What on Earth are They Thinking?

Honestly. I might be to old to talk about Taylor Swift or maybe not old enough. I’m not sure. But since this blog is all about what touches my life? Of course I have an opinion!

I’ll tell you up front that I am not old enough to have children of similar age as Taylor Swift, even though I do. Children of my own body. Children that came into my life because God sent them. Children that came into my life because of my children. Children of my friends who became part of my life. There are a lot of children, who are now young adults of similar ages to Taylor Swift, whose lives have touched mine. And since they were there, she was also there. On the periphery, but there. I knew who the “kids” were listening to. It was part of my career as a parent to know what my kids and the kids that came into my house were doing. So, if they were listening, I was.

Drama. Taylor Swift’s music has always been about relationship drama. It wasn’t music I had much of an opinion on. It was background. Music that came and went in the background, but it was always easy to hear a song and know it was one of hers. And then I moved on. She was making music aimed at the under 25 or so audience and it wasn’t anything I was concerned over. There was much worse music my teens could chose listen too.

The children of my body and those who were in my house all knew, especially as teenagers, that I don’t do drama. We don’t create or participate in drama for the sake of drama. If you came to this blog for drama, you might be a little bit bored. We didn’t and still don’t watch things on the telly that are drama for drama’s sake. No reality tv on the main tv in the living room. Things like “Dancing with the Stars” or “America’s Got Talent” were sometimes watched and discussed. But in our house we were doing things. TV was for documentaries or “Junk Wars” or the news. It was a tool, not an idol. And the same went for music. So Taylor was there and also not there. Her music mixed in with the music of others. A piece of the mosaic of our lives.

The “kids” grew up and as they did, I had no reason to police their music. The family standards were taught from the time they were little on up. Once they passed into their older teens and got their driver’s licenses, they all had headphones. I was busy with other things and missed good chunks of popular music through those years. Sure, I would see a story on the news or run across something on the internet about Taylor but, as we taught our kids to ask, “What effect is this going to have on my life”. Most often, the answer was and is nothing. We did not use celebrities as models for our lives, because our lives did not and were not, going to look like theirs. How they lived their lives, just wasn’t a big deal. If one fell out of favor because they lost control or just because they couldn’t adapt to the changing tides of fame? Well, life is change. Don’t get to comfortable. “Make sure you are controlling your life and that your life isn’t controlling you.” “If you don’t like how a star is living their life, don’t contribute your time, energy or money towards the products they produce.” “You have a choice. Is that really the lifestyle you want to spend your time working for?” These were the questions I asked myself and taught the kids to ask about whatever they were doing.

That included their relationships. “If you don’t want drama, choose your dates wisely. How do they act in school? Is the person you are considering always in the middle of some sort of drama? Do you want to join that drama?” And the children of my body took a good look around them during those years and the answer was a resounding no. They saw their friends falling into and out of relationships. Sometimes they heard the reflection of the emotional trauma their friends went through in Taylor Swift’s music. Art follows life. Taylor uses her life in her art very well. While none of my children can be called “Swifties” they are smart enough to see this, not only in Taylor Swift’s art, but in the art of other artists as well. They chose their dates wisely and if someone didn’t live up to their expectations, they were not afraid to say no to another request for a date.

So Taylor’s music was there and I heard enough to know who she was and was becoming. Now it seems she has been turning a corner. Becoming something else. Life is change. We see change all around us. My children have changed dramatically from what I thought they would become, to what they have become. I too had changed in those years while the children were growing up into young adults. There was change everywhere. Life is change. It’s a constant. Today the dishwasher works. Tomorrow it doesn’t. Today that 5 seat car fits the family, tomorrow you are looking for a vehicle that fits 6 or 7 or 8. Then the next day you are wondering why you have all those empty seat behind you and you look for something smaller. Life is change.

But we expect our celebrities to remain the same. To produce the same music. To stay in a relationship that we were so enthused about in the beginning, even though it doesn’t quite fit them very well. We want the illusion they created and that we spent our money on and enjoyed, sometimes for years. We want the fairytale. We want the new, but not too new, release of music from “Taylor’s Version”. We want the nostalgia we believe we experienced, even though if we paid attention, we knew it was an illusion and that nothing stays the same.

Taylor didn’t stay the same either. While her music style continued to be recognizable, it and she, also became more confident. She put her foot in the the relationship pool. Dove in a couple of times. Climbed back out. Found a new record company. Started taking more control over her life. Started having opinions. After all, she was growing as my children grew. She was bound to change. Taylor is after all human and human children of a necessity grow up. We humans might know that nothing stays the same, but we don’t usually want to admit it. We really don’t want to admit that our children have grown in ways we never imagined and hold opinions on things that we don’t hold too. It makes us uneasy. It forces us to look at our own selves and ask, “where did I go wrong?” It forces us to consider if the opinions that we hold, from a time when children were supposed to hold to their family’s “values” and “traditions” and were shamed if they stepped out of line, were ever correct.

Now Taylor has stepped out of the lines that we as her audience have drawn around her. The signs that this was coming have been the media for quite some time. Even I had heard it or read about it at some point and been aware that Taylor was stepping into her own. Now, the volume has increased. People are howling in disappointment. Maybe not you the reader or I the writer, but all you have to do is open Facebook to hear it. Words like “demonic”, “blasphemy”, “not suitable for young children”. To be certain, some of this was already happening before this album. People were wondering how she dared become so popular that she might swing the political opinions of an entire generation away from “conservative morals” to “woke liberalism”? Preachers, that still try to use the Bible to create hate where Christ created love, had already begun to preach about “Satanic rituals and witchcraft”. Then oh my goodness! Time magazine outed her status and wealth by making her their pick for the “2023 Person of the Year.”

How dare she?!!!! How dare she…become a billionaire…be this incredibly popular music artist…slip in under our consciousness while we were not paying attention and catch the imaginations of our young women…to say to those young women “what if right is wrong and wrong isn’t as wrong as we think it is”…to start turning young women’s ambitions and ideologies against the party of religion and “Christian morals”…

She dared. Now she has released an entire two album set that calls out “the party” and their morals. Music that steps, not just out of the lines that were drawn for her, but then turned around and erased them. Taylor Swift is proving not only that life is change, but that sometimes life needs to change. This album isn’t all about politics. It is still about relationships. Relationship drama still sells and Taylor still sells it with the best. It is music that can be listened to without ever considering politics. Because, after all, Taylor makes music to sell. She didn’t reach billionaire status by making music that would offend the parents of approximately half her audience. This time she didn’t write lyrics that skim along the line of what her audience wants. She very cleverly introduces some of her own thoughts and opinions into the lyrics. It asks questions about morality. What is moral? Who gets to decide what is moral and what is not? Is that nebulous “who” the best suited for the job?

So we are going to talk about Taylor Swift for a few posts, or until I get bored with the subject of her new album. It might be that something else will cross my path that I will have an opinion on and I will write on that for a while. I’m not in a hurry.