Blank Space
Everyone told me Taylor Swift was trash. I had to learn it early, absorb it from older siblings, from the kids in school who read music magazines, from that guy who wouldn’t shut up about which artists were real.
Hating her was the price of not being laughed at. So I paid it. Years of it. I said the songs were shallow, the videos vapid, made sure I looked the right way when her name came up—unimpressed, bored, above it all.
I stopped doing that. At some point the effort of pretending just wasn’t worth it anymore. Taylor Swift is good. I Knew You Were Trouble
is good, Safe & Sound
is good, Shake It Off
works. These aren’t accidents—they’re songs built to do something and they do it. The writing is tighter than people want to admit, the hooks land, the production knows what it’s doing. You can dislike it, but pretending it’s incompetent is just noise.
Blank Space
is not her best work. I’ll give anyone that one. The video is so boring I had to stop watching halfway through. The melody’s fine, the lyrics are fine, but nothing about it hits the way her stronger songs do. And yet I still listened to it again because she’s made enough good work that I trust her even when she’s just coasting. That’s the bar—not whether every single is perfect, but whether the person is worth paying attention to.
There’s something about admitting you like something everyone told you to hate. You feel stupid at first, then you stop caring. The thing is, Taylor Swift’s music was never the problem. The social cost of admitting it was the only thing that mattered, and once you stop paying that tax, you realize how arbitrary it all was. She was always good. You just weren’t allowed to say so.