taylor, but know the dangers lurking in policies of all political parties. “Am I bad or mad or wise,” asks Taylor in her new song Guilty as Sin. We’ll see.

Barbara Amiel, Baroness Black of Crossharbour, is a British-born columnist and author who was editor of the Toronto Sun from 1983-85. She has written for the Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, Maclean’s magazine and National Post, among others. Her latest book, Friends and Enemies: A Memoir, was published in October 2020.