Calling Taylor Swift “Too White” Is The Ultimate Pick-Me Move

It’s true she’s the most poetically inclined of her pop star contemporaries. Writing her own music was the big selling point of her body of work. Swift might not be the strongest vocalist or produce the edgiest sound, but she writes from personal experience. From heart to paper. She’s also reinvented herself several times sonically and aesthetically, including an entire genre switch. Swift’s reputation as a precocious hopeless romantic since her teenage years, though, has led to brutal scrutiny of her less-than-Shakespearean lyrics in recent years. Some personal favorites from the “how did this make it past the demo” canon: “karma is a cat purring in my lap ‘cause it loves me,” “hey kids, spelling is fun!,” “touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto,” “I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists,” “I scratch your head, you fall asleep, like a tattooed Golden Retriever,” and, of course, “we declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.” While Swift has made some perplexing lyrical choices in recent years, they seem to stem from a shift away from her own natural storytelling intuition and a strong influence of her successful industry peers. The influence of Lana Del Rey can be seen in her attempts to be more playfully suggestive and esoteric while referencing comically modern things. For Del Rey, it works, but when Swift does it, it feels forced. In her most recent release, The Life of a Showgirl , many worry that Swift’s career-long paranoia has come true: that finding true love would cost her creative voice—an Ursula-style bargain. Swift’s reputation as a precocious hopeless romantic since her teenage years has led to brutal scrutiny of her less-than-Shakespearean lyrics. Lovestruck and happy as a clam following her recent engagement , the quality of her writing has never been worse, the internet clamored. And while screenshotting out of context lyrics in isolation does make for some hysterical posts, notably from songs like “Wood,” a Sabrina Carpenter-esque cartoonishly sexual song packed with references to Travis Kelce’s appendage, the sound of this new music is unambiguously infused with her newfound zest for life. Though many of the songs leave much to be desired, there are some serious gems, like “The Fate of Ophelia,” which even has the Matthew Knowles stamp of approval . It’s clear Swift hasn’t lost her knack for poetry, but in taking after other artists, her new releases run the risk of being too on the nose for their own good. When Swift released songs like “Blank Space” more than a decade ago as meta commentaries on her own career and reputation, they were biting, incisive examinations of persona, the collapse of ego. But now, hearing references to “memes” and “girlbossing too close to the sun,” it feels like Swift is perhaps a little too aware of the narratives surrounding her public image, to a grating degree. To the point, I am genuinely convinced this Ariana Grande fan from stan twitter is owed royalties for inspiring Swift’s new release “Wood.” Cosmopolitan aptly described The Life of a Showgirl as a “ very online ” album. If Swift is guilty of anything, it’s a tendency toward navel-gazing and imitation; trying to channel artists whose sensibilities clash with her own. These are qualitative critiques that make sense. Art is supposed to be divisive, so it doesn’t really matter whether people like the direction Swift’s music is going, as long as she’s happy with her body of work and can stand by it. What isn’t a coherent critique is using Swift’s “whiteness” as the penultimate failure of her brand. The audacious claim was made by a TikToker whose brain has evidently been rotted from overconsumption of leftist video essays, in a six-minute ranting TikTok video. It made a nice addition to the behemoth of liberal takes on Swift’s new music, interpreting her expression of innocuous, universal desires like marriage, motherhood, love, contentment, having children that look like her husband, as sinister far-right MAGA dogwhistles . As per usual, Taylor Swift inspires madness in her haters. TikToker @sotfotsotfog went on a tangent about how being a “cute little white girl” is crucial to Taylor Swift’s brand. She claims Taylor’s parents took the country route because pop in the early 2000s was “too sexualized” and thus “no place for a little white girl,” while country “loved little white girls, making her industry introduction a no-brainer for the aspiring one-day pop singer. With her whiteness, blonde curly locks, and fake country accent in tow, her blooming country career was a sure thing." Sure, she needed musical talent, presumably, but she fit the aesthetic, and it’s easier to break through by developing a niche. "And now to talk about white girls,” she begins. “White girls don’t have sex. They don’t know what that is. White girls are cute, they’re adorable, they’re like dolls. They’re precious. They have to be protected,” she says, mockingly. She cites moms reportedly scandalized at Sabrina Carpenter’s onstage sexual references. “Of course they were,” she says facetiously. “How could a short, cute little white girl who is also blonde possibly know what sex is?” Then she unleashes her woke, ironically incredibly racially loaded thesis, “It’s the assumption women having sexual freedom and willingly engaging in sex is highly associated with blackness.” I mean, that’s certainly a confession. She points to former Disney and Nickelodeon stars as proof. Hannah Montana was the quintessential all-American girl that little girls looked up to, but when Miley wanted to shed that image and announce, “I’m not a little girl anymore,” she released Can’t Be Tamed and Bangerz . Ariana Grande, another “cute little white girl,” followed a similar path with Dangerous Woman and Sweetener . These artists, she argues, aligned themselves with rappers and borrowed from black musical styles to signal sexual maturity—an attempt to escape “the chains of being a white girl.” Over time, they drifted from that persona because, she insists, it was never authentic, just a strategy to break free from the chains of being a white girl. Sure, Miley and Ariana both broke away from their innocent child star images into a more adult, risque era of popstardom by showing more skin and producing more mature music, often infused with R&B, rap, or hip hop elements. These were, by the way, choices that were heavily criticized at the time as cultural appropriation . Their embracement of sexuality and shedding of childhood innocence wasn’t exactly achieved by “appealing to blackness” but by embracing more adult themes, showing more skin, and being more suggestive. The musical avenues they used to achieve this, like hip hop, R&B, EDM, rap, and pop, were incidental and merely what was popular at the time. The premise that cute little blonde white girls as a brand aren’t sexy is completely contradicted by the biggest pop stars of the 2000s, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. It doesn’t get more archetypally “cute little blonde white girl” than that. And if the argument is going to be that they were inspired by black artists like Janet Jackson or borrowed from black musical styles, that’s just a disingenuous form of pedantry. Black musical traditions underpin almost all of American pop dating back to Elvis; framing any flirtation with R&B aesthetics as racial borrowing erases how thoroughly those influences are already baked in. And these child stars were shedding childhood, not whiteness. Disney and Nickelodeon’s marketing is to children, not “white girls.” But back to Swift, who apparently has “never had to do that” because she makes being a white girl so f***ing profitable, and not just profitable, but her entire brand. What’s the brand of being white, you ask? Apparently, dancing awkwardly, loving things like cats, baking, and hanging out with her fans. But Swift’s age now poses a problem—no, a threat to her little white girl brand: she’s now 35 and with the steady passage of time, before long will be pushing 40. When she approaches middle age and starts to bear wrinkles, it’s not going to be cute to be awkward. Swift is “aging out of being a white girl,” she argues. “Keep in mind, the world has been moving on. An artist like Sabrina Carpenter could not exist ten years ago. There was nowhere on the pop landscape for her—for a cute little white girl who’s that sexual. It just didn’t exist.” Hello, Britney, anyone? She continues, “Things have been rapidly changing politically, so people want different things from women now, and The Life of a Showgirl is a testament to Taylor’s inability to rise to the occasion,” and cites songs like “Wi$h Li$t” and “Wood” as primary examples. Sexuality, according to this creator’s logic, is inherently coded as black, though somehow that’s not racist. “Wi$h Li$t” is about how everybody else wants bright lights and designer things and a fat ass (hedonistic Hollywood lifestyles), but she just wants to have Kelce’s kids and live in a house with a driveway and a basketball hoop (longing for suburban simplicity). Which, of course, is really bad, somehow, because it’s normal. Then Swift’s personal struggle between her and a cute little girl is really embodied by the song “Wood,” which is referential to Kelce’s “red wood tree.” The song isn’t sexual at all, though, she argues, “because the song isn’t about sex, it’s about a woman justifying the fact that she has sex.” It portrays Swift as being super insecure until Travis Kelce ‘dickmatizes’ her and opens up her eyes. “Keep in mind, white girls cannot be sexual beings. It’s not that she has sexual feelings; it’s that a man came along and unlocked it in her. The curse was lifted. You see, you guys? It’s not about sex at all; it’s about love. His love was the key that opened my thighs. I don’t have sexual feelings, I’m just a little white girl,” which feels like an overly hostile response to a woman being a lover girl rather than a lady of the night. I’m not sure being sentimental about sex with the love of your life, who you’ve just committed to spending forever with, is the own you think it is. Perhaps some of this frustration is in the clickbaitiness of the choice of showgirl aesthetics and album title, which she complains “is supposed to be her embodying her sexual energy, thus, Life of a Showgirl , but Taylor either feels unable or isn’t willing or whatever it is you want it to be, Taylor doesn’t actually embody it." She doesn’t explore it, she argues, because the embodiment of Swift’s sexual energy would come at the expense of her seemingly incompatible brand. “She has to be her own fully embodied grown woman in order to keep up with the times, but she also has to be a cute little white girl in order to keep up with the brand of Taylor Swift, and in trying to do both, she successfully does nothing.” Sexuality, according to this creator’s logic, is inherently coded as black, though somehow that’s not racist, so Swift should be more sexual, even though that would be problematic in its appropriation of blackness, because nothing is worse than the banality of whiteness, due to its sterile asexuality. This wasn’t the ‘read’ this creator thought it was. It’s like she took every old ageist, sexist, and racist trope in the book and put it in a blender and said, “Okay, now make it woke.” Besides the fact that this is logically incoherent and the kind of terminally online interpretation you’d expect from ‘that one friend who’s too woke,’ it’s also historically revisionist. The biggest sexual pop stars of the 2000s rose to fame as “cute little white girls” and then just started showing more skin in a, and I can’t believe I have to say this in an article that isn’t satire, “totally white way.” To the extent these artists engaged with black culture and were influenced by it, that’s just the nature of living in a country where we have an open exchange of artistic influences and don’t live in an ethnostate. There are aspects of black culture that are incredibly popular and successful. White artists are inspired by that and incorporate it into their own acts as a means of appreciation, not theft. But this is a separate conversation from where sexuality stems from. That’s the first revisionist strike. The second comes within Swift’s own career. She’s already reinvented herself as a much more mature, sexier brand since Reputation . The music video for “Look What You Made Me Do” featured a much more “sexy” Swift, donning fishnet stockings, a latex get-up, and dancing in black stiletto boots. The song’s narrativization, “I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, because she’s dead,” marked the pivotal shift between the “old Taylor”: squeaky clean, innocent, inoffensive, and the new one: sexier, edgier, and more confrontational. Sure, it was “sexy” and “edgy” in the Swiftian sense, but she’s no stranger to growing up and embracing more mature themes, nor is she new to accusations of “appropriating black culture.” Back in 2014, the “Shake It Off” video sparked outrage because it featured both black and white women twerking. The early wokescolds of Tumblr claimed they were exploiting black bodies by featuring twerking black women, while the white women twerking were committing cultural appropriation . What great heights we can hope to achieve with this over-segregation of racial and cultural ideas. Tone policing, punishing cross-cultural influence, and cultivating an environment hostile to creativity. And, might I add, that this whole white guilt performance is just racial pick-meism. Performatively putting down other white women to be seen as “one of the good ones,” begging for crumbs of attention from people of color when they don’t need you to be their spokesperson, is the same level of self-flagellating cringe as women with internalized misogyny during performative “not like the other girls” gimmicks. Being a self-hating white woman is no cuter than being a self-hating woman. If Swift’s brand is whiteness, then it’s super hot right now. Even the ranting anti-white girl TikTok creator ended the video admitting she loves “thinking about white women” and “Taylor Swift is just the embodiment of it, she really is.” If white women’s greatest branding issue is being wholesome, popular, and normal, then I think we’re doing pretty good.