How Taylor Swift Took on Her Foes and Detractors—and Triumphed

Last weekend, Taylor Swift kicked off her much-anticipated “Eras” tour for 69,000 delirious fans in Glendale, Arizona, population 250,000, officially if temporarily renamed Swift City for the occasion. She broke a record with her three-hour, 44-song set at the sold-out State Farm Arena: it was the most attended concert by a female performer, a record held since 1986 by another member of musical royalty, Madonna.

Swift opened her tour with the song “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince” from Lover, her seventh studio album released in 2019. It was an unexpected choice, something of a deep cut. But as soon as Swifties heard the chorus, “It’s been a long time coming,” echo around the vast stadium, the pieces fell into place.

According to a recent poll, more than half of adults in the U.S. call themselves Taylor Swift fans.

Even viewed through shaky cellphone videos from the nosebleeds, the atmosphere in that stadium is palpable, intimate and epic at once. As the show began, giant screens flashed vignettes of what’s known in the fandom as “Lover House,” a structure featured in a video for the song, “Lover,” in which each room is thought to represent one of her 10 albums. (There’s an entire sub-genre of TikTok videos analyzing the symbolic meanings of those rooms.) Snippets of sound from the past—“My name is Taylor, and I was born in 1989!”—were greeted with screams of ecstasy, before Swift herself appeared on stage, rising goddess-like from beneath the floor in a sparkly, pop-tastic bodysuit that epitomizes the Lover era.

Over and over, Swift has reinvented herself, to the point where you can tell which “era” she’s referencing in the show based purely on her costumes. She has made it clear that this tour is an unabashed celebration of the 17 years of highs and lows that have brought her to this triumphant moment, and a love letter to the fans who have stood by her through them.

That Swift is embarking on a retrospective tour at 33 years old is a testament to the staggering scale of her success. There was so much demand for tickets that when Ticketmaster’s processes buckled under the pressure, the company was hauled in front of a Senate committee to explain itself. Swift’s latest album, Midnights, earned the most streams in a single day, 180 million upon its release last October. It also made her the only artist to simultaneously hold all 10 top spots on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. According to a recent poll, more than half of adults in the U.S. call themselves Taylor Swift fans, with 16 per cent professing to be “avid” enthusiasts.

But there have been many points in her career when her current dominance seemed unlikely, if not impossible.

In 2016, for instance, Swift disappeared from public view for over a year after what she called “a mass shaming” due to a toxic blend of overexposure after the smash success of 1989 and Kim Kardashian’s ire (a feud that can be traced back to their interactions after Kardashian’s now-ex-husband Kanye West interrupted Swift’s Grammy acceptance speech to say that Beyoncé should have won instead). Swift channelled this period of turmoil into her sixth album, Reputation.

Earlier in her career, gossip about who she was dating (John Mayer, Jake Gyllenhaal, a Kennedy scion) overshadowed her work, resulting in a misogynistic reduction of her songwriting to a girl pining over boys. On The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2013, the comedian badgered Swift to reveal which celebrity man had inspired her songs, via a game that required her to ring a bell every time a picture of someone she’d been with flashed up. “Do you know how badly this makes me feel?” said Swift. “This is…the one shred of dignity that I have.”

While she did write heartbreak anthems about these relationships, and they did make her famous, in response Swift also became an astute chronicler of female rage, eviscerating older men who take advantage of young women (“Dear John,” “All Too Well”) and the patriarchal structures designed to keep women down (“Mad Woman,” “The Man”).

She took on some of her foes on in real life, too. In 2019, she fought back against the power brokers of the music industry, publicly excoriating Scooter Braun, a record executive who bought her former record label and the masters for her first six albums. Swift called it her “worst case scenario,” saying she felt like her art had been stolen from her, thanks to the terms of a contract she signed when she was just 16. That Braun was behind the purchase was a double blow: Swift claimed he’d been subjecting her to “incessant, manipulative bullying” for years, enlisting his clients such as Justin Bieber and Kanye West, to join in.

In 2020, Braun sold the masters to a private equity holding company for over $400 million. Cue another statement from Swift, who claimed that she had been trying to negotiate with him for over a year to buy back the masters herself, but he had refused to engage unless she signed an NDA promising to never speak of him again unless it was in a positive light.

Swift embarked on a re-recording process, putting out “Taylor’s Versions” of the “stolen” albums for fans to listen to rather than put another penny in the pockets of her arch-nemesis.

Rather than end the story here, Swift embarked on a re-recording process, putting out “Taylor’s Versions” of the “stolen” albums (two so far) for fans to listen to rather than put another penny in the pockets of her arch-nemesis. Brilliantly, she added “from the vault” tracks, which hadn’t made the final cut for the original albums, like “I Bet You Think About Me” from Red (Taylor’s Version), which became hits in their own right.

In the process, she also endeavoured to reform predatory music contracts in general, shining a spotlight on how many artists sign away almost all of the rights to their own music when they’re unknowns desperate for a record deal. She pulled her entire catalog from Spotify until the streamer agreed to award artists a slightly-larger per-play pittance than before.

In 2017, she took a radio station DJ, who groped her when she was 23, to court for sexual assault—and won. In a statement at the time, she said, “I acknowledge the privilege that I benefit from in life, in society and in my ability to shoulder the enormous cost of defending myself in a trial like this. My hope is to help those whose voices should also be heard.” After winning a nominal $1 damages, she made donations to organizations that help sexual assault victims defend themselves.

Less traumatic but damaging in its own way, Swift has also long been denied credibility or coolness, by anti-pop critics who dismissed her chart-topping songs as sugary bops that lacked real artistry; by Blur’s Damon Albarn who accused her of not writing her own songs (he later apologized after Swift called him out).

In the midst of the pandemic, Swift managed to win over much of this contingent by releasing two low-fi, folk-leaning albums, Folklore and Evermore, in collaboration with indie stalwart Aaron Dessner of The National. Pitchfork, often thought of as a gatekeeper for “real” music, rated Folklore an impressive 8 out of 10, praising its “interesting images, indelible hooks and real signs of maturity.” Unlike most indie recordings, Folklore went on to win Album of the Year at the Grammys. More strategic collaborations have included indie darlings Phoebe Bridgers, Lana Del Rey and Haim, resulting in a symbiotic swap of their indie cred and Swift’s massive reach.

Swift’s Netflix documentary Miss Americana also came out in 2020, in which she pulled back the veil on the struggles behind the shimmery facade. She spoke about her eating disorder, the devastation she felt after being “cancelled” after the Kimye drama, and her conflicted desire to be an inoffensive “good girl” while having courage of her convictions in an increasingly political world. The latter culminated in Swift calling out ultra-conservative Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn in her home state of Tennessee, a big risk for a pop star who got her start in the traditionally red-leaning world of country music. It didn’t hurt her popularity.

Swift’s rock-solid relationship with her core fans—who have a military-like ability to mobilize on her behalf, streaming new remixes of a song to keep it at #1 for another week, voting for her at awards shows, coming en masse for anyone they believed has wronged her—is, to quote her own lyrics, the wind in her “free-flowing sails.” They’re also the reason Swift is estimated to be worth over $400 million. Before releasing a single snippet of Midnights, never mind a single, she sold 1.2 million copies within three days in the U.S. alone, 500,000 of which were vinyl. These records came in four different editions that, when put together using a mechanism available on her website for the low, low price of $49, turned into a working clock. Getting people to buy multiple copies of an album they haven’t heard yet is both a triumph of capitalism and a testament to just how much her fans love her.

“This is the first time I’ve felt the need to confess, and I swear, I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian ’cause I care.”

To be a Swiftie is a heady experience: There’s the emotional connection to her music, which has soundtracked many fans’ lives as they’ve grown up alongside her, but there’s also the joy of decoding her carefully planted Easter eggs, which she’s said she plans as far as three years in advance. Months before Lover was released, for instance, she posed for a magazine cover in a jean jacket covered in pins that were references to yet-to-be-released songs. She pays attention to their reactions, famously “Taylurking” on her fans’ conversations on Tumblr, Twitter and most recently TikTok. The fandom delights in Swift’s scheming, something she finally acknowledged in Midnights’ “Mastermind: “This is the first time I’ve felt the need to confess, and I swear, I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian ’cause I care.”

The very last song on the “Eras” tour setlist is “Karma.” It’s about justice, trusting that you’ll be vindicated when what goes around eventually comes around. The bridge boastingly taunts “Ask me why so many fade, but I’m still here,” but the karmic fruits listed in the chorus aren’t the accolades, the money, or the broken records. Instead, she details gloriously mundane pleasures: a breeze in her hair on the weekend, a cat purring in her lap.

These things, she sings to the largest crowd ever gathered to hear a female artist perform, are what truly matter.