[Critique] The Genius and Taylor Swift’s Cardigan

An Analysis of an Analysis of the Lyrics

Hey everybody,

We’re back with our second dose of content on our first week of bi-weekly posts, special last-time-I’ll-be-bringing-that-up edition. 

For today’s piece I wanted to do something a little more specific to my scholarly background and delve into a little bit of textual analysis. As an English Major, I’ve spent countless hours in high school and college digging deep into lines of text, prying apart layers of interconnected and referential material to build a deep and enriched profile of meaning from the most minute details. Doing this not only allows us to pay proper respect to the meanings baked in by the authors themselves, but also to build new and exciting interpretations that extend and renew the significance of the text for new schools of thought and future generations. 

The thing that I’ve always loved the most about that pursuit is that the subjects of its focus are limitless. You can (and if you’ve got a sufficiently alt-leaning English professor, likely will) write a dissertation on the literary significance of the ingredients on a ketchup bottle. Today, however, I’d like to focus on something slightly less intellectually complex than ketchup ingredients: Cardigan, the hit track from Taylor Swift’s critically acclaimed 2020 album Folklore.

My initial plan for this piece was to dig into the song lyrics directly, but as I began to re-read them in preparation for this, I realized that would be akin to trying to scrape one last scoop of Cherry Garcia from the inside of Ben Cohen’s or Jerry Greenfield’s mummified corpses. The genius.com entry for this song is so exhaustively annotated that David Foster Wallace would think it’s kidding. Since I couldn’t dig deeper into these lyrics than genius.com did without fracking equipment, I decided it would be fun to take a look at some of the annotations on the song lyrics from genius.com and see what inferences can be made. However, before we begin that exercise, I don’t want my analysis of this song to go to waste, so I’ve distilled it into the following image:

Alright, let’s get started right of the bat with the first three lines of the song:

Vintage tee, brand new phone

High heels on cobblestones

When you are young, they assume you know nothing

I count four objects and two ambiguous pronouns in those three lines, a few adjectives for good measure, culminating in a final line that would have made me purse the corners of my eyes in pained agreement 14 years ago. 

This is a good time to mention that I like Taylor Swift; there are several of her songs that I really jam to, and I do not intend for this article to be an evisceration of her whatsoever. I’ll make a few jokes at her expense, but I’m not listening to Taylor Swift because I accidentally spilled my Sazerac onto my copy of Eliot’s Four Quartets. She’s a talented pop artist and writing pop lyrics at a talented pop artist’s level. But now, let’s take a look at the genius.com annotations for those three lines in order, and let’s marvel at the sheer amount of meaning they were able to glean from less words than the opening stanza of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Line by line: 

From Taylor: Vintage tee, brand new phone

From Genius: This line uses the literary device of juxtaposition, placing two contrasting ideas in close proximity, to imply that the relationships we assume exist between age (vintage/new, young/old) and “knowing” are not as clear-cut as they may seem. The stanza also details Taylor’s past four musical and personal eras. “Vintage tee, brand new phone” references the RED era, in which her instagram focused on a hipster aesthetic. “High heels on cobblestones” points to her love for the Tribeca area of New York City, where she lived during her 1989 era. She references reputation in “Sequin smile, black lipstick,” as evidenced in her 2016 Met Gala look. Finally, "Sensual politics” refers to the Lover era, where she became a more outspoken voice both in politics and in her romance with Joe Alwyn.

From Me: To begin, Genius here has correctly identified the literary device of “juxtaposition” evidenced in this line, but misses the mark slightly by identifying the subject of the device as the “young/old” dichotomy, rather than the “tee-shirt/phone” pairing, tee-shirts and phones of course being diametric opposites. Genius then goes on to note that knowing is not as clear-cut as it may seem, clearly referring to how we know nothing about this tee-shirt or this phone. Make, model, point of origin are all withheld, leaving us to reckon with these objects sans context, and cleverly allowing the listener to then imagine themselves in these tee-shirt wearing, new-phone-having circumstances. Taylor here embraces the postmodern concept of the death of the author, abandoning the responsibility of dictating meaning and surrendering agency of meaning construction to the reader. Truly to pack so much into five goddamn words is a remarkable feat. Genius then goes on to discuss in detail the rest of the first verse and the significance of the lines therein, but I’m going to move on, because even though it does that here, every single other one of the lines in the first verse has its own annotation, and at this rate I’ll have my doctorate in Taylor Swift just in time to write a beautiful T-Swift pastiche about my memory of watching our fucking sun die. 

From Taylor: High heels on cobblestones

From Genius: The later track “betty” touches on how this relationship ultimately crumbled:
I was walking home on broken cobblestones
Just thinking of you

From Me: So either this line is hauntingly echoed in a later track on the album, breaking down the temporal space between this song and that, creating in the mind of the listener a kind of simultaneity where we can experience both the joy in and loss of this love, or Taylor Swift didn’t move after her breakup so of course it’s the same street. 

From Taylor: When you are young, they assume you know nothing

From Genius: The idea of youth being too naive to understand or change the world is a common critique. It’s dismissive and assumes that people like Taylor have nothing to contribute to ‘serious’ discussions. Taylor also sang about the power of youth in politics in her standalone 2019 single “Only The Young”

Only one thing can save us

Only the young (Only the young)

Taylor sets up an interesting paradox with a callback to this line later in the song where she sings:

‘Cause I knew everything when I was young

She also references this idea later in the album, on “betty:”

“I’m only seventeen, I don’t know anything”

From Me: Given the thematic weight of this line, it is obviously much more ripe for analysis than “Vintage tee, brand new phone,” which has a longer annotation even if you cut off everything that isn’t explicitly talking about those two lines from earlier. Genius here begins reminding us that the idea that youth being too inexperienced and naive to contribute to “serious” discussions is both a common critique and also a dismissive reduction of people like Taylor. I’d like to pause here to tell Greta Thunberg to go fuck herself. Maybe if Taylor had changed that lyric to “CO2 is trouble when it wafts in” we’d actually be getting somewhere right now. Genius then goes on to mention that Taylor discussed youth politics in “Only the Young.” However, the quote from the song that they cite afterwards seems to indicate that Taylor “discussed” it in the same way that I “discussed” Greta Thunberg fucking herself earlier in this paragraph. Genius finally touches on the fact that these lines are undercut by later lines in this track and others, noting that she thought she knew everything when she was young, and then that she didn’t know anything at seventeen. Here’s where a little bit of close attention to the source material can help to parse meaning out of potentially disparate lines. “When you are young they assume you know nothing,” is a present-tense. “Cause I knew everything when I was young,” is past-tense. “I’m only seventeen, I don’t know anything,” is present-tense. Authors will often present plot points outside of chronological order to give them greater impact. Clearly these lines are a masterful example of this device working to great effect, as the practiced reader can then deduce that at some point between “when you are young they assume you know nothing” and age seventeen, Taylor was tragically stricken with early-onset Alzheimers, heartbreakingly reminiscing about the immeasurable loss in a rare moment of clarity later in life.

Alright class, well, I know that we’re only three lines into the song, but I think that we all have plenty to think about until our next installment of “The Genius and Taylor Swift’s Cardigan.” I think there’s enough material left for us to do a whole semester on this. Stay tuned!