Cascadia Calling 2025.07.21

I knew you were trouble when you walked in so shame on me now

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We have to talk about Taylor Swift. It’s not optional. If you think music is important and that the impact that music has on culture matters, then Taylor Swift is one of the most important people on the planet. That’s just math.

My partner (a Taylor Swift superfan) and I went to the Eras Tour back in 2023. There were more people in attendance than lived in my home town when I was born. Three beers deep, an hour into the show, I tapped out some items in the “Note to Self” section of Signal. Here is a selection:

Chemistry of her lipstick and sequins? How the fuck did they do section by section lights on the wrist bands. Taylor is 5’10” but looks tiny on stage and impossibly large on screen. Motherfucking blade runner shit.

I left myself a screenshot of the song ID app on my phone accurately IDing a song she was playing live. Her live performances were accurate enough (and/or algorithms have gotten good enough) that my phone thought I was listening to the radio through massive speaker stacks.

The tone of my notes is fawning. One or two beers later I may or may not have tapped out “Muse of a generation”. In my defense, I have always loved a spectacle.

The show itself didn’t particularly change my opinion of Swift’s music. I still think it’s decent. I enjoy many of her songs, even though they’re not really for me. Her songs are usually well-written, always well-crafted, and some of her tunes are extremely fun, which I think is the point of pop music. She’s at her best when she’s doing unapologetically joyful, bold bangers and the musical equivalent of winking at the camera.

As a non-Swiftie, I’ve spent the last few years being blindsided by Swift’s influence on music and popular culture. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize that there are elements beyond just being a competent pop craftswoman (which she undoubtedly is) that account for her massive impact.

One element is that she skillfully treads the line between emotional vulnerability and the kind of glamorous spectacle that so charmed me at the Eras tour. The critic Mark Fisher talked about the continuum of genres from interiority (songs about the inner reality and emotional state of the artist) to exteriority (the aesthetically pristine, glamorous view of the artist as idol or object.) Punk with all its anger about a world gone to shit is fundamentally about the interior. Goth with its arch high aesthetics of vampires and droning sonic textures is exterior.

Taylor Swift bridges this gap in a unique way. Her songs have an autobiographic vulnerability that most artists shy away from. It’s rare for artists to be so public about the personal influences in their songs and for autobiographical songs to make up such a large volume of an artists work. At the same time, her iconic look and winking femme fatale performances throughout much of her career bring a veneer of glamour and idol to her music. At times, she even sings about exactly this kind of dichotomy as in “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”: “Lights, camera, bitch smile, even when you wanna die”.¹

The other element is that Swift isn’t afraid to tell stories that are undeniably current and that resonate with her largely young, female audience. This sounds obvious, but it’s something that I don’t actually see discussed very much when people talk about her music. She’s up front about writing music about her own life and she doesn’t shy away from contemporary references. (“Say it in the street, that's a knock-out
But you say it in a tweet, that's a cop-out”). Personally, I find her references often try too hard, but again, they’re not for me and they clearly land with her intended audience. The “tweet” reference above demonstrates another risk with current references: 6 years on from releasing that single, and it’s not even called Twitter anymore. Of course, with the rate at which she produces new music, I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t also factor the shelf-life of her references in to her artistic calculus.

So there are millions of people out there who see themselves in Swift’s songs, often in very concrete ways. There’s enough variety and emotional range in her catalog to cover a wide variety of human experiences, all while providing the glamour of pop stardom so refined it might as well have been made in a lab somewhere. That all explains her popularity, but I think her massive influence is a little harder to pin down.

I think the biggest critique that can be leveled against swift in her use of emotion and autobiography is this: she’s not subtle. Which is true. But that critique is often a cover for saying that she doesn’t armor her music in cynicism enough that disaffected millennials can like it without risk being accused of being “cringe”.

Sometimes, though, subtlety and cynicism suck. Both tend to close off art. Cynicism blunts its emotional impact and excessive subtlety can err on the side of making art inaccessible, rather than interesting. Directness and vulnerability, on the other hand, can open art up, including to give space for audiences to experience the work more fully and room other artists to reinterpret it.

When Ryan Adams released his cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989, he was often asked “why”. On the surface, the question sort of makes sense. A 40-year-old (at the time) indie-folk veteran covering the pop album of a 26-year-old starlet seems odd. Listening to his covers, however, it doesn’t feel strange at all. As he said himself in an interview about its release:

The record is its own alternate universe… There’s just a joy to 1989. I think she said it as well: she was in a joyful place making that record. Even if there are elements that describe these situations—that describe interactions and the world of romance and the confusion of being alive and knowing how you fit in—all that stuff is there. It’s what we write about.

That bold, direct joy that Adams heard in 1989 inspired him and gave him enough emotional material to work with to re-imagine it in his own style.

Full-album covers are a rare thing and, as far as I can tell, this one is unique in modern pop music. It makes for an instructive listen for anyone who has strong feelings about Taylor Swift, positive or negative. Adams manages to find a different emotional core in every one of the songs on the album. There’s something lonesome in Adams’ echoing, stripped down guitar on “Blank Space”. He sings the song with a sorrowful desire that’s at odds with Swift’s more impish, flirtatious original.

That Adams draws different emotions out of every single one of the tracks on 1989 indicates a depth that Swift’s critics regularly deny. Swift’s pop music is many things, but it’s not emotionally shallow by any means.

But Swift’s influence on the music isn’t only artistic. She’s been immensely influential on the business of music as well.

Throughout her career she has changed the way that musicians and the music industry operate, and she’s in the process of rewriting the story of how musicians relate to music labels and rights holders. Her efforts to re-record several of her albums in order to secure rights to her own music was such a simple stroke of genius that when it was announced, I literally asked myself “wait, she can just do that?” Not only can she do that, but she inspired several other artists to do the same thing. Including long-time industry veterans like John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

The latest to pull this maneuver are groove metal band Five Finger Death Punch. Both Fogerty and FFDP explicitly credit Swift with inspiring them to make new recordings of their old material expressly for rights purposes. Of the CCR recordings, Fogerty is quoted in a recent Rolling Stone piece saying: “I wanted to call it Taylor’s Version… I lobbied very much to the record company.”

In a way, this might have a longer lasting effect on what music is recorded and how than any of her many accomplishments and historic firsts (such as being the first artist to occupy every slot in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time.)

Another aspect of her impact is more personal. She’s an enthusiastic collaborator and notoriously generous with her stage (both figuratively and literally.) She seems to have a genuine passion for the art of others and I think this amplifies her impact on the music world.

You can see this in her covers of other artists’ music. One reason I like live recordings is that you get to see how artists physically relate to their music. There’s something deeply personal about seeing an emotive artist play a song (theirs or another artist’s) when they can’t contain the rhythm or emotion they feel. (This is one of the great joys of seeing live bands, in particular, since you get to see the interplay between the members.)

Great musicians must love art broadly. They have to love music, of course, and it’s clear from this cover that Swift loves it almost too much to hide. The bigger and broader an artistic love affair, the more it will impact a musician’s work. It’s pretty clear to me that Taylor Swift has a pure, unadulterated love for the work of many of her contemporaries, having covered their work, collaborated with them, and brought them on as guests during her shows. Her lyrics, especially in her most recent albums, often make clear references to artists who have influenced her.

Artists that love art are more likely to end up creating art that someone else loves.

I also suspect this it’s the root of the significant changes that Swift has gone through over the course of her career. She’s changed and matured quite a bit as an artist, and I don’t think that’s going to stop. She could easily have rested on the lyrically simpler, musically uncomplicated pop music of her first couple of albums and had a fine career. That the artist that created “Love Story”, a well-crafted but saccharine and obvious Romeo & Juliet retelling with all of the rough edges sanded off would go on to give us a proper murder ballad in the form of “No Body, No Crime” would be unexpected to most listeners in 2008.

Swift’s impact on pop music, on the music industry, and on the entire culture is undeniable at this point. I think the best thing she’s done for me personally—other than putting on a hell of a live show and bringing years of joy to my partner—is to give me the perfect example of my belief that art is never universal, even if it’s widely loved. So many of the criticisms leveled against Swift, at their core, boil down to “she doesn’t make music for me.”

What not even her critics can deny, though, is that you can’t even begin to understand modern American music without her. That impact is a testament to the power that her art has for the fans that it was written for and her genius as a working artist.

1. As an aside, I think that there’s a separate essay to be written about the themes of alienation in Swift’s music and how they apply to Capitalism. I don’t think it’s accidental that someone who expresses alienation and the isolation of stardom, while also being one of the most successful Capitalists in history, speaks particularly to other women struggling with alienation under Capitalism.