Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
It may come as a surprise that it wasn’t Taylor Swift referring to re-recording her hit albums as “collecting horcruxes and infinity stones” in her recent Time magazine Person of the Year profile that put me over the edge. (Although that kind of millennial speak also brings a twitch to my eye, even if it perfectly aligns with the perma-Tumblr brand that Swift has crafted for herself.) Rather, it was a quote from the article’s scribe, Time’s West Coast editor Sam Lansky, that enraged me. Lansky’s profile is a detailed and knowledgeable pop culture chronicle, but it takes little more than a single quote to reveal that the article is a Swift-approved puff piece.
Lansky says in his piece that, when Swift is speaking about her mythic journey to her current status as the untouchable queen of culture, he thinks about challenging her. “It did not always look like [a hero’s journey],” he writes of the massive success of Reputation, an album Swift notes as an integral point in the arc of her redemption from tabloid target to critical darling. “She did not look like someone whose career had died. … I am tempted to say this. But then I think, ‘Who am I to challenge it, if that’s how she felt?’ The point is: She felt canceled.”
Reading that should be all that anyone needs to know about the careful control that Swift has over her career and image, and the kinds of people that she not only surrounds herself with but also allows to peer into her life. She wants nothing more than to keep the narrative she has so meticulously crafted intact. This is her picture-perfect image of herself: a pop star who clawed her way back from the dregs of cultural cancelation to revive a career that, in actuality, never came close to dying. Swift seemingly let Lansky in because she could regulate the circumstances so precisely that even the most discerning part of his profile would end in the relinquished bow of a head.