TAYLOR SWIFT IS IN CONTROL
Taylor Swift’s career owes much to a carefully controlled narrative
My first live encounter with Taylor Swift dates back to July 2009.
Swift was opening for tank top-sporting country guy Kenny Chesney at Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton during a summer concert that had more of a mini country festival flair. I was covering the event for the Edmonton Journal, The Sun’s sister paper.
Back then Swift was still considered a “country” artist, not having fully transitioned into pop yet, although her most recent album at the time, Fearless, certainly wasn’t considered “old school” thanks to crossover singles like You Belong With Me.
With her golden curly locks, those signature red lips and big bright eyes sporting long eyelashes, she commanded the stage.
“Swift shimmies her way across the stage, constantly aware of the video cameras projecting her image on the big screens — on one song, she’ll playfully cast her immaculate smile with pinpoint accuracy at just the right angle, on another, she’ll pout and brood, glaring exactly the right way at the right moment.
“Throughout, Swift seemed very aware her act is a pop spectacle,” I wrote at the time.
How could a 19-year-old understand so much about stage presence and have 30,000-plus fans in the palm of her hand? How could she make a stadium feel intimate, as if she was singing just for you. And you. And, yes, you too. How could she have so much control?
Swift, now 25, was bred to be a star. And even before her career-defining blockbuster album Red (featuring We Are Never Getting Back Together and I Knew You Were Trouble) and her latest smash hit 1989 (cue Shake It Off), it was obvious she had been in charge all her life.
There’s Something About Taylor
Swift’s rise to fame is well documented, and it is often based on Swift’s own accounts. “Self-made talent fights hard to rise to the top,” that kind of thing. It’s the kind of hard-luck lore that sells well in country music culture.
At every turn, from ex-boyfriends she wrote hit songs about, to recent Twitter spats with Nicki Minaj ahead of the MTV VMAs (where Swift has been in the spotlight numerous times), to her very public battle against Spotify and Apple Music and their royalty schemes, the story has been about making Swift both the victim and the power player.
“Haters gonna hate, hate, hate,” right?
Lately, cracks have appeared in the narrative.
In response to a New York Times review of a recent concert in which critic Jon Caramanica referred to Swift, whose current net worth is $200 million, as an “underdog,” online magazine Salon wrote a rather vitriolic post deconstructing the carefully concocted storyline that says Swift has always had to fight to get her way.
The Salon piece goes on to explain how Swift’s family was hardly hardluck, and that her parents were more than willing to back their daughter financially and logistically to the point of moving the entire family away from their Christmas tree farm in Reading, Pennsylvania, to further her budding career.
“When Swift was 14, her father relocated to Merrill Lynch’s Nashville office as a way to help dear Taylor break into country music,” Salon staff writer Scott Timberg wrote. “As a sophomore in high school, she got a convertible Lexus. Around the same time, her dad bought a piece of Big Machine, the label to which Swift signed.
“This kind of thing is especially offensive since there have actually been plenty of musicians who really were underdogs,” Timberg added. “Johnny Cash was raised by poor cotton farmers during the Great Depression. John Lennon’s mother and father abandoned him. Jimi Hendrix’s early life was a nightmare that involved shoplifting food so he could eat. For decades, the average blues and country musician came from poverty or close to it. Billie Holiday was jailed, as a teenager, for prostitution. And so on.”
Granted, Timberg wasn’t slagging Swift. He was criticizing the discourse that analysts have laid upon Swift as the most successful self-made story of her time.
But Swift isn’t necessarily an uninvolved bystander in all of this.
Total Control
A good example of Swift’s deliberate need to control her story is what happened with Ronnie Cremer.
Cremer was profiled by the New York Daily News in a story explaining how he became Swift’s guitar teacher before the family relocated to Nashville.
Swift had always said, before the Cremer story broke last January, that a random encounter with a computer tech visiting the family home to fix their machine led her to learn some guitar basics on which she would later expand on her own. It’s a story she told in a promotional video found on a 2009 concert DVD.
Cremer, who was later sued by Swift for creating the website ITaughtTaylorSwift.com, rebutted the tale by saying he had been hired to record a demo for the singer and, afterwards, to teach Swift on a regular basis for months, six hours a week. He just also happened to be a computer tech at the time and didn’t work on their machine until months later.
“I got a lot of hate mail from Swift fans who just do not want to believe under any circumstances that Taylor lied to them,” Cremer said in a Daily News update after he was sued. “That she’s just not capable. That her story, that she called a ‘ magical twist of fate’ story, could ever not be the truth.”
Fans have also felt the brunt of Swift’s control issues.
The pop star recently threatened to sue fans making homemade merchandise featuring her lyrics and selling their wares on popular arts and crafts marketplace website Etsy.
She also took action against concert photographers, threatening to destroy equipment if photographers didn’t comply with some stringent rules that included one-time use only without commercial purposes. (She also has her own team of Getty Images-approved photographers touring with her.)
The photographer release form stated “authorized agents” of Firefly Entertainment (Swift’s company) could “confiscate and/or destroy the technology or devices that contain” the original photographs.
After a backlash from several news organizations, the photography agreement was amended in late July and the destruction clause was removed in favour of one stating Firefly and Swift may ask for photos to be deleted instead.
(Rock band Foo Fighters has faced similar criticism, to the point where Quebec City newspaper Le Soleil sent a cartoonist to a concert rather than a photographer. At press time, their photo contract was unchanged.)
“Ms. Swift should be commended for showing by example her concern not only for the rights of musicians but for the rights of the photographers and organizations that cover her concerts,” Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel of the National Press Photographers Association, told photo news website PetaPixel on July 22. “After taking the time to hear our concerns regarding her world tour photography guidelines agreement, the news and professional associations and Taylor’s team are very pleased to have been able to work together for a revised agreement that is fair to everyone involved.”
To Swift’s credit, she likely would not have made it where she is without the kind of grasp she has on the business of her music. It’s the same kind of power play strategy many of the world’s top music stars — from Jay-Z to Madonna — have built over the course of their careers.
There’s a very good reason why she now stands among them.