Rob Sheffield is a music critic at Rolling Stone and the magazine’s in-house Swiftie. This has occasionally caused him grief, as when his rave “instant classic” review of Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, was so diverged from mainstream critical assessment it provoked many responses saying Sheffield couldn’t be objective when it came to Swift’s work. Sheffield also maintains the magazine’s ranking of all of Swift’s songs, updating it every time she releases a new album or more vault tracks on one of her Taylor’s Versions.
As a big fan of Swift’s whose opinion on TTPD was much closer to Sheffield’s than the critical establishment, I was very interested to hear that he was publishing a book about her career. That interest was significantly curtailed when I saw that the book was only 202 pages long. Swift’s career is nearing the end of it’s second decade, and a book that brief didn’t seem like it could possibly cover it in depth. Reviews were generally mediocre as well, so the book went on my back-burner until I recently saw that it was available as an Audiobook on Spotify Premium.
Sheffield narrates his own writing, and does a credible job there. The content, however, is more of an issue. Heartbreak is the National Anthem (the title is derived from Swift’s song “New Romantics”, a deluxe track from her first purely pop album, 1989) would be a fair introduction to someone completely unfamiliar with her career, but for the informed fan it too often felt like an extended version of her Wikipedia page. In roughly chronological order, he runs through her albums, her boyfriends, her public controversies, and her business deals. If you’ve been meaning to look into why Swift and Kim Kardashian don’t get along, or why she’s re-releasing albums she put out years ago, Sheffield’s definitely got you covered.
What’s missing is context. Sheffield’s subtitle boldly claims that Taylor Swift reinvented the genre of pop music, but Sheffield doesn’t seem interested in laying out an argument for his position. He rarely cites which artists Taylor was inspired by or which she diverged from. He doesn’t really discuss her music at all, focusing more on her lyrics. This is fair to the extent that Swift isn’t really noted for her instrumentation, but his exploration of her lyricism is only surface-level as well. His entire evidence of her having reinvented pop consists of the fact that so many young female artists cite her as an inspiration, though many of those artists are quite different from her stylistically.
The bottom line is that I don’t see what a big fan of Swift’s would get out of reading this book, nor do I see why anyone who isn’t a big fan would read it. Maybe there’s a grandfather out there who wants to understand what his grandchildren are talking about, but that’s about it.