For the sake of the Swifties, let’s get straight down to business. What are the juicy reveals in Taylor, the two-part Channel 4 documentary strategically positioned to air in the overwrought run-up to the release of The Life of a Showgirl? Well, there’s the camp titbit about her first tour bus being decked out in leopard print and previously belonging to Cher; and at one point Robert Ellis Orrall, who co-produced her debut album, deftly fans out a bunch of CDs of unreleased songs like a croupier in a casino.
For the minority who are not Swifties, these takeaways are about as tantalising as a snake emoji (her snake era in 2017 marked the beginning of Swift’s iconic promo cycle for sixth album, Reputation). All I can say is: Taylor is not for you, babes. Because we are now in the era of putting aside our curmudgeonly Madonna-did-it-first cynicism to bask in the 100-watt joy generated by two ultra-earnest teen American Swifties (Niamh Adkins and Nina Haines, who deserve a Gogglebox show of their own) intensely dissecting their icon. “I just fell in love with how she celebrated girlhood,” sighs Haines. “She gave me permission to yearn.” This is Swift’s power in a nutshell. And, like yearning, it’s limitless.
Coming five years after the slick, stage-managed Netflix documentary Miss Americana, this one is more … popcorny. (Neither approach brings us any closer to the real Taylor, obviously.) The action toggles back and forth between years – sorry, eras – as a former manager, producer, bandmate, PR guru, music journalists and superfans reflect on Taylor Swift the global phenomenon, brand, proxy for girls’ feelings, bellwether for how society views women, and so on. I would have liked more on Swift herself, her childhood especially, to get a sense of the conditions that produced a girl with the gumption to “go to every major label in Nashville and say: ‘I’m Taylor, I’m 11, and I want a record deal!’” Beyond some archive karaoke footage and home video of her parents arriving home with baby Taylor, there isn’t much to go on.
Holly Armstrong, AKA the first Swiftie, recalls stumbling upon her heroine singing on a makeshift stage on a New Jersey boardwalk in 2003, a seismic encounter that eventually led to their meeting. Early band member Emily Poe Stumler remembers how “incredibly driven and young” Swift was, and how it was “like having a little sister who is also your boss”. Not exactly the stuff of tabloid toplines. Things get slightly more spicy with Rick Barker, Swift’s manager from 2007 to 2008 (the poor man didn’t last long despite their relationship being, in his words, “more like two girlfriends”). He recalls the Kanye-Taylor feud – given a disproportionate amount of airtime, along with the predictable rundown of her boyfriends – which started when Kanye West stormed the stage of the 2009 MTV Video Music awards while Swift was accepting an award: “Someone give Kanye a hug! You cannot buy that kind of publicity.”
As for Swift’s decision a decade later to mobilise her ferociously loyal army of fans against Scooter Braun, the investor who bought the masters to her first six albums and, worse still, used to manage Kanye West, Barker is Team Braun all the way. “No one stole her music,” he says. “Scooter Braun made a very good business decision. End of story.” Actually, the story ended when Swift re-recorded four of the albums and later bought back the rights to the master recordings of all six, eloquently making the point that artists should own their work. And women have had enough.
On politics, Swift has been accused of pandering to the right, not being political enough and, as English professor Elizabeth Scala says, “being too late to the party, too privileged, too white”. Essentially, says journalist Zing Tsjeng, she can’t win. During the 2018 US midterm elections, by which point she was being claimed by white supremacists as their all-American Christian goddess, she finally broke her silence, damning the far-right politics of Marsha Blackburn, the Tennessee Republican candidate for Senate, and asking her fans to get out and vote. In 12 hours, 35,000 people registered to vote.
Towering above it all is Swift’s extraordinary ability to turn any conflict to her advantage, usually by turning it into a multimillion selling platinum album. Or, in Swiftie-speak, to reclaim her narrative – as when critic Bob Lefsetz wrote Swift’s career was over after a flat performance with Stevie Nicks at the 2010 Grammys and she came back with the anti-bullying anthem Mean. “Every girl who was bullied knows every word to Mean,” says Haines. Then she and Adkins belt out lines from the song and I find myself wishing, not for the first time, that Taylor Swift had been around when I was a girl.
Less attention is paid to Swift’s music and songwriting craft, which is what happens when a female pop star goes stratospheric. Analysis turns, as it inevitably does in Taylor, to her capacity for reinvention, steely backbone and ability to manipulate her own image. All of which are sexist ways to avoid saying she’s successful because she’s good. In a telling moment, music PR Alan Edwards, making the point that every brand reaches saturation point eventually, compares Swift to chocolate, coffee, “whatever it is we consume”. I prefer the Swiftie take: “She gives us built-in community,” says Haines. “Take me to church, mama … Taylor is Jesus!”
• Taylor is on Channel 4 now.
