who's afraid of little ol' Taylor Swift?

(or) the brutal takedown of the tortured poets department, a brief inquiry into online situationships, a look at who is allowed to self-mythologize, and matty healy... again.

Typewriters, the 1975, black and white visuals, angst gone aesthetic, and Taylor Swift—you could be forgiven for thinking it’s 2014 and that you were discovering the world as it was on the internet, all over again.

After countless TikTok videos, Substack posts, newsletters, and tweets heralding the so-called return of the tumblr-core indie (sometimes sleazy) era, nothing has shepherded in the return of it so firmly as Taylor Swift herself standing on the Grammy stage, announcing her new studio album called THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT. With a cover shoot full of Swift looking sad, tortured, and sexy with her all-too-familiar tresses, it was peak tumblr core, sad misunderstood girl aesthetic to a t. Swift solidified that indie, sleazy, angst has made its return—or signaled the death of a trend by ensuring it reached widespread popularity, depending on how you feel about her, generally.

But Swift is crafty. The announcement wasn’t just an announcement--it also began the process of spinning the public’s perception of all of those things on their heads. Following the dramatic proclamation at the Grammys, public speculation ran rampant, with everyone seemingly in agreement that this would be the album that would open the doors and offer a peek into the six year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn that had ended. 

Instead, in her latest--and longest--studio album, Taylor turns the tables on us all, keeping the doors more or less shut on her relationship, and launching full throttle into an excavation of her controversial situationship--and laying out her case for just who, exactly the tortured poets department is (hint: not her) and just who, exactly can even tell stories about themselves anyways (hint: her).

TTPD is not the story of a six-year relationship gone wrong. It is the story of a (fortnight?) post-heartbreak situationship gone earth-shatteringly miserable, the confessions of which are spilled over an array of songs, ranging from unapologetic to gleeful to downright depressed. Joe Alwyn gets off the way he did for the majority of his relationship:  she won’t air their dirty laundry and he won’t run his mouth. 

This gives Swift plenty of space to take to task who she insists is both the love and the loss of her life—Matty Healy.

To the casual fan or the casual listener (do those exist anymore?), it might not be common knowledge that they’ve orbited each other for years—but The Tortured Poets Department lays it all out in the open. If Blondie is to be believed, he’s the great Question of her life, and for a hedonistic moment in spring 2023, the question was brilliantly, blisteringly answered. According to TTPD mythologizing, across years and cities, Swift and Healy have dated other people but kept one eye on the other the whole time. They’ve dedicated albums to their respective lovers and written each other’s names in the liner notes. They’ve shared beds with partners and yet kept gasping the other’s name in the middle of the night. They’ve moved in with other people and kept thinking back to the house Swift sings about, with a porch made just for two. They’ve danced, drunk, and toured the world and all the while kept wishing on shooting stars from their jet plane windows that they’d land their happy ending with that special someone, that missed connection.

And then—the stars align, the wishes come true, and Taylor finds herself an outrageous outlaw, a bad boy with gun-calloused hands, a raunchy controversial fallen angel just begging for salvation—

—for her salvation.

At first glance, it might seem insane—but perhaps only to those who have yet to meet the Matty Healy type in their own lives.

If asked off the cuff to name a single girlfriend of mine who fell headfirst and starstruck into a deep, love-flavored, tinged-by-forever relationship with a skinny, weed-smoking, artsy, sleazy, white boy, I could name five. Wait, ten. No, at least a dozen. No girl who started her coming of age on tumblr, listened to the Arctic Monkeys and the 1975, and then finished her coming of age on the streets of The Big City was ever going to come out unscathed. I know the type. And it’s notable to point out that, perhaps to you, this type of boyfriend might not have existed before (or existed in different fonts, if you will), and to that I can say that, well, Matty Healy might have been the Sleazy Indie Boyfriend all the rest spawned from. 

The Sleazy Indie Boyfriend is most often white though he doesn’t have to be (it’s been thrilling to see more and more men of color find themselves in this irl archetype. That’s the future Obama asked us to hope for). The blunt he’s rolling is shoddily wrapped and perpetually hanging in the space between his chapped lips. He’s skinny in a way that suggests (but is not, he is vegan) heroin-chic; his thoughts on films are pretentious on a good day and unbearable on the worst, he thinks he’s a feminist because he says the Oscars are a sham aware because not enough of women are awarded, but he also can’t name the last movie he saw by a female director.. His scuffed Converse by the door will catch your eye as you do your best to listen to the Chet Faker pouring out of his tinny speakers and you’ll try and find yourself in the poetry he scribbles onto lined paper in the handwriting of a child—a real shame, since you know his parents paid plenty of money for that Very Good Private School he went to.

As he dabbles in drugs you’ll dabble in him, and worst of all? You’re going to get addicted. Intoxicated by your Sleazy Indie Boyfriendy, you’re going to believe it when he traces hearts on the skin of your back and tells you that he’s going to marry you. Lovestruck by your Stinky Indie Boy, you’re going to dream about the babies he promises to give you as you share earbuds and holds hands and trade kisses under the flickering glow of the subway fluorescents. Totally buying into the dream of your wet rag of a man child, you’re going to be heartbroken, shell-shocked, and left devastated when he breaks it off without so much as sorry, moving onto the next girl in need of stars in her eyes, fake promises, and the rush that comes from talking him down from doing too many shrooms with his friends.

Gazing wistfully from a distance, you’ll watch her make the same mistakes you did, nurse your broken heart til it’s soaked in alcohol and turns into I think I know better now, and try not to soften at the next guy who tears up while playing you the song he swears he wrote about you on his vintage guitar.

And while the rest of us usually find ways to move on, rewriting and reconciling parts of a love torn open until it no longer hurts, until we no longer care, it is not as if the urge to try and hurt as you were hurt ever goes away. It’s usually normal and fine because none of the rest of us do anything about it.

Taylor Swift is not the rest of us.

If history is written by the victors, and all’s fair in love and poetry, then I’ve simply never seen anyone try to win a breakup this hard.

Pop stars born in the glittery glow of the internet were only ever going to be self-aware, and Matty Healy is no exception: no matter how much he doesn’t want to be called a pop star, no matter how many times the 1975 splashes WE ARE NOT A POP BAND over the skin of their largest drum. Taylor’s sycophantic Socratic junkie wannabe loverboy pulls the same shit she does; cultivates an aura as much as he sheds it, demands the attention while screaming about how much of a prison fame is, and self-mythologizes in a desperate attempt to gain control over a narrative that can never be his, despite being about him. It is in this album that Swift lays it all out for the largest audience possible—that is, everyone who listens to her music, which is to say, everyone—and we get to hear her take him down head on. 

She goes from lovingly chiding him for his pretension, for likening his own intellect and songwriting prowess to Bob Dylan (in her title track, “The Tortured Poets Department”), to then adorning this flaw into something she can clean and shine and make gleam, to raking him over the coals, assuring him that it will be his own downfall, that he is the butt of every joke he himself tells. Matty’s carefully curated image for his own “era” becomes mocked, Swift sneering at the way they resemble the kind a Jehovah’s Witness would wear. In a low, sultry voice lit against the starkness of “I Can Fix Him (No, Really, I Can)”, his tasteless comments are loaded guns she’s staring down across the dirt path of an old Western town, remarks to tame along with the man, only to turn around merely a song later and claim that they’re the work of a conman attempting desperately to claw his way to being relevant. In “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”, she takes him to task for loving and leaving her (“they (her friends) just ghosted you/now you know what that feels like”), attacking everything from his intentions (“gazing at me starry eyed… who the fuck was that guy?”, “I just want to know/if rusting my sparkling summer was the goal”), to his callousness after ‘getting’ her (“once your queen had come/you treat her like an ulcer”), his motive (“Sleeper cell spy/in fifty years, will this all be declassified?/And you’ll confess why you did it?”), and even his fucking look.

And while it may seem like only the back end (NOTE: this was written ahead of the anthology dropping) of the album caps to Matty Healy’s terribleness, this would be too simple a puzzle for a master puzzler like Swift. On another listen, it becomes clear the entire thing is meant to ridicule him. She sings in the title track “You left your typewriter at my apartment/Straight from the tortured poets department/I think some things I never say/Like who uses typewriters anyway?”. Within the context of the bitter, tortured end to their relationship, the line goes from silly quirk to yet another piece of evidence that Healy is a self-important pretentious jerk, dragging typewriters around in an effort to commit to the bit. She absolves herself of any of his Sleazy Indie Boyfriend stink by reminding him and the listener in the chorus, again and again, that “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith/This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel/We’re modern idiots.” 

Healy is the performatively misunderstood soul and she is merely the arms he seeks shelter in, arms she promises can hold him like no one else can. Because he spurns her and her arms and her love, she turns his entire carefully crafted persona on his head. Her album is called after the thing he calls himself, the things she laughs in his face about. His typewriter has become the iconography of the Era, videos of lyrics she types out on its pages posted on social media until they’re reposted into oblivion. What was once likely ever-cool, ultra-exclusive  in Matty Healy’s head has now become the pop shill he likely detests; an era, a mood, a vibe, an album, a set list, and a long line of merchandise meant only to sell. Every dollar added to her bank account thanks to this album and this era makes a mockery of his own delusions of grandeur. Every time the album is talked about, tweeted about, written about, and trends, it throws in the face the power of the cultural capital and control of the zeitgeist Swift carries that Healy is oft-rumored to have mocked. He spurns her and ghosts her, skipping town like an asshole outlaw, and so she’ll burn every inch of his carefully crafted public image and persona in retaliation. The message is clear and it is written by the victor of poetry, if not love; he cannot show his face. He has no face to show.

And in stripping apart his persona for parts to sell to add more shiny things to her coffers, Swift makes it clear just who, exactly, is allowed to have the opinions, hold the cards, and self-mythologize—her. Indeed, this album still manages to hinge on the same leitmotif present in her entire discography; given a taste of success at a young age that has only ever grown bigger, Swift understands the precarious position she’s been in and always will be, dancing in the glories of fame while being beholden to its burdens. She tries desperately to control the narrative surrounding herself, reflecting on the starlets who get away from it all on songs like “The Lucky One”, crooning with Phoebe Bridgers about the cruel grasp of a youth fading on “Nothing New”, and in this album, she attempts to paint a direct line to her lineage. “Clara Bow” sees her connect with the original It-Girl, who Swift fans will know she has long been fascinated by, and Babylon fans (so, me) will know she’s who Margot Robbie’s character was based on. Clara Bow, adored and tragic and talented and beautiful and queer and misunderstood. Clara Bow, who ran away from it all after the frothing at the mouth over her love life hit a fever pitch, hiding away from everyone and everything until her death. Clara Bow, who then turns to Stevie Nicks. Stevie Nicks, famous for being a part of a band that wrote stunningly haunting music while trading lovers and barbs. Stevie Nicks, whose tambourine showed up at Taylor’s own pop up, and then—

“You look like Taylor Swift…. You’ve got edge/She never did” Swift sings, crowning a star yet to come (or perhaps already has?), writing herself into the narrative, supporting her own mythos as she breaks Healy’s down.

But who is she to give out that crown?

Fans joke that she’s God or she’s Jesus (and she sings it on reputation too; “Honey I come back from the dead/I do it all the time”) but never have the comparisons to religion been so blatant—or so specific.

Swifties love self-aware, cocky, “The Man” Taylor, sure, and call her Tayjesus jokingly, but here she leans into it; the Son of God and the Son, too. On “Guilty as Sin” she sings of leaving her lover to run to the one she longs for with “What if I roll the stone away/They’re gonna crucify me anyway/What if the way you hold me/Is actually what’s holy?” and reasserts the goodness of it with “I choose you and me/Religiously”. There’s leaning into a joke and there’s believing it. There’s being but an earnest musician, a girl with teardrops on her guitar, and then there’s becoming the one-woman powerhouse who significantly boosts the revenue of a city when she tours there and makes the ground move when her fans dance along to her songs as she performs.

Always strikingly self-aware, Swift knows before she even “touches his skin” just how the public perception will shift if she dates this (intensely problematic) man—and doesn’t care. She’s crucifying herself—both for the love of him and for the spectacle of it all, providing us fodder, something to talk about and giving us something to listen to, sacrificing herself for our sins of being far too interested in her life.

She takes it even further in “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”. Set over the low and haunting swoon and swing of the sort of instrumental one would hear set against the backdrop of a spaghetti Western, she sings “They shake their heads and say ‘God help her’/When I tell em that he’s my man/But your good lord doesn’t need to lift a finger/I can fix him/No, really, I can.” Swift croons about his loud, tasteless jokes, the smoke from his lips, and the gorgeous halo he’s got—that only she can unearth and bring forth—she can fix him, you guys! No really, she can!

And only she can.

The title track hammers this point home, which is a remarkable feat, as it seems almost deceptively lighthearted and lovestruck. She sings over and over again, asking Matty, “who’s going to hold/love/know you like me?” and answers her own question—no one.

And I get that. After every single romantic tryst has ended, I’ve left smug and safe in the (deluded and lacking nuance) opinion that the other person was the one missing out—no one was going to love them like I would or had. This sort of blind faith in one’s capacity to love requires a certain level of both confidence and delusion (and, truthfully, a deep capacity to love), and so—I get it, Taylor, I do. I’m the God in my own love story. I, too, have convinced myself no one could hold them like I could, and I, too, have been willing to die for my lover’s sins.

But I am not Taylor Swift.

Pop stars are image obsessed. And Taylor loves to cultivate her public persona, to write the mythos surrounding herself. She’s aware she’s The Man and that she’s Taylor Fucking Swift. And in a world where she regularly sells out tours across the globe, singing to hundreds of thousands of people who flock from far away to see her shows, buy her merchandise, memorize the gospel of her song, build shrines to her in their homes, and pause their lives for a directive the moment she opens her mouth or lifts a finger—well, who’s to say Taylor Swift isn’t God?

And Taylor is fully aware that she really might just be God—or maybe Jesus, or maybe both, or maybe none, maybe just Taylor—and that she is uniquely positioned to carry out the sort of post-ghosting, post-situationship, post-heartbreak, winning the breakup fantasy of dreams. She can take the tortured poets department in Matty’s mind and flash it on billboards. She can take his pretentious typewriter and turn it into a laughingstock. She can take every inch of his pretentious persona and feed it to the wolves—us, her hungry, adoring, greedy fans. She’ll take water and turn it into wine and that’s another thing he does ruined too, for how on earth can Matty even dream of guzzling entire bottles of red wine onstage, night after night, after the woman he ghosted calls him out for it so succinctly on her new album?

Part of me loves the mess. I love getting the billionaire pop star’s confession and sermon (brand new testament just dropped, guys!), I love getting new songs to mull over and talk to my friends about, before ultimately assigning them to moments in my life or to the fictional characters I love. I love getting tea from the mastermind herself, I love watching a grudge be sustained, love seeing retaliation so brutal it’s biblical.

But on the other hand?

The worst thing Matty Healy did is pursue Taylor Swift across years and other lovers and albums and cities, relentlessly “haunt her stunningly”, tell her he loved her, would start a family with her, and then ghost. Which in itself is bad and would be enough to make a normal girl go insane—I know those girls, I was those girls, I get those girls. But those girls are dealing with douchey skinny white guys who smoke too much weed. Taylor Swift was dealing with Matty Healy, who publicly and unabashedly did a Nazi salute during his tour and refused to walk it back, admitted to watching horrific, racist, and sexually exploitative videos and refused to apologize, made horrible and racist remarks about Ice Spice, a new-to-the-industry young female rapper, imitated multiple accents on that same podcast and then asked people to imitate what they thought a Japanese prisoner in a prison camp might sound like, and was part of the reason Rina Sawayama was so unbelievably depressed she almost quit the industry during her breakout year. His words and actions had and will continue to have real, gripping, dangerous, lasting affects on people, specifically woman of color. Taylor Swift can taunt him with his own self-made, grandiose mythos, paint “tortured poets department” across cities across the globe, and bring out the typewriter he left at her apartment to torture him some more. The people Matty Healy hurt can’t do any of that. They can only protest where they can against what he’s put him through and then face his wrath and the wrath of an industry and people who will always, always, unfailingly protect him—a fact that she sort of acknowledges on this album too!

As Swifties rise to defend her and drag his name through the coals, the fact of the matter is that Taylor Swift went into the relationship with her blue eyes wide open, willing to take every single inch of this tattooed golden retriever, pretentious poet, “likes to say racist things to seem shocking or cool”, and keep him. She knew who was and didn’t care, a fact she sings about often in her album, telling us to keep our noses out of her business, telling the wine moms can go fuck themselves—she doesn’t care.

After all, why should she? The album was breaking records before it was out. She is mere weeks away from returning to her record-breaking, earth-shattering tour, this time on the European leg. When she steps out of the house, articles are written about who she is with, where they were going, what they could have discussed, and how it all might factor into the Easter Eggs she so loves to drop for her fans. Nearly a year out from the situationship with the Scummy Indie Boyfriend, she continues to make headlines, sell records, and generally be too big to fail--

--and he is the sort of person who everyone was shocked the album was about. 

Now, with the release of the album, she’s told her side of the story. She’s dropped a dense and lyrically rich album with her perspective of events, given the adoring fans and hating hordes something to chew on, and flipped the perspective on its head entirely. She’s claimed the position of Chairman of The Tortured Poets Department for her own, kicked her ex out not because of his casual bigotry but because he broke her heart, and flipped us all off as we scrambled to unscramble her puzzles and hints.

The fact of the matter is—she’ll ruin Matty Healy, she’ll ruin herself, she’ll take her good name and ruin that too, and do it while hitting her marks.

And we’ll keep coming back for more.