Taylor Swift and the witch motif
It is no understatement that Taylor Swift’s folklore was the single most spectacular moment of my quarantine experience. It combined all the things that make the perfect popular culture moment for me — shared experience, work stemming from a long period of collective suffering, shamelessly mainstream and unpredictability that my brain only gets from sports watching. It seems trivial but the triviality of it doesn’t make it any less true.
It seemed that Taylor truly emerged from a cabin in the woods to give us not the most musically complex or creative album, but an album we could experience — and that it is the most memorable thing about art, how it makes us feel rather any external parameters of valuableness. At a time when we are increasingly looking inward, as a product of the distancing forced upon us, Taylor’s direct, confessional writing style paired with the stripped-down, folksy aesthetic hits truer than it would at any other time. It doesn’t seem forced because it is truly a product of the moment we’re inhabiting right now, earned because of the artist’s country origins and unsurprising since the popistation of indie music has long been accomplished in the mainstream before Taylor attempted it.
One particularly notable aspect of this album has been Taylor’s wholehearted embrace of the witch motif. This is apparent even in her extra-textual communication. In response to a fan who tweets before leaving on a 2-week camping trip hoped that Taylor wouldn’t do anything drastic while she’s gone only to return to an entire album drop, Taylor invoked the image of isolation in the woods, fairies and wicker baskets as a collective swiftie experience.
Taylor is very deliberate with her interactions on social media, known to be an avid Tumblr user and consumer of fan theories, the message to her fan reflects self-image Taylor has post-2016 when her media external image drastically shifted from the leader of the “squad” and wide-eyed wonder kid to the master manipulator who kept silent about Trump because she allegedly didn’t want to alienate her country base, lied about Kanye and darling of white-supremest groups. In mad woman, Taylor explicitly refers to herself as a witch:
Now I breathe flames each time I talk,
my canons all firing at your yacht,
and women like hunting witches too,
doing your dirtiest work for you
The entire song is about feminist rage, sung in a searing confrontational style of a vengeful woman comparing herself to a “scorpion” who stings, a lady mouthing “fuck you forever”, and refers to the feminisation of mental health with adjectives of the “crazy”, “mad” and “angry woman”. The archetype of the witchy woman is interwoven in the song, probably and deservedly about Scouter Braun, invoking the spectre of a woman who hexes men in self-righteous rage for their indiscretions.
This is not the first time Taylor has evoked the witch aesthetic, in fact, her 2017 Reputation was perhaps her most overtly-witchy album, where Taylor (at times awkwardly) committed herself to a goth visual and lyrics that name-checked the witch trials as an analogy for the media trial she experienced:
They’re burning all the witches even if you aren’t one,
they got their pitchforks and proof,
their receipts and reasons
They’re burning all the witches even if you aren’t one,
So,
light me up, light me up, light me up, light me up
Go ahead and light me up,
light me up, light me up, light me up, light me up
When Taylor declares “the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now, why??? ohhh, because she’s dead!” in Look What You Made Me Do, the metaphorical death of the “nice” Taylor is done with such caustic casualness it is reminiscent of a ritualistic sacrifice. From the ashes of the ritualistic death, emerges the ultimate bitch who unabashedly expresses her sexuality (“you know I’m not a bad girl but I do bad thing with you”, “I bought this dress just so you could take it off”) and makes no apologies for the curses she put on men who wronged her. While the lead single of the album was rightly critiqued for the lack of responsibility Taylor expressed for her public missteps, a closer look at the songs on the album demonstrate that she embraces the complicated nature of adulthood and steps out of the sole prism of victimhood she had previously painted for herself:
We were jet-set, Bonnie and Clyde,
until I switched to the other side,
to the other side,
it’s no surprise I turned you in,
cause us traitors never winI’m in a getaway car
I left you in a motel bar
put the money in a bag and I stole the keys
that was the last time you ever saw me
(Getaway car)
Taylor on I Did Something Bad embraces the label of a bad woman and tells us that she feels no shame for her deviant behaviour, in turn, calls into question whether the behaviour is truly bad or just a product of our sexist standards. The refrain is actually “they say I did something bad, then why’s it feel so good?”, drawing attention to the ones with the pitchforks as opposed to the witches on trial. The song references one of the most successful storytelling devices Taylor has used in the past, particularly perfected on Blank Space where Taylor personifies her own public image to ask the audience, is this really that bad? In its most iconic moment (I’m heavily biased that this is one of the best pop songs ever, second only to Toxic), the music video features Taylor wearing her signature red lipstick and looking straight into the camera with a red apple in her hand appearing to hex her designated generic male lover-for-the-weekend and alluding to the fairytale poison apple singing:
Boys only want love if its torture,
Don’t say I didn’t, don’t say I didn’t warn ya
It’s obvious that Taylor loves the bad, mad woman as a stand-in for the modern-day witch. She’s never been afraid to be vengeful in her songs, coming a long way in her feminist journey from the days of You Belong With Me where she used the virgin-whore dichotomy in a high school cheerleader-nerd girl setting to proclaim her love for a boy. She moved on to feminism = sisterhood, which is no surprise given that she was introduced to feminism by Lena Dunham, while actively invalidating the experience of black women through tone-deaf declarations (see: feud with Nicki Minhaj in 2015). I wouldn’t hold anyone to their views on feminism as a teenager so bringing up You Belong With Me is immaterial, and Taylor now seems to have understood that all women not having the same experiences is not an existential threat to feminism and has found a way to express displeasure towards women upholding the patriarchy in better ways (see: the already referenced lyric about Demi Levato in mad woman).
Taylor’s feminism in 2019’s Lover can be seen most explicitly in The Man which unsurprisingly relies on a Lean In-esque analysis of gender inequality which comes as no surprise from a woman who has been widely successful since she was a teenager. Taylor wants to be as successful and accepted as her male counterparts in her feminist utopia. Her acceptance speech for the Woman of the Decade Award is less reductive; her journey has been realising that even as the most successful woman in the industry her gender was always used to trivialise her success and art… which is a fair enough conclusion to reach, and it's unsurprising that she is self-aware because she’s actually quite smart. And we should not be looking to Taylor Swift — the most popular musician on the planet — for songs about working-class women anyway, it just hasn’t been the experience she has inhibited for her entire adult life.
The equation of deviancy and unpopular women with the witch trials has become more confident given Tayor’s fall from grace post-1989 (the album, not the year). Since then Taylor has become more and more comfortable with being represented by animals; the infamous snake from Reputation and the scorpion in mad woman. Silvia Federici argues in her seminal Caliban and the Witch that in the transition of feudalism to capitalism, the body was disciplined and its limitless potential was reduced to that of capitalist labour, bound to the respectable function of serving capitalism — the mechanical body, the body-machine. This meant that the potential of the body captured within magical powers had to be controlled (Federici, p. 141). Taylor’s drift towards a more animalistic conception of herself and the body speaks to her more subtle embrace of witch imagery.
This process perhaps also contributed a marked shift in Taylor’s song-writing, the move from first-person narratives to a more fluid notion of the self to the point where she can inhibit narratives that are not hers so comfortably that even the most die-heart fans are speculating (see: fan theories about the cardigan-betty-august trilogy). The ethos of folklore is explained by Taylor herself as: “The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and fiction become almost indiscernible”.
Taylor’s fascination with deviant women, though, has been confined to upper-class, white women. In the beautifully crafted the last great american dynasty, Taylor tells the story of a ‘social climber’ middle-class divorcee who was the former resident of the Rhode Island house Taylor now owns. In a brilliant move towards the end of the song, she switches from the third-person narrative to the first-person: “she had a marvellous time ruining everything” becomes “I had a marvellous time ruining everything”. Any self-respecting swiftie knows this house was host to the infamous and now-defunct July 4th parties Taylor used to have with her squad. Taylor has an affinity for these outcast women, but outcasts in a limited sense, still within the bubble of privilege. However, Taylor is on to something, there is something to the protagonist who not only ‘kills’ her husband in society’s eyes, rejects the reproductive familial role society expects of well-heeled women and actively squandered the wealth of a capitalist ‘old money’ dynasty. There is something decisively witchy about this woman. The family structure upholds the disciplining of women’s bodies as tools for reproduction, the protagonist of this song rejects that role in many subversive ways. A witch par excellence.
Nevertheless, this reading of a shift in Taylor’s work post-Reputation is extremely selective as it ignores her simultaneous (near absolute) embrace of domesticity in Lover and even in the latter part of Reputation (see: Call It What You Want and the stunning but ultimate ode to domestic bliss New Year’s Day). Folklore, to its credit, is a lot more queer and less certain of stable relationships (even exploring the subject of infidelity in illicit affair). But it would be disingenuous to argue that Taylor has abandoned the privileges of being a straight, upper-class woman in her embrace of the witch persona. On peace, Taylor expresses doubts but ultimately gives in to the hetero-patriarchal desire to“give you my wild, give you a child”. It stems from a failure to imagine desire beyond the confines of marriage and domesticity, one of the end goals of the disciplining project of the witch trials. I prefer the witchy take on romance Taylor has on invisible string, a wink to the trope of love spells us witches place on the objects of our desire, inverting the nexus of control on the male subject for once under conditions of patriarchy.
To her credit, Taylor could have continued being the sweet country girl who acts surprised whenever she wins an award, but as she became an adult she called out sexism and exploitation within her own industry, even taking on Spotify to demand fair commissions from streaming by withdrawing her music from the platform. While the protest was about her bottom-line, but it was also about independent artists. These positions have been admirable and often overlooked in the public persona we paint of Taylor. Her testimony during her sexual harassment trial was actually quite moving and powerful in its clarity:
“I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions — not mine.”
The statement is direct and simple, just like her lyrics — therein lies the power of Taylor’s words. She refused to be put on trial on her own sexual harassment case.
Like most artists in the mainstream, cut off from political movements and struggles, it would be absurd for Taylor to reproduce the perfect, intersectional, anti-capitalist ethos in her music that we might want her to pen. In fact, it would be kind of weird. However, it’s fun and maybe important to examine the popular use of witches as a stand-in for deviant women used by the most popular female artist of this moment if wish to politicise the women who identify with these images and bring them into the coven of feminism.
