The patron saint of vengeance is a tenth-century Russian princess named Olga, whose husband was brutally murdered by a warring tribe called the Drevlians. Years later, Olga asked the Drevlians to give her three sparrows and three pigeons per household as a peace offering. She then tied a cloth covered in sulfur to each bird’s leg and set them free, causing the entire city to go up in flames. When I learned of this tale of murderous retribution, my first thought was that it sounded like the type of vaguely feminist, obscure metaphor that would be referenced in a Taylor Swift lyric.
Taylor Swift is a collector of slights against her, devoting to them a level of attention and care that nearly approaches love. There is no one on the planet more prone to pettiness, who more revels in rancor, who more assiduously accounts for slights against her that are both large and small. No other celebrity, with the possible exception of our current president, comes even close. But Swift is able to transform her grievances into something more durable, even useful, to others: dreamy pop anthems and heartbreak ballads that are fun for drunk people to shriek.
Swift’s grudges are legion, to the point that even the most casual fan is able to recount, unprompted, nearly half a dozen of them. There are those against the myriad romantic partners who have wronged her: the pop star who dumped her with a 25-second phone call; the actor who reportedly stood her up on her 21st birthday, the DJ who bristled at crediting her for the hit single they co-wrote. Swift rarely discusses the inspirations for her songs, but some are more obvious than others. When she rerecorded “All Too Well” and “Dear John,” for instance, the rumored inspirations behind both songs — Jake Gyllenhaal and John Mayer, respectively — faced harassment and death threats from Swifties, even though both relationships ended more than a decade ago.
Then there’s her list of professional grievances. There was her near-decade-long feud with Katy Perry after she hired some of Swift’s backup dancers, an incident that inspired Swift’s single “Bad Blood” and permanently cemented her reputation as someone with an interminable capacity for spite. There was her dispute with Kanye West after he interrupted her acceptance speech at the 2009 VMAs, which resurfaced when West released his 2016 song “Famous,” in which he boasted of Swift, “I made that bitch famous.” Kim Kardashian also got involved when she released an edited portion of a phone conversation between Swift and West that made it seem as if Swift had approved the lyric; eight years later, Swift released “thanK you aIMee,” widely believed to be a dig at Kardashian.
And that’s not even to mention the minor entries to the canon: her dispute with Olivia Rodrigo (allegedly over a songwriting credit); her rumored beef with Billie Eilish and Charli XCX (allegedly over the Billboard charts); whatever may or may not have happened between Swift and her once-BFF Karlie Kloss, a former fixture of Swift’s mid-2010s “squad” before the two stopped publicly interacting.
As she sings in the first single from her 2017 album, Reputation — indisputably, the period when she leaned into her darker impulses the most — Swift keeps “a list of names, and yours is in red, underlined.” There is no telling who or what will prompt her ire, or how lengthy the list will get. Though I imagine I register as a nonentity within the Swiftie ecosystem, it has occurred to me that writing this essay could land my own name on the list. (Tree Paine, if you are reading this, please take mercy; my 8-year-old and I are huge fans.)
To be clear, I have no problem with this. On the contrary, I would vastly prefer to live in a world where Taylor Swift writes about the high-school mean girls who ghosted her at the King of Prussia mall 25 years ago than one in which songs like “Mean” and “Karma” and “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” don’t exist. And it’s not just because I think her ability to alchemize her rage against those who failed to appreciate her greatness is precisely what makes her a once-in-a-generation songwriting talent. It’s also because, as someone who is also an aging millennial trying to make sense of the culture before it self-destructs entirely, I think there is something to admire about the fact that she absolutely refuses to let go of her grudges, or extend any of her foes the slightest bit of grace.
Grudges are so deeply personal, such an unvarnished reflection of one’s worst impulses, that there is something inherently embarrassing about making them public; it’s akin to showing someone you’re dating your search history, or using your full name to leave a YouTube comment. There is an expectation that part of becoming an adult means learning to play well with others, to stop holding on to slights and resentments and start letting shit go. Some people — co-workers who get in fights on Slack, for instance, or relatives who get too inebriated at Thanksgiving — are less willing to accept this than others. And they, more often than not, face negative consequences: They are laid off, or disinvited from family functions, or left off the group chat.
Not so for Taylor Swift. Her fans love her not in spite of her grudges but because of them. No matter how petty or ridiculous or flat-out unrelatable they may seem, her appeal lies in her ability to make everyone else care about them just as much as she does.
There are many, many examples of this in her oeuvre, but the one that stands out to me is the song “The Man” from her 2019 album, Lover, in which Swift gripes that she’s “so sick of running as fast as I can / Wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man.” When I first heard this song, my eyes rolled into the back of my head. The idea that the most rich and famous pop star in the world could purport to be held back by her gender struck me as so tone-deaf as to be borderline insane. A woman who is worth more than a billion dollars believes misogyny is holding her back? From achieving … what, exactly?, I remember thinking. What more does this woman want?
But “The Man” makes a lot more sense when you think about it not as a cringe girlboss anthem but as what basically every single Taylor Swift song is: an attack aimed at some guy who once made her feel like she was anything less than exceptional. It’s easy to imagine her writing it after some minor dispute with a C-suite record-label exec in an expensive suit, just Taylor Swift and her guitar and her unmitigated loathing for this random guy who may or may not have even known how badly he may have fucked up.
It may strike her haters as petty or embarrassing or corny, but Taylor Swift’s grudges are the engine keeping her empire humming. Like Princess Olga, she’s playing the long game, distracting us with Reputation (Taylor’s Version) Easter eggs and letter-T thigh chains and paparazzo shots of her cavorting with her himbo boyfriend, all while secretly plotting against her enemies, waiting for the right moment to unleash her grudges and set the night sky ablaze. She’s not motivated by anything other than getting her shots in at those she has perceived to have wronged her, and her list of names is only getting longer.
More From This Series
- ‘I Regret My Grudge’
- Extremely Petty and Incredibly Stupid Grudges
- The 12 Juiciest Celebrity Grudges