The Swifties Are at War Over Taylor Swift’s Teen Years

Taylor Swift, age 34-1/2, recently sang of feeling “so high school”—which is either a romantic admission or ironic self-own, depending on how you look at it. The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology track finds Swift recounting the suburban mundanity of her relationship. (“Touch me while your boys play Grand Theft Auto,” she sings, in the Lilith Fair-esque track’s best line.) But what it actually means for someone like Swift to feel “high school” has been under litigation of late, as Teen Taylor suddenly becomes an object of the internet’s ire and obsession. While her journey from artsy high schooler to one of the world’s biggest artists is well-documented, poking holes in her own myth-making has become an internet pastime—a nostalgia that Swift is, of course, capitalizing on.

The last week alone has been full of reasons to talk about the girl Swift once was. On r/travisandtaylor, one of the most prominent Swift-critical communities online, a poster resurfaced a video from 2006 of the singer as a sophomore in high school. Its origin is unclear, but it appears to be from a local news segment. In the clip, the 16-year-old takes a camera crew through Hendersonville High School, which she started attending when her family uprooted to Nashville to help launch her music career.

There she is, sitting barefoot (...?) in the school hallway, writing songs and singing to herself; driving her new Hummer to school; telling her friends that it’s been awhile since they’ve “driven around with the top down and harassed people.” Swift’s bestie Abigail Anderson of “Fifteen” fame even gets her own shoutout. If she weren’t Taylor Swift, she’d come across as any other rich, popular blonde, who writes and performs music. (Or, rather, a rich, popular blonde who writes and performs music with a clearly affected Southern accent.) But because she is Taylor Swift, Reddit has made a meal out of this clip and the version of 16-year-old Swift it portrays vs. the version she’s sold to fans over the years.

Read more at The Daily Beast.