Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: A Celebration of Taylor Swift's Musical Journey, Cultural Impact, and Reinvention of Pop Music for Swifties by a Swiftie

In Heartbreak, Sheffield locates Taylor Swift at the end of a long lineage of female artists who have navigated and impacted the recording industry since its inception. Many of these predecessors are identified and discussed in the text: Stevie Nicks, Joni Mitchell, Lesley Gore, and Carly Simon among them. Sheffield also discusses influential contemporaries of Swift, like Beyoncé, Olivia Rodrigo, and Katy Perry. Many of these foremothers of pop music remain unnamed by Sheffield, invisible forces who are present throughout the text.

Understanding the ways in which women have historically been forced into passive roles in the recording industry is essential for understanding Sheffield’s central argument that Swift has “reinvented pop in the fangirl’s image” (8). While women have always been a favorite subject matter of pop music, they have not always been granted control over the narratives about them put forward by the recording industry. In the early-to-mid twentieth century, female artists faced overwhelming, systemic misogyny. Lucy O’Brien writes that Black women who became stars of the jazz and blues scene in the 1920s and 30s, like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Billie Holiday, “were among the first businesswomen,” but “their success was hard-earned” (Lucy O’Brien, She Bop II: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop, and Soul, Bloomsbury Publishing 2003, 10).