How can Taylor Swift top her 20s?
Is she America’s most put-upon sweetheart, or is she pulling, as they say, the world’s ‘biggest swifty’?
Confidential
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Is she America’s most put-upon sweetheart, or is she pulling, as they say, the world’s ‘biggest swifty’?
As Taylor Swift celebrates a milestone birthday on December 13, there can’t be any items left unchecked on her “30 things to achieve before 30” list. Sell more than 50 million albums, tick, win 10 Grammy Awards, tick, appear in Billboard’s Top 10 Greatest Artists of All Time, tick, be named American Music Awards’ Artist of the Year and Decade, double tick, perfect the art of turning a public feud into a weapon of mass publicity, tick, tick and tick again.
She’s also on the cover of British Vogue and delivered an album that Rolling Stone dubbed “a career-topping masterpiece”.
All of it she credits to her army of Swifties. “I was up there because of you and I know that every minute of every day,” she posted to her 123 million Instagram followers and 85 million Twitter fans, following the AMAs.
Snapping up six awards – making her the biggest winner of all time, overtaking Michael Jackson, Swift said in her speech, “The last year of my life has had some of the most amazing times and also some of the hardest things I’ve gone through.
“I wanted to thank you so much for being the thing that has been a constant in my life.”
While Tay Tay’s fans have indeed been constant — many of them growing up with her — they will be used to her battles, as the polarising star seems to attract love and hate in equal measures and some suggest, courts controversy.
Her recent issues have been over ownership of her hits – before the AMAs Swift tweeted that Big Machine Records bosses Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun, with whom she has been in a lengthy dispute, said she was not allowed to perform her back catalogue on TV. “The message being sent to me is very clear,” she wrote. “Be a good little girl and shut up. Or you’ll be punished. This is WRONG.”
Big Machine Records disputed her version saying there was no ban and Swift did perform her hits including Love Story and Shake It Off at the awards on November 24.
She fell out with Big Machine in June, when the label was bought by Scooter, who manages Justin Bieber and Ariane Grande, and as such, now owns the master rights to her back catalogue, which she had been trying to buy. “Scooter has stripped me of my life’s work,” she wrote. “This is what happens when you sign a deal at 15 to someone for whom the term ‘loyalty’ is clearly just a contractual concept.”
“When I left my masters in Scott’s hands, I made peace with the fact that eventually he would sell them. Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine the buyer would be Scooter.
“He knew what he was doing; they both did. Controlling a woman who didn’t want to be associated with them. In perpetuity. That means forever.”
Controversy has never been far from Swift, who first hit the charts aged 16. After a string of high-profile romances, she says she was “slut-shamed in her early twenties”.
“It’s a way to take a woman who’s … succeeding at doing her job and … minimise that skill by taking something that everyone in their darkest, darkest moments loves to do, which is just to slut shame,” she told Apple Music. “And that happened to me at a very young age, so that was a bit hard.”
At the same time, she’s an expert at revenge songs, about ex-boyfriends including Joe Jonas and John Mayer. “You know what, if they don’t want me to write bad songs about them, they shouldn’t do bad things,” she said.
She’s also never far away from a celebrity feud, including bust-ups with Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry, but her most famous has been with Kanye West. It began in 2009 when Kanye gatecrashed the MTV Awards stage to say Beyonce should have won instead of Taylor.
After subsequently making amends, he then included the line “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/Why? I made that bitch famous,” in his 2016 hit Famous. Swift did not take this well – and took the revelation from Kim Kardashian that she had given approval for the lyric even worse, especially when she branded her a snake.
Never one to concede the last word, Swift used snake imagery on her album Reputation and took a giant snake on tour. “I can’t tell you how hard I had to keep from laughing every time my 63-foot inflatable cobra named Karyn appeared on stage in front of 60,000 screaming fans,” Swift wrote in Elle magazine. “It’s the stadium tour equivalent of responding to a troll’s hateful Instagram comment with ‘lol’. It would be nice if we could get an apology from people who bully us, but maybe all I’ll ever get is the satisfaction of knowing I could survive it, and thrive despite it.
“Grow a backbone, trust
your gut, and know when to strike back. Be like a snake — only bite if someone steps on you,” she wrote.
Swift penned her frustrations into her new album Lover, which includes the self-affirming anthem Me! with lyrics, “I know that I’m a handful/I never leave well enough alone/And trouble’s gonna follow where I go”.
The question is where is Swift going to go next and will her Swifties follow her as she heads towards 40?
“When I was younger, I used to get questions like, ‘Where do you see yourself in 10 years?’ I’d try to answer. As I get older, I’m learning that wisdom is learning how dumb you are compared to how much you are going to know,” she told Vogue.
Perhaps that future will include more acting — she appears in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s upcoming movie-adaptation of Cats with Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, Judi Dench and Rebel Wilson.
“I really had an amazing time. I loved the weirdness of it,” she says. “I loved how I felt I’d never get another opportunity to be like this in my life.”
We’re not so sure about that — if there’s one thing you can rely on Swift being, it’s full of surprises.
After all, she is Fearless.