“I have suffered a certain loss of personality—at first the loss was pleasant, easy; now it aches and stirs up my general disposition to be malcontented with a new fierceness.”

“Putting the shell shock that approximately 60% of the nation has been feeling into song is a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it, and who knew it would fall to America’s sweetheart? When the 2016 election went down, pop critics unhappy with the election result rushed to assure each other that at least we’d get a resurgence of great counterculture music out of it, a la the Nixon era. Instead, our rock and hip-hop heroes have proven unable or unwilling to rise to the occasion. Imagine the Woodstock veteran who comes to realize that the girl who sang “Bad Blood” has done a better job of encapsulating the current political climate’s bad blood than any of her elders have. One reason why “Miss Americana” is so effective, and may affect Swift’s audience so much, is because of how deeply sad it is, beneath its shiny, tense surface. And as any fan of “Red” knows, disappointment is something Swift does really well. Most protest music is ineffective on a mass scale because that anger feels like a lifetime condition, not something that’s been arrived at as the culmination of a long character arc. For better or worse, Rage Against the Machine didn’t sound like they just discovered rage-aholism yesterday. Swift, for her part, might be standing in for tens of millions of millennials who looked at the American machine and figured they could get away with not knowing or caring how the sausage was made. Some of her fans might have gotten there ahead of her, and a whole lot of others will be prompted to think hard about what they think of the state of the union by her lyrics. And if you think a mere album track can’t do that: you really need to meet a Swiftie.”