On Midnights, Taylor Swift is in her after-dark era — literally, in the sense that there is no sun at midnight (well, unless you’re in the Arctic Circle, but Taylor tends to stay in warmer climes), but also because Taylor is really embracing her swear words this time around. After first dipping her toe into saying “fuck” on folklore (in both “betty” and “mad woman”), Swift has gotten even more explicit two albums later. She repeatedly says “fuckin’,” works in a “goddamn,” and even has a song titled “Vigilante Shit.” She’s an adult! But does she swear like one in the studio? Well, not really; Taylor still seems a little hesitant about going all out into being foulmouthed. Whenever she does get explicit, it feels more like she’s putting on a Reputation-style persona than her actual self. And for all of her use of “fucking,” she tends to only use swears as intensifiers, not as descriptors of actually explicit acts. In honor of her increasingly swear-y language, we’ve organized the swears on Midnights from least to most adult. At this rate, she’s practically PG-13.
“I don’t give a damn what people say of me” in “Lavender Haze”
A classic Taylor sort of swear, both in that it feels like she’s posturing (of course she cares what people think about her; why else keep returning to this idea?) and the sentiment it expresses is pretty mild.
“All this shit is new to me” in “Lavender Haze”
A little more intense, but still!
“Ain’t that how this shit always ends?” in “Maroon”
“Maroon” is a song about drinking too much and waking up to poor decisions — it’s one of the swearier songs on this album — but here at least she’s relatively tame.
“How the hell did we lose sight of ourselves again?” in “Maroon”
I’m not sure anyone would say “hell” instead of “fuck” about this sort of thing, but Taylor’s one to soft-pedal her shock. She’s easing up to the bolder swears later on in the album.
“Karma is a cat / Purring in my lap / Flexing like a goddamn acrobat” in “Karma”
Here we upgrade from damn to “goddamn,” which is exciting because now a higher power is involved. Taylor’s probably just intensifying the language for better scansion, but it’s nice to imagine that she’s decided to get theological here. Is Lucifer the acrobat who has been damned by an almighty god? Is Karma actually a force of the devil? Taylor, have you read Paradise Lost?
“I don’t start shit, but I can tell you how it ends” in “Vigilante Shit”
Props to Taylor for including “shit” in the title of an actual song (will this sell at Target??), but deductions for using “shit” in conventional ways. First up, there’s her fairly generic insistence that she doesn’t start shit, which isn’t all that explicit, but does wrap up in a nice enough threat that she can tell you how it ends. Villainess Taylor is a recurring theme on the album.
“On my vigilante shit” in “Vigilante Shit”
The better instance of swearing in this song comes when she invokes the title, saying that she is figuratively on her vigilante shit, acting as a sort of caped crusader seeking revenge when she is wronged. It’s a bit corny as an image, but Taylor herself is very corny, so we’re happy for her embracing it.
“No deal / The 1950s shit they want from me” in “Lavender Haze”
“Lavender Haze” is supposedly inspired by Mad Men (a show that is primarily set in the ’60s, but whatever), which puts Taylor in the position of a sort of Betty Draper raging against the feminist mystique or something. “Shit” is not much of a swear by itself, but there’s a nice contrast between “shit” and “1950s” semiotically, which gives this a little more of a charge.
“She’s laughing up at us from hell” in “Anti-Hero”
There’s a place in hell for women who don’t support other women, and also for the character at the center of this song, who imagines herself getting revenge from the grave by having her family read her will and realizing she’s laughing at them. I guess hell as a noun isn’t really a swear word, but this ranks just because it’s suitably bold for Taylor to damn herself.
“I wake up with your memory over me, that’s a real fuckin’ legacy to leave” in “Maroon”
Okay, now we’re fucking — though, really, we’re only fuckin’ because Taylor is resistant to ever pronouncing the “g” at the end of the word. Is that just the way she says it, or her pulling back from really embracing the swear? Either way, she prefers to use the word as an intensifier rather than ever referring directly to sex.
“It’s like snow on the beach / Weird but fuckin’ beautiful” in “Snow on the Beach”
If you’re bringing on Lana for a song, you better invoke some adult language. Again, Taylor swears for effect, but not for much descriptive usage. The divide between the placid image and the language gives the lyric some nice friction, but the swear is still pretty tame in and of itself. (And she still doesn’t use the “g”!)
“Did you realize she was out on the town on your mind with another dickhead guy” in “Question …?”
Who could imagine that Taylor would ever work up to using the word “dickhead”? For someone who likes to stay in the shallows of “shit” and “damn,” this is a big step forward for her, especially since she’s using it to diss some “dickhead guy,” a pretty brutal line for her, all things considered. Taylor will probably never sing about an actual head of a dick, except buried under layers of metaphor (and even then!), but the fact that she’s saying it straight out as an adjective — pretty wild.
“Your roommate’s cheap-ass screw-top, rooftop rosé” in “Maroon”
One of the most vivid images on Midnights comes as Taylor co-opts my personal experience of moving to Greenpoint after college and drinking too much. (Did she start writing this song in her 1989 era? It’s a better depiction of being young in New York than “Welcome to New York.”) Cheap-ass isn’t the kind of word Taylor uses much, but it fits for the character, scans really well into the rhythm of “screw-top, rooftop,” and tells you just what kind of rosé she’s drinking. No wonder the hangover in the rest of the song sounds so bad.
“One thing / After / Another / Fuckin’ / Situation” in “Question …?”
“One drink / After / Another / Fuckin’ / Politics” in “Question …?”
Taylor puts a “fuckin’” right in the center of this album’s biggest singsong pop chorus, pacing out words like a metronome so that she has to hit both syllables of “fuck-in” hard (and, yes, there’s no “g”). The line repeats, describing a fuckin’ situation and then a fuckin’ discussion about politics and other boring subjects. The lean-back rhythm of her patter here is Taylor trying on her most world-weary “I’m washed” posture on the album. Plus, there’s the exaggerated pause after “fuckin’,” which makes it sound like a noun just before she adjectivizes it. She fucks! She’s not going to say it directly, but we know what’s up.
