Critical Analysis Article

I chose the article titled “How Taylor Swift Played The Victim for a Decade And Made Her Entire Career” by Ellie Woodward. In this article the author tells us how Taylor Swift has been playing the victim long before the Kanye West incident of him interrupting her on stage during her Video Music Award acceptance speech. The author highlights that she has been playing the victim since the start of her career by writing about all the ways boys had wronged her in past relationships. https://www.buzzfeed.com/elliewoodward/how-taylor-swift-played-the-victim-and-made-her-entire-caree

Rhetorical Situation:

Authors Background: Ellie Woodward is a celebrity article editor for Buzzfeed UK. She has written several different celebrity articles including Taylor Swift.

Target Audience: Young adults who have an interest (good or bad) in Taylor Swift with the secondary audience being fans of Taylor Swift.

Context: This article was posted on January 31st, 2017. This was 2 months after Taylor Swift’s album ‘reputation’ was released and during the secondary feud Taylor was having with Kanye West and his wife Kim Kardashian West.

Argumentative Elements:

Main Argument: How Taylor Swift has created her entire career off of playing the victim.

Claims: Taylor Swift’s innocence contributed to her common theme of playing a victim.

Presenting herself as a victim of the betrayal of famous exes fueled the media.

Manipulating timelines in her relationship/breakup history in order to make it seem like songs on her album were about different celebrities to fuel sales.

Evidence:
Swift as the victim of the behavior of a bad boyfriend, or rejection by her crush. This is a common trope in teen pop music, but for Swift it became the very foundation of her posture as victim.

When she and Joe Jonas split in 2008, Swift went on primetime TV to assign the blame firmly to him. Speaking on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, she said: “When I find the right person, I’m not going to be able to remember the boy who broke up with me over the phone in 25 seconds when I was 18.”

The timeline of her relationship with Harry Styles and when her song ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ who she claims is about Styles don’t align. Swift revealed that the idea for the song came to her six months before her scheduled writing sessions – around January 2012. This was at least three months before she’d even met Styles. But the video for the single suggested clearly that it was about him, even using a lookalike with an identical tattoo.