Taylor Swift and I have a long history with each other. We have a rather a love/hate relationship. While I listen to her music (at least her old stuff), I could never like her as a person. For years, I never understood why people consider her so admirable and refuse (or are just too stupid) to recognize her glamorized vitriol and money making manipulative nature she has always possessed. I grew up in Taylor Swift mania and so my history of her road to fame is much more accurate than what most of her fans know about today.
Taylor and I are around the same age, she's exactly one year older than me. I remember when her debut song Teardrops on My Guitar premiered and I really liked it. Afterwards, like many other teenagers, I became a Taylor Swift fan and witnessed her immense rise to fame. Her music was fun, real, but not too serious. It was country, but with a more youthful sound to it. Taylor reinvented the country music industry and made it appeal to younger audiences.
Country music is usually about heartbreak and no one got heartbreak better than Taylor Swift. Because Taylor was a teenager, it was easier for girls to relate to her funky brand of country music as compared to the more mature sound like Shania Twain or Martina McBride. Actually my favorite song from Taylor Swift isn't actually about heartbreak, it's about an everlasting love. Taylor's sweet little ballad Mary's Song always reminded me of Melanie and Jake from Sweet Home Alabama (a favorite of mine).
Anyways, so 2008-2009 rolls around and Taylor Swift is getting out there in the world. She's beautiful, outgoing, talented, funny, the whole package. Now lets switch gears for a moment. Around 2007, I discovered the Jonas Brothers with the release of Year 3000 and also like many teenage girls, I fell hard for them! I was so in love with the Jonas Brothers and it was hard to have a favorite. Similar to Taylor, I'm around their age and so I had a lot of the same interests and tastes.
Taylor Swift and the Jonas Brothers came during a sort of renaissance of the Disney Channel. In the early Millenia, there had been a Disney Channel golden age with shows like Lizzie McGuire, Even Stevens, Kim Possible, not to mention some excellent Disney Channel original movies. Then after 2003, it wavered a little bit. With the advent of Hannah Montana and High School Musical in 2006, Disney Channel was back on a roll. Other shows like That's So Raven, The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, Phineas and Ferb, The Wizards of Waverly Place and breakout talent such as Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez, Ashley Tisdale, The Cheetah Girls and many others, made that space between 2006 to 2009 a new era for young talent and Taylor Swift and the JoBros were right in the middle of it.
So it really didn't come as a surprise when Taylor Swift and Joe Jonas who were constantly being linked up with one another in the media, revealed that they were dating. However, for two outgoing personalities like Joe and Taylor, they kept their relationship relatively quiet. Then it happened. The story that changed everything. Joe Jonas did the unthinkable (yet, that's nothing new to Joe) and he broke up with Taylor. And this was when Taylor Swift became the Taylor she's now so famous for. She played the role of the heartbroken, put-upon girlfriend quite well and milked the story for all its worth on the Ellen DeGeneres show. Fans were furious that Joe could do such a thing and soon the Jonas Brothers were in the hot seat and it wasn't good.
Whether it was her intention or not, Taylor dragged the Jonas Brothers through the mud and almost single handedly ruined their careers. Taylor wrote about her heartbreak in the song Fearless. She slandered Joe's new girlfriend, Camilla Belle, in the song Better Than Revenge, blaming her for Joe's actions. And the world ate it up. Due to the break-up with the highly publicized and well liked Jonas Brother, Taylor used that as the platform for her new, edgy sound. Instead of songs about moving on from a bad relationship, she was writing about revenge and her own personal martyrdom.
The backlash from fans got so bad that Joe had to post a message on the band's MySpace page. This is a summery taken from People.
“Several things I will state with all my heart,” writes Jonas, 19, who’s now quietly dating actress Camilla Belle. “I never cheated on a girlfriend. It might make someone feel better to assume or imply I have been unfaithful but it is simply not true. Maybe there were reasons for a breakup. Maybe the heart moved on. Perhaps feelings changed. I am truly saddened that anything would potentially cause you to think less of me.”
Although Swift, 18, told Ellen DeGeneres that Jonas broke up with her in a 27-second phone call, Jonas explains in his posting on the Jonas Brothers page that he was not the one to end the conversation abruptly.
“For those who have expressed concern over the ’27 second’ phone call, I called to discuss feelings with the other person,” he writes. “Those feelings were obviously not well received. I did not end the conversation. Someone else did. Phone calls can only last as long as the person on the other end of the line is willing to talk.”
Jonas doesn’t go into the specific reasons for the split.
“Anytime you are in a relationship for any length of time there are going to be issues,” he writes. “Sometimes they resolve. Other times they lead to a change of heart. This was the case recently.”
He concludes by writing, “I wish the best for the other person, but could not sit back any longer and leave our fans with a wrong impression of the truth. Hope this helps enlighten a little.”
It wasn't long before Taylor got the reputation of a serial dater. She went through a string of men and then would write songs about her time with them. Usually her being the victim. I was still listening to Taylor's music, but I was growing more and more dissatisfied with her treatment of people and her manipulation of the media. It soon became a running joke in society. Taylor Swift was using people for her own benefit and making bank off of their time together, giving no regard to what it might happen to the guy in question.
By that point I was tired of her. I was even more tired of people who were constantly defending her behavior. Taylor claims to be a strong and independent woman, however for someone that's so strong, she spends a lot time complaining about other people. I hated the fact that she utilized people for her own gain and telling young and vulnerable girls that it's acceptable to be vengeful and hateful. In my mind she was not a role model. Like Princess Diana did with Prince Charles and the Royal Family, Taylor Swift could sway the media anyway she wanted and make whoever got in her way a heartless villain.
Yes, Taylor was 18 when this all started. Maybe she was immature, but she wasn't stupid either. She made her debut writing about boys who broke her heart. By the time Joe Jonas rolled around, she knew full well what she could pull and how successful she could be. In 2019, 10 years after the infamous breakup with Joe Jonas Taylor admits that she regrets what she did to Joe and his brothers. Obviously some maturity has caught up with her and clearly Joe has moved on as well.
I don't hate Taylor Swift. She's immensely talented and I don't think that she's an inherently a bad person either. Other songs I enjoy are You Belong With Me, Love Story, Mine, White Horse, The Best Day (I always cry!), Haunted and Blank Space. Unfortunately she's now fallen into the celebrity political trap, so who knows where she's going now. However, I can never see Taylor Swift as a victim of her own actions. People who constantly defend what she does and how she treats people tend to bother me. Taylor cannot be viewed as as an admirable person when she threw herself from man to man, broke up with them and then wrote a hit about it, regardless if she's painted herself as the victim or not. There is nothing to praiseworthy or honorable there.
I guess Taylor's newest album, Folklore, has taken a complete turn from her usual pop artist scene and she's returning to her country, ballad roots. Good for her. What made her famous was her fun country music. When she was just a young girl trying to understand the world. Even now, I think I find more emotion and depth and maturity in the simplicity of Mary's Song than I ever could in Better Than Revenge.
I enjoy Taylor Swift songs, I do not like her as a person at all. Her main talent as people have pointed out is marketing. Everything she does is calculated, down to moving from PA to Nashville to break into the music entry as a country music star because that is the lowest barrier to entry in music as one article I read put it. She's not Southern, her accents were fake (as I grant many country stars are now). All the dating and putting in songs, pretty obviously publicity stunts (often from both people in the "couple") although T Hiddleston is the most egregious.
ReplyDeleteThe fighting with executives. I'm sure there was shady stuff, there always is, however, she isn't "self-made" and all her music isn't exclusively hers, its a total production, she wouldn't have got where she was going indie, so that whole furor was something of a publicity stunt as well.
I do think she has some song-writing talent. Most "artists" have mass produced corporate songs. I think she had help on lots of hers, but she put more individual work into hers than a lot of pop singers. They are no poetry that is sure, but comparatively they are good. I've always enjoyed them, but they have gotten super hateful and spiteful (but soo catchy) increasingly since she moved to pop which for someone as powerful as she is is pretty nasty. I think the later ones are less spiteful, but more dark and less unique and interesting. I didn't care for her last two albums, but then I usually am behind a few in terms of my mood.
It does feel like most pop songs are dark and/or dreary and I'm not a huge music person and it affected my mood in a way that scared me earlier this year, so I've not been listening to much.
If all that she does is put into marketing than it's a pretty sad way to get your name out there. Using men as publicity stunts only to be publicly humiliated for money, being eaten alive by their own fanbases and their careers put in jeopardy seems like a desperate way to make yourself known. Anything else she does, I don't really care, but I draw the line at the utilization of people for your own gain. It shows a lack of general goodness and little to no confidence in yourself and your talent.
DeleteThis was interesting to read, I grew up on her music but was never a die hard fan I guess. I'm a bigger fan now. But I always listened to her albums, I didn't keep up with a lot of the celerity gossip, but always knew who her songs were about. Her personal life has always seemed to publicized. Though it's definitely intentional to a point.
ReplyDeleteI think what she did to Joe Jonas was wrong, and she has admitted that when she wrote that song she still thought people could be taken from you, which is wrong. They have to want to leave. I do think she's matured a lot since then and has written lyrics about how she's changed her mindset on a lot of things. I don't think she ruined the Jonas Brothers career though, they had almost as
big and rabid of a fanbase as she did, and I think Nick did some things that didn't help their reputation. And their definitely doing good now. I like both of their music.
You make a lot of great points, she definitely made calculated moves. And made a lot of mistakes and handled things badly.
I think she's grown a lot more now, but I completely understand why all of those things would put you off her.
And a lot of people are way too quick to excuse things with celebrities just because they like them.
Thanks. I don't hate her, but I do despise the people who truly believe that she was victim in her mistakes. Some of these people who have bought into it I actually follow, hence the graphic on top of my post.
DeleteI remember that the Jonas Brothers' did really have a hard time with the rabid backlash from the public after what she did to Joe, because she would not let it rest. It did take them awhile to recover from it, but their popularity waned quite a bit afterwards.
Oh yeah I hate when people do that too, she's definitely not. Ugh, that's frustrating. Right.
DeleteThat really sucks that, that happened to them. I never really pick a side with stuff like that, so it's dumb that so many people did. She did harp on it for quite a while. Glad they sorted it out now.
This is such a well-written and interesting post. I think Taylor Swift is very talented, and I like lots of her music, but I'm not sure what I think about her as a person. So many people either adore her and think she can do no wrong or hate her and think everything she does is wrong. You did a great job of writing down the facts and making lots of good, true points without being cruel. Taylor has definitely made a lot of mistakes, and I can't stand most of her revenge songs, but she seems to have matured, so I'm willing to give her another chance.
ReplyDeleteAgain, great post. You're a very talented writer.
Thank you! That means a great deal to me. I try to be fair and balanced when it comes to writing about issues that people may see as controversial.
DeleteHmm. I think to say that she 'threw herself from man to man' is unkind. She dated seven or eight people over the course of maybe ten years, and about half of them broke up with her. All musicians write about their heartbreak (and she definitely does play on it to help her sell records!) but I think the main difference in her case is that she dated famous people - also as she's a young woman people (particularly the media) are much more quick to judge. She was very young at the beginning of her career and I feel like she's matured a lot and admitted her past mistakes along the way. Personally I really admire her for voicing her political opinions - especially as with her big country fan-base it was a risk for her to be brave in that way. I feel like her lawyer now haha, and I can never really decide whether I like her or not. But she's only human and she's had her share of backlash. Also the Jonas Brothers have forgiven her and are all doing well now, so I think we can forgive her for Joe at least!
ReplyDeleteThe problem with Taylor is that she didn't take a break in-between relationships. She may have dated seven or eight people, but the story was usually the same. They were the problem and she was the victim. And women do tend to be victimized more in the media, however, Taylor did a bring a great deal of criticism in herself. Publicly humiliating someone just to make money is never acceptable. If she could just say in interviews, "Yeah, he and I broke up. It just wasn't working" and left it at that, no one would question it.
DeleteAh, when you listen to the albums though she writes 'sorry' songs too. I think 'Back to December' was for Taylor Lautner? And 'I know you were trouble' is basically her admitting that she knows she should know better when it comes to the John Meyer types, and blaming herself. I don't think she's worse than any other celebrity when it comes to this stuff, we're just more aware of the drama as it's all in her lyrics! I think that's why she's interesting to me, haha. I see your point though.
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