Fearless Love: An Existentialist Analysis of Taylor Swift’s Fearless Phillip Kong, Pomona ’24 Staff Writer I. Introduction Taylor Swift is a household name in Western pop music, taking the industry by storm for most of the twenty-first century with recognizable melodies about heartbreak and romance. A decorated artist, Swift won her first Grammy Album of the Year in 2010 with Fearless, making her the youngest recipient of the award. The album was touted by critics for its nostalgic reflections on her younger self.1 Additionally, Swift’s lyrics convey intimate confessions about her experience with love.2 Among her reflections are life lessons she learned about freedom and defining herself in relationships. A close reading of Swift's debut album Fearless reveals prominent existentialist undertones. In this paper, I will examine the album through a Sartrean existentialist lens to dissect Swift’s reflections on her romantic life. In Fearless, Swift addresses how one might live in bad faith as a young person in a romantic relationship and the possibility of transitioning to living authentically, offering a positive outlook on overcoming existential anxiety. Existentialism, broadly speaking, is an ontological theory concerned with human existence that emphasizes freedom as integral to the human condition.3 French philosopher JeanPaul Sartre was one of the first thinkers to adopt explicitly the term in their philosophy.4 In his lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre describes existentialism as “a doctrine that… render[s] human life possible.”5 The foundational premise in Sartre’s lecture is the absence of a predetermined purpose for human existence. That is, unlike a designed artifact such as a spoon – which was made with the intention for it to serve the function of transporting food while eating – human existence
was not manufactured with a purpose in mind.6 Further, Sartre argues that humans determine what it means to be human through their own will—by conceiving of themselves after existing—a concept he terms “subjectivity.”7 The combination of these two principles is summarized by Sartre’s motto “existence precedes essence,” as the invention of oneself comes only after their existence. However, Sartre recognizes the difficulties of existing subjectively—namely, there is a profound experience of anguish associated with freedom. The feeling of anguish is founded upon a sense of “complete and profound responsibility” on the part of the individual.8 Faced with an infinity of choices, we become overwrought by our own transcendent agency. Coupled with the fact that there is no one but ourselves who is able to choose, we therefore also face inescapable responsibility. Anguish has the potential to manifest whenever humans make a decision. In everyday life, we often follow routines and seek the comfort of objects or concepts that act as “guardrails against anguish.”9 For instance, we initiate and cease our actions based on the temporal movement of a rod on a disc with numbers. For Sartre, it is not uncommon for one to attempt to ignore the feeling of anguish by evading it.10 He termed this phenomenon “bad faith,” when one lives inauthentically and succumbs to societal pressures to deceive themselves of the fact that they are, indeed, free.11 In this paper, I present a close-reading analysis of the lyrics in Fearless in relation to Sartre’s existentialism.12 In particular, I will focus on the manifestation of existential ideas in romantic relationships of young people—a common theme in Swift’s music beyond
59
