Taylor Swift’s “Mine” gives false hope to feminist movement

“Mine,” a new single by Taylor Swift, was released Aug. 4. After one month, the song still (unsurprisingly) holds much popularity with mainstream audiences, reaching the third spot on “Billboard Hot 100.” 

I’ve always considered popular music to be somewhat like religion. I can’t criticize someone who just lost a child and is coping with it the only way he or she can—by turning to religion.

Fairly similarly, I can’t criticize someone who just tragically separated with a partner (due to a heated debate over who ate the last piece of pie) and is coping the only way he or she can—by listening to a Taylor Swift song. Again, I can’t criticize. But nevertheless, I don’t think it’s healthy to blindly follow either.  

I’ll be passed off as pretentious or arrogant, but people really need to consider what artists like Swift get across in their near-meaningless songs, or what the mass public will make of them. 

Like most pop, the main problem with Swift’s song is how distorted its message is. Never mind that it’s completely lacking musically (a mass of G, C, and similar chords played on top of a metronome beat). Lyrically, the song shows such an unhealthy point of view that it’s just bad.

Sung in a first-person narrative, the song begins with Swift telling us about a young man she met, who attends college and waits tables part time. (The “narrator” and her love interest are unnamed in the song, but judging from the music video, we’ll call the two, “Swift” and “young man.”) 

The two fall in love. This is the chorus and is described as a memory: they sat by the water and he “put [his] arm around [her] for the first time.”

Lyrically speaking, the song isn’t completely terrible, up to this point. It has potential because Swift even tries bring realism and maturity into the picture: “But we got bills to pay. We got nothing figured out.” 

Unfortunately, the final scene is the distorted picture that causes the song to morbidly implode. The two lovers fight at 2:30 a.m. Swift runs out of the house and onto the street, crying. She wants him out of her life. The young man runs out, too, and recites the chorus of the song from his point of view—how he “put [his] arm around [her] for the first time,” and how Swift is the “best thing that’s ever been [his].” Swift then falls in love with him again. 

I laughed so hard my windows shattered. 

So it turns out the feminist movement is going strong. The song’s lesson here, girls, is this: your lame boyfriend will make you cry and run out onto the streets, but with “poetry” that would make Soulja Boy cringe, he will make you love him again. 

This will repeat. Over. And over again. Like, have fun not being dependent on a man, right? Have fun showing the world what the centuries-long struggle for female independence has come to. I can let all the other distorted points of view pass, but this is one is too hilarious.

Also, in the music video, Swift marries the young man and has children.