Bad Songs about Bad Things

At some point in the early 2010s, a gif of Taylor Swift was making its way around on Tumblr. In a sequence of images, Taylor Swift wears a wry yet demure smile as she does a mock interview with The Today Show host, Hoda Kotb:

Hoda Kotb: When you write songs, you include the names of actual guys you've dated.

Taylor Swift: Yea, I do.

HK: So these are guys who are walking around, right now, and they are named in a song?

TS: Uh huh.

HK: So here's my question — I'm a little concerned about this — if you're naming the guys you've dated in your songs, why do you think any guy's gonna wanna date you?

TS: Well, I guess in that situation, I'd just figure that if guys don't want me to write bad songs about them, they shouldn't do bad things.

The gif was reblogged by some Swift fans who identified as feminists and some feminists who did not necessarily identify as Swift fans. And while Swift might have been everywhere during that time, especially following the success of her country-pop crossover album, Fearless (2008), I first came to Swift's music through Tumblr posts written and reblogged by feminist writers like Kara Jesella, Trisha Low, and Jeanne Vaccaro, who were interested in the uses of the confessional mode as the public cultivation of a private feminized psychic interiority through autofiction.

For them and others on Tumblr, Swift's songwriting practice of naming names dovetailed with the writing practices of women authors at the time like Chris Kraus, Kathy Acker, Kate Zambreno, Maggie Nelson, Marie Calloway, and Natasha Stagg. These writers, associated with the ambiguous and recently ubiquitous genre of autofiction, experiment with confessional narratives of an estranged, defamiliarized, fabricated, at times strategically parasitic self,1 in ways playful and humorous, but also heartbreaking and cruel, given how their self-disclosure implicates those around them, including ex-lovers, as well as family, friends, and co-workers. In the realm of autofiction, no one is safe, especially not the authors themselves.

Discussions around these authors' work have considered the ethical stakes of writing about real people in one's life, who are around and likely to read what you've written about them, whether damning or not.2 For some of these writers like Kraus, Calloway, and Zambreno, this is part of the point. Writing is revenge without the need to ask for permission or apology, and the very question of ethics is pushed aside for the political act of refusing to give in to gendered expectations of etiquette and propriety in one's writing where, as we know, the personal is political. Indeed, as Swift says, "if guys don't want me to write bad songs about them, they shouldn't do bad things."

Upon the release of Swift's albums folklore and evermore, critics have written about both as departures from Swift's other albums in their sound and lyrical scope. As Craig Jenkins writes, "We used to parse Swift's songs for clues about where her mind was and how her life was going, and trace the lines between [them] and the real-life circumstances that seemed to inform them."3 Instead, in folklore and evermore, Swift creates characters from which to write stories other than her own. She names names, but these names — Rebekah from "the last great american dynasty," "betty," "dorothea," "marjorie" — seek out the fantasy of the folkloric rather than empowerment through the exposure of herself and others.

Similarly, Pam Thurschwell writes that Swift's songs on folklore move away from her own life and instead offer capacious stories to move through — narratives ready to be inhabited by others. She writes, "The old Taylor baggage was a mono-myth, but folklore is plural; the whole exhausting project of being Taylor seems to have floated away. folklore knows that identity is important but Taylor's is not."4 Swift's turn becomes a willingness to decenter her position as a straight white woman, who is also one of the most successful pop artists of the contemporary moment. She relieves us from her at times odd, misplaced displays of queer allyship (as seen in the music video for "You Need to Calm Down"), liberal feminism (as revealed a little too late in the documentary Miss Americana), and unapologetic villainy (yes, I am talking about reputation). folklore and evermore, while about women as nuanced, misunderstood figures, do not prioritize proof of Swift's politics. These songs' stories forego the self to move toward the nonspecific, the nondistinct, and impersonal as points of relation, intimacy, and identification.

While both albums are some of her best work, and while part of that is due to how she distances herself in her lyrics, it is worth rethinking why these moves are praised as signs of her progress, maturity, and growth, and furthermore, what that says about whiteness, gender, identification, and narrative, in ways that can and already do extend to considerations of autofiction.

Ongoing discussions around whiteness and autofiction critique how and why it is that the genre becomes nameable, applicable, and legible as such in the work of white writers, while writers of color doing the same work, contemporary and otherwise, can only write within the realm of memoir and autobiography, where the self is expected to be authentic, accessible, relatable, and knowable.5 Autofiction asserts the particular rather than presumes the universal, and this is what makes autofictive (song)writing, like Swift's, compelling. I would hope no one is all that interested in demanding more stories about the specificity of white women's liberal feminist plights. But there's something to be said about how those stories are made to confront their own failures that are both political and ethical, and that moreover have no claim to the universal. Swift's miscalculated errors, the moments when she falls out of public favor, assure that there's no ascendancy to universality through storytelling. The work is caught up in the abjection, anger, and hurt rooted in the position, privileged as it is, of the one who risks sharing, who names names, of being that person who warns you that if you do bad things, you'll show up in a song, an essay, or a novel.

So I'm not ready for Swift to be done with autofiction, even if we might be fatigued by the debates around it. This is not just because those "bad songs" about boys doing "bad things" are devastatingly good. These songs stay rooted in the personal and particular that although at times induce a cringe with their indulgent self-awareness and Cher Horowitz-esque cluelessness (recall the moment in Swift's "Look What You Made Me Do" when she tells all her past selves that "the old Taylor can't come to the phone right now"...because "she's dead."), nevertheless bring us back to Swift herself, and moreover, the risk, vulnerability, and antagonism that autofiction demands of its (song)writers, readers, and listeners. This is not to say Swift, or autofiction for that matter, should only be expected to air one's regrets, insecurities, and failures, but that the specificity of names, Swift's confessions as confidences shared, render her position as a white woman one that does not overstep, moving into what Jean-Thomas Tremblay, in an essay on New Narrative, describes as "the assumption that impersonality, once intensified, will turn into commonality."6 The commonality shared around Swift's past break-ups and falling-outs have come from details that are her own that others might forget, but that she holds onto and knows "All Too Well": like memories of autumn drives upstate, a photo album of childhood photos, phone calls where words exchanged are "casually cruel in the name of being honest," and one's familiar scent left on a scarf kept by another.

Swift's music video for "22" came out in 2013, around the same time as Miley Cyrus's music video for "We Can't Stop." After watching both, my friend and I asked each other which party we would rather go to, now that we had been presented with two cute, chaotic sides of white womanhood. Swift's party had baked goods, heart-shaped sunglasses worn underneath balayage bangs and top buns, sparkly cheerleader pompoms, and a pool. Cyrus's party had a pool too, and it also had bisexual lighting before it was called bisexual lighting, drugs, athleisurewear, tacky carpeted floors, and problematic twerking and grills. It was a tough choice, but in the end, we chose Cyrus's party. We didn't want to party with Swift because to us, she was a Mean Girl. We didn't see her as someone we would be friends with, but that wasn't the point when it came to why we listened to her music. We didn't need to relate to her in that way, for the distance created by difference and detail was already there, in that small smile she gives knowing that she could take you down with a "bad song" about the "bad things" you've done.

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Summer Kim Lee (@summerkimlee) is a writer and Assistant Professor of English at UCLA, and has published and forthcoming work in ASAP/Journal, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Social Text, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books.

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