Understanding Taylor Swift means understanding America

Rob Sheffield wants you to know that he is now a real Swiftie. “Heartache is the anthem,” his sleek, strongly felt, and delightful collection of chapters on Taylor Swift begins with his awe at the “total devotion” of her early fans. It ends with Sheffield attending “three consecutive nights” of the Eras tour, “singing and crying and suffering through an emotional epic Taypocalypse.” In between, Sheffield responds to each album and a triple handful of favorite songs, riffs and extensions on the 274-paragraph ranked list of Taylor’s songs that Sheffield, a longtime writer for Rolling Stone, maintains for that magazine.

This book clearly grew out of those lists, and other pieces Sheffield has submitted on Swift’s career: it’s what science fiction writers used to call a renovatea book compiled, expanded and revised based on work made for magazines. In science fiction, that could be a future history full of robots. For Sheffield, this is Swift’s way of “reinventing pop in the image of the fangirl,” sharing the deepest cuts and brightest flashes from her “zero-to-sixty heart.”

Faced with so much power and such a familiar subject, another writer might fall into a cliché. Another might still plan and execute a longer book with longer, step-by-step arguments, placing our girl within musical, cultural, or literary traditions (full disclosure: I’m currently writing such a book). Sheffield doesn’t have to do such things, because – like celebrated rock critics of decades ago – he doesn’t write paragraph by paragraph, but sentence by sentence. He could say something about his prose said Walt Whitman about his verse: “I and mine do not convince with arguments. … We convince by our presence.”

And what a presence. “Taylor invented crying in the bathroom – no one has shed more tears in more facilities since the invention of the indoor sewage system.” “Sometimes Taylor likes to brag about her self-awareness in a way that makes you wonder if she’s ever met herself.” You could distill a quick biography from the facts of Sheffield Marshals, but why? He’s here for the vibe, and he’s at his best when the vibe hits the hardest: when he writes about hearing “Lover” (supposedly Swift’s happiest album) while grieving his mother, or when he – about Taylor’s romantic moments to discuss – brings its own moments. background in the British youth movement New Romantics, the boys-in-make-up, synthesizers-in-everything trend that gave us Duran Duran.

Sheffield also wants us to know he’s an A-list rock critic. “The first time I heard ‘Fearless’ was over the phone. The label was so paranoid about leaks, they wouldn’t even play it for me in a private room. In 2008, Sheffield was the kind of writer who had “Fearless” played for him over the phone. “Boy George told me a few years ago,” begins one sentence (this is the best part of the sentence). “During the Reputation tour in New Jersey, in July 2018,” Taylor “asked me before the show: ‘Enchanted’ or ‘The Lucky One’?” There’s no good reason to ask a rock critic to explain his personal life away to love his work, but these asides do somewhat undermine the identification that Sheffield seeks elsewhere between himself and the mass of Swift fans.

That’s also Swift’s problem, as Sheffield knows all too well: how can you stay emotionally close to your fans when their numbers number in the hundreds of millions? He knows better than to give a single answer. Instead, he continues to respond, appreciate and notice, with some platitudes, more insights and a whole lot of fierce statements. Swift takes up most of her album “Reputation” trying to act jaded and chill, a truly sophisticated New Taylor, but eventually gives up and jumps back into Old Taylor hard enough to break her ankle. A lesser writer would have stopped at ‘Old Taylor’. ‘Delicate’, one of her softest and most beautiful love songs, also shows that ‘Tay has no idea how bars work. You don’t send your date to make you a drink.”

Half of the best moments in this book work that way: they begin as verbal flourishes and end as one-sentence keys to the Swiftian kingdom, or at least to a province of it. The other half is based on Sheffield’s decades of hearing and writing about pop stars not named Taylor Swift. Any Eras concertgoer knows that the pre-show music is Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me,” but who else knows Gore’s up-and-down discography, or remembers that Gore came out on PBS in 2005 and stayed’ in a lesbian couple for thirty-three years”? Who else could explain so clearly the Taylorian parallels with Bruce Springsteen, the only other “star whose charisma is so likable”?

“Heartbreak Is the National Anthem” (Sheffield borrowed the title from “New Romantics”) is not the first witty, critical book about Swift, and will not be the last. It can be the shortest, and that’s okay. Few Swifties – few readers – will come to Sheffield for a litany of facts, or even (although we get some) for assertions about how a particular melody or drum machine works. We look to a critic like this for his own feelings, his reactions and judgments, and his personal experience with Swift’s nearly 300 songs. This is what we came for, whether his prose is matter-of-fact or bejeweled: and he can make the whole place sparkle.

HEARTBREAK IS THE NATIONAL ANTHEM: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music

By Rob Sheffield

Dey Street Books, 208 pages, $27.99

Stephanie Burt is a poet (“We are mermaids“), literary critic (“Don’t read poetry“), and Donald and Catherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. Her The next book, ‘Super Gay Poems’, will be published by Harvard UP in 2025.