voeux-envie

[voeux-envie]

BEYOND THE TITLE TRACKS

Plato had a point when he said that music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t listen to a song on a daily basis. For some people, songs are a source of entertainment, a means to make them feel all sorts of emotions from happiness, sadness, love, anger and so much more. To me, songs are more than that. They’re like poems (which they are) but better. They’ve got a melody that’s hard to resist. And yes, I called them “they” because songs are like persons. Each one has a story, a message, and a purpose. Like an old friend you’ve never met yet knows you best, finding the perfect song that describes exactly how you feel and what you’re going through is a magical and extraordinary experience–if you let it be. And this is how I fell in love with music.  

When you think of Taylor Swift, the first thing that would probably come to your mind is a mainstream love song of hers you’ve heard on the radio or the amount of celebrity boyfriends she’s dated in the past years from online articles you’ve probably scrolled through on social media. This is how the media portrays her to be: a mainstream American pop singer whose only goal in life is to sing about her exes.

Taylor was only sixteen years old when her first studio album came out in 2006. I was four years younger than her, but there wasn’t any other artist I could relate to as much as her. As a teenager, she helped me go through the toughest and most confusing phase of my life. Not a lot of people know that Taylor wrote more than just love songs. This is what the media fails to tell. She wrote about friendship (Fifteen), what it’s like to feel betrayed (I Did Something Bad), and what it’s like to be an outsider (A Place in this World), to be alone, and to be bullied (Mean). She wrote songs about her family (The Best Day), about a child who passed away from cancer (Ronan), about not wanting to grow up (Never Grow Up), about her relationship with music and her fans (Long Live), and so much more. Her self-written songs were authentic, personal, and relatable. It was as if she was writing my own life story while simultaneously giving me life lessons. She knew how to express my thoughts and feelings better than I could. Because of her, I fell more in love with songwriting. It became more than just a hobby to pass the time. It became therapeutic. The next thing I knew, I was on YouTube watching video tutorials on how to play her songs on the guitar and piano. 

Clean, a track from her album, 1989, is one of my favorites to listen to on Spotify. During her 1989 World Tour concert, she gave a speech about what this song meant:

“Let me tell you, people are mean to each other, but no voices are as mean as our own voices are to ourselves... Let me tell you the things you are not, okay. You are not somebody else's opinion of you...  You are not damaged goods because you've made mistakes in your life... You are your own definition of beautiful and worthwhile. It's not about being perfect... One thing I have learned in 25 years, and I'm still learning, is that if you get rained on, you walk through a bunch of storms, life is constantly coming at you. That doesn't make you damaged, it makes you clean.”

It wasn’t just her songs that made me connect to her, because what made me like her even more was her personality, her humor, and her outlook in life. If you look beyond what she posts on Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram, you’d realize that she not only uses it to update fans about her life, but she also uses it as a platform to personally interact with them. Tumblr is her safe haven. This is where she’s most active and where she’s most like herself. Since 2014, she’s liked over 27,000 posts from her fans, commenting and reblogging their content. By using this platform, she proved that she’s not an untouchable celebrity that’s high up in the clouds. She was and still is a fan of her fans and saw through their eyes, forming a strong bond with them. This proved to be an excellent marketing strategy. The Swifties are the ones who naturally do the promotion for her.

When it’s album release season, one thing Swifties look forward to are her Secret Sessions. This is an event where she personally messages her fans on social media and invite them to hang out with her and bake pastries at her house. She lets them hear the unreleased songs on her new album and talk about them before its release date. There aren’t a lot of celebrities who would go so far as to trust their fans to let them in their own homes. This just goes to show how much she treats her “fans” as more than just fans.

Despite everything she’s done to create good image of herself, the media always has a way to tear her apart. As a celebrity, she was constantly criticized for her every move: from the clothes she wore to the people she dated. People called her a snake, saying she was deceitful and manipulative because of Kanye West’s rap single Famous, where he degraded her with his lyrics. Because of this, haters spammed her Instagram and Twitter posts with snake emojis. But instead of letting this get to her, she used her craft—her music—to fight back. Before her latest album, Reputation, was released, Taylor took a break from social media. She deleted all her posts because of the hate she was receiving. She came back armed with songs and used the symbol of a snake to her advantage. It became the whole theme of her album.  She decided to turn the tables around and use their hatred as her strength. This is how Reputation was born.

A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) on Aug 23, 2017 at 7:01am PDT

Aside from her album, she also wrote poems to talk about what she went through.

Excerpt of Why She Disappeared:

"Whatever you say, it is not right."

"Whatever you do, it is not enough."

"Your kindness is fake."

"Your pain is manipulative."

 When she lay there on the ground,

She dreamed of time machines and revenge

 Said a prayer of gratitude for each chink in the armor

she never knew she needed

Standing broad-shouldered next to her

was a love that was really something,

not just the idea of something.

 "without your past,

you could never have arrived-

so wondrously and brutally,

By design or some violent, exquisite happenstance

...here."

 And in the death of her reputation,

She felt truly alive.

Those who only know her from the surface would say she has a bad reputation, but for fans like me who have been following her career from the start, I see her as a strong, mature and down-to-earth woman–one whom I aspire to be. How the media psychoanalyzes every single aspect of her life does not tell us who she really is. Those who care enough to really listen to her music beyond the title tracks do.

References

Taylor’s Social Media Accounts

Official Website: https://www.taylorswift.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/taylorswift/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/taylorswift13

Tumblr: http://taylorswift.tumblr.com

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/06HL4z0CvFAxyc27GXpf02

 Articles

https://studybreaks.com/culture/music/taylor-swift-criticized-exes/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/if-you-think-taylor-swift-sings-only-about-her-exes-then-you-dont-get-taylor-swift/2017/11/01/76c0227e-b9a8-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.01a2fdf44bf1

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/taylor-swift-tumblr-safe-space-fans-posts-reputation-album-release-social-media-a8045511.html

 Plato’s Quote:  http://www.sjsu.edu/people/thomas.leddy/courses/66/s1/Plato-on-Music.doc

Why She Disappeared Poem: https://genius.com/Taylor-swift-why-she-disappeared-poem-annotated

1989 Secret Sessions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKnl7STzSMU

Instagram Snake Post: https://www.instagram.com/p/BYI48JxniO3/

Clean Image & Speech: https://soundcloud.com/igor-astapov/taylor-swifts-clean-speech-1989-world-tour-foxborough-ma

Album Covers: https://www.theprospectordaily.com/2017/08/26/a-look-at-taylor-swifts-lead-singles-over-her-career/

Taylor’s Tumblr Replies: https://twitter.com/tswiftla/status/559017810740137984