Okay, I’m just going to say this because the way people engage with Taylor Swift’s music does speak to a much wider issue with the way people understand art. I can’t relate to most of her music, I have never been in a relationship, fallen in love, or had my heart broken. I feel connected to her music because she tells a good story and allows me to tap into an emotional experience my circumstances haven’t. I relate it to characters from books, tv, and movies, or I think of new ones entirely — the faceless, nameless impressions of people in the songs themselves.
This is the point of art, to show you aspects of the human condition beyond yourself, to let you feel things and gain some sort of understanding of matters you have no hope of experiencing. That’s why people are always going on about representation. It’s not just about marginalised peoples seeing themselves reflected back at them, it’s so that everyone - especially of a cultural majority - has the opportunity to see everyone in a positive light, so that it makes it harder to dehumanise and devalue entire groups, entire cultures.
Anyone who can only interact with any form of art in the context of themselves, or the creator, is missing the opportunity to grow in kindness and empathy, and we see the effects of that everyday.
YES ugh i completely agree. theres this joni mitchell quote that i think about constantly that goes something like 'if someone writes a song and the listener sees the songwriter, thats a bad song. if the someone writes a song and the listener sees their own experience and story, thats a good song'. and i think that applies to taylor in a way. not saying shes a bad songwriter, im saying the way fans will not see her music as anything but her story, that limits the art and makes it less powerful. fans dont take the song out of the context of what they think taylors life is, so the song can never be its own thing, it can never grow into a million stories from a million peoples imaginations or hearts, it's only always limited to some online conspiracy or gossip narrative and thats just plain disrespectful to her work. taylor herself has said she wants her music to be extended past the reasons she initially made it and have people make it their own but fans just refuse to.
