An INDY Artist: Our Coverage of Taylor Swift, Then and Now

“At this point, I can confidently say she is greedy. I can also confidently say the music is so good that I’ll never stop giving her my money.” Olivia Baisier (CAS ’24), a former INDY editor, wrote this two years ago in an article titled “Money, Power, Glory: Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour.”  During her time at the INDY, Baisier wrote four articles on Swift, supporting her career and musical choices and steering our coverage of her in a more nuanced and positive direction. But do her words ring true for the INDY across Swift’s many eras, past, present, and future?

To properly answer this question, we have to go further back in time, in Swift’s career and in INDY history. The INDY wasn’t always the arts and culture magazine it is today. In 1995, a group of Georgetown students founded a conservative political newspaper they christened “The Georgetown Independent,” operated out of their dorm rooms. Since then, things have gotten a lot more indie, pun intended. Over the course of the past 30 years, the INDY has shifted dramatically in terms of content and style, changes most easily tracked through the paper’s tagline. At its inception, the INDY’s tagline read, “Student Journal of News and Commentary.” By the early 2010s, it had been revised to “Student Journal of Features, Commentary, and the Arts.” Later in the decade, editors distilled the subhead down to “Student Journal of the Arts and Culture,” something much more closely aligned with the INDY you’re reading now.

So when Taylor Swift’s career began in the mid-2000s, the INDY hadn’t yet grown into its arts and culture focus. But we have some articles on Swift from earlier than you might expect. In Leavey 409, aka the INDY office, the 2012 article “Today Was a Fairytale: Can the Magic Last?” is haphazardly taped onto the wall. In it, Emily Hall (CAS ’15) shares her thoughts on Taylor Swift’s controversial and short-lived relationship with Conor Kennedy (L ’23), son of now-Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. At the time, Swift was 22, and Kennedy turned 18 just before their romance became public. On the immortalized copy in Leavey 409, someone has written “MOOCH” with an arrow pointing to Kennedy.

Hall criticizes not only Swift’s choice of boyfriends, but her music as well. She writes, “I have to question what on earth inspired Conor to put up with her. Sadly, the only reason I can give is that as a former worker with the Ocean Alliance, who has a particular affection for whales, he accidentally mistook the screeching ‘Oh’s’ and ‘We’s’ of Taylor’s newest song ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’ as a humpback whale.” However, she clarifies that she is a fan of Swift’s music, especially Speak Now. But even then, Hall adds, “that doesn’t mean I haven’t noticed that a disturbing number of her songs could have—let’s face it: should have—been written by a middle school girl.” She argues that Swift’s lyricism and subject matter in songs like “Mean” and “Love Story” are immature and undeveloped.

Just before the release of Reputation in 2017, the INDY again satirized Swift’s music and image in its yearly costume recommendations. There’s advice to dress as Ted Cruz, New Leo’s (the dining hall had just been remodeled), and Incredibly Normal Human Mark Zuckerberg. But the very first recommendation explains how to dress as Taylor Swift (Scary): “A $25 gift card to Hot Topic; 15+ ex-boyfriends; Pure, concentrated evil; Twitter feuds with multiple celebrities; Disdain for carbon-based life forms.” The list pokes fun at what some consider Swift’s superficial bad girl persona that she adopted during her Reputation era.

However, Reagan Graney’s (CAS ’21) 2020 Suggests piece recommending folklore marks a turning point in the INDY’s coverage on Swift. After describing the Swift listeners heard in folklore as “trained” and “mature,” Graney concludes, “We can certainly hope [folklore] marks a new era in the evolving career of Taylor Swift: one in which she blossoms into an artist fully confident in her style and sure of her place in the industry.”

Olivia Baisier would argue that Graney’s hopes have been realized—Swift’s confidence in her place in the industry is reflected in her latest release. Baisier’s INDY articles covers the breadth of Swift’s work in the first half of this decade, from her album re-recordings to a Midnights review that analyzes how the album responded to the indie sleaze revival. Baisier says that when she first started at the INDY, the content was a lot less “esoteric” than it is now, but her Taylor pieces kept making it into print because they made the INDY more accessible and intriguing for the average Georgetown student reader. Plus, there were plenty of Swifties on the INDY staff. 

Looking back at her time on the INDY and coverage of Swift, Baisier stands by her arguments and thinks they continue to apply to Swift’s recent work. Her take on The Life of a Showgirl? It’s perfectly catered to commercial success, which, at this point, is all we can really expect from Swift. Tracks like “The Fate of Ophelia” and “Opalite” are a reflection of Swift’s greatest strength: not her lyricism, not her vocals, but her knowledge of the pop music industry she’s become synonymous with. We have to accept, she argues, that it’s “Taylor Swift LLC” who’s putting out this new music. Baisier recognizes this corporate buy-in, stating, “I’m buying a product. I love it.”

Of course, the INDY’s Taylor Swift coverage is ongoing (you can read three current writers’ thoughts on The Life of a Showgirl in this very issue!). And although, as Baisier said, our coverage has become more “esoteric” in recent years, INDY writers are still interested in exploring what defines the mainstream. While the opinions of a few writers don’t represent the magazine as a whole, looking through the INDY’s articles about Swift, it’s clear that the INDY’s—alongside the public’s—opinion of Swift, her music, and her growing brand is anything but stuck in the past.

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Lorelei Schwarz is a freshman in the College studying linguistics, English, and journalism (but please don’t quote her on that). She is a co-Archivist for the INDY.