Taylor Swift released her highly-anticipated album, The Tortured Poets Department, on April 19. The 31-track double album started breaking records even before it was released by becoming the most pre-saved album on Spotify in history. Not even a full week had passed that TTPD broke the record for the first album to hit 1 billion Spotify streams in a week. Amid all the buzz, Swift is also facing backlash for a certain lyric on the track I Hate It Here.
In the controversial song that has left the internet divided, Swift sings- “My friends used to play a game where we would pick a decade, we wished we could live in instead of this / I'd say the 1830s but without all the racists and getting married off for the highest bid.” What makes this lyric stand out from the 34-year-old singer's other songs is the mention of race. While Swift rarely shies away from speaking her mind, there are a few subjects, including race, politics, and gender issues, that she seldom talks about.
Apart from her latest album, the only time she ever brought up the topic of race was in 2020 amid George Floyd's murder at the hands of police officer Derek Chauvin. “As a Tennessean, it makes me sick that there are monuments standing in our state that celebrate racist historical figures who did evil things. Edward Carmack and Nathan Bedford Forrest were DESPICABLE figures in our state history and should be treated as such,” the Cruel Summer hitmaker tweeted at the time.
What are experts saying?
Naomi Ekas, who is a professor at Texas Christian University, where she teaches a course about the connection between psychology and Swift's place in pop culture, says that many of her students believe that her songs are “white girl experiences, and this is white girl music and there isn't kind of that representation or that connection kind of outside of that particular racial group,” per USA Today.
“Everyone's dated the bad boy and they’ve had the friendship breakups and they’ve, you know, crashed and burned in relationships, revenge – these are pretty common themes across humankind, but then her particular life and how she's living them out might not connect to everybody,” Ekas adds.
Professor Stephanie Burt, a literary critic who teaches a course on Swift at Harvard University, says that through TTPD, the Blank Space singer is reflecting on “illusions and delusions that have captured her psychology.” “She goes on in the same verse to say, 'Wow, that was silly.' She ends up criticizing (herself), which she is honestly doing a lot on this album. She ends up framing her own folly and inviting us to see her making bad judgments and oversimplifying her own history and world history,” Burt adds, per the outlet.
