Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: A Celebration of Taylor Swift's Musical Journey, Cultural Impact, and Reinvention of Pop Music for Swifties by a Swiftie

Heartbreak is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music is a 2024 work of cultural criticism by music journalist Rob Sheffield. The book provides a comprehensive analysis and timeline of Taylor Swift’s career trajectory prior to the date of publication, as well as an account of Sheffield’s personal experiences as a fan of Swift. Through his exploration of Swift’s career, in its many facets, Sheffield encourages the reader to consider themes of Femininity and Misogyny in the Music Industry, The Relationship Between Fans And Music Idols, and Taylor Swift’s Pop Persona as a Paradox.

This guide refers to the 2024 digital eBook edition of the text, published by Dey Street Books.

Content Warning: This guide and its source text contain discussions of gender bias and sexual harassment.

Summary

In 2007, Rob Sheffield discovered Taylor Swift’s music when the CW played “Our Song” during an advertisement break between episodes of a show he was watching. He was immediately enthralled by her witty lyricism, and intrigued by her youth, thinking to himself, “How bizarre—she was just starting out? And only sixteen? Damn. I hoped she might have another great song or two in her” (xv). Over fifteen years later, Swift has secured her legacy as one of the most popular and influential musicians of the twenty-first century. Having worked as one of Rolling Stone’s experts on the singer for many years, Sheffield writes Heartbreak, a retrospective on her career and cultural impact to-date.

Heartbreak surveys all of Swift’s albums released prior to 2024, outlining their respective musical contributions and importance within the scheme of Swift’s career. Taylor Swift, her debut, was a dramatic, youthful entry into the sometimes exclusionary world of country music. Fearless was her first Album of the Year at the Grammys, a record so masterful in its world-building that Sheffield thought at the time that she would probably never top it. But he was proven wrong in 2010 by Speak Now, an album written entirely by Swift, which he labels “prog” because of its overwhelmingly experimental spirit. These three albums mark her “early” period, which was decidedly ended when she released Red, the album where she began to openly embrace pop sounds and sensibilities. Red includes “All Too Well,” the song Sheffield consistently ranks her best in his comprehensive ranking of her discography for Rolling Stone (a list he updates with every new music release).

1989, Swift’s fifth album, was her most thorough self-reinvention to date, as the singer abandoned all traces of country and instead told a story set in New York to the sound of synths. Sheffield pays particular attention to her historical references for his album, a feature highlighted by the song “New Romantics,” which pays homage to the New Romantic bands of 80s Britain. In the midst of 1989’s massive success, public opinion turned decidedly against Swift when Kanye West released his song “Famous,” which included a controversial line claiming credit for Swift’s success. Inspired by the experience of total ostracization, Swift released her sixth album, Reputation, a simultaneously aggressive and romantic record that (literally) declared her old self dead.

Sheffield associates the seventh album, Lover, with mourning, since Swift released it around the time of his mother’s death. In it, Swift engages more directly in dialogue with her past self than she ever had before, all with a summery, crowd-pleading delivery. This retrospection would become a central theme of her later albums, but Lover was quickly overshadowed when Swift released Folklore and Evermore during the Covid-19 pandemic. Sheffield pronounces Folklore her best album, writing, “It’s the way the songs keep evolving the longer you live with them. It’s the way she builds her most labyrinthine fictional universe” (154). Evermore builds upon the folk-goth mythology of Folklore by applying a similar aesthetic to stories more personal to Swift, including “Marjorie” which is a tribute to her late grandmother. By 2023, Swift had reached new heights of stardom and self-referentiality, releasing Midnights, an album where each song corresponds to a different sleepless night from her life, and embarking on The Eras Tour, a show that included songs and sets for every one of her albums.

The book also addresses elements of Swift’s personal life that have contributed to her cultural image and impact. Sheffield pays particular attention to the way she has been treated by powerful men in the business, including Scott Borchetta, Kanye West, and Scooter Braun, who have all attempted to leverage their male authority against her. Her ongoing “Taylor’s Version” project, which was conceived in response to Borchetta’s sale of the masters of her first six albums to Braun, is the culmination of her career-long quest for complete autonomy over her own music. Sheffield contextualizes this struggle within the broader scheme of music history, framing Swift’s individual experience as a continuation of the feminist endeavors of predecessors like Lesley Gore and Stevie Nicks. Ultimately, he argues that Swift has “reinvented pop music” by centering the female fans and musicians who have historically been taken advantage of by industry leaders.

This “reinvent[ion of] pop in the fangirl’s image” has required Swift to have a particularly close relationship with her fans, who call themselves Swifties (8). Sheffield devotes a significant portion of the book to examining this relationship, which he argues is inspired by Swift’s own experiences as a young music fan, and which relies heavily on Swift’s habit of leaving codes for her fans to decipher in her music and other materials. Sheffield counts himself and his family as members of this fan community, and ends the book with an anecdote about his sisters celebrating amongst other Swifties in Vienna after her Eras Tour dates there were cancelled due to a terror threat.