Michael LuccheseTaylor Swift is the most talked-about woman in the world. Yet while it is clear she is remarkably popular with most Americans, nothing she does seems to please the angriest, most online segment of the population. Every facet of Swift’s life is scrutinized endlessly by the digital mob, from her song lyrics and style choices to her relationships and even attendance at her husband’s football games. The seething rage of social media is truly shocking to behold.
The latest Two Minutes Hate was occasioned by Swift’s new musical release, a four-song “encore” to her recent album “The Life of a Showgirl.” Though a smashing commercial success, the original record came under intense fire from the industry media and so-called “fans” alike. These newest songs are facing more of the same; some have even alleged Swift has lost her pop star touch. Ultimately, though, these extreme reactions reveal that the loudest critics simply do not understand that Swift has finally achieved a real measure of happiness in life.
Much of that has to do with Swift’s marriage this summer to Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Whatever her actual politics are, one could call her a “conservative of the heart.” As Clare Ath recently argued in these pages, there is actually something profoundly conservative about her celebration of Kelce’s success on the football field. Those occupying commanding heights of American culture seem to have turned against marriage, treating it as a joke or, worse, a relic of a backwards past. The example of a loving, supportive relationship is therefore countercultural, even counter-revolutionary. Indeed, some pro-natalist commentators have half-jokingly suggested there may be a Swiftie-inspired “baby boom.” By contrast, the bitter reactions denouncing it as “tradwife cosplay” only demonstrate how out-of-touch the digital chatterers are.
For years, Swift’s music fixated on heartbreak and yearning. Swift deployed her remarkable lyricism not only to articulate her personal suffering and desire for something more, but also to express the wider pain of loneliness — something that has become an epidemic afflicting generations of young people. Now, though, Swift has found a love that will last. And far from making her less interesting as a songwriter, as some (including Swift herself!) feared, marital bliss has inspired new music that is actually an antidote to some of the worst ills afflicting our culture.
In his book “The Closing of the American Mind,” Allan Bloom famously described young Americans as “souls without longing.” He argued that modern education was numbing students to the permanent things that make life worth living, in part because schools morphed into ideological seminaries that flattened out eros in pursuit of a bland, egalitarian “openness.” Those formed under this regime may seem friendly and even intelligent, but a sense of bitter detachment lingers beneath the surface. “The student who made fun of playing the guitar under a girl’s window will never read or write poetry under her influence,” Bloom asserted. “His defective eros cannot provide his soul with images of the beautiful, and it will remain coarse and slack.” Put another way, as Swift sings on the track “Eldest Daughter,” “Sad as it seems, apathy is hot.”
Swift’s sincerity has been a rebuke of this politicized apathy throughout her entire career. In her early teenage albums, she relied on references to classic stories and the conventions of country music to re-enchant romance. Her later work, in many regards, wrestles with how those romantic hopes have been frustrated over and over again. Bloom’s teacher Leo Strauss once characterized the modern predicament as the “joyless quest for joy,” which could just as well describe the struggles Swift recounts on her most mature albums, such as “Midnights” or “The Tortured Poets Department.” That is exactly why millennials have embraced her as the voice of a generation. The emotional specificity of Swift’s lyrics helps listeners contextualize their own experiences in this uprooted, modern world, breaking through the layers of insincerity even at the risk of sounding what Gen Zers would call “cringe.”
What Swift’s Showgirl era demonstrates is that the pursuit of happiness is something much more than this “joyless quest for joy.” On both the original album and these new “encore” songs, she makes it clear that her marriage to Kelce has been healing, fulfilling those deepest longings that are so often derided in American life today. The most-disparaged “encore” track, “Cleveland,” takes on the haters directly with a sense of humor. “Now I’m wearing white, so hate all you like,” she sings, “This is the love of my life.” Swift understands that the true love at the heart of marriage endures no matter how the cultural critics belittle it.
The happiness Swift has found also has the effect of helping her heal and move on from the failed relationships of the past. “Pink Clouding,” for example, is a sort of apology to an ex-boyfriend (likely Tom Hiddleston) for mistreating him: “And the way I treated you, you never deserved it / And I swear to God, to this day / I wake up scared that I left scars on a good person.” “Patient Zero” is a message to the new girlfriend of another ex, exploring Swift’s own emotional vulnerability and the problems of romanticism: “The fever turns a dreamer into a pathetic ghost.” Both songs benefit from the sense of perspective Swift has clearly gained through life with Kelce, showing how marriage redeems eros.
The most mature song on the “encore,” and perhaps the whole Showgirl album, is “Babylon,” a haunting ballad about the dangers of nostalgia and materialism alike. The singer tells a story about a man constantly dissatisfied with life. As a young person, he was a “liberated libertine who then longed for home,” and in his marriage he’s “using nostalgia as a weapon to hurt” not just himself but “everybody else,” too. Swift warns of “the self-harm of never being where you are,” a danger very apparent in culture today.
That message is precisely why Taylor Swift continues to resonate with the general public; the “encore” tracks have already racked up listens in the tens of millions. In an essay on Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind,” the late scholar Peter Augustine Lawler wrote that true conservatism is about “showing the road from anger, meaninglessness, and despair to a world once again full of ladies and gentlemen — people who know who they are and what they’re supposed to do as beings born to know, love, and die, and designed for more than merely biological existence.” Swift’s music is full of the same sentiment, a longing for something more than modern culture has to offer. She understands that the freedom that comes with love is a sense of belonging — and finally, on “The Life of a Showgirl,” she has found it for herself.
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Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty, and a contributing editor to Providence. He is also the editor of a new anthology of Russell Kirk’s writings, “On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776.”
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