Lord help us all. Taylor Swift covers the latest issue of Variety to promote her Netflix documentary Taylor Swift: Miss Americana. I didn’t know what to expect with this doc, but luckily Variety spells it out in exhaustive detail. The doc won’t be about the Scooter Braun stuff, although there’s some of that. It’s mostly about Taylor’s move to becoming Political Tay and LGBTQ Ally Tay. Of course, the doc also has a section about Kanye West and Tay’s still-convoluted feelings about all of that. Again, I’m not saying that Kanye is a good guy and Taylor is a snake. That’s not it. I just can’t even believe that she’s STILL harping on and on about that. You can read the full Variety piece here. Some highlights:
On her work on Cats: “I’m happy to be here, happy to be nominated, and I had a really great time working on that weird-ass movie. I’m not gonna retroactively decide that it wasn’t the best experience. I never would have met Andrew Lloyd Webber or gotten to see how he works, and now he’s my buddy. I got to work with the sickest dancers and performers. No complaints.”
On the Dixie Chicks getting cancelled: “I saw how one comment ended such a powerful reign, and it terrified me. These days, with social media, people can be so mad about something one day and then forget what they were mad about a couple weeks later. That’s fake outrage. But what happened to the Dixie Chicks was real outrage. I registered it — that you’re always one comment away from being done being able to make music.”
Why she came out against Marsha Blackburn: “I can’t see another commercial [with] her disguising these policies behind the words ‘Tennessee Christian values.’ I live in Tennessee. I am Christian. That’s not what we stand for.” Pushing back tears, she laments not having come out against Trump two years earlier, “but I can’t change that. … I need to be on the right side of history. … Dad, I need you to forgive me for doing it, because I’m doing it.”
Her LGBTQ allyship: “To celebrate but not advocate felt wrong for me. Using my voice to try to advocate was the only choice to make. Because I’ve talked about equality and sung about it in songs like ‘Welcome to New York,’ but we are at a point where human rights are being violated. When you’re saying that certain people can be kicked out of a restaurant because of who they love or how they identify, and these are actual policies that certain politicians vocally stand behind, and they disguise them as family values, that is sinister. So, so dark.”
Her recent speeches criticizing Scooter Braun & the music industry: “Well, I do sleep well at night knowing that I’m right, and knowing that in 10 years it will have been a good thing that I spoke about artists’ rights to their art, and that we bring up conversations like: Should record deals maybe be for a shorter term, or how are we really helping artists if we’re not giving them the first right of refusal to purchase their work if they want to?”
Regarding that last quote… those are great issues and if I honestly thought she was beefing with Scooter Braun as part of a larger effort to Trojan-horse those issues into a larger music-industry conversation, I would applaud the hell out of her. But… nothing she’s done thus far leads me to believe that she is trying to speak to the issues of shorter recording contracts and more rights for artists. She’s really just mad that contractually, she got screwed over. Which is fine – she did get screwed over and she has every right to be mad. But be honest about it.
“Pushing back tears, she laments not having come out against Trump two years earlier, ‘but I can’t change that. … I need to be on the right side of history…’” I mean… she didn’t come out in 2016 because she didn’t want the personal/professional hit so soon after The Receipts, Taymerica and Tiddlebanging. Be honest about that too.
Update: This Variety cover story was super-long and there were a lot of interesting, gossip-worthy moments and I obviously culled a lot from the piece for these highlights. Taylor did talk about how her mom has a brain tumor and said she’s really been struggling with her mom’s illness for a while.
Cover and photos courtesy of Variety.
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