As you may be aware, tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of the release of The Tortured Poets Department, which means that some time in the next 24 to 48 hours marks the one-year anniversary of the first time I heard Taylor Swift sing the words, “Now I want to sell my house and set fire to all my clothes” and have yet to shut up about it.
I don’t remember where I was the first time I heard this line from “The Black Dog,” but I know that I went directly to my Notes app to confirm that I did, in fact, have a note from the previous October that read, “I want to burn my entire wardrobe because it’s been on your floor.”
I’m aware that burning things—or at least wanting to—in the wake of heartbreak is a well-established trope, so this similarity between Taylor’s post-breakup thoughts and mine really wasn’t any tremendous coincidence. But months after the fact, I could still recall the searing specificity of the pain I’d felt when tapping out those words with perfect, cutting clarity. Hearing it echoed back at me in Taylor’s voice was such a visceral resurrection of that grief that I was almost relieved—the way you might be to receive a diagnosis, however bleak, because at least it means you weren’t imagining it. Your symptoms—your pain, were real.
Shortly after releasing the album, Taylor announced she would be adding a Tortured Poets set to her Eras Tour, dubbing it, “Female Rage: The Musical.” Naturally, the response among many fans at the time was something to the effect of, “Why, God? Why must the greatest creative mind of our generation also at times be the cringiest of millennials?”
Personally, I couldn’t really claim to mind the cringe itself all that much—I am nothing if not a baby millennial who would’ve absolutely retweeted something like “Female Rage: The Musical!” back in 2016. What does bother me, however, is that the millennial pink, #girlboss-ified version of “female rage” we know and cringe at today so glaringly belies the very real, very dark, very insidious force Taylor so artfully captures throughout TTPD. The heartbreak-fueled fury Taylor channels here is not of the “crazy ex-girlfriend” variety she has been accused of weaponizing throughout her career but something much more sinister, primal, and—crucially—self-destructive.
The scorned woman trope that has followed Taylor—and pretty much any woman who writes, sings, or otherwise speaks publicly about heartbreak—from day one paints these unhinged exes as chaotic, vengeful, and out to destroy. They key your car, smash your phone, throw a drink in your face. In the 2014 “Blank Space” music video, Taylor glamorously parodies this female-rage-filled caricature of herself the media so relentlessly clings to, cutting up her former lover’s shirts, setting them on fire, and hurling them out the window.
A decade later, in TTPD’s “The Black Dog,” however, it’s not her ex’s clothes she wants to burn but her own. Of all the lyrics on Taylor’s arguably verbose eleventh album, “Now I want to sell my house and set fire to all my clothes” remains the number one line that stops me dead in my tracks. Not just because I find it so relatable on a personal level, but because it evokes a very specific, eviscerating fusion of grief and anger that breeds not bloodlust but self-destruction.
This ninth circle of female rage where wrath meets anguish is not home to man-eating shrews out for revenge. This rage is directed inward, and it echoes through TTPD like a broken heartbeat. Throughout the album, Taylor’s anger is so intimately intertwined with her grief, it can be easy to mistake one for the other, to miss that they are equal parts of the same poison cocktail she wants to drown in. She “might just die, it would make no difference.” She would’ve “died for your sins,” instead she “just died inside.” She wants to hire a priest to come and exorcize her demons, even if she dies screaming. And she hopes you hear it.
This is female rage at its deepest, saddest, most self-annihilating. “I want to burn my clothes” also translates to “I want to crawl out of my fucking skin because you’ve touched it,” and “I want to change my name because I can still hear it in your voice and it sounds like a slur,” and “I want to fake my own death and start a new life somewhere else because you’ve ruined mine” and “I want to Eternal Sunshine you out of my brain.”
Female rage doesn’t take a golf club to your car or throw your flaming clothes on the lawn. It eats itself alive. Sets itself ablaze. Screams itself sick. The only vengeance it seeks is in hoping you witness us self-destruct in your name. Female rage wants to grab the knife you dangled over our heads for weeks while you slithered your coward’s slink out of our lives and hoped we wouldn’t notice—hoped we wouldn’t text you after 19 days of silence and say, “Can we talk?” But it doesn’t want to turn the knife on you. It just wants to finish the job itself. It doesn’t want blood; it wants to bleed out. And it wants you to fucking watch.
