On Taylor Swift's "Folklore"
I have this very distinct memory of watching CMT with my father back in like 2006 when the video of “Teardrops on my Guitar” came on and I remember my dad telling me that Taylor Swift have real longevity in the music industry because of how talented she was. And like with so many other things, he was right.
I was thinking about the responses to J.K. Rowling’s overt transphobia, many of which were intent on preserving the sanctity of Harry Potter as a text in spite of its author’s bigotry. One such tweet, coincidentally by a man, claimed that Rowling was one of the first female writers to attain prominence and consequently, she should be forgiven for her bigotry. However, Rowling does not exist in a vacuum; she owes her legacy to the many, many female writers that came before her, whether or not history acknowledges their contributions. History is written by the powerful, and so many women, as well as other marginalized individuals are erased by it due to a lack of agency. After all, the only reason profoundly intellectual Renaissance dilettantes could well, be profoundly intellectual Renaissance dilettantes is because they had women and servants and slaves doing their cooking and washing and childrearing for them and they were able to sit around and ponder things and make art and debate in coffeeshops with fellow dilettantes.
But, even if we’re solely considering published female writers, what about Jane Austen and Emily Bronte? Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou? Arundhati Roy and Amy Tan? Do these women not count because they’re not destroying their legacy on the regular on Twitter.com? That is one of the central theses of Joanna Russ’ “How to Suppress Women’s Writing,” a 1983 work that describes how misogyny, especially when coupled with systemic racism, classism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry, impedes the widespread recognition and catalyzes the dismissal of work by female authors. The fact is, in her arrogance, J.K. Rowling might not regard herself as the descendent of women like Austen and Bronte and Hurston and more, Taylor Swift on the other hand, decidedly does and her discography proves it.
I have to admit though, Folklore wasn’t my cup of tea when I first heard it but two days after listening to it on repeat, I’ve developed a healthy respect for the album even if I had to pick, Red is still my #1 Taylor Swift album. The thing is though, I’m highly skeptical of people that are now lauding Taylor as intelligent and a good songwriter after deriding her for a decade because this album veers towards alternative and folk instead of the dance pop of 1989 or Lover. For the record, Taylor has always been an excellent lyricist and musician and it’s really telling what kind of art inspires respect versus what kind of art inspires mocking in certain people.
In a way, Folklore reminded me a lot of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. For one thing, both Folklore and “Wuthering Heights” were written by women whose talent and intelligence have long been underestimated by large portions of the general population; and for quite another thing, the whole vibe of Folklore is “running through a rainy moor into the arms of a mysterious lover.” To many scholars though, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte has always been regarded as the superior Bronte book but I wholeheartedly disagree and not just because Jane Eyre is racist. For a long time, Emily Bronte lacked any form of literary definition because her work was solely characterized as being “a dream world” and most importantly, “by a woman.” It seemed impossible that a woman could have possibly conceptualized a character as cruel and callous the Heathcliff of the 2nd half of the novel (which I’ve steadfastly never reread after the age of 12) but it simultaneously felt impossible for the same people to comprehend that a man would lower himself to write about the kind of visceral emotionality that drives the whole novel. Thusly, how could she have written it?
As Russ explains, societally speaking, we prefer to collectively deny the agency and genius of women, especially when it’s impossible to deem it innate or even better, something that was unearthed and cultivated by a man. In an interview with The Rumpus, Alana Massey said:
“I think there’s definitely overlap in the way that men expect women to be effortlessly thin, or accidentally thin, or just predisposed to thinness in a way that doesn’t require women to be thinking about it and the way they want women’s genius to manifest. If a woman creates something that is multilayered, deep, revelatory, and complex, men often want to be the ones who explain all of those elements back to her, as if she was just thinking her magical thoughts and they come out brilliant, that she didn’t labor over them intensely. They want to be the ones to name the depth in them, to recognize the beauty in them, rather than allowing a female genius to be the owner of that genius and to say, “Oh yes, these levels of meaning, this strategy, and indeed, this genius, were all my design.”
And that kind of delineates the problem of Taylor Swift. She started off her career as a talented little girl, performing in dive bars with her mom on the side, co-writing ditties about ballgowns and pick-up trucks, and people could be condescending about her and get away with it. But then, she was 19 and wrote Speak Now (2010)by herself without any co-writers and aimed her pen at those who mistreated her, even famous men like my birthday twin John Mayer (“Dear John” is eviscerating to this day and highly deserved), and the question arose, “She wrote it but ought she to have done so?” Moreover, fine, she wrote it once but how dare she recreate it over and over and dare to take pride in it?
For what it’s worth though, I would say that 2012’s Red was perhaps even worse than Speak Now in terms of the public discomfort it engendered because anger in women can be sexualized and processed in a way that doesn’t necessarily reflect badly on the external observer. In other words, when Taylor’s being petty in pithy rhymes like in “Better Than Revenge” or “Speak Now,” we as an audience can distance ourselves from it, laughing at her and assuring ourselves that we’d never be like that. But the sentiments that are expressed in Red aren’t fun to relate to and perhaps more significantly, to paraphrase an old Rolling Stone review of Mad Men, simplistically speaking, some negative traits, ruthlessness, rage, self-interest, a propensity for physical violence, are gendered as male while other negative traits, passivity, bitterness, grief, emotional enmeshment, a knack for attacking and deflating egos, are gendered as female. In other words, femininity can be beneficial when it can be sexualized and/or related to and doesn’t actually threaten the patriarchy, but otherwise, all bets are off.
The Taylor of Folklore is colored by her experiences of the last decade and half in the spotlight and always, her gift is communicating specific experiences to her in a manner that is universal. For instance, in “Mad Woman,” she writes “Every time you call me crazy/I get more crazy.” Maybe Taylor is talking about her own life, the way in which the media has pathologized her for so long but for better or worse, that feeling is relatable to so many women all around the world. Gaslighting you know? Being told you’re a certain way only makes you more inclined to be that way and decades of psychological research (not to mention Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper”) has validated this.
When I heard “Exile”, my favorite song on Folklore, for the first time, I absolutely lost it. I started choke sobbing while I was driving to work because it physically felt like I was watching a movie of my history and spoiler: it didn’t have a happy ending. I’m not that person anymore, not in that phase of life, and I would say I’m categorically over everything happened but this song reminded me of when I was younger and sadder and meaner, a sort of little sister I wish I could protect from what was to come. In the past, I have debated internally what I would have done differently had I known how things would play out but I know for a fact I wouldn’t have listened to anybody’s advice because there was always a disconnect between what I knew was smart and good and what I wanted to do, what felt right and real. When you spent years balancing on breaking branches so to speak, having both feet on the ground feels odd and uncomfortable even if it’s objectively better for you. But I digress.
I do take issue with the idea that Folklore is superior to Red for one because it’s not as explicitly confessional or well, girly. Firstly, Folklore is confessional, just in a different way than Red, which practically screams that its narrator is hurting and denounces anybody listening for not doing lifting a finger to help, ignoring the practical fact that the essence of the hurt is coming from within. Folklore is honest and relatable to the very same people who loved Red and Speak Now and Fearless, young women who grew up alongside Taylor but whose modus operandi of sentimentality is simply different than it was in 2012 as tends to happen when the seasons change and the years go by. It doesn’t mean we are fundamentally different people than we were back then, but only that different aspects of our beings are being inhibited and expressed due to the nature of things.
As Leslie Jamison wrote in “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain:”
“Suffering is interesting but so is getting better. The aftermath of wounds—the strain and struggle of stitching the skin, the stride of silver bones—contours women alongside the wounds themselves… I don’t believe in a finite economy of empathy; I happen to think that paying attention yields as much as it taxes. You learn to start seeing.”
The kind of pain that I felt in 2012 is not the same kind of pain I feel in 2020 and is not the same kind of pain I’ll feel in 2030. But, I’d like to believe that Taylor Swift will evolve just like I will and I think that’s all I can ever ask for from any artist. And so I am.