The folklore of Taylor Swift
Near the end of July 2020, Taylor Swift suddenly dropped a surprise album entitled “folklore”. The album was a result of introspection brought on by social isolation. It also marked a stylistic difference – a folk album that mashed up her country music background with the pop music that had risen her to prominence. “It started with imagery,” she wrote about the album. “Visuals that popped into my mind and piqued my curiosity.” These images became characters who had voices. She tells the stories of these characters, in the hopes that they grow to be folklore, as the album’s name implores. “A tale that becomes folklore is one that is passed down and whispered around,” she wrote. But can music be folklore?
It’s most interesting to me that this concept of an album came from Taylor Swift. Not because of the sudden alteration to folk music – her origins in country makes that not quite as surprising. Rather, there has been a folklore surrounding Swift and her music ever since her name started to skyrocket in the charts. Her love life became inseparable from a discussion surrounding her music. Whispers jumped of who the latest song is actually about. The whispers even spread to the musicians she dated, with Ed Sheeran’s “Don’t” (2014) being rumoured to be about Swift and his relationship. Her friendships were also subject to gossip and connection to music. Her fall-out with Katy Perry was well-circulated in gossip magazines, and made up the background story to her 2014 song “Bad Blood.”
Folklore, especially in the way Swift describes it, has always been in the background of all her music. There are always characters which capture the imagination of the audience – but these characters, in the past, have been other musicians and herself. The gossip and folklore around her music came to a head with her 2017 album Reputation, which launched with Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do”, a song which blamed media and intense gossip attention for her actions and reactions.
In many ways, it makes sense that it’s Swift to create an album with stories about people the audience gravitates to. She had been the subject of folklore for years. And the importance of these stories is that it didn’t matter what the “truth” was – what was important was the story people could read into the music, both that which came from Swift and that which the audience could read into themselves.
Music, like many other elements of popular culture, does not rest in one solid category of either reality or fiction. In fact, music helps to cross these boundaries in more ways than may be expected, and creates interesting relationships between music and audience. They spin tales that can be about the original artist, the audience member, and a fictional character all at the same time. Each of these interpretations can be true simultaneously.
Music reveals to us the fluid nature of “truth” and “reality”. The secured boundaries we’ve drawn around the word “fiction” is never as solid as we like to think it is. We cross these solid lines every time we see something important to us in the fictions we spin. We bring something that was once solidly fiction into the realities of our every day life.
This is how storytelling always has been. I have always rejected the typical assumption that we, as humans, are no longer telling stories the way we used to. For those who assumed this alteration happened, why do they think so? What drastic change occurred that rendered humans no longer able to connect self and society to narrative? Its either incredibly self-aggrandising, or terribly self-deprecating to assume we no longer connect to narratives. Storytelling is something so fundamental to the human that I have no understanding of how we would live or communicate without it. We tell the stories about ourselves and our own past history, we understand our pasts through narratives, we worry about the narratives others are telling about us, we spin tales (both true and fictional) when asked about our day. We are but narratives wrapped up in flesh.
And we sing these narratives. We sang old myths and folklore, sang epics of our ancestors. We sang our own stories, and the stories of the lives of those we care for. And we continue to sing these stories. We weave between the boundaries of reality and fiction with crescendos in our voices. Our notes connect our stories, to those of the artist, and to those of the fictional creations and images which first inspired the narratives we sing.
Swift admits her album does this – blurring the stories of other characters and herself so seamlessly that it actually takes attention away from the role Swift plays in the stories. She has always been the spinner of folklore – connecting her own stories to those who listen to her – but previously it had been her who was the character whispered about.
Regardless of your definition of folklore – Swift’s definition, an academic one, or a personal one – the narratives we sing are our folklore, and the stories we spin are there to connect us to not only others around us, but also to other parts of ourselves. Swift’s album demonstrates her own ability to suddenly step away from the limelight of the narrative whispers, while also making sure she was still the centre of conversation. Taylor Swift has always been folklore, but now she has agency over the folklore spun about her. Its a remarkable way to control flow of narrative, while also unleashing a swarm of narratives to flourish. She created more folklore, like most musical artists, but is doing so very consciously of the stories we spin.