But daddy, I’m daddy!
A belated Taylor Swift newsletter :)
Taylor Swift has a new album! (I started this newsletter a long time ago, can you tell, lol. But walk with me!) To me The Life of a Showgirl feels a little thin and stale. I’m not motivated to listen to it more than once, so I can’t robustly support this claim, but oh well. I’m not here to Review the Album. I am here with a read on the only song on the album I like: “Father Figure.”
It brought me so much joy and reflection!
Before I get into why, let us pause to listen to the song (it’s 3 minutes) and consider: Who are the father and progeny here?
One internet read is that this is a song about her masters, and the father in the early verses is Scott Borchetta or Scooter or whoever, some old business guy, addressing/”mentoring” baby Taylor. But by the end of the song the speaker (and the owner of Taylor’s masters) has changed. She’s daddy now!
This feels a little convoluted, but okay.
Another hypothesis: The song is about her relationship with Olivia Rodrigo, who Taylor ripped off as much as Olivia ever ripped her off? But I guess Taylor could still be mad.
I choose to walk a different path here. I read “Father Figure” as one more diss track about Taylor’s most recent ex, Matty Healy (lead singer of The 1975) (subject of The Tortured Poets Department, “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” etc.).
Viewed in this light it is very delightful and interesting.
Why it’s delightful:
Casting a man who casually broke your heart as your lackluster mentee in a song — something funny and true in that.
The song is obviously referencing “Father Figure” by George Michael, which had its most recent cultural moment in Babygirl, a movie about a hetero workplace affair with a power imbalance that favors the woman. But that doesn’t mean CEO Nicole Kidman comes out on top or controls the trajectory of the relationship. Feels like a good, complicating reference in an otherwise triumphant, big-dog song.
Key change for “whose portrait’s on the mantle?” !!!!!!
This song feels In Conversation with something Matty said in 2016: “I am NOT being Taylor Swift’s boyfriend… you know, FUCK. THAT. That’s also a man thing, a de-masculinating, emasculating thing.” (The comment lives on in secondary sources, but the original has been meticulously scrubbed from the internet… Tree Paine, is that you?) “Father Figure” strikes me as playing with this comment: “You’re right son, I was always daddy.” Love to see an alternative to the “Woman shrilly contesting a sexist comment” role.
Saying “you remind me of a younger me” to a man exactly your age, in your industry… one of the sickest burns ever.
Fun to see Taylor Swift, one of THEE most cisgender women we have, strap it on a little. It’s nothing groundbreaking, and nothing Nicki Minaj hasn’t done more and better and 10+ years ago, but genderbending is edgy in the context of Taylor Swift’s brand. She literally sold a “Life of a Showgirl cardigan box set” this album cycle. A showgirl… cardigan… an object playing so safe it doesn’t even make sense.
Why it’s interesting:
To me, “Father Figure” loudly echoes… Kanye West’s “Famous.” Uh oh!
To review, “Famous” is the song Taylor hated so much that it restarted her feud with Kanye and started her feud with Kim Kardashian. The GQ scoop and the phone recording leaks that sent Taylor spiraling into her Reputation era — that was all about “Famous,” and whether she approved these two Kanye lines about her / the 2009 VMAs mic grab:
I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex
Why? I made that bitch famous
Now, in “Father Figure,” she’s not exactly telling us “I made that bitch famous,” though she was repping The 1975 in 2014 and there’s a case to be made. The claim is a little more mournful: “I tried to make that bitch famous.”
She did. She made a surprise cameo at a The 1975 show in 2023, and the band was slated to open for her EU leg of The Eras Tour, iirc, up until she and Matty broke up. (Tree! You made a source hard to find on that.)
But ultimately, Taylor’s efforts backfired. Matty left their relationship widely disliked, after he made an appearance on a podcast where he made comments / laughed along with jokes that people read as racist, sexist, homophobic, and disrespectful to Ice Spice. The vibes were so bad Matty started watching what he says?!! The ultimate depression symptom, for him.
But seriously, people were mad. Not Ice Spice… but Swifties. A lot of Swifties who had discovered his existence ~2 days prior. To them, his comments and snickerings on the podcast were his first and only utterances. Stripped of context in Taylor World, he experienced the extreme end of natural PR consequences for what he said.
So yes, Taylor did help Matty’s career by dating him while wayyyy more famous than him, and connecting him with a new audience. She did make some (audibly rushed!) efforts to “cover up [his] scandals.” But I’d say she also put him in a uniquely vulnerable professional position by surrounding him with a fandom that wasn’t his.
Like “Famous,” it all makes a person wonder what constitutes a professional favor.
Ultimately, I think Taylor and Matty lived a reality HR has been telling us about for decades: It’s hard to be close, or even helpful, across huge power differentials. The lines between support and control and abuse blur, as Taylor herself chronicles in songs like “All Too Well” and “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve”; she captures the blurring most insightfully when she’s on the losing end of a power imbalance.
In “Father Figure,” she takes on the winner role and blurs history in her favor even more than Kanye does in “Famous” — casting herself as the betrayed, benevolent hero. In “Famous,” Kanye’s just a benevolent hero… but no one is betrayed. Life is fun and hopeful. They might still have sex!
(I find the “Famous” lyrics pretty gross, but in a similar way to “Actually Romantic.” Why are we sexualizing these vulnerable, sexless moments — the VMAs mic grab and “Sympathy is a knife,” respectively??? It’s weird.)
Now I don’t want to be too hard on Taylor for the (possible) punching-down moment in “Father Figure.” She says Matty ghosted her, and after they had known each other a long time. That hurts BAD and warps your judgment. I also think “Father Figure” is sort of tongue in cheek, a bit “Blank Space”; “Matty thinks I’m some freaking mafia don careerist because I worked hard on my tour, lol.”
But here’s my closing thought: I think Taylor very primally wants people to understand her feelings. It’s why she writes confessional songs, and why they’re good. And sometimes, to feel understood, people end up inflicting their feelings on other people without even meaning to. It’s like… an effort to connect?
I was recently reading an article largely unrelated to Taylor Swift, “The Pain of Perfectionism,” and this passage stood out to me:
The analyst Elizabeth Spillius wrote about a time when she felt that sessions with one patient were going badly; then she realized that her perfectionist patient was subtly “trying to make me want to be perfect and then to feel discouraged and despairing, just as she expected herself to be perfect and was constantly disappointing herself.”
The patient’s trying to induce her feelings in her therapist, instead of just verbally describing them. I see a bit of this in “Father Figure,” too. It’s a diss track that’s also a bid for connection: Taylor strikes a Kanye pose and feels a little of how he felt making “Famous.” Taylor makes Matty the unwilling subject of a powerful person’s mentorship anthem, so he can know how she felt hearing “Famous.”
We’re all getting to know each other forever, I guess! Even after it seems like we’re done.
Question for readers
What did you think of The Life of a Showgirl and “Father Figure”?
Linxxx
Do you want to read EVEN MORE of my thoughts about Taylor Swift? Well here you go and seek treatment.
The GOAT Taylor Swift fan zine. Thanks Tavi!
“Matty Healy… took over the DJ booth to play ‘Call Me Maybe’ while smoking a cigarette.”
I love freshly-sober Matty on equine therapy (4:46).
Random product rec: this hair mask is AMAZING.
I’ll write a research memo about new/scary Trump policies for ya — reply to this newsletter to request!