50 pages • 1 hour read
Rob SheffieldHeartbreak Is the National Anthem: A Celebration of Taylor Swift's Musical Journey, Cultural Impact, and Reinvention of Pop Music for Swifties by a Swiftie
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Pop Persona as Paradox
Throughout Heartbreak, Sheffield seeks to pinpoint who Taylor Swift is—a task he ultimately concedes is impossible given that her public pop persona is fundamentally built on paradox. This argument is summed up by his early remark, “she’s become the star who embodies pop music in all its maddening contradictions and cultural riddles” (2). Some of these paradoxes are embodied in her early song “The Archer,” in which she portrays herself as—in Sheffield’s words “full of secrets everybody already knows” (70). Swift portrays herself as an open book—detailing her personal life endlessly in songs, often in coded messages to be deciphered by her most dedicated fans—but the “real” Swift remains hidden behind the performance. Across any given album—to say nothing of the span of her career—Swift sings from many perspectives that often contradict each other. Sheffield notes that while the speakers of Swift’s songs are often fictional characters, each nonetheless represents a facet of their author’s identity. He does not concern himself with whether these paradoxes reflect who Swift is in her personal life, since the book is much more concerned with Swift’s cultural impact. For the rest of Heartbreak, Sheffield addresses the tiny paradoxes that are sprinkled throughout Swift’s discography and that, together, create the larger paradoxical persona.
Sheffield’s analysis of “right where you left me” and “it’s time to go,” neighboring tracks on Evermore, is a central part of his argument for Swift-as-paradox. The speaker of “right where you left me” is a woman who remains permanently frozen in time at the moment when her boyfriend left her for another woman. She haunts the diner where their final conversation took place, unable to move on. Meanwhile, the speaker of “it’s time to go” offers advice to listeners about the importance of recognizing when it’s time to leave unfulfilling relationships and situations behind. Sheffield imagines the narrators of the two songs as diametrically opposed versions of Swift in conversation with one another: “Of the two voices at the end of Evermore, [the narrator of “it’s time to go” is] the one to listen to and take seriously. But the other is more fun” (168). This reading illustrates how Swift’s many paradoxes can play out over the course of multiple songs, or even multiple albums, requiring listeners to pay very close attention for long periods of time in order to discern them. Just as “right where you left me” and “it’s time to go” present opposite versions of Swift, so do the grayscale portrait of her on the cover of Reputation and the pastel rainbow portrait on the cover of Lover, released years apart.
Sheffield’s analysis of “The Archer” allows him to trace the ambiguous border between Swift the person and Swift the public figure. Sheffield dissects the song’s narrator in detail, writing, “she is full of secrets everybody already knows” (70). His use of oxymoron here conveys Swift’s self-contradictory persona, simultaneously inscrutable and transparent. Sheffield seems to identify with Swift’s incarnation in “The Archer” more than any other, though the identification is not positive. He admits, “she always scares me, because she’s the parts of myself I dread. The Archer is confident she’s conning everybody, so proud of finally seeing through herself, when she’s the last to realize how transparent she is” (71). Somehow, the paradoxical persona is an essential aspect of what fans find relatable about Swift’s music, even though these paradoxes also help Swift to elude description.
Fandom as a Source of Creativity
Much of Heartbreak is devoted to examining Swift’s relationship with her fans, the Swifties, and how that relationship has changed the music industry. Sheffield’s central thesis is that Swift “reinvented pop in the fangirl’s image,” (8). To prove this point, he must analyze the Swift-Swiftie relationship and how it compares to the fan-idol relationships that came before it.
Sheffield establishes that long before becoming a pop star, Swift was an avid music fan herself. Her immediate love for LeAnn Rimes’ 1996 album Blue, and her subsequent interaction with Rimes at a 1997 concert proved formative to the particular mold of stardom that Swift has created. Sheffield writes, “That moment of LeAnn Rimes remembering Taylor’s name had a massive impact on the world we live in now—it formed Taylor’s idea of how a pop star rolls, raising the standard so high that it’s now just part of any rookie pop star’s job. We owe LeAnn so much” (44). Swift’s fandom is equally evident in the way she discusses music and culture. Recounting her appearance at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival, where her references to John Cassavetes, Pablo Neruda, and Barbara Stanwyck earn her the honorific “Film Geek (Taylor’s Version),” in Sheffield’s estimation (39). This characterization of Swift as a covert geek disguised as a glamorous pop star builds to Sheffield’s sweeping conclusion: “She treats fandom as an art form. That’s why she writes the kind of songs she writes. Taylor the fan is the truest Taylor; everything else comes from that” (59). Because she thinks of herself primarily as a fan, Sheffield argues, everything Swift does as a musician is geared toward building the kind of immersive world in which fans can fully participate.
Swift’s reverence for fan culture manifests, for example, in the intricate cryptology she creates in music and visuals in order to communicate with her fans. Sheffield explains how this proclivity for codes was inspired by the Beatles, another group who famously revolutionized the nature of fan-musician relationships:
She got the idea from the Beatles. ‘The Beatles did an album where you played it backward—back when they had records and stuff,’ she said. ‘You would play it backward and it would say ‘Paul is dead, Paul is dead,’ all these secret messages and stuff. I can’t really do that with CDs because you can’t play them backward. So, this was as mysterious and creepy as I could get.’ Not even close, as it turned out. She got even more into these mind games as she got more famous. When she drops a new project, the mystery and codes are part of her artistic statement (91-92).
The codes are a key example of how Swift has deepened the industry’s previously surface-level engagement with fangirls. Sheffield puts forward her adaptation of the New Romantic sound and aesthetic as another instance of this, noting that New Romantic legends Duran Duran seemed hesitant to embrace or acknowledge the femininity of their audience. In this sense, Swift has not changed the make-up of music audiences in any fundamental way, but rather chosen to acknowledge and engage with the female fans who have been essential to the industry’s functioning for decades.
Femininity and Misogyny in the Music Industry
One of the most frequently-touted criticisms of Taylor Swift in the press is that she sings too much about her exes, using them as fodder for her career rather than respected partners. In Heartbreak, Sheffield submits that these critics aren’t paying close enough attention, that they have completely missed the point of Swift’s music:
These songs aren’t really about boys at all. They’re about girls, the topic Taylor has pursued more relentlessly than any other pop artist in history. She’s written more songs about girls than anyone, even Paul McCartney, and like Paul, she has nearly no interest in male characters. The boy in a Swift song is usually just a mirror for a girl’s experience of self-discovery and self-figuration (49).
Hyperfixation on Swift’s love life is just one of the many ways her career has exemplified the issues of misogyny that continue to plague women in the music industry. In Chapter 17, Sheffield addresses how Swift’s early “nice girl” image was weaponized against her, a clear example of how female artists are measured against different standards than male artists. “Nobody gives a shit if Mick Jagger is nice,” he writes, “The concept simply doesn’t apply. Taylor Swift has a very different relationship to nice.” One instance where this double-standard of “nice” played out in real-time was the 2013 sexual assault of Swift by David Mueller. Sheffield describes the red carpet photograph that captures the moment Mueller groped Swift: “It’s a horrifying image: her smile, game face on, keeping it together for the camera. She’s frozen in a split second of revulsion, confusion, fear, self-doubt, too visible to step back” (134). This description aims to convey the intensity of Mueller’s sexual aggression towards Swift, and by extension, how laughable it is that Mueller felt entitled to a “nice” reaction from her.
In the face of overwhelming sexism and sexual harassment, however, Sheffield argues that Swift has made femininity the defining theme of her entire discography. The girls in her songs range from Swift herself to young friends playing pirates, to a fictionalized version of Joni Mitchell who escapes the oppressive spotlight of fame for a quieter life. In Chapter 13, Sheffield describes how Swift’s music references and engages in dialogue with other music about femininity, including Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable,” Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me,” and Stevie Nicks’ “Sisters of the Moon.” Swiftian feminism and femininity thus builds upon the gender expression of Swift’s predecessors and contemporaries, who have all made major contributions to the same musical cause. In summary, Sheffield borrows a quote from Nicks, who said of Swift, “Taylor is writing for the universal woman and the man who wants to know her” (77). In Swift’s musical universe, the men who have victimized her are always secondary to the women who have inspired her and supported her as fans.
