Taylor Swift Really Hates Matty Healy, and Also Maybe Us

In her eleventh studio album, Swift grapples with the consequences of the monoculture she’s built around herself.

Damn, Taylor Swift is mad.

That was my initial reaction after listening to her eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, which dropped at midnight on Friday. And this isn’t Reputation, carefully curated, easily monetizable anger with a cute little snake mascot. This seems to be real rage, the kind that comes from lived pain, the kind that has led Swift to maybe let us behind the curtain in a real way for the first time in a long time.

It’s hard to imagine that we could possibly ever in this lifetime need to know anything more about Taylor Swift. I’ve joked often that we now live in a Swift monoculture, but it’s kind of true. I really didn’t think she could get more famous after Folklore and Evermore, but then she did Midnights, the Eras Tour, and emerged from a more than six year relationship with Joe Alwyn to do pap walks all over New York City. Then she started dating Travis Kelce, and well, we all know what happened next.

It really feels like Swift is inescapable. No corner of my life is safe from constant discussion about her: not the internet, not my group chats, not shopping at boutiques or going to coffee shops. Not only is every person seemingly obsessed with her, every business is too, or at least, obsessed with latching onto her now billion-dollar brand.

And it does not seem to be waning at all. In October, I wrote that I suspected a “Taylor Swift fatigue” was imminent, because her brand had become so saturated. I’m mature enough to admit that I was wrong, but it’s kind of insane just how wrong I was. Swift not only didn’t start to rub people the wrong way, she won the Grammy for Album of the Year. She literally took over the Super Bowl. Every event, from the Golden Globes to Coachella to the Met Gala, has been overtaken by questions of whether or not she will attend and if she does, she becomes the main attraction.

As Swift herself says, she’s a Mastermind, and her total domination of our world is carefully crafted by her now unassailable marketing machine. It’s always been very obvious, as well, that this is what she wants. Swift makes no apologies for her ambition, saying in interviews and her Miss Americana documentary that she deeply cares about things like topping the charts, album sales, and winning awards, much more so than you’d think considering how successful she already has been. And she seems to get a special satisfaction from connecting with her fans, who breathlessly follow her every move, speculate on her life, and constantly search for her “Easter eggs.” If Swifties are a monster, Taylor is their Frankenstein.

But in The Tortured Poets Department, Swift seems to aim her weapons squarely at her own creation: her fans’ deep parasocial relationship with her. The schism, it appears, came over her extremely ill-fated whirlwind fling with The 1975’s Matty Healy. If you were living under a rock, a brief synopsis. Swift broke up with Alwyn, immediately started dating bad-boy rocker Healy, may or may not have said she loved him on stage, fans began to rage against him online for his myriad racist and sexist remarks, and then they split. She then started dating Kelce, and many fans who were mad at her for dating, in their estimation, a scumbag like Healy quickly forgave her for the misstep and embraced her new Americana love story.

Healy, to basically everyone’s surprise, is the main antagonist of The Tortured Poets Department, instead of Alwyn, who gets barely a mention in comparison. It seems their fling was, in a nutshell, extremely toxic and ended very poorly, and Swift seems extremely bitter about the whole thing and how he treated her. In one song, titled “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” she lets him have it.

“You are what you did, And I’ll forget you but I’ll never forgive, the smallest man who ever lived,” she sings.

But an equally biting missive seems to be aimed at a surprising target: the fans who thought they knew better than she did about her relationship with Healy. Titled “But Daddy I Love Him,” Swift accuses those judging her relationship as”the most judgmental creeps” who “say they want what’s best for me, sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see.”

“I’ll tell you somethin’ right now, I’d rather burn my whole life down, Than listen to one more second of all this bitchin’ and moanin,’” she says. “I’ll tell you somethin’ ’bout my good name. It’s mine alone to disgrace. I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing.”

Okay, sure. But honestly, what did she expect? Swift has spent her entire career building what she now has: an empire of a fandom with perhaps the most parasocial relationship to parasocial in history. Her fans think they can advise and criticize and judge her because that is the relationship she has built with them, as not a pop icon, but a friend who understands them on a deeper level. And it seems for the most part she enjoys the monoculture she built, when it is giving her accolades and making her a billion dollars. After all, with Kelce, she is more out in the open than ever, and apparently loves it.

Of course this has consequences! Of course sometimes her fandom—which is frequently jokingly compared to QAnon or a cult for its devotion—feels entitled to feel personally affected by herr admittedly poor choices. If Swift wants *waves hands* all this, she has to accept that her life is 100 percent hers anymore. How can it be?

If you’re a Swiftie feeling sad about this though, don’t be. It appears the rage Swift felt was actually just a brief moment in time. In the album’s “prologue,” she appears to be speaking directly to her fans, admitting that she was wrong, and asking them for forgiveness.

“At this hearing, I stand before my fellow members of the Tortured Poets Department…as you might all unfortunately recall, I had been struck with a case of a restricted humanity,” she writes. “Which explains my plea here today of temporary insanity.”

The thing is though, I liked the song. Sometimes it feels like Swift can be so curated, so focused on world domination, that she loses her humanity a bit. I often wonder how she could possibly be dealing with this level of attention and not losing it a little bit.

Turns out she is, but just a little.