Look What You Made Her Do
Taylor Swift Reveals How She Likes To “Mock” Trolls In Her Music
Listen carefully...
From “Mean” to “CANCELLED,” Taylor Swift’s oeuvre contains no shortage of musical missives for her trolls. In fact, practically every era has its own anthem about challenging critics — whether they be school bullies or famous feuders.
As the hitmaker revealed in a new interview, the hate isn’t entirely unhelpful when it comes to the songwriting process.
During Swift’s 20-year retrospective with the Grammy Museum (published on Aug. 24), Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. asked whether public perception ever blocks her creative process. “I don’t know — sometimes it fuels it,” she said. “Sometimes when people are mocking me, it’s really fun to mock them back. Sometimes I like to just use words that they have to look up in order to talk sh*t about.”
Of course, it’s no surprise that Swift loves a good thesaurus session. She described herself as “your English teacher” in her post about getting engaged to now-husband Travis Kelce — fittingly, “your gym teacher” — last year. And before that, she leaned into a literary persona on The Tortured Poets Department, where she called out critics “sanctimoniously performing soliloquies” in “But Daddy I Love Him.” As she told The New York Times, she saves terms and phrases she’d like to use in future songs. “I don’t have social media on my phone. It looks like I’m just endlessly scrolling, but I’m scrolling through words — like, the words in my file.”
While Swift might take pleasure in crafting comebacks for her critics, she also got transparent about how she deals with all the noise behind the scenes, sharing in her Grammy interview that she employs several “coping mechanisms” for the level of exposure she experiences.
“One of them is saying, ‘You chose this. You chose this every day. You could’ve opted out of this any day before it got unmanageably big,’” she said. “And I decided not to because I love it that much. And that’s just where it begins and where it ends. And everything that comes with this ultimately is worth it, as long as I get to still make music.”
Even so, Swift probably wouldn’t mind quieting the conversation just a tad. Describing one of her life dreams in “Wi$h Li$t,” she sang: “We tell the world to leave us the f*ck alone and they do.”
