Taylor Swift is fascinating – but you really wouldn’t want to be her

There had been some question about whether Taylor Swift’s Netflix special would actually appear. Last year it seemed that the ownership of her old songs by her previous record label would scupper it. But no, Ms Swift is not to be resisted, and lo, Miss Americana is available right now on Netflix, one of its two big music documentaries for the spring.

Many older men seem to have a visceral distaste for Ms Swift. If you share that distaste, then I’m sorry, it’s your loss, because she’s a fascinating figure (who has also made three truly terrific albums in Fearless, Red and 1989), and Miss Americana is well worth watching.

What makes her so fascinating is the way her life and work blend into one another: she’s been mind-bendingly famous since her mid-teens, and her principal songwriting subject for some years has been what people think of her. Her very life has often appeared to be a performance, and Miss Americana feeds into that. It’s an official film — there is nothing in it Swift does not want the world to see — but it’s revealing nevertheless. Her role in Miss Americana is as the young woman trying to transform herself, to secure self-determination (the heart of it is her decision to speak out publicly against a Trump-backed candidate in Tennessee in the 2018 midterms, to the horror of those around her). There’s a point at which she reflects on the great dilemma of being Taylor Swift: she is required to spend her whole life calibrating her behaviour to the expectations of others, for fear of being viewed as less than perfect, only to then be accused of being calculating. You really wouldn’t want to be Taylor Swift.

I am ploughing my way through music programming because my normal evening activity of watching bands has gone with the virus (this column would have been about gigs by Warmduscher and King Krule were it not for the End of the World).