Swift Syllabus
Full Playlist: Apple Music | Spotify
This started as a series of texts with my friend Shady after the release of Midnights and I went to Eras Tour in April. There were multiple conversations happening at once during that time and it was easier to create a single syllabus to address everything. Taylor Swift and I are the same age. She has made 1989 into the most famous year on earth. This has been great for me when lecturing to undergraduates. When I am introduced I am “old”, because the term “millennial” is looked upon with the same disdain as “Boomer”. But then I say I was born in 1989, and then everything is perfectly fine. None of these children would dare call Taylor Swift old, or out of touch, or evil, and I owe her one for that. This playlist goes in chronological order more or less, with some retrograde editorial. I have put some break up songs in place where they belong. For example, “All Too Well (Ten Minute Version) was released sometime in 2021? 2022? But it is about a breakup that happened somewhere in 2010, so that’s where it lives. This originally existed as a document in Notes App and has been passed around several Bard College lists etc. This is up to date as of The Life of a Show Girl release. This is barely optimized for my huge Mac, it is definitely not optimized for your phone.
PART ONE
Love Story, You Belong With Me, Fearless
This is the album that got her noticed by MTV. We were 19. “You Belong With Me” was the video that she was up on that stage for when Kanye interrupted her to talk about Beyoncé’s brilliance. I watched the MTV incident live, but I was addicted to heroin and homeless at the time, so I couldn’t really waste any time trying to interrogate the dark racial dynamics and the fallout, I had bigger fish to fry. “Fearless” is her first Sagittarius anthem, the flip side to “The Archer”, the first suggestion of transgression. It’s saccharine and rural flavored, her badness isgetting her “nice dress” (school clothes?) dirty because she has staid out late and danced in the rain in a parking lot. It’s She’s All That, 10 Things I Hate About You, the Riverdale pilot. The language is high school because that is her whole world. It is Juno because Black people haven’t been invented yet. These are the rerecordings, which erase the teenage voice she had at the time. Her voice at 33, 34 is richer, deeper, denser. The originals verge into hysterical, feline yowls,overwhelming. Critics said the worst part of this album was her thin, reedy voice.That criticism doesn’t exist anymore — Billie Eilish has an extremely thin, reedy voice, and is acceptable. But Taylor Swift, positioned as a Britney Spears without the (Black, southern) baggage, couldn’t afford to be weak in this area. No one ever said Britney’s voice was weak or thin. She begins taking serious voice lessons from opera singers. She is dating her male equivalent, Joe Jonas, with their matching promise rings and shit.
Books in Riverdale (List)
The Oral History of the Beyoncé - Taylor Swift - Kanye West MTV incident (Article)
Taylor Swift - You Belong With Me (Video)
Crossroads (Film)
Riverdale (Pilot): In one day Veronica gets Betty every single thing she’s ever wanted (Video)
PART FOUR
Style, Blank Space, Wildest Dreams
[Editors Note: This is the album I tried the most to get into, and to me is the peak of her Aryan Goddess/Nazi Worship. This is the Taylor Swift that nazis love, the way she looks, the way she talks about her own looks and her lovers looks — perfect nazi fodder. The white, the lace, the red lipstick, the feminine skirts etc.]Two years have gone by, better settled, making better money, have better (and hotter) friends. Still looking, but less of a chaotic mess than before. You’ve made it through the worst things you’ve ever felt. You don’t have your own total aesthetic yet, but you’re more selective about it. You’ve been watching a lot of Barbara Stanwyck movies, a lot of Elizabeth Taylor, consuming a lot of Golden Age Hollywood movies and reading a lot of mid-century novels. Mildred Pierce, Peyton Place, etc. Some things will stick — the lipstick was a good choice. But the white…not long for this world. The sex is getting better, but the toxicity is also getting better. It feels good to be crazy. Your lover crashing the car you’re speeding around in because he can’t stop fingering you is a rush because it makes you feel so fucking powerful. It feels GOOD. Everything is BIG, her friends are big names, the drama is big, the videos are big, things are big and crazy.
This is the final nail in the coffin for her country career, nothing on this album even sniffs that direction, and she knew she had to change to survive. And because she isn’t a child anymore. She was named after James Taylor, and now any Taylor born after 2010 is named after this one. There are questions about the purpose of Taylor’s highly visible, rich and pretty “squad”, and the function of it. As a PR move to distract people from looking too closely at her romantic life, a PR tactic to hide Swift’s bisexuality, especially her very intense relationship with Karlie Kloss. As of this writing this group of women is more or less still intact, minus…Karlie Kloss. On the same day the Bad Blood video was released, Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj dropped “Feeling Myself”. During this time, Kim Kardashian releases doctored audio about the ongoing feud. Taylor disappears, leaves the country, and goes completely silent. The consensus is that everything about Taylor Swift is a lie, fake, artifice. She also settles a sexual assault lawsuit against a DJ who groped her in public for 1$.This is when I tried the first time to understand what was going on, because the whole fallout seemed absolutely nuclear, but nothing I tried worked, she was still totally unaccessible. I didn’t listen to Taylor Swift again in any form for five years.
The Complete Taylor / Kanye Timeline (Article)
Robin Morgan - The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism (Book)
Seyward Darby - Rise of the Valkyries (Article)
Lana Del Rey - Video Games (Video)
Mazzy Star - Fade into You (Video)
Taylor Swift ft. Kendrick Lamar - Bad Blood (Video)
Nicki Minaj & Beyonce - Feeling Myself (Video)
Riverdale: Veronica Challenges Cheryl to a dance off for control over the River Vixens (Video)
PART SIX
(The Sapphic Section)
Dress, betty, Question…? right where you left me, Cruel Summer, no body no crime, willow, You Need to Calm Down
The gay part! Minus “Question…?” These are all from the albums she released and didn’t tour for. The two indie folklore/evermore, Lover… For one reason or another these are the most gay. The emphasis on wanting more than a friendship, the paranoia and obsession that a man has stolen a woman from you, feeling left behind by when a woman leaves you frozen in time, a wild summer of sex and freedom (with Karlie Kloss), the challenge to kiss someone right here right now in a crowded room in front of all your fucking stupid friends, fuck the closet, etc. A song from “Midnights” that directly addresses the Karlie Kloss break up (Maroon) is not on here because 1) I don’t like it as much and 2) Karlie Kloss sucks and it was good that this break up happened. She released a lot of little “mixtapes” during this time with different stories from the two indie albums and the woman focused one was how I finally “got it”. I have never listened to folklore/evermore and I can’t tell you what’s on it because the little mixtapes are so much better, and gayer, and sadder. “You Need to Calm Down” is her coming out, if people even do that anymore, and making up with Katy Perry, which she also didn’t need to do.Taylor Swift - “the ladies lunching chapter” (EP)
Taylor Swift - You Need to Calm Down (Video)
Mary Gaitskill - Veronica (Book)
Patricia Highsmith - The Price of Salt (Book)
“Love on the Run: Re-reading “The Price of Salt”, Patricia Highsmith’s eerie-romance-as-thriller” (Article)
Mariah Carey feat. Jay-Z - Heartbreaker (Video)
Spring Breakers - Every time (Film Clip)
Riverdale (S7x03) - Toni’s Sex Poem (Video)
Riverdale (S7x06) - Toni tries out for the Vixens (Video)
PART EIGHT
Glitch, Midnight Rain, Bejeweled, Karma, Mastermind
[Editors note: The album for me. Once Riverdale helped me enter, Midnights came out and it’s the only one for me, even though I like parts of almost all of them. This is probably because Midnights is “The Queen That Never Was”, a bunch of songs about “nighttimes” that couldn’t go on the albums they were supposed to. ]
The Eras Tour & Midnights is Taylor Swift doing a Homecoming - an in-between albums, a greatest hits / career retrospective in the middle of a career that is nowhere near over, but that has almost 20 years of music to choose from. Midnights has a bunch of friends — Zoe Kravitz is one of the writers listed on Glitch, Lana Del Rey and Dylan O’ Brien play drums and sing on several songs, etc. It’s stoned, moody, reflective. It’s also the most “writerly”, despite what she says about inventing stories for the ‘characters’ on folklore/evermore. She made the effort to create an overarching theme that transcends the time or space the songs were written in, to create a narrative structure. I hope that she continues to do this in the future, because it’s extremely effective. “Mastermind” is her as a woman who “knows how”, the end point of “Enchanted”. Sex, attraction, the promise of a stranger who may or may not want to fuck you, she’s got it down now. We all get it down at one point or another, and my guess is that “Mastermind” is a late Midnights addition — I think it belongs on Lover or 1989, there is something very earnest, very toxic, very damaged, very nasty about it. The reason I put it to Lover is because at the end, her prey sees thru her, but even looking at them as prey is very 1989 toxic behavior.
Sky Ferreira - Night Time, My Time (Video)
Ottessa Mosfegh - Death in Her Hands (Book)
A$AP Rocky feat. FKA twigs - Fukk Sleep (Video)
Ann Powers - Lorde Sounds Like Teen Spirit (NPR) (Article)
Billie Eilish - NDA (Video)
Lovage - Book of the Month (Video)
Handsome Boy Modeling School feat. Cat Power - I’ve Been Thinking
She Wants Revenge - Tear You Apart (video) (directed by Joaquin Phoenix)
Taylor Swift - Bejeweled (Video)
Taylor Swift - Lavender Haze (Video)
Taylor Swift ft. Ice Spice - Karma (Video)
PART TEN
Allies, villains, homegirls, and others
....to be continued
Special thanks to Dustin who managed to get Eras Tour tickets for us out of thin air and was the best date ever, Kristin, Grace, Shady, Victoria, Bill & everyone who asked me to make a Taylor Swift playlist for them.
for more Taylor Swift & Riverdale, see: https://serpentqueensgambit.cargo.site
PART TWO
Better than Revenge, Mean, Enchanted
The post Kanye moment album, but was probably in development when she went to MTV. These are the first songs that have any “blood”, probably the first songs written post menarche, based on how “late” she was to expressing her sexual development. She watches a Paramore video. The casual, petty misogyny of “Better than Revenge” has been changed in the rerecording (“She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress…”), so the original recording is here. Teenage girls are nasty, vicious things and to erase that I think is a crime which I won’t participate in. “Mean” was the first song to get her on the gaydar, the anthem for small town queers who are going to get away from all of that, and become bigger, brighter than the narrow vision provided for them. “One day, I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me” does a lot of work here. “Enchanted” is the first suggestion that her beauty, her sexuality, can be weaponized. It’s the side A of “Mastermind”, which I think is probably the best song she’s ever written or will write, because it’s cruel in its devastation and flat banality. What happens when a weaponized body meets another one? We’re still figuring it out. Swift says Speak Now is the first album that is “hers”. This is when she begins to date Jake Gyllenhaal.
Paramore - Misery Business (Video)
Taylor Swift - Mean (Live @ The Grammys, 2012) (Video)
PART THREE
22, I Knew You Were Trouble, We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, All Too Well
The most emotional. It’s a young woman literally all over the place. Her problems are suddenly much bigger than they were before and she doesn’t have the mechanisms to deal with being suddenly facing a future in which she has power, control, but everything is terribly fucking out of control. She has her own apartment where she and her friends can get drunk and dance, sing songs like “22” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”, about the end of her first “young relationship” (Joe Jonas), which she is too mature for now, but she’s also reeling from the first big personal disaster in her life, the ending of the relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal, which is the first disaster in every beautiful, smart, ambitious girl’s life. He’s older, powerful, charismatic, sexy, and has a huge world that she wants to explore. This is the person she loses her virginity to. She’s around more and more people (especially women) who also have large worlds, and her music is changing, and she doesn’t have it together enough to really comprehend the scope of the damage. “I Knew You Were Trouble” is that kind of negative self talk, if only I knew better, if only I listened, if only I was stronger, better, less needy, etc etc. But what can you do? Absolutely nothing. Just like it’s routine for every girl, it’s routine for every man who does it to her.
The Nabokovian All Too Well:
I’ve never even heard the original album version, but at this point it doesn’t matter. Apparently the original was 20 minutes long, and she called her songwriting partner in tears to get her to help fix it because there was something there that had to get out, because of course it had to be. She was with this man for something like four months, and the speed and scale is crazy. Nabokov’s view is that memory is just as dangerous as any other aspect of human life, and probably the most dangerous. Who remembers, what is remembered, what is written down. This is all of her memory, and the fight is fucking terrible to watch. Her emotions are so high, and everything is sharpened by that, and her memory is just as jagged now as it was then. The language of the fight is so realistic because her memory (at least to her) is real. Jake Gyllenhaal absolutely can never speak about this ever, because his memory can’t ever be as sharp because this wasn’t devastating for him, this wasn’t world ending. And he would lose. Because he either would have to admit that it hurt him too, that he behaved badly, or he would have to lie and say it didn’t. And either way it would be terrible for him. The lyrics are full of loss of virginity slurs common amongst the Promise Keeper crowd (she’s a crumpled up, used piece of paper, she’s needy, the innocence of the scarf, the smell, the tangible reminder of her virgin body etc) and what hurts the most, what is the most damaging, is that he doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember what it was like to be shown a new world, doesn’t remember what it feels like feeling all of these feelings new, sharp, violent, world ending. He doesn’t remember. So she remembers it, for both of them. And what she wants, is him to remember anything, anything about what happened, to be there with her, even for a minute. And he won’t. Most critics say this is her legacy song and will be what lives on in the American Songbook well after she’s gone. Maybe it will, but its most important legacy is that it gave women, especially young women, a language to honor the power of their own memory.
Lana Del Rey - Video Games (video)
Anais Nin - Little Birds (Book / Erotica)
Riverdale (S2x08): Betty Strips to join the Serpents
Taylor Swift - All Too Well (Short Film/Ten Minute Version)
PART FIVE
Don’t Blame Me, Gorgeous, Delicate, Dress
So the whole vibe is pretty terrible! The worst part is that until all three of the people involved in this are dead it’s going to be something we have to deal with, and will continue to deal with, literally until the end of time. We won’t be able to say Beyoncé without Taylor and without Kanye. She’s angry and lost and really, really alone. The first time she can honestly say “I don’t care” because if she did she wouldn’t come back. This is the most ‘Black’ album in tone and influence, and the one that Atlanta dressed as for the show, and she performed “Gorgeous” as a secret song for my show. She kept forgetting the lyrics to it, because she was “so distracted” by everyone’s “amazing outfits”. I haven’t seen her speak a lot about this time, as why would she? But it is her first album that most critics pan, and is not nominated for any of the big awards at the Grammys. At this time, her Black peers are expressing all kinds of furious and horny. This album owes absolutely everything to Rihanna’s enraged “Bitch Better Have My Money” , S&M, and Work (and ANTI as an album in its entirety). Dress is considered the horniest she’s ever been which…is not horny at all but comparatively for her up until this point it absolutely is. “Dress” appears at what is supposed to be the horniest moment in The Summer I Turned Pretty which feels like it was written explicitly as a vehicle for Taylor Swift, and of course misses its own point. This is the last album that is on Big Machine, the record company that she hates. She does not re-record this album, which is a wise decision. Rihanna - “Bitch Better Have My Money” , S&M, and Work (Videos)
Angela Carter - The Sadiean Woman (Book)
Beyoncé - I Been On (Homecoming Live) (Video)
Taylor Swift - Look What You Made Me Do (Video)
Taylor Swift - …Ready for it? (Video)
Beyoncé - Blow (Video)
Mariah Carey feat. Gucci Mane - Obsessed
PART SEVEN
Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince, London Boy, champagne problems
Thirty, flirty and fun! Things are making sense, her plans are working. She’s happy, in a long term relationship, she’s politically come out of the closet (endorsing Obama and getting involved with local Tennessee races), and in 2019 its primed to bring in her best decade. Her friend group is more diverse and more stable — she’s among the minority of Americans that can say she is a close friends with Palestinians (the Hadids) Black people (Zoe Kravitz), Hispanic people (Selena Gomez) and queers and her videos start reflecting that. There hasn’t been an album this poptimistic in decades, not that I can remember. This Obama’s America. She’s literally Miss America! That is Idris Elba telling me to get on his scooter. But....that London Boy wants to get married. She says no, and they don’t break up right then, but it starts the countdown. Because he’s a traditional boy from a traditional family, and once a marriage happens then it’s baby time, and she’s not going to do that, not now and probably not ever. How could he have misread this so badly? I don’t even know her and I know that a girl who only talks about children in terms of people who murder her for her money is not into this life. The relationship lasts through the pandemic and then her and her champagne problem ends that.
Bruce Springsteen - I’m On Fire (Video)
Taylor Swift - Lover (Video)
Estelle feat. Kanye West - American Boy (Video)
Charli XCX - Boys (Video)
Santigold & Lil Yachty - Worry No More (Video)
Sinead O’Connor - The Last Day of Our Acquaintance (Live, 1995) (Video)
PART NINE
Fortnight, Florida!!!!, Father Figure, Actually Romantic, CANCELLED!
Well, it’s all over, right? The Eras Tour is probably the most successful tour of all time, she’s getting married, everything is awesome! The Tortured Poets Department is my least favourite album out of all of them, and the most unimpressive to me on all fronts — musically, lyrically, aesthetically. To me it is put together after staying up all night and someone has convinced her that this was a good idea. The only reason it gets a place here, because it was my least favourite until the next album, which is some how even worse. Tortured is about the last breakup before her Joe DiMaggio / Marilyn Monroe / The Last American Marriage, the 1975’s Matt Healy. Having never heard any of their music and still not even sure I could pick him out of a line up, the most I can say is that he is a toxic Aries junkie rat fuck and that whole crew in London feels like people who would be assumed to be my friends and I couldn’t imagine any room I would want to be in less than that one. The two songs from Tortured here are the only ones I can stand listening to all the way through, even with support from my Gen Z coworker Adrienne. She said that the way to do it is to be exceptionally depressed and not to speak to any men. Which is fine, but not a way to listen to music over the long term.
The Life of a Showgirl is even worse. At my euphemistic, all I can say is that it’s brand management, Marvel style. There are at least three songs that are just interpolations of other songs — “Father Figure”, “CANCELLED!” and “Wood”. It’s nihilistic, and embarrassing. She is overexposed, and not even trying. This was the first album I was “Taylor Swift Aware” of and it is almost repulsive. It seems like all of her worst impulses are on display, and for absolutely no reason. She should be taking time off and planning a wedding and just not…being anywhere. Was she disassociating the whole time this was happening? “Actually Romantic” cements her reputation as a sociopath to me. A diss track against Charli xcx for absolutely no reason, as Charli xcx’s song was vulnerable, conflicted. About being constantly compared, pitted against other women, even white women who are more successful than her, Charli’s song “Sympathy is a Knife” does not read (I would argue cannot be read) as a spiteful, hateful song, and more about how awful it is to be a woman in music in general. When “Actually Romantic” started making waves through the fandom community, knowing tons of eyes would be on her, Charli posted about Gaza, which made Taylor seem even smaller.