"}\u201cI\u2019ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon,\u201d Taylor Swift said with a straight face to an interviewer from Vanity Fair while the magazine was profiling her in 2013.
No, not Taylor Swift. Not the author of songs like \u201cForever and Always,\u201d\n written in the wake of her relationship with former boyfriend Joe \nJonas, the better-looking Jonas brother, and featuring this lyric: \u201cDid I\n say something way too honest, made you run and hide like a scared \nlittle boy?\u201d Not her, who wrote/sang about her relationship with the \nactor Jake Gyllenhaal, \u201cFighting with him was like trying to solve a crossword/and realizing there\u2019s no right answer.\u201d
Not\n Taylor, who leaves the impossible-to-crack clues in her liner notes for\n each song by capitalizing a variety of letters that spell out the \nsubjects in a very essential way: \u201cTAY\u201d for a song about ex-boyfriend \nTaylor Lautner; \u201cSAG\u201d for the Gyllenhaal one (as in Swift And \nGyllenhaal, or that they\u2019re both Sagittarius. I don\u2019t know).
For \nTaylor Swift to pretend that her entire music career is not a tool of \npassive aggression toward those who had wronged her is like me \npretending I\u2019m not carbon-based: too easy to disprove, laughable at its \nvery suggestion.
Don\u2019t get me wrong\u2014I say all this with utter \nadmiration. Taylor\u2019s career is, in fact, the perfected realization of \nevery writer\u2019s narrowest dream: To get back at those who had wronged us,\n sharply and loudly, and then to be able to cry innocent that our \nintentions were anything other than poetic and pure. Most of us can only\n achieve this with small asides. Taylor not only publicly dates and \npublicly breaks up, but she then releases an achingly specific song \nabout the relationship\u2014and that song has an unforgettable hook\u2014all the \nwhile swearing she won\u2019t talk about relationships that are over. Yes, \ndate Taylor Swift, and not only will she shit on you on her album, but \nthe song will become a single, then a hit, and then you will hear \nyourself shat upon by an army of young women at Staples Center. And then\n she\u2019ll deny that she was ever doing anything other than righteously \nmanifesting her art. It\u2019s diabolical, and for a lifelong \npassive-aggressive like me, it\u2019s made her my hero.