Angela Mollard: Tay Tay is Shakespeare in sequins, and she’s shaking it up

The nice girl ‘wow’, the grown woman’s ‘f**ked up’. All of that, along with Taylor Swift’s superb talent for transcending genres, will be on show in Australia next year, writes Angela Mollard

She’s only nine but there’s a microphone in her hand, an iPod by her side and she’s belting out Taylor Swift’s Love Story with such fervour you’d think finding her own Romeo was her single life goal.

It was exactly a decade ago but this week as I re-watched that video of my youngest daughter on my phone, I laughed out loud. You see I’d worried about that song with its “I-need-a-boy-to-save-me” lyrics and I silently cursed Swift for pumping out such archaic nonsense even if the tune was lovely.

I needn’t have worried. Now 19, my smart, funny, capable girl is very much running her own life and Swift – who could so easily have crumpled under the cruelty that is a hallmark of contemporary fame – is doing likewise. She, too, was 19 when Kanye West so callously shamed her at the 2009 MTV VMA awards, triggering a long-running pop culture feud that was further amplified when West released a song claiming: “I made that bitch famous”.

As 800,000 fans this week clamoured to secure tickets to Swift’s Australian concerts, there’s something triumphant about America’s sweetheart not only selling out stadiums but winning at womanhood.

Taylor Swift performs in Arizona. Picture: Getty

Of course, she’s not the only one. Kylie, Madonna, Beyonce, Rihanna, Adele and Pink all command the stage and the charts on a single-name basis but it’s Taylor’s success that intrigues the most, particularly since – as music critics point out – she lacks the vocal range of her contemporaries.

Rather, Swift has survived and flourished on something else, something you can’t quite put your finger on until you listen closely to her songs or go to one of her shows. I’m not her target audience but after taking my daughters to see her perform during her Red Tour in 2013 I became an instant fan. I’ve seen some top acts during my time on this planet but even a decade later, Taylor Swift wins my best concert award. It wasn’t just the showmanship; here was an artist with character, instinct and grit. But her real talent? The thing that transcends? Poetry.

The girl is Shakespeare in hotpants, Keats in sequins. I know what it is to wrestle words but Swift has to make hers literally dance to a tune. Evidence that song writing isn’t easy is there in all the hits littered with cliches or bereft of sense. Yet since she was a kid Swift has stitched together lyrics with the precision and artistry of a spider spinning her web.

What’s more, in every tale of lost love or misunderstanding or empowerment she validates the feelings of a generation who are going through it with her. As she writes in Cardigan, from the gorgeous Folklore album, “When you are young they assume you know nothing.” Yet as she goes on to chronicle the complexities of young love, she concludes: “I knew everything when I was young.”

Swift is not just adored by her fans but admired by stars like Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen.

For a long time, Swift occupied Disney princess territory, a precocious ringleted white girl who, as West attempted to insinuate, had none of the heft of, say, Beyonce. Yet as next year marks her 20th year in the industry after becoming the youngest artist to sign a publishing deal with Sony/ATV at just 14, the singer has shown that not just knowing your audience but knowing yourself is vital to both self-worth and success.

West and a few others notwithstanding, Swift is not just adored by her fans but admired by her contemporaries. The likes of Kendrick Lamar, HAIM, Ed Sheeran, Keith Urban, Lana Del Ray and Ice Spice wouldn’t work with her if they didn’t respect her or her music. Even the old-timers are enchanted. Paul McCartney who delightedly shared the cover of Rolling Stone magazine with her told of how she twice moved her album release date in 2020 so it didn’t coincide with his release. Ringo Starr has said simply, “I love her” while Bruce Springsteen said her songs were “really, really well-built and well-made” and that she spoke very personally to her audience.

What I find captivating about Swift is how skilfully and imperceptibly she’s taken all the elements of a sensitive girl writing songs in her bedroom and catapulted it to stadium-filling superstardom. Behind that all-American smile there’s a brain constantly churning and a heart always attuned. She’s quiet and loud; earnest and playful; girl-next-door and vamp; mannered yet angry. When Blur frontman Damon Albarn last year claimed she didn’t write her own songs, she came back hard: “I write ALL my own songs Your hot take is completely false and SO damaging. You don’t have to like my songs but it’s really fucked up to try and discredit my writing. WOW.”

In that single refute there’s everything that continues to make Swift compelling. The nice girl “wow”, the grown woman’s “f**ked up”, the tenacious businesswoman’s refusal to be made small by the cool guy. All of that – along with Swift’s superb talent for transcending genres – will be on show in Australia next year. If you missed out on a ticket, your disappointment is real but take heart. Ms Swift will be around for a long while yet.

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