Taylor and Me

Before Taylor Swift won her Grammy last night, I legitimately spent all day trying to write a piece that eloquently defended her and expressed why I was so incredibly angry at Kanye West’s lyrics about her. To be honest, by the time the Grammys started I had pretty much given up and was going to leave it to be hopefully forgotten as West continued to flounder and Swift continued to shine. After the Grammys, though, I want to return to my task.

Now, I’m going to say upfront that everything I’m about to say has nothing to do with whether 1989 deserved album of the year or not. It hurt to see Kendrick snubbed again and to be fully honest I was rooting for him. I love 1989 and Swift, but from all accounts Lamar’s music is truly revolutionary. I’m really not qualified to say and therefore please do not take my words as an endorsement of the actual Grammy.

Ok, throwing the shiny gold trophy aside, Swift’s acceptance speech was by far my favorite moment of the night and to me her words were incredibly important and powerful. When I first started listening to Taylor Swift, I was 13. I was a young woman who did well in school, who followed all the rules, who had a good group of girlfriends, no love life, and was not part of the popular crowd. At the time, I was a big country fan and listened to XM’s Highway 16 on a regular basis. They did a feature at the time called “Driver’s Ed” and when new albums came out where they would play the whole album on Tuesday (I think?) nights. I was listening one fateful Tuesday when they highlighted this new young woman named Taylor Swift and played her entire first album. The point they kept emphasizing was that she was 16 and had written all her own music. I was hooked.

I listened to that album over and over again. “Our Song” was my happy song. “Picture to Burn” was my badass song. “Tied Together with a Smile” was my crying song. “The Outside” did more to help my self-esteem than any song I had ever heard or have listened to since. If you want to get inside the mind of an insecure teenage girl, please listen to that song. Meanwhile, her entire album became a sort of safety blanket for me. Not only did it make me feel better about myself, it made me believe in love and it felt real. She was funny and warm and seemed to genuinely care about her fans. That being said, in a weird way she always felt exclusively like mine. I was growing up in New Jersey where there were not a lot of country fans so I constantly had to explain who she was. It’s hard to believe now when she’s opening the Grammys and selling out stadiums, but back then she was the little unknown artist and I felt like her advocate. Always, though, the focus was that she was young and she was writing her own music. In some ways I feel like those who did notice her then had far more respect for her than many of those who cheer for her now.

Safe to say her amateur phase did not last. That being said, it did take longer than you would think for people to catch on. I remember when she started to date a Jonas brother and suddenly many more young women my age knew her name. In some ways that kind of killed me. “She’s more than that! She’s not a Disney Channel star! She’s cool; I promise!” It was a sad omen of how defined by her love life she would become. It is also a good moment to mention that she did cultivate a good girl persona. She didn’t swear; she didn’t talk about sex; she covered up. I have to say, I am in no ways anti-sex and am super anti-slut shaming. I loved Rocky Horror from a young age, essentially wanted to do a burlesque number in middle school, proudly wore a corset through most of college...well, you get the idea. That being said, I do defend the right for a woman to choose to be more conservative if she wants to. Burlesque aside, I was that girl in middle school. American Girl guides were my Bible and that worked for me. I can’t begin to tell you how much it hurts to be told you are weaker for being more like Sandra D than Sandy in her leathers. This will become important later on, but for now I’m going to put a pin it and just say that her persona did help associate her with the Disney channel stars of the day. This also seemed to be another nail in her coffin at least for a time. While it got her the same fans as the Disney stars, it also meant that her reputation for song writing went out the window and it was automatically assumed she came from the same machine. Luckily, she did not let that stop her and quietly behind the scenes she continued to be the same young woman who wrote her first album. She continued to write, she started to bring guest artists on tour with her when she finally got the chance, and she continued to engage with fans. I remember vividly watching every home video compilation she put on YouTube. They made her feel even more like my friend and that is a precious commodity to a teenage girl. That was her though and the people she hired. She was always the boss even when she was young herself.

It is only after all this that Taylor won the VMA for Best Female Video for “You Belong with Me.” It was 2 years after her first album came out. That was the moment that Kanye made headlines interrupting her. I remember reading about it at my semester school. I remember laughing. That’s right, I remember laughing. I was laughing because all these celebrities came to her defense and most were celebrities I knew already liked her because they had been vocal about it before. It was terrible for his reputation and reinforced hers. I say reinforced deliberately. She was popular. She was receiving an award. She had celebrity fans and this fan was laughing because Kanye clearly didn’t know who he was dealing with and the drama seemed overblown and faked. After that, I quickly forgot about it. I went back to listening to Fearless and then Speak Now and then Red and then 1989. I went to the Fearless and Red tours and couldn’t snag ticks to ’89 only because I didn’t know where I was going to be. I went with my mom and best friend to those tours and reveled in how ridiculously talented this young woman who was barely older than me was. Meanwhile, I found hope in “Long Live” and “Change.”  I found power in “White Horse.” I fell in love with imaginary men while listening to “Enchanted.” I led parties full of people in “I Knew You Were Trouble.” I laughed at the haters with “Dear John” and much later with “Blank Space.” I was “happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time.” I really never stopped listening to “Our Song.” In short, Taylor Swift wrote the anthems of my life.

This is why Kanye West’s statements put me into a rage this week.  To me, Swift isn’t her squad or her cats or her boyfriends. She’s her words. She’s the fact that she started writing songs when she was a 14-year-old girl. She’s never underestimated her young and female fan base even when they are mocked every day for being shallow and silly and delicate. She was good without being pure and then she became sexy in her own way. She wrote her life into song so that we, her fans, could relate and feel empowered. Today, many things may be manufactured about her, but that part will always be real. It goes without saying that Kanye had nothing to do with that. I could go on about the control she has over her tour and her business and how crafty she has been with her image, but to be honest, that doesn’t feel as important any more. She is so much bigger than some jerk’s attempt to inflate his ego. I’m so happy she didn’t put up with his crap for a single minute and showed it to him on live TV. It felt like some one was sticking up for 13 year old me and for that, I say thank you and throw up my best heart shaped hand signal in her direction.