Romance, “Rhapsody,” and Historical Revisionism
The Role of Memory in “You All Over Me” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”
If there was a track five among the Fearless “From the Vault” songs, it would be “You All Over Me.” Quintessentially 2008-era Swift, the country imagery woven throughout the lyrics – like the descriptions of old dirt roads and rainstorm-drenched streets – explicitly echoes the album’s title track, and in doing so details the catastrophic aftermath of the perfect romance that “Fearless” captured.
Like a countryfied version of “All Too Well,” “You All Over Me” allows Swift to do what she does best: agonize about the persistence of memories after a breakup. Exploring the difficulty of moving on from heartbreak when you remember both the perfect and painful moments all too well, “You All Over Me” is crafted as a series of metaphors (just like “Red”) that detail the lasting impact of lost love. The song compares the ability to forget and move on to “graffiti on the walls of old bathroom stalls/ You know, you can scratch it right off/ It’s how it used to be,” while remembering the romance is “like the dollar in your pocket that’s been spent and traded in/ You can’t change where it’s been/ Reminds me of me” (As a side note, the exchange of money is also the symbol she uses to describe rejected love in “Tied Together With a Smile”). Ultimately the punchline of the song is that “No amount of freedom gets you clean/ I’ve still got you all over me.” In other words, even after the relationship has ended, the memories of it continue to shape Swift’s life, perspective, and decisions. An era of her life that has passed still influences her in the present.
The way in which the song reiterates key images, narrative structures, and themes in Swift’s discography further demonstrates how Swift’s past impacts her present. Just as the song highlights how the memory of the past informs the future, by incorporating relics of Swift’s other songs, “You All Over Me” shows how Swift’s previous works inevitably play a role in the development of Swift’s musical identity, as she repeats key themes and phrases through her different eras.
The enduring relevance of the past in the present – whether it’s the way in which previous breakups continue to shape a person’s life or how prior eras of one’s art show up in new works – is a theme that both TSes have grappled with extensively as they’ve explored the role of memory (In fact, Cats, the travesty of a musical that both Taylor Swift and T.S. Eliot helped create, even features a song called “Memory”). Among Eliot’s most famous lines is the start of “Burnt Norton,” in which he writes, “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future.” Former relationships and styles continue to be present by impacting Taylor’s future.
For Eliot, the way Swift’s past relationships and artistic personas continue to inform her life and career makes sense because, as he saw it, memory creates the structures that frame how we understand the present and look to the future. Eliot began exploring this concept in one of his earliest poems, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” As the poem’s speaker wanders through the streets at night, he describes how the moonlight seems to “dissolve the floors of memory/ And all its clear relations,/ Its divisions and precisions” because “Midnight shakes the memory/ As a madman shakes a dead geranium.” As the core of memory is shaken – and how we remember the past changes – Eliot contends, the frameworks we rely on to make sense of the present – which we learn from the relationships between memories, and the precise divisions between reality and fantasy that past experiences teach us– disappear. In his mind, memory is key to understanding the present. Thus, not only would Eliot expect Swift’s past romances and artistic styles to shape her present ones, he would argue that the memories she holds of her past are fundamental to the way in which she views herself and perceives the world.
Just as memory impacts our knowledge of the present, our perspectives, and our sense of self, historical memory also influences collective beliefs and identities. George Orwell explored this concept in 1984, with dystopian Big Brother rewriting the events of the past and altering historical records in order to control collective memory and, by extension, the population’s understanding of what is true. Orwell writes, “‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’” For example, when the nation is at war against Eurasia, “The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia” even though “He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago.” By controlling how people understood and remembered the past, Big Brother controlled the frameworks people used to make sense of their present. Big Brother created a false history that justified the Party’s policies, and stamped out people’s ability to question the war by asserting it had always existed.
And this isn’t just fiction. As one brilliant scholar of global democratic norms put it, “Memory of the past provides key context for and fosters dialogue about ongoing political repression and human rights abuses,” so that as political institutions rewrite the past and shape what people learn about history, they foster the ideology and civic norms they’d prefer people adopt. By pointing out the importance of the past in influencing the present, both Taylor Swift and T.S. Eliot identify why historical revisionism is a key tool of totalitarian rule.
Great piece! Plus, love the name checking of brilliant scholar of democratic norms.