Book Review: ‘Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music,’ by Rob Sheffield

HEARTBREAK IS THE NATIONAL ANTHEM: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music, by Rob Sheffield

It’s possible that I know too much about Taylor Swift. I know the words to all her singles and every name on her long list of ex-lovers. Thanks to her current relationship with Travis Kelce, I know details about the various social entanglements of his Kansas City Chiefs teammates that I would prefer not to. I listen to her music about as much as the median American, which is to say: all of the time. Swift has become America’s Muzak, her songs the soundtrack to our Starbucks lines and her life the fodder for our tabloid stories.

In “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music,” Rob Sheffield charts how Swift, who rose to fame writing songs for teenage girls (when she was still one herself), became ubiquitous — and he makes the case that even as her cultural dominance can work to obscure her skill, everything always leads back to her virtuosic writing.

Sheffield is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he publishes consistently glowing reviews of Swift’s seemingly limitless offerings. Here he steps back to consider the roots of her appeal. Swift has “always had a unique flair for writing songs in which people hear themselves — her music keeps crossing generational and cultural boundaries, in ways that are often mystifying,” he writes. She makes her “experiences public property, to the point where she makes the world think of her as a character.”

Swift’s self-mythologizing stretches beyond her music to become a collaborative storytelling prompt, one that manages to absorb even her critics. As her superfans brand themselves as “Swifties” and build an extended Taylorverse of analysis and intrigue on social media, they recruit her haters into their project, using them to cast their billionaire idol as a complex and scrappy protagonist.

A character becomes more interesting when she has challengers and flaws. “Taylor’s hubris, her way-too-muchness, her narcissism disguised as even more narcissism, her inability to Not Be Taylor for a microsecond — it’s a lot,” Sheffield writes. “You can’t fully appreciate her without appreciating the wide range of visceral reactions she brings out in people.”

Sheffield’s book, which unfolds over 30 punchy chapters, zooms in on Swift’s albums, feuds and marketing gambits. Each dispatch is a perceptive close read of Swift’s music and persona, from the symbolic importance of her guitar to her conspicuous use of the word “nice.” Along the way, Sheffield drops enough of his own backstage encounters with Swift to satisfy fans hungry for new material to incorporate into their own character sketching.

Taylor Swift is a pop phenomenon so big, rich, prolific and long-reigning, she hardly needs defending at this point. The idea animating the book’s subtitle, that Swift reinvented pop music, is almost a truism. Sheffield argues that her relentless business drive has opened new creative doors, too; when Swift responded to an ownership dispute by meticulously rerecording six of her albums, she turned what he calls a “dumb idea” into a “mastermind’s triumph.”

Sheffield is less interested in the ways in which Swift’s commercial impulses might negatively impact the work itself. In April, Swift released her new album “The Tortured Poets Department,” with 16 songs and a bonus track. Two hours later, she dropped 14 more songs in an expanded album, “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.” That added up to 31, a number of great Swiftian brand significance, even as the glut of tracks weighed down the album as a whole. Given the insatiability of her fan base, what’s the incentive to curate anything anymore? Swift easily broke Spotify’s record for the most album streams in a single day.

Sheffield writes that Swift “reinvented pop in the fangirl’s image,” and while he’s not a fangirl himself, he has long cultivated an interest in the cultural interests and contributions of girls. In his tender and original 2010 book “Talking to Girls About Duran Duran,” he negotiated his own identity through his relationship with the music best loved by his sisters, crushes and girlfriends in their 1980s youth. (He thanked Swift in that book’s acknowledgments, on behalf of his nieces and nephews who had claimed her as their own generational obsession.)

Sheffield came to Swift at middle age, and I wanted to know more about what drives this 6-foot-5 dude who is so unrivaled in his decades-long attention that when he went to the bathroom at a 2011 show, he found the men’s room “so sparklingly clean, you could eat breakfast out of the sink.” In “Heartbreak,” we get just hints of Swift’s specific importance to his life, and to his work as a journalist.

As Swift changed pop music, she changed pop criticism, too. With her prolific songwriting and her collaborative hooks, she built a cultural consensus that united rockists and poptimists. And with her celebrity power, she became representative of the kind of artist whose stan army often makes the critic into the villain of their narrative, one where Swift must perpetually be framed as the underdog.

Now the music critic writes, if not to serve the fangirl, then with the knowledge that she is alert at her phone, ready to pounce on any perceived slight. (Even as I write this review of a book about Taylor Swift, her fans are on my mind.) In April, a sharp review of “Tortured Poets Department” was published in Paste with no byline, with an editor’s note blaming the “threats of violence” produced by the publication’s “Lover” review in 2019.

It’s appropriate that the critic’s job description has expanded to require an understanding of the fan, as that symbiotic relationship is now a defining element of the work itself. Sheffield is unabashedly a fan himself — even when he admits that Swift’s lead singles are sometimes “terrible,” he builds their terribleness into another expression of her mystique.

Inevitably, his book of Swift criticism has been integrated into the Swiftie world-building project. One TikToker has already applied Taylor numerology to the book’s page count and its ISBN number.

I’m curious about how that all feels from Sheffield’s perspective, this tall man who writes that he must cower at Swift’s concerts so the kids behind him can see. I guess that’s confirmation that I’m not a real Swiftie — that there’s another character I’m interested in beyond the woman we know all too well.

HEARTBREAK IS THE NATIONAL ANTHEM: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music | By Rob Sheffield | Dey Street | 208 pp. | $27.99