the late-stage capitalism of taylor swift is eating itself

taylor swift is the victim-turned-steward of a broken music industry

I’ve been listening to a lot of Taylor Swift lately. So much so, I realized that she has a pretty good shot at being in my Top-5 most streamed artists at the end of 2024. This placement seems to happen every year, and every year I’m surprised because when I’m not listening to Taylor I’m probably complaining about her. On a long drive home a few nights ago, I thought about what I would post on my story when Spotify and Apple Music eventually release these data wrap-ups. Would I playfully scratch Taylor from her #3 spot, like the disgraced Kanye fans I used to pity?

I’ve never really been guilty of texting and driving, but changing the music and driving is a different story. After I’d had enough of The Tortured Poet’s Department (Simi’s Version),¹ I let Apple Music (I know) take the lead and tapped on the first suggestion given to me, the apparent 18th-best album of all time: 1989 (Taylor’s Version). Now, I had kept up with this countdown as each group of ten was released last week, and Apple Music has, as usual, left me disappointed, but not surprised. 1989 (Taylor’s Version) is far from the best album of all time, it’s not even the best album released by Taylor Swift called 1989. Therein lies the issue: How long can we pretend that these new versions of old Taylor Swift albums are accurate or reasonable stand-ins for the original work, especially when we draw lines in the sand trying to prove their place in the pop music canon?

via @AppleMusic on X

Weaving through traffic, 1989 (Taylor’s Version) forces me to start airing out my grievances with the Taylor’s Versions as a whole. At best, these songs are just as good as but never better than their originals. At worst,² they’re shoddy recreations that sound hollow and, frankly, a bit sad. Not to mention the vault tracks: revisionist history and B-sides that should’ve never seen the light of day, with a few gems here and there. I change the music again, throwing on folklore to cleanse my ears.

As an evermore truther, I’m still constantly shocked by how much folklore still manages to do it for me. I drive and talk to myself: “I think this album changed in my life.” “I can’t believe she wrote this song with Joe while they were still together.” “Wow, a Wordsworth reference on a bonus track. That’s crazy.” I think what was so special about this pair of albums in the bleak, bleak year of 2020 was it felt like the start of something brand new for Taylor the mega-star. You could hear her understanding herself and the truly special gifts she brought to the table. folklore and evermore showed us a Taylor Swift that could practice restraint, control, and subtlety. She could write a novel in one song and make it look easy. This was a Swift that didn’t need an album cycle and could let the work speak for itself. A Swift that loved the music she was making and just wanted to share it. 2020 Taylor Swift could have set the tone for the next, fresh phase of a prolific career.

Almost four years later, my heart breaks a little for what I now know was a false hope. The roads get more familiar so my mind and mouth wander a little more (I guess you could say I was yapping). Switching between singing along to “peace” and musing on this billionaire’s career, I ask “What the fuck happened?”

I wish I was being dramatic, when I said every album Taylor has released following evermore has been disappointing to a certain extent, this includes two original albums and four remakes.³ In trying to understand the massive drop in quality from a 2020 Swift to a post-2020 Swift, I can only point to one thing: the decision to re-record her albums in the first place.

To me, what is so frustrating about the Taylor’s Version project is that it seems like we as listeners have to pretend we’re getting a 1 to 1 substitute for the original record when that just isn’t true. If you’ve put in enough hours with any original Taylor record, the recreations will never sound the same—which is mostly fine! It’s like Taylor Swift recording Taylor Swift cover albums, a good effort and they don’t necessarily sound bad but they don’t sound like the songs that changed country music. They don’t sound like the songs that changed pop. And they surely don’t sound like the songs that changed me. So, no, Apple Music, 1989 (Taylor’s Version) is not the 18th-best album of all time. If you even wanted to get close to that argument then you’ve named the wrong album.

Taylor’s Versions feel like new albums entirely and I feel like that’s what’s missing from the critical conversation surrounding these re-recordings and the original works of Midnights and TTPD that have come out in between. If you simply zoom out, Taylor Swift has released 6 studio albums in the past 3.5 years, but the two fully original works show us Swift that sounds more stuck and confused than ever. I agree with most critics about MIDnights, and I’ve been delivering the same one-liner about TTPD: “As it is, it’s not a good album, but there’s a great album in there.”

When I consider why I love a piece of art, I can’t help but wonder what it was like to make it. I imagine the interiority of an artist, how they arrived at a conclusion, what they wanted—needed—to get across. When I think about Taylor, I picture her in purgatory. I’m no expert, but I don’t think revisiting, reproducing, and reselling a decade of work that made you famous would be good for any creative brain. In fact, it sounds like a fresh hell for any artist interested in progressing or pushing the envelope and Taylor’s music shows it. Some of the best criticism I’ve heard about TTPD is that for every concept that appears on the album, there’s an example of a song from earlier in Taylor’s career where she explored it in a deeper, catchier, or more interesting way. A few years into this pursuit of reclaiming her masters, even if Swift isn’t regressing, she’s stagnating—and I don’t even think it’s (entirely) her fault.

Consider the coconut tree… the one Kamala Harris talked about. Taylor Swift, the capitalist, exists in the context of everything and everyone that came before her. Swift is not the first and certainly not the last white feminist to make a career off of victimhood, parasocial relationships, and mediocre choreography, her legacy is also a product of a toxic, broken⁴ industry. It’s no secret that the structure of the global music machine is made to screw artists into cycles of debt and unpaid labor that reward the few, the lucky, and the already rich. Swift, in one sense, is a success story: A “young” woman who “beat the odds” and “worked her ass off” to reach the “top.”

Having her masters “stolen” represents a day of reckoning for Swift, when the industry that put her through the wringer, an industry that she was finally reaping the rewards from came to collect one more time. Under late-stage capitalism, you do the same thing you did before, this time for less value. You get on the hamster wheel, relive the greatest hits, and pretend they’re something new. You can only hope to start selling the slop instead of making it yourself, and then one day you get booted back to the assembly line. You keep selling 8 versions of the same album. You audition for dying media franchises. You serve your fans by singing about your NFL boyfriend on tour. You do it all with a smile, and tell everyone how grateful you are.

In 2020, I can only imagine Swift found herself at a crossroads: Path A: Re-record your original body of work. You’ll get to earn money from your music again and stick it to those who stole from you. Or Path B: Call it a wash. Disown your old work, and accept that for the rest of time, a bunch of guys in suits will make millions and millions of dollars off of your legacy even after you die.

Four years ago, the obvious choice of Path A felt like a no-brainer, even a privilege. I thought: Taylor Swift gets to remind everyone of her best moments and gift her fans the strange, beautiful experiences they’d had of falling in love with her when they were kids. Today, I wonder if the cost was simply too high, that Path B could’ve left Taylor less rich, but with some shreds of her integrity intact. I’m watching one of the best songwriters of her generation lose years of artistic growth in pursuit of reclaiming work that can never really be reclaimed. Swift is a greedy, rich white woman, but I’m sad to report that these re-recordings are probably the most earnest thing she’s had to do in her career, and where I can give her the most sympathy. It’s not about the royalty checks, it’s about the principle. 

I’m not entirely sure how Swift’s decision to re-record her old work will age. I can only hope once it’s all said and done that we stop getting albums like TTPD, where Taylor sounds like an artist who has eaten so much of herself that she’s sick too. Will the rewards from one of the biggest tours ever, millions of dollars in sales, Spotify records broken, and half a spot on Apple Music’s best albums of all time be enough to soothe the creative wound of nearly half a decade of ruminating and recreation? Who’s to say?

In an industry that is becoming less sustainable by the day, Taylor Swift is a product to be sold and the man in the suit doing the selling. A cautionary tale that there’s no such thing as creative or financial freedom if the creative and the financial are inextricable. A symptom of enshittification and franchised IP. A tortured poet doing the torturing—both because she wants to and because she has to.

1. A near-perfect curation of TTPD that trims the fat from the 31-song project. It includes: “Fortnight (feat. Post Malone),” “The Tortured Poet’s Department,” “So Long, London,” “Guilty as Sin?,” “loml,” “The Black Dog,” “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus,” and “I Look in People’s Windows”

2. Half of Red (Taylor’s Version) I’m looking at you!

3. Fearless (Taylor’s Version), you may be safe…

4. When people get screwed over or die under late-stage capitalism, we should remember that that’s a feature, not a bug.