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

In Heartbreak, Sheffield locates Taylor Swift at the end of a long lineage of female artists who have navigated and impacted the recording industry since its inception. Many of these predecessors are identified and discussed in the text: Stevie Nicks, Joni Mitchell, Lesley Gore, and Carly Simon among them. Sheffield also discusses influential contemporaries of Swift, like Beyoncé, Olivia Rodrigo, and Katy Perry. Many of these foremothers of pop music remain unnamed by Sheffield, invisible forces who are present throughout the text.

Understanding the ways in which women have historically been forced into passive roles in the recording industry is essential for understanding Sheffield’s central argument that Swift has “reinvented pop in the fangirl’s image” (8). While women have always been a favorite subject matter of pop music, they have not always been granted control over the narratives about them put forward by the recording industry. In the early-to-mid twentieth century, female artists faced overwhelming, systemic misogyny. Lucy O’Brien writes that Black women who became stars of the jazz and blues scene in the 1920s and 30s, like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Billie Holiday, “were among the first businesswomen,” but “their success was hard-earned” (Lucy O’Brien, She Bop II: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop, and Soul, Bloomsbury Publishing 2003, 10). Industry executives, who were almost never women, denied female artists equal, or even livable, pay. Sheffield presents Lesley Gore’s career as an essential case study in this gender dynamic, relating to readers how she was a “people-pleasing ingenue who got chewed up and spat out by the Sixties machine, dismissed as a disposable trifle” (84).

With the onset of second-wave feminism in the early 1970s, women in the western music industry began to collectively push for a new form of popular music that centered femininity and female perspectives. This effort crystalized into the Women’s Music movement, a feminist submovement that promotes the creation of music “by women, for women, about women, and financially controlled by women” (Cynthia M. Lont, “Women’s Music: No Longer a Small Private Party” in Rockin’ The Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements, South End Press 1992, 242). The Women’s Music movement was led by lesbian feminists who established their own labels, like Olivia Records and Redwood Records, to create a music culture “run along non-hierarchical principles and distributed through alternative channels” (O’Brien, 257). Released a decade beforehand, Lesley Gore’s 1963 song “You Don’t Own Me” is frequently cited as the recording that incited the Women’s Music movement, and its lyrics’ blatant demands for women’s self-determination became a rallying cry for second-wave feminism as a whole. Over sixty years later, Sheffield writes that “You Don’t Own Me” “is the premise of the Eras Tour, of Taylor’s Version, of [Swift’s] whole career” (84). Swift’s embrace of the song is an indication that the issues of self-determination and total autonomy that plagued the female artists of the previous century are ongoing.