Our theme for the month of March is “I was wrong about.”

My first post on the post calvin was nearly five years ago now. I like the conclusions I came to in that piece: that “sophistication can[’t] be equated with depth of meaning, and that depth of meaning can[‘t] be equated with worth.” And that “being popular doesn’t make something bad.” Those are formative lessons for me, and Taylor Swift’s music was the catalyst for those lessons.

But I also wrote this: “Taylor Swift […] is an expert storyteller, fantastic lyricist, and all-around extremely talented songwriter.” I no longer believe this.

To be clear: I think this was a perfectly fair assessment at the time of writing. I even liked her next album, Midnights, so much so that I ranked it #4 in her discography a little while later. After that, though, things started to go downhill. I didn’t like The Tortured Poets Department. I thought it was overall campy and melodramatic in a way that still sort of had plausible deniability for being tongue-in-cheek, but the individual songs themselves weren’t enough to hold the album up on their own.

Then Life of a Showgirl came out. Not only is this album very bad by nearly every metric, it also makes the last two worse in hindsight. Swift’s supposed self-awareness in previous songs like “Anti-Hero” or “But Daddy I Love Him” (both songs which I liked, by the way) seems to fall flat in light of songs like “CANCELLED!” which demonstrates a comedic amount of ignorance about the various criticisms leveled at Swift for the company she chooses to keep, both now and in the past, to say nothing of its middle-school level edgy lyricism.

In the past, I (and many others) would have been quick to defend the entire product as deliberate, clever, and satirical. “Swift gets the better of her critics by embodying the version of her they’ve created in their minds,” or something similar. But it’s been years now, and after a sequence of repeated failures—both to use her unprecedented wealth and power to do anything other than amass more of it, and to even do the thing that got her there in the first place: make good music—I’m now forced to consider the possibility that she is really, genuinely out of touch.

I know it shouldn’t surprise me. Her last tour made more money than the GDP of some countries, and she’s been in the public eye for the last twenty years. But it’s true that she’s been receiving criticism that entire time, for every reason you can think of, and a lot of that criticism comes from a straightforwardly sexist place. For example, some people have blamed Travis Kelce as the primary reason that Swift’s words and actions have leaned more conservative in the last couple years than before.

I understand where this idea is coming from, but I think it wrongfully, bizarrely, suggests a total lack of agency from one of the most powerful people in pop culture. No, I think Swift can take the full weight of responsibility for everything she does. Her private jet usage, her steadfast silence on an endless list of genuinely life-and-death political issues, and most certainly for the declining quality of her songs.

I suppose it’s sort of unfair to say I was wrong when I praised Swift’s work in the past. Reputation is still good. 1989 is still good. Hell, I still like Midnights for mostly the same reasons I did before. But Swift herself has lost me. Depending on your social circles, Swift has has been a polarizing figure for a long time, but it appears that the tide is turning on her more than ever, as an ever-growing group of former fans—myself included—begin to finally hit a threshold of frustration with her, no longer outweighed by the quality of her music. It’s becoming less cool to identify as a fan, because you’re communicating two things: that you’re indifferent to her political inactivism, and that you like her new, bad music. For the latter, it’s like we’ve come all the way back around. Or at least I have.

Regardless, I’m still glad to have learned that it’s okay to like things that are popular, and fortunately for me, Taylor Swift isn’t the only person making music. In fact, there are plenty of extremely popular artists who aren’t out of touch yet. I’ve been listening to a lot of Haley Williams, a lot of Hozier, and a lot of AURORA. I’d recommend them.

Philip Rienstra

Phil Rienstra (they/he) (’21) studied writing and music, and since graduating has developed an interest in labor rights and coffee. They’re an amateur chef, a perennial bandana wearer, a fledgling dungeon master, and an Enneagram 4. He lives in St. Paul with his spouse, Heidi.