Miss Americana: Taylor Swift Review

Miss+Americana%3A+Taylor+Swift+Review

Jacob Rodney, News and Website Team

When you hear the name Taylor Swift, you probably immediately have a thought: Kanye West, Love Story, red lipstick, pop-star, idol, snake. Despite what you think of her, watching the documentary will let you see the inside of a celebrity’s life which isn’t as pretty as it seems. As you probably know, Taylor Swift has been in the music industry for about 13 years now and has made some top Billboard 200 songs. She has also been caught up in a lot of drama lately, with Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, and Scooter Braun. This documentary was a way for her to get out what she needed to say about everything she’s ever done, and we start with the beginning of her career. 

We see some old home videos from when she was 5 until about 16 as she talks about what she wanted to be seen as. Her ideology was to be a good person, do the right thing, and be the person everyone wanted her to be. Then it cuts to the Reputation Stadium Tour, showing how her being the “good girl” didn’t go as planned. This perfect persona she had tried to keep and maintain came crashing down, first beginning when Kanye took the microphone from her at the 2009 VMAs award show. She explains that “At the time I didn’t know they were booing at him [for] doing that. I thought that they were booing me. For someone who’s built their whole belief system on getting people to clap for you, the whole crowd booing is a pretty formative experience.” It then became thinner as magazines and talk shows started calling her out for her dating life, weight, and personality. And you know how this ends, with Kanye West’s song “Famous”. “#TaylorSwiftIsOverParty was trending worldwide. Do you know how many people have to be tweeting that they hate you for that to happen?’ She states soberly. “When people fall out of love with you, there’s nothing you can do to change their mind; they just don’t love you anymore.” 

She brings up her songwriting and more musical side saying that if she doesn’t top herself every time it’ll be “deemed as a colossal failure”. We see when the Grammy nominations came out, Reputation was not nominated, and she immediately started talking about making a better record and working harder while Reputation set records and so did the tour. When she starts thinking about her next album, she knows it has to be really good or she’ll be thrown away. They show parts of her writing the song “The Man”, where she says she constantly has to be strategizing how not to be seen as insane or anything negative. 

There is also a bit of her family and personal life in the documentary. Her mom, Andrea Swift, had cancer and that was a huge thing for her. While it wasn’t a happy ordeal, it kept her sane saying, “But like, do you really care if the internet doesn’t like you today if you’re mom’s sick from her chemo.” We later see her talking about how she would starve herself to be skinnier because of photos or comments she would get. “It’s better to think you look fat than to look sick,” she says while discussing the impossible beauty standards women are being held to. Then we go into her more political stance, showing us how the Dixie Chicks were destroyed for their political stance and how she was always told to be quiet about hers. Obviously, we know her political stance now and she’s been very active in the past few years. We also get to hear her talk about when she was sexually assaulted. She says that the process is dehumanizing, the other person looks at you like you did one thing wrong, and how there isn’t any feeling of victory when it’s over. 

After seeing everything she’s gone through and hearing what she had to say, a lot of people’s opinions are going to change. There were so many things she’s gone through that made her so much stronger than most people originally thought. This was definitely a much needed documentary to see Taylor Swift in a new light and see her as her true self.