former label Big Machine Records
(which includes her back catalog)
was another example of her open-
ing up on a massive scale. The
late-June entry, with its detailed
descriptions of what Swift viewed
as Braun’s offenses along with her
broken-heart sign-off, was as well
constructed as Swift’s best songs:
personal and seething, each word
meticulously chosen. It sparked
not only reactions from her
devoted listeners but rafts of
headlines and supportive posts
from fellow A-listers like pop
firebrand Halsey and country
belter Kelsea Ballerini.
Amid all the cat photos, cleverly
framed art shots, and callouts to
support GLAAD and Democratic
candidates, Swift has continuously
cultivated a close online relation-
ship with her die-hard fans—the
ones who have “swiftie” in their
handles or are invited to her
“secret session” album previews.
Being a superstar would, theoreti-
cally, not allow for much time spent
diving into one’s Tumblr stream,
but Swift scrolls through hers long
enough for “#taylorliked” and
“#taylurking ” to trend.
Yet dissecting her public moves
in the context of what Lover (her
seventh album) ultimately might
be is a tricky notion, in large part
because “sincerity” and pop have
always been uneasy bedfellows.
Once a piece of music is put up for
sale, the notion of it being a fully
personal gesture becomes compli-
cated; add marketing departments
and corporate tie-ins to the mix,
and you’re further muddying the
waters. This is as true for artists on
the margins of Bandcamp as it isfor Good Morning America head-
liners, although the latter get put
under the microscope for it far
more often.
That’s been changing in recent
years, though, because of the rise of
social media as a place not just for
people to keep up with old friends
but for companies to market their
products, making the idea of the
self as performance utterly plain.
An online persona being seen as
separate from a person’s “real” self
holds whether you’re a platinum-
plated songwriter or someone with
five followers, four of whom are
bots: You’re selecting parts of your-
self to present to the world. By
extension, everybody’s putting on a
show. Swift, as a child of the share-
everything digital era (she turned
10 in 1999, the year the let-it-all-
hang-out platform LiveJournal was
introduced), is keenly aware of
this—and so are her fans.r -made
SummerLover’s social media rollout is
a breath of fresh summer air
compared with the icy prologue
to her 2017 album, Reputation,
which was introduced by glitching
snake posts on Instagram and big-
budget videos in dark hues. Even
though that record actually had a
much lighter ballast than its
diamond-hard first two singles
(the sneering “Look What You
Made Me Do” and the cacopho-
nous “...Ready for It?”) implied, it
still had a note of defiance. Lover,
on the other hand, has been all
about mending fences and being
kind to the self—even the gently self-
flagellating third single, “The
Archer,” has an air of forgiveness
about it. Feeling comfortable in
one’s skin and opening up to kind-
ness runs through Swift’s recent
lyrics and Instagram Live hang
sessions with fans—and also drove
much of her March Elle piece on
lessons she’d learned in her first
30 years on the planet.
Perhaps the large-scale honesty
Swift seems to be embracing is a
side effect of that growing up;
Swift’s prominence means she’s
living the performed-life ideal on a
grander scale than even the most
influential Instagram celebs, but
putting up fronts for so often can
be taxing. Sure, the tabloid head-
lines about her feud with Braun or
her relationship with actor Joe
Alwyn might garner rubbernecking
from people more interested in
gossip than music. But those
breathless reports won’t be pealing
out of radios or appearing on “the
2010s’ top hits” playlists five or 10
years from now, while the stand-
outs from Lover just might.