There was a moment this year when I decided, actually, the next generation of girls has every chance of doing all right. The moment was the climax of a Taylor Swift concert at the O2 Arena, with Swifty as the ringmaster of a fantastical circus, dressed in red sequinned coat tails and top hat, singing “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” – and the audience sang it back. All around me, teens and tweens lifted up their handmade LED signs and flashing torches of allegiance to their heroine, and they raised their voices too and chanted along: “We-ee are, NEVER, EVER, EVER getting back together!” And I thought: you lot aren’t going to take any nonsense from boys, are you? As they spilled out into the night outside the dome, with lyrics painted on their faces, every girl there had been anointed with knowledge most women take several heartbreaks to acquire: guys just aren’t worth the anguish, but you should matter to you.
Swift is probably about to be the biggest thing in the world, and that’s one of the rare events that makes me feel hopeful for our species. Unequivocally, I love her. “Shake It Off”, the lead single from her new album 1989, has debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 (the album is named for the year she was born: implausibly, she’s still only 24, and has been in the business for a decade). Though Swift is surely used to smash hits and sell-out tours, this is likely to be an even more gargantuan form of success as she crosses over definitively from country-pop to POP-pop. “Shake It Off” itself is an endlessly relistenable manifesto of screw-you, as Swift enumerates some of the duller criticisms aimed at her (“Got nothing in my brain”/“Go on too many dates”) before dispatching them magnificently in the chorus: “Just shake it off, shake it off.”
The video is possibly even more joyous, with Swift scampering to keep up with ever-changing troupes of dancers, and goofily failing, before the screen fills with fan kids freaking out delightfully to the song. It’s the perfect synthesis of the Taylor triple-threat: close to her audience (Swift was one of the first stars to build a fanbase on Myspace, and she still leaves unbearably sweet comments on her fans’ Instagram pictures), not too serious about her public image, and super respectful of hard work and talent. (There’s been justified criticism of the twerking section for insensitivity to the racial politics of white stars using black women’s sexualised bodies as props, but there’s also no doubt that the twerkers – like the ballerinas, the gymnast, the cheer team and the rest of the dancers – have been recruited for being absolutely amazing at what they do.)
Actually, it’s part three of the Taylor equation that is rapidly becoming my favourite thing about Swift: she’s manifestly unfaffed about looking aloof or sexy, but she knows she’s an A-grade songwriter, and she expects her due for it. “They can say whatever they want about my personal life because I know what my personal life is, and it involves a lot of TV and cats and girlfriends,” she said in a recent Guardian interview. “But I don’t like it when they start to make cheap shots at my songwriting. Because there’s no joke to be made there.”
Her last album, Red, has an almost inexhaustible supply of lyrical brilliance – the intoxicating invocation of falling recklessly in love on “Treacherous”, the gleeful celebration of being young and having fun in “22”, the chilly and sly “Last Time” that twists from desperate relationship-saving promise to irrevocable dumping in the last chorus. But I secretly believe that the most heartfelt line of all is one of the sick burns she delivers to the ex in “Never Ever”. “Go and listen to some indie record that’s much, much cooler than mine,” scoffs Swift. She doesn’t care what the try-hard boys think. She knows she’s good.
She knows she deserves to get paid, too. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about the future of the music industry (Taylor Swift wrote an op-ed for the WSJ! She is truly a renaissance woman), Swift sounded an unusual note of optimism about the financial viability of the recording industry: “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.” Whether audiences will universally fall into line after a generation raised in Napster libertarianism is unclear, but what matters is that Swift clearly isn’t going to tolerate a set of rules that don’t value her correctly. It’s a principle that she expands on, too: “My hope for the future, not just in the music industry, but in every young girl I meet… is that they all realise their worth and ask for it.”
Until recently, Swift distanced herself clunkily from feminism. “I don’t really think about things as guys versus girls. I never have. I was raised by parents who brought me up to think if you work as hard as guys, you can go far in life,” she told the Daily Beast in 2012, and the world echoed to the sound of Swift-loving feminists shouting “Noooooo! You have made a fundamental error about the nature of both society and feminism there, Taylor!” But last week, she revised this in the Guardian interview: “I didn’t understand that saying you’re a feminist is just saying that you hope women and men will have equal rights and equal opportunities … I’ve been taking a feminist stance without actually saying so.” Poet laureate of women’s inner lives, resolute booster of the girls who love her, healthily selfish, and heartily unconcerned with what the haters think about her: Taylor’s world is one we should all spend more time living in.
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