A Catholic mom recently questioned why Taylor Swift’s songs contain so many swear words, wondering whether the profanity throughout her music is a failed attempt by the singer to make herself more relatable.
Maggie Phillips wrote for Angelus News that while Swift’s music appeals across generations, she’s been “embarrassed” before to listen to some of Swift’s songs while she’s with her young daughters.
“As a Catholic, a mom, and someone who likes a good sing-a-long, I have to ask: What’s with all the swearing, Tay?” she asked, pointing out that Swift’s first album with profanity, “Reputation,” “felt like it was supposed to signal a more mature version of the pop phenom.”
Later albums continued featuring swear words, with Swift’s 2024 album, “The Tortured Poets’ Department” containing seven explicit songs. Eight of the 12 songs on her latest album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” have profanity.
“I can’t help but feel this is gratuitous,” Phillips wrote. “Having spent most of her early adulthood as a celebrity when the rest of us were getting jobs and contributing to our Roth IRAs so as not to inconvenience our loved ones in our dotage, a 35-year-old billionaire putting out an album where three-fourths of the songs are marked ‘explicit’ smacks of a kind of arrested development. Swearing is an 11-year-old’s idea of maturity.”
Phillips hypothesized that Swift’s writing of songs that include profanity is a desperate attempt to convince her audience that she’s “all grown up now” or that she’s relevant to the average person. However, according to the Catholic mom, Swift’s explicit songs convey an inauthentic message.
“When she peppers her music with profanity, Swift is not only letting down the legions of little girls who love her beautiful, shiny costumes. It’s condescension,” she wrote. “We can only conclude that she is debasing herself because whether she realizes it or not, that’s how she sees the average Jane.”
Phillips said that a good test for engaging with content, including Swift’s music, is to ask whether an encounter with the work leaves “us feeling worse about ourselves” or “less able to see ourselves and others as beloved children of God.”
She later added, “Art doesn’t only have to portray wholesomeness to be good. It does have to be true. I’ll listen to ‘The Life of a Showgirl.’ If I let my girls listen, it will be the clean version. But actually, I don’t know if they’ll be interested. My middle-schooler said her friends are kind of over Swift. Kids are good at identifying phoniness. Are grown-ups?”
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