Damn, Taylor Swift is mad.That was my initial reaction after listening to her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, which dropped Friday at midnight. And this isn’t Reputation, which expressed a carefully curated, easily monetizable anger with a cute little snake mascot. This seems to be real rage, the kind that comes from lived pain, the kind that has led Swift to maybe let us behind the curtain in a real way for the first time in a long time.
It’s hard to imagine that we could possibly ever in this lifetime need to know anything more about Taylor Swift. I’ve joked often that we now live in a Swift monoculture, but it’s kind of true. I really didn’t think she could get more famous after Folklore and Evermore, but then she did Midnights, the Eras Tour, and emerged from a more than six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn to do pap walksall over New York City. Then she started dating Travis Kelce, and well, we all know what happened next.
It really feels like Swift is inescapable. No corner of my life is safe from constant discussion about her: not the internet, not my group chats, not shopping at boutiques, or going to coffee shops. Not only is every person seemingly obsessed with her, every business is too, or at least, obsessed with latching onto her now billion-dollar brand.
And it does not seem to be waning at all. In October, I wrote that I suspected a “Taylor Swift fatigue” was imminent, because her brand had become so saturated. I’m mature enough to admit that I was wrong, but it’s kind of insane just how wrong I was. Swift not only didn’t start to rub people the wrong way, she won the Grammy for Album of the Year. She literally took over the Super Bowl. Every event, from the Golden Globes to Coachella to the Met Gala, has been overtaken by questions of whether or not she will attend and if she does, she becomes the main attraction.
As Swift herself says, she’s a mastermind, and her total domination of our world is carefully crafted by her now unassailable marketing machine. It’s always been very obvious that this is what she wants. Swift makes no apologies for her ambition, saying in interviews and her Miss Americanadocumentary that she deeply cares about things like topping the charts, album sales, and winning awards, much more so than you’d think considering how successful she has already been. And she seems to get a special satisfaction from connecting with her fans, who breathlessly follow her every move, speculate on her life, and constantly search for her “Easter eggs.” If Swifties are monsters, Taylor is their Frankenstein.
