90 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
pop music
TAKEBACKS
Taylor Swift reclaims control of her work.
by carrie battan
ILLUSTRATION BY LAURA LANNES
I
n the early years of her career, Tay-
lor Swift stepped lightly, transform-
ing from a precocious country musician
into a global pop star. She shifted her
sound and her image gradually, a strat-
egy that seemed less about allegiance
to a particular genre than about per-
sonal traditionalism. (She did not start
cursing in her music until she was in
her late twenties.) Swift has always been
a rule-follower—a diligent songwriter
with a wholesome image—which made
her a kind of renegade in a brash, hyper-
sexualized pop landscape. On “Red,”
her fourth album, from 2012, she began
dipping a toe into modernity. In the
song “I Knew You Were Trouble,” she
nodded to the aggressive and trendy
sounds of E.D.M., adding a light dub-
step drop before the chorus. By most
pop standards, it was a subtle flourish,
but for Swift it was like an earthquake.
In “Treacherous,” she incorporated sex-
uality into her lyrics for the first time:
“I’ll do anything you say/If you say it
with your hands.”
On “Red,” Swift also experimented
with grander sounds that translated bet-
ter in arenas, which she had begun to sell
out. The album’s opening track, “State
of Grace,” is more U2 than Emmylou
Harris—a dramatic number with huge
drums and echoey electric guitars. Her
voice, too, soars above her preferred
conversational register. At the end of
the song, she offers a bit of doctrine:
“Love is a ruthless game/Unless you
play it good and right.” As with much
of Swift’s music, it seemed like an in-
nocent declaration, but it also carried a
threat: play by the rules, she implied, or
else. Swift was a moralist in matters of
the heart, and once someone broke her
trust all bets were off. Anyone who dared
to injure her—as many of her roman-
tic interests seemed to do—would be
subjected to retaliation in the form of
withering lyrics.
Swift’s thirst for justice, in recent
years, has carried into business affairs.
As a teen-ager, she signed to a small
independent label in Nashville called
Big Machine, run by an executive named
Scott Borchetta. After six albums, she
moved to Republic Records, a major
label. But as she grew more popular her
back catalogue, which Borchetta owned,
became more valuable. Swift—a stock-
broker’s daughter, who once told her
childhood classmates that she would
be a financial adviser when she grew
up—attempted to buy back the master
recordings. In 2019, in a Tumblr post,
she described a galling proposal from
Borchetta: she could earn back her mas-
ters if she returned to Big Machine; for
each new album, she would regain con-
trol of an old one. (In a statement, Bor-
chetta described the proposal differ-
ently: “We were working together on a
new type of deal for our streaming world
that was not necessarily tied to ‘albums’
but more a length of time.”)
Swift declined the offer, and Bor-
chetta soon sold Big Machine—and
the six Swift albums—to one of her en-
emies, Scooter Braun, a music manager
who had handled the career of her long-
time adversary Kanye West during the
peak of the artists’ feud, in 2016. Even
a deft storyteller like Swift couldn’t have
dreamed up a betrayal like this. “All I
could think about was the incessant,
manipulative bullying I’ve received at
his hands for years,” she wrote of Braun.
“Essentially, my musical legacy is about
to lie in the hands of someone who
tried to dismantle it.” (Braun told Va -
riety, “All of what happened has been
very confusing and not based on any-
thing factual,” and he denied bullying
Swift, saying, “I’m firmly against any-
Swift’s rereleases seem designed to punish her transgressors and fortify her legacy. one ever being bullied. I always try to SOURCE PHOTOGRAPH FROM GETTY
