Taylor Swift Has Evolved. Can Critics Keep Up?

Despite the progress many high-profile women have made toward gender equality in recent years, from the U.S. electing its first female vice president, to the U.S. women’s soccer team demanding equal pay, to a number of women successfully leading their countries through the global pandemic, double standards and gender inequality still pervade our culture. Take, for example, the music industry and more specifically, Taylor Swift, whose ability to craft exceptional music in different genres isn’t received the same as her male counterparts.

When the Beatles went from creating light pop on their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to cultivating music with a darker rock mood on their White Album, the vast majority of reviewers praised the result and their intention to evolve musically. Similarly, U2 went from performing politically inspired songs like those heard on Joshua Tree to creating more personal, electronic-sounding music on Achtung Baby, which was also well received by critics and the public.

Taylor Swift, on the other hand, has been questioned for exploring different genres. Swift entered the music scene in 2006 with her debut, self-titled country album. Two years later, she released Fearless, followed by country-pop hybrid albums Speak Now in 2010 and Red in 2012. In 2014, Swift made a clean transition to pop with the release of 1989 followed by pop albums Reputation and Lover. Then in 2020, Swift surprised everyone by delivering folklore and Evermore, alternative, indie albums created during the pandemic.

Unlike the Beatles and U2, when Taylor Swift transitioned between genres, she wasn’t congratulated for her new musical endeavors but was said to be “abandoning a sense of duty” to the genres she had built upon before, according to a New York Times review of her album folklore.

The disparity in reception between Swift and male bands like the Beatles and U2 could be an honest interpretation of Swift’s music, but considering Swift’s widespread appeal and success, the criticism is likely the result of a double standard in the music industry. In 2021, folklore won the highly coveted Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards. Swift is the first person to have won Album of the Year in three different genres; earlier in her career, Swift won the same award for her country album Fearless and pop album 1989. This shows that many people in the music industry acknowledge that Swift’s genre switching has been successful.

However, some critics perceive Swift’s genre changing as calculated. A Pitchfork review of folklore states, “There are those who already dislike folklore on principle, who assume it’s another calculated attempt on Swift’s part to position her career as just so (how dare she).” At the end of a Click On Detroit folklore review, a commenter says, “Over the course of her career, Taylor has switched her genre constantly and now she’s profiting off of Folk music.”

Through internet commenting platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and other news sites, listeners have also conveyed their belief that Swift’s genre changing is a calculated attempt to follow trends and profit off them. A Reddit comment in a discussion titled “Would ‘folklore’ be a commercially successful, and critically lauded, record if it was released by an unknown artist instead of Taylor Swift?” reads, “It’s all just a spoiled rich white girl from a privileged background who gets to eat her cake and have it too for her entire life. She gets to be a country princess, she gets to be a pop star and now she gets to be the painted indie artist.” Instead of judging folklore for its merit and Swift’s musical evolution, these commenters are judging the music based on their perceptions of Swift’s (bad, they assume) motivations. In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Swift responded directly to people calling her calculated, stating, “a man does something, it’s strategic. A woman does something, it’s calculated.”

Folklore solidified the fact that Swift is no neophyte when it comes to embracing new genres and creating complex music many can connect to and enjoy. Swift’s ability to switch between performing and creating country songs about heartbreak like “Teardrops on My Guitar,” upbeat pop songs like “Shake It Off,” and indie songs like “Cardigan” and succeed in all different genres is proof of her musical talent and shouldn’t be held against her. Listeners and critics should apply the same standards to Swift as male musicians who evolved and shifted genres, instead of writing Swift’s musicality off as straying too far from her roots or being profit-driven. In Swift’s words, if she were “The Man,” “They’d say I hustled/Put in the work/They wouldn’t shake their heads and question how much of this I deserve.”