Rob Sheffield wants you to know that he’s now a true Swiftie. “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem,” his slim, strongly felt, and delightful collection of chapters about Taylor Swift begins with his awe at her early fans’ “total commitment.”
It ends with Sheffield attending “three consecutive nights” of the Eras tour, “singing and weeping and suffering through an emotional epic Taypocalypse.” In between Sheffield reacts to each album and to a triple handful of favorite songs, riffing and expanding on the 274-paragraph ranked list of Taylor’s songs that Sheffield, a longtime writer for Rolling Stone, maintains for that magazine.
In science fiction that might be a future history full of robots. For Sheffield it’s how Swift “reinvented pop in the fangirl’s image,” sharing the deepest cuts and the brightest flashes from her “zero-to-sixty heart.”
Faced with such power, and such a well-known subject, another writer might devolve into cliché. Another still might plan and execute a longer book with longer, step-by-step arguments, placing our girl in musical, cultural, or literary traditions (full disclosure: I’m writing such a book right now).
Sheffield need not do such things, because — like celebrated rock critics of decades past — he writes not paragraph by paragraph, but sentence by sentence. He might say of his prose what Walt Whitman said about his verse: “I and mine do not convince by arguments. … We convince by our presence.”
And what a presence. “Taylor invented crying in the bathroom — nobody has shed more tears in more facilities since indoor plumbing was invented.” “Sometimes Taylor loves to brag about her self-awareness in ways that make you wonder if she’s ever met herself.”
You could distill a quick biography from the facts Sheffield marshals, but why? He’s here for the vibes, and he’s at his best when the vibes hit hardest: when he writes about hearing “Lover “(supposedly Swift’s happiest album) while grieving his mother, or when he brings in — to discuss Taylor’s romantic moments — his own background in the British youth movement called New Romantics, the boys-in-makeup, synthesizers-in-everything trend that gave us Duran Duran.
Sheffield also wants us to know he’s an A-list rock critic. “The first time I heard ‘Fearless’ was over the phone. The label was so paranoid about leaks, they didn’t even want to play it for me in a private room.” Sheffield in 2008 was the kind of writer who would get ‘Fearless’ played for him over the phone.
“Boy George told me a few years ago,” one sentence begins (it’s the best part of the sentence). “On the Reputation tour in New Jersey, in July 2018,” Taylor “asked me before the show, ‘Enchanted’ or ‘The Lucky One’?” There’s no good reason to ask a rock critic to keep his personal life away from his work, but these asides do undermine, just a bit, the identification that Sheffield elsewhere seeks between himself and the mass of Swift fans.
That’s Swift’s problem too, as Sheffield knows all too well: how to stay close, emotionally, to your fans when they number in the hundreds of millions? He knows better than to give any single answer. Instead, he goes on reacting, appreciating, noticing, with some platitudes, more insights, and a wolfpack’s worth of fierce phrases.
Swift takes up most of her album “Reputation” “trying to act jaded and chill, a really sophisticated New Taylor, but then finally gives up and jumps back into Old Taylor hard enough to fracture her ankle.” A lesser writer would have stopped at “Old Taylor.” “Delicate,” one of her softest, most beautiful love songs, also shows that “Tay has no idea how bars work. You don’t send your date to make you a drink.”
Half the best moments in this book work that way: They begin as verbal flourishes and end up as one-sentence keys to the Swiftian kingdom, or at least to a province thereof. The other half draw on Sheffield’s decades of hearing, and writing about, pop stars not named Taylor Swift.
“Heartbreak Is the National Anthem” (Sheffield took the title from “New Romantics”) isn’t the first witty critical book about Swift, and won’t be the last. It may be the shortest, and that’s OK. Few Swifties — few readers — will come to Sheffield for a succession of facts, or even (though we get some) for claims about how a particular melody or a drum machine works.
We look to a critic like this one for the critic’s own feels, for his reactions and judgments and personal experience of Swift’s nearly 300 songs. This is what we came for, whether his prose is matter-of-fact or bejeweled: and he can make the whole place shimmer.
