Taylor Swift is reclaiming sexual slurs and entering her feminist era

The pop star has re-recorded and repackaged her award-winning 1989 album with five brand new tracks including one titled ‘Slut!’.

Taylor Swift is now back on top of the music charts and the box office in Australia thanks to her new music and concert film, The Eras Tour, selling out.

You know how much you really loved your ex if Taylor Swift summons their memory.

It’s a type of emotional litmus test she keeps creating and on Friday she made us sit a new one.

The chart-topping, box office smashing, history-making pop star, who will tour Australia early next year, has liberated five brand new songs “From The Vault”.

Taylor Swift has re-released her album 1989 with five new tracks. Photo – Beth Garrabrant.

When you hear a Swift tune, some prefer to decipher which one of her high-profile partners inspired each of her songs. While most of us older self-identifying narcissists, who moonlight as “Swifties”, prefer to project our own experiences on her prose.

Swift is not a pop music star, she’s a poet with great marketing acumen, which is why her 1989 (Taylor’s Version) – a fresh recording of her critically-acclaimed 2014 album – went viral and shot to the top of streaming charts within hours of being released.

✨🫶 My name is Taylor and I was born in 1989 🫶✨https://t.co/klomIqGx38pic.twitter.com/sWofWRjpvN

— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) October 27, 2023

Welcome to a new musical era for Taylor Swift. It’s Swift as we rarely hear her. These new tracks are not bops, they are lyrically dark – similar to what we heard on last year’s release Midnights – with hints of the pain of some of 1989’s more melancholy tunes like Clean, I Know Places and I Wish You Would.

Highlight of her old stuff given a make over includes a more electronic Blank Space and a mature sounding Style.

OMG BLANK SPACE??? HER VOICE IS SO CRISP AND MATURE 🥹

— The Eras Tour Singapore (@TSTheErasTourSG) October 27, 2023

This new music is stripped back – there is no catchy hook like 1989’s smash hit Shake It Off – but all five songs are brimming with her trademark bridges that will, no doubt, go on to become trending Instagram slogans.

“I don’t have to pretend I like acid rock. Or that I’d like to be on a mega yacht with men who think important thoughts … The only way to reclaim my dignity was to turn to shrouded mystery,” she sings on Now That We Don’t Talk.

If you had Taylor Swift on “who would reclaim the word slut” bingo card, congratulations. In 2023, the same week pop star Britney Spears released her tell-all, warts-and-all memoir no less, Swift uses the slur for an empowering ballad about self-esteem.

“If they call me a ‘slut!’ You know it might be worth it for once. And if I’m gonna be drunk, I’m gonna be drunk in love,” Swift sings on a song titled: ‘Slut!’

We shouldn’t be shocked. After years of having her sexuality and private life speculated on for years, this is some of Swift’s grittiest music to date.

Taylor Swift is now reportedly dating NFL star Travis Kelce. Photo – Getty

The music “From The Vault” is not about pining over lost lovers, cheaters, those who conducted themselves poorly post break up or lamenting about being alone – these new songs are about self-love and charts the process of how to rebuild rather than rebound.

Swift is a poet, but she’s also an anthropologist.

Her music, and her schtick, continues to chart the universal experience of what it’s like to be a girl.