Sarah Hines Y11
Taylor Swift is a singer-songwriter who is not only the highest-grossing music artist alive, but
is also the wealthiest female musician as of 2026. Even though she is a highly accomplished individual, she commonly finds herself surround by online controversies.
Many people dislike her and believe that she is “generic” and “overrated”, although I believe that most of these accusations come from unfair generalisations. Oftentimes, these people fail to engaged with her music properly, usually going no further than “Shake it off” before critiquing it. I believe that this leads to hate that originates merely from aversion to popularity, with people only repeating common arguments without doing the evaluation themselves.
My first critique to their hate is that many people say that her music “sounds the same”. It may be true that many songs resemble each other, like with any artist, but she also experiments with very unusual styles; in each of her albums she explores a different genre: she does pop, rap, folk song, country, jazz however when people criticise her, they fail to truly research her wide-range of music. In fact, by exploring many styles, she has been able to reach more people than anyone could imagine, inspiring the idea of the “Eras Tour”. For her “Eras Tour” each album represents a different style, and a different audience, meant to bring in community from people with different tastes. Therefore, the accusation that all her songs are pop songs is unjustified, and is a sign that people tend to hate on Taylor Swift just to show hate.
Many people also say that she only writes about herself and her breakups, however, only 29% of her songs our about these topics. Her songs cover wide topics such as family, loss, and friendship problems. She often inspires her songs on her own experiences, although she has demonstrated the ability to write about fictitious stories. Two of her famous albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore”, are all about characters that she invented; also showing how this claim is un-based hate. Moreover, even if her stories were only about herself, artists have the right to decide what they right about, with this being an unfair aspect to critique her character on.
Another thing people always complain about is how she is fake. They say “She claims to care about
her fans but then proceed to rise her ticket prices”. What they do not understand is that
despite becoming known at a young age, she had to work very hard to get any sort of
recognition. She started her career with a not-very-well-known country singer, and since
then she has been climbing up the ladder to success. She lost rights to her music and only
recently got them back. Through all of this she has always said that the fans are the most
important, and has gone above and beyond to support her fans. She makes an effort to have one-on-one conversations, sends cards, bakes… going beyond lots of artists who claim to care about their fans.
Finally, people say that her lyrics are often too cheesy or unnecessary, however that is just a shallow attack on Taylor Swift’s effort to include artistry in her songs. Taylor Swift makes the effort to use rhyme and elevated words, even contributing to her listeners vocabulary. She even uses many allusions, such as “you part the crowd like the Red Sea” or “something wicked this way comes”, with the latter being a verse from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. She also uses many comparisons and other literary devices. For
instance, in the lyrics “from sprinkler splashes to fire place ashes” she is not only contrasting
water and fire through sibilance and rhymes, but she is also evoking the fact that the person is going from good times in the park, getting splashed by sprinklers, to sitting in sadness by the
fireplace ashes; also implying the passage of the seasons . These examples are just to reinforce that her lyrics are very carefully thought out, although some verses may be cheesy, they get unfair representation in the eyes of the public, being only a tiny minority of her songs.
In my opinion , most of people’s claims against Taylor Swift are made without basis and even if her style of music is not appreciated by everyone, that is no reason to degrade her.
