The Story That’s Holding Taylor Swift Back
The year was 2006. Popular music was, for women, a pretty desolate landscape. Songs such as “My Humps” and “Buttons” served up shimmering, grinding strip-pop, while dull, minor-key objectification infused “Smack That,” “Money Maker,” and similar tracks. In the video for “London Bridge,” the singer and former child star Fergie gave a lap dance to a silent, immotive King’s Guardsman, barely pausing to lick his uniform. For “Ms. New Booty,” the rapper Bubba Sparxxx staged a mock infomercial for a product offering women “a little more frosting in your cakes … cantaloupes in your jeans,” before proselytizing the message of the era: “Get it ripe, get it right, get it tight.”
Against this backdrop, late in the year, a 16-year-old ingenue arrived who radiated not sex appeal but . Taylor Swift at this point was a country artist, welcomed into a genre that embraced the kind of romantic imagery she played with in her lyrics: small towns, broken hearts, blue jeans, innocence that’s bruised but not shattered. Her self-titled debut record was full of diaristic songs that courted intimacy with her listeners, sharing adolescent dreams and secrets (“In a box beneath my bed / Is a letter that