Everyone had their era: your parents sing along to Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson, while you grandparents still know all the words to every Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald song. For us, it’s Taylor Swift. Some call it ‘white girl’ while some call it ‘lack of musical taste’ and others call it ‘fan-girling.’ But if you’re anything like me, you’ve been a T-Swift fan since ’07, and you pity those that can’t see the genius behind it.
6. These are your stories.
It was easy for everyone in the media to sensationalize the lyrics, make jokes about who the next song would be about. Some called her ruthless, while others warned the men in her life to, “stay away if you don’t want a song written about you.” But five albums later, Taylor Swift never stopped telling her stories, using the lyrics to speak to the 16-year-old crying over the first boy that ever broke her heart. She never wavered in what she believed, that if people wanted portrayed in a different light, then maybe they should have behaved differently. You own the right to tell every single one of your stories, and if you’re lucky, you can make a few billion dollars off of them.
5. You are allowed to have emotions when you’re young.
We grew up being told that we were too young to know what love is, that we were only being dramatic, teenage girls. We were never allowed to have negative emotions, because surely we didn’t have a big enough grasp on the world if we were to invest anything into a 17-year-old boy. For some, Taylor Swift was the first person to let them know that it’s okay to cry in the bathroom because an immature boy kissed some cheerleader at the end of the hallway after class today. She told us that just because we were young, didn’t mean that our emotions weren’t valid.
4. People change.
If you didn’t learn it from all the lyrics prior, you learned it by the time 1989 released. Before, she preached that boys change their minds, and you have to pick of the pieces when they leave. Now, she was preaching that sometimes you pick up the pieces when boys leave, and then you change too. Suddenly, Taylor had a new sound, a new outlook and a new representation of what it was like to be woman. And we fell in love with it.
