Among Taylor Swift defenders, there is a certain mantra: Wait for the second single. That mantra has failed us now.
Taylor Swift’s new single “You Need to Calm Down” is exhausting
The new song harks back to “Mean.” In a bad way.
Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.
When Swift releases a new album, she usually premieres it with a single that has wide blockbuster appeal, something catchy and fun and maybe a little bland. That’s how we got “Shake It Off” from 1989 and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” from Red. Then she follows it with a second single that’s a little bit more idiosyncratic, something personality-driven and specific: “Blank Space.” “Begin Again.”
So in April, when Swift introduced her forthcoming album Lover with the aggressively generic “Me!,” her defenders cautioned everyone to wait, to hold out for single two from her new album Lover (then unannounced, now officially forthcoming), which would surely do something more interesting.
The second single from Lover is now here. It’s called “You Need to Calm Down,” and while it’s not exactly generic, it’s not on the level of “Blank Space.”
“You Need to Calm Down” instead harks back to a much earlier Swift song, the song that perhaps features Taylor Swift at her most insufferable: “Mean,” in which Swift explained that she was being bullied by critics and that her experience was the same as being a gay teen bullied by homophobes, but luckily, she was rising above it.
In “You Need to Calm Down,” Swift instructs her haters that they should calm down about her. “I’ve learned a lesson that stressin’ and obsessin’ ’bout somebody else is no fun,” she explains. Likewise, haters should stop bullying people at LGBTQ Pride parades (“Why are you mad when you could be GLAAD?”), and also they should stop pitting the women of pop music against each other. “We all know now we all got crowns,” Swift sings. (That last sentiment is especially timely because Swift and her longtime foe Katy Perry just made a much-publicized peace deal.)
Swift is playing one of her worst games here: She’s linking criticism of her as a celebrity and as a musician with homophobic and anti-feminist bullying, and she’s suggesting that they’re all equally wrong. It’s as though she thinks there’s a marginalized group of people who are historically disenfranchised from political power and as such should receive certain protections, and that group is named Taylor Swift. To quote Swift herself: I’m just like, “This is exhausting.”
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