“The Last Great American Dynasty” by Taylor Swift, Tuesday, November 12, 2024
On folklore, Taylor Swift’s essential fall album, the singer delves into the craft of storytelling. While many of Swift’s songs tell stories, until her eighth studio album, most of those stories were about herself. Tales about “betty,” James, and Augustine could be a metaphor for the singer but it was quite refreshing to hear about other people in towns created by the singer. With Swift returning to making anthemic pop hits, the lowkey double album cycle has come and gone. “The Last American Dynasty” is a song on folklore in which Swift tells the story about the previous owner of her house. The song tells the story of the wealthy widow to the heir of the Standard Oil fortune, Rebecca “Betty” Harkness. It’s a kind of country song, romanticizing its subject and drawing parallels between Harkness and Swift, setting them up as outsiders unable to fit into the social classes they happened to belong to.
THERE GOES THE MADDEST WOMAN THIS TOWN HAS EVER SEEN. Taylor Swift has become a feminist icon--a self-made woman. The men Swift dates are below her income bracket, subverting archaic yet all too present expectations of women. In 2013, Swift bought Holiday House in Rhode Island. The realtor told Swift about the estate’s previous owner. When talking about the song with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Desner on the Disney+ special Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions, Swift said that hearing about Harkness she “wanted to know everything about her.” For years, Swift wanted to craft Harkness’s story into a song, finally releasing “The Last Great American Dynasty” in 2020. Swift writes about Harkness’s eccentric, decadent practices in a way that endears the heiress, though she only focuses on the positive aspects. Swift sees Harkness as a feminist icon. The socialite certainly had some admirable qualities, disrupting the upper class as a wealthy woman enjoying the fruits of her inheritance. But notably absent from the song are the objectionably damning details of Harkness’s character, including how she treated her children and grandchild. One of the reasons she built her “saltbox house” into the 11,000-square-foot mansion with eight kitchens and 21 bathrooms it became was to have accommodations for governesses to take care of the children completely out of her sight.
HOLIDAY HOUSE SAT QUIETLY ON THAT BEACH. The way Taylor Swift tells Rebecca Harkness sets the socialite up as a likable antihero but her legacy is more complicated than merely being a badass. Swift’s omissions and revisions, such as changing the cat that she dyed “key lime green” to a dog, show just how much Swift is trying to relate with this probably horrible person. The criticisms of Swift used to be about her dating life and her celebrity feuds. But perhaps a more valid criticism is about her carbon emissions generated by her private planes or that she has been repeatedly blocking other female artists from achieving their potential by churning out repackaging of her old records to feed a capitalist society that in turn exacerbates climate change. The true story about Harkness reminds us that legacies are mixed. Americans love a Great Gatsby story even when they are incurring The Grapes of Wrath. The myth of the self-made billionaire makes us think that we too can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. It’s in the post-Industrial revolution psyche and reinforced by Reaganomics that make the American electorate believe that hands-off conservative leadership will somehow make the businesses pay their workers well. These conservative ideas that come out and songs like today’s song are ones that I feel like I’ve overlooked when the shock of last week hit me. It almost makes me want to start another blog series. We’ll see. How could the American people fall for completely on sound economical math? How could a wealthy man serving them food at McDonald’s for one shift prove that he was just like them? Why did it take so long for Taylor Swift to finally endorse Harris? In my own bubble podcasts and newspapers, I thought Trump was fringe. I thought really the American people didn’t feel this way. And it turns out that 49% of the voting population didn’t feel that way. Swift writes that Harkness is part of the last great American Dynasty, but it turns out that probably many listeners felt similarly about Trump. Even if Trump really does “hate Taylor Swift” as he tweeted after using an AI generated meme of Swift supporting him prompting Swift to endorse Harris.
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