Taylor Swift has been criticized her whole life for so many things. She's been criticized for having too many boyfriends, for writing too many songs about them, for abandoning the genre of country, for fighting with other celebrities, for trying to avert attention to herself, and so many more things. Taylor Swift's most recent album, Reputation, addressed this. A lot of the people avoided her album after they had listened to her released singles, thinking that her switch in style of music was unpleasing. What the public didn't realize was the fact that Taylor Swift's album Reputation went much deeper than just the music. Recently, Taylor Swift released her Reputation tour documentary on Netflix streaming services. The documentary was basically her live concert in full for people to see.
Taylor Swift's documentary caught the eye of a lot of different people who weren't fans and had the world suddenly finding a deeper meaning to the girl who just "writes songs about her exes".
Swift's whole show focuses on the fact that so many people are have been commenting on her reputation with little no information about her actual personal life. The whole show and album focus on the fact that she wrestled with trying to hard to clean up her reputation until she finally decided that it wasn't going to bother her anymore. She starts her concert with a mashup of different audio clips from different news and celebrity gossip channels talking about her in a negative light and the show ends with a short film with a statement that says, "In the death of her reputation she finally felt alive".
Leaving this concert, I felt like I had something to think about and to reflect on.
This statement alone blows me away. Whether or not you're a Swift fan, I believe that Taylor's message is something very important for us all to hear. How many of us worry about what other people are going to think of us? We don't wear the things we want to wear because we are afraid of getting judged. We don't admit to our music tastes because we are afraid that our "guilty pleasures" are too embarrassing to share. We wear different masks for different people in order to fit in. The pressure to be someone we are not is something that is extremely overwhelming and it often suffocates us, preventing us from obtaining happiness within our own selves.
While some may think that Swift released this stadium tour documentary in order to promote her brand and image, I personally think that Swift timed the release of this documentary before the new year in order to inspire us with a goal for the new year. Swift challenges us in this documentary to leave our worry about our reputations behind and to embrace our true selves. When we abandon our reputations, we find a new found love and confidence in ourselves that we have never been able to find before. Abandoning our reputations allows us to be brave, resilient, strong, and independent. As we start the year of 2019, I encourage you to take the advice that Taylor Swift offers. You never know, you may find yourself happier than you've ever been.
