Taylor Swift is a “rule breaker”, apparently

Taylor Swift, we can logically say, has had a damn good year. Her latest album, 1989, has turned even the most ardent haters into reluctant… well, toleraters, at the very least. It’s a great album, and Taylor Swift makes a great pop star and those two things combined have made her star soar pretty much out of sight. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that TSwift is on the cover of pretty much every magazine going, including The Hollywood Reporter, which is more traditionally reserved for stars of screen, stage and TV. But you see the headline – Taylor Swift is a “rule breaker”!

I suppose I’m a bit confused by the concept. Which rule(s) has Taylor Swift broken, exactly? She’s an upper-class white girl living the perfect popstar dream, colouring within the lines, playing by all the rules… or so it seems. I can buy her as a lot of things: America’s sweetheart, the darling of pop, a talented, independent woman, a feminist… but a rule breaker? Eh, sorry, no.

I suppose the implication here is that because Taylor decided to do some straight pop – which anyone who ever listened to Red would have seen coming anyway – she broke the rules of country music. Uh, I guess? Here’s her explanation:

“The biggest challenge this year actually was convincing members of my own team that this was a good call. I’d get called in front of a group of people who have known me and worked with me for years who’d say, ‘Are you sure that you want call the album 1989? We think it’s a weird title. Are you sure you want to put an album cover out that has less than half of your face on it? Are you positive that you want to take a genre that you’ve cemented yourself in and completely switch to a new one that you are a newcomer to?’”

Pretty small potatoes to fry when you’re already on top of the world, to be honest, so I’m not all that moved by this. Who knows, maybe it was a risk? But either way, it looks like one that’s paid off in myriad ways.

Here’s a vid from Taylor’s interview with THR: