With my daughters, I have read bits and pieces of various books on Taylor Swift bought through school bookclub. They often capture the myth or artist as commodity, always with an eye to being objective, starting from the beginning and working their way through, trying not to get bogged down by distraction. Rob Sheffield’s Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music is different to this, his book embraces the distractions.
Heartbreak is the National Anthem is complicated. On the one hand Sheffield is a writer for Rolling Stone, with his focus on various questions, connections and access, but he is also a a 6’5 middle aged man who loves Taylor Swift and has from the beginning. For example, he maintains a running list of all her songs ranked, with Bad Blood always being last. Sheffield’s text zooms in and out as required, capturing various aspects, myths, the brand, the cultural phenomenon. He is both inside and outside of the conversation. On the one hand critiquing the machine as a reviewer for The Rolling Stone:
I went to Taylor’s Tribeca apartment in the fall of 2017 to listen to her new album Reputation, for security reasons. (It was the only place where she could guarantee there weren’t any hidden microphones.) Two vinyl albums were propped up on the piano where she wrote most of the album: David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs and Kris Kristofferson’s Border Lord. She had a book (and only one) sitting on her dining room table: the collected lyrics of Bob Dylan.
Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield
While next minute at the very heart of it:
On the Reputation tour in New Jersey, in July 2018, she asked me before the show: “Enchanted” or “The Lucky One”? She knew it was an easy choice for me. But it added an element of stomach-churning anxiety to the show, as if people should be warned that something so cataclysmic was about to happen in the wild-card slot. There had been rain showers off and on that afternoon, but she triggered a full-on thunderstorm with this song. The clouds burst the exact moment she hit the “Please don’t be in love with someone else” coda—and nobody will ever convince me she didn’t make that happen.
Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield
He will zoom out to capture particular situations, such as the saga involving Kanye West or the decision to re-record her back catalogue. While he also zoom in to dig into particular tracks.
What I enjoyed about the book was Sheffield’s placement of Swift within the wider pop pantheon. He often compares her current status with artists of the past to place it in context:
Eighteen years in, even the greats tend to hit a dry spell. Let’s put it this way: When David Bowie was at this point in his career, he was hitting the skids with his 1980s shoulder-pads era with Never Let Me Down. Prince was turning into the Artist Formerly Known As, with Emancipation. Springsteen was in his Lucky Town era. Dylan bottomed out in his preachy born-again phase. Stevie Wonder got lost in The Secret Life of Plants.
Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield
He also situates her work in a wider literary tradition. For example, he compares her re-recording of songs with William Wordsworth’s lifelong revision of The Prelude or makes the connection with John Keats’ obsession with a particular kind of desire.
“Cruel Summer” is her ultimate window song, and not just the way she sings “Killing me slow, out the window.” There’s so much mystery in the erotics of windows in Taylor’s song—she’s got a Keatsian obsession with the kind of desire that doesn’t dare use the door. Heading out the window, she feels a rush that she doesn’t feel when she gets wherever she’s slithering off to. These lovers keep it on the hush, but that’s the attraction, the sub-rosa thrill. She’s seduced by the window.
Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield
It was interesting to think about this alongside Peter Kirkpatrick discussion of song lyrics as a form poetry on Late Night Live podcast. “Words used in an astonishing way.” Although, there are also some who, such as Simon Armitage, who argue that although they are related, lyrics and poetry are distinctly different:
In most cases, the orchestration has been built into the language already … when a composer takes those words, they want to fit them around another tune … very often what we admire in the poem gets lost in the transference.
Source: “Like portals to other worlds”: UK poet laureate Simon Armitage on the power of poems – ABC listen
…
Lyrics are made to come with this other stuff called music. When sung they can be transcendent, but when read on the page they can be inane.
Sheffield makes links with other artists throughout. including a bridge to the book of thirteen songs that Swift might have on a playlist.
One of the interesting things about Sheffield’s book is that he questions what writing can be. I initially wondered if the book was patched together due to lack of time, making the most of the current moment. However, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether I even wanted a dry and critical biography. In some ways, this book is as much about how to best capture the complexity that is ‘Taylor Swift’ as it is about Taylor Swift herself. Although the book begins with a traditional timeline, from there it embraces the subjectivity associated with culture and music. Some examples include listening to “Coney Island” on Coney Island.
I’ve spent an hour on the Q train each way just to hear “Coney Island” in Coney Island with the sun going down.
Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield
Having an attachment with the Archer when his mother passed away:
“The Archer,” that was the one. It spoke right to me, as I tried to blend into the background, pretending to be invisible. I flinched every time the line “they see right through me” led into “I see right through me!” Like most of the album, it’s a song about having secrets that you kid yourself you’re doing a great job of hiding, when they’re written all over your face. The woman in “The Archer,” she believes she’s making a bold confession, unaware that her intimacies are already obvious.
Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield
(In addition to the personal patchwork, another quirk to Sheffield’s writing is his perchance for littering the text with lyrics throughout.)
I came to this book after seeing Sheffield mentioned in Dylan Jones’ Sweet Dreams. I did not have much expectation other than a book about Taylor Swift. What I ended up enjoying was the way Sheffield’s bias as a fan invited me as a listener and reader into the text to reflect upon my own experiences as no book could properly do justice to all the nuisances.
She will be so many different Taylors, way too many, and they’ll all want the microphone all the damn time.
Source: Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield
She will make brilliant moves—or catastrophic gaffes, because that’s what rock stars do, giving us facepalm concussions. She’ll break up with country music, then get back together. She will break up with being single, then get back together. She will get judged, denounced, laughed at, condemned. (Ignored? That one’s not really in the cards.) She will have great ideas and terrible ideas. She will turn some of these terrible ideas into great songs, or vice versa. She will find the drama in any situation, no matter how trivial or ordinary it might seem. She will change how pop music is made, heard, experienced. She will bait. She will switch. She will be a terrible role model for anyone trying to lead a calm and sensible emotional life. She will jump into every feeling with the certainty that it’s the last one she’ll ever have.
In 2024, it’s a cliché to say Taylor Swift is the music industry, but it isn’t necessarily wrong.
REVIEW: Heartbreak is the National Anthem – How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music (Rob Sheffield) by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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