Down Bad off The Tortured Poets Department is a favorite off Taylor Swift’s latest album. Come on, an alien abduction standing in for a toxic romance? Perfect. But if we know anything about Taylor, she's grown as a writer and her stories of romance are sometimes disguises for another. This album is a reflection on Taylor's relationship to fame and its effects on her life and this song just happens to use an extraterrestrial metaphor to emphasize that.

Verse 1 - The industry of fame

Did you really beam me up?
In a cloud of sparkling dust
Just to do experiments on
Tell me I was the chosen one
Show me that this world is bigger than us
Then sent me back where I came from
For a moment I knew cosmic love

To perform on the world's stage, artists must forever leave the quiet lives they've known. Through shows like X-factor, American Idol, and The Voice, we're shown that mere mortals would be so lucky to have a chance at fame. The industry has invited them to participate in the madhouse that is Hollywood. In the first verse, she could be speaking to the fame industry that picked her up and apart, showered her with praise, before dropping her off. Taylor has experienced the these moments of adulation and abandonment in her career, just look no further than the VMA awards or that infamous phone call. As quickly as you rise into universal acclaim and cosmic love, you can just as easily lose it all.

Down Bad | Did you really beam me up… Tell me I was the chosen one?
Clara Bow | All your life, did you know you'd be picked like a rose?

Verse 2 - Her old selves and masters

Did you take all my old clothes?
Just to leave me here naked and alone
In a field in my same old town
That somehow seems so hollow now
They'll say I'm nuts if I talk about the existence of you
For a moment I was heaven struck

Taylor has famously changed her aesthetic with every era, and we all know her eras are her albums. The rerecording project was born from the masters dispute with her old label and her inability to purchase them. They stripped her of her old selves and left her in the industry with nothing but herself. While Taylor has used town to refer to Hollywood, she also uses small towns and hometowns as stand-ins for safe and familiar places: what's safer than yourself? What is fame without the work that she lovingly wrote as she grew?

Down Bad | Did you take all my old clothes? Just to leave me here naked and alone
Cardigan | Vintage tee, brand new phone, high heels on, cobblestone… Sequined style, black lipstick, sensual politics
Fortnight | I was a functioning alcoholic til nobody noticed my new aesthetic

The celebrity industry loves protecting itself and will do its best to warp your memories and experiences. If she dares talk about the people who wronged her, people will tell her she's petty. If she talks about how she wasn't given a chance to own her work, people will call her a crazy billionaire. If she mentions the casual misogyny when people speak of her abilities and business acumen, she’s dismissed as overrated. Fame is a prison, and it's more than happy to eat its captives alive.

The bridge - Her lover and us

I loved your hostile takeovers
Encounters closer and closer
All your indecent exposures
How dare you say that it's -
I'll build you a fort on some planet
Where they can all understand it
How dare you think it's romantic
Leaving me safe and stranded
Cause fuck it, I was in love
So fuck you if I can't have us
Cause fuck it, I was in love

In the climax of this song, Taylor addresses the industry and her fans. She doesn’t love our invasions of her privacy and peace. How dare we keep creeping into her personal life? How dare we expose intimate details of her life? How dare we say her relationship is…?

That’s a sentence she never finished.

She’s interrupted by the simultaneous demands of her lover. While she’s trying to appease us and the celebrity machine, she’s also trying to appeal to him. Taylor pleads with him, promises him a sanctuary away from us invaders, promises a place they could know peace. How dare he leave her alone in a world without him?

Choosing between two loves is a familiar problem to Taylor, one she encountered when choosing between staying in country music or doing pop: “At a certain point, if you chase two rabbits, you lose them both.” If you don’t chose, someone else might choose for you… and whether or not you like it, you will have to live with that choice.

The bridge is the only time where Taylor sings “fuck you" and one can't help but wonder who she's screaming it at.

Down Bad | I'll build you a fort on some planet, where they can all understand it
the lakes | Take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die, I don't belong, and my beloved, neither do you

The chorus - Teenage petulance

Taylor’s brattiness is on full display and she has to face reality. I mean who didn’t throw a teenage temper tantrum when things didn’t go her way? Taylor has lamented that she’s grown up and hasn’t changed much in some ways, and this meltdown is just another example. She’s gonna cry and scream and be moody. Everyone gets to behave badly, why not her?

The Archer | I never grew up it’s getting so old
Anti-Hero | I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser.

In her petulance, she screams fuck it. What's the point if her lover doesn't want her? She and her music, and all the fame it comes with, are inseparable. She may not like it, but they’re forever linked. She could stay in a pool of her own blood or she could distract herself from her own heartbreak and be abducted by fame again. Taylor will die either way, so what’s the difference?

Down Bad and the rest of her album

The alien as her lover is a very easy to comparison to make, especially considering the lyrics in the preceding and succeeding songs in the track list. Taylor shares her sadness, grief, denial, and anger about her relationship. There's no acceptance here. She’s contorted herself in so many ways for her career and for her lovers. How can anyone accept the cost when it has taken so much?

My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys | Stole my tortured heart, left all these broken parts
Down Bad | Just to do experiments on…
Down Bad | Waving at the [space]ship
So Long, London | And you say I abandoned the [relation]ship, but I was going down with it

If it seems unlikely that she’s criticizing the music industry and celebrity machine, look no further than the closing song of the main album: Clara Bow. It takes similar events and lyrics in Down Bad and more directly ties them to the fame monster (thanks Lady Gaga).

Down Bad | Did you really beam me up in a cloud of sparkling dust?
Clara Bow | Take the glory, give everything, promise to be dazzling
Down Bad | I might just die, it would make no difference
Clara Bow | I'm not trying to exaggerate, but I think I might die if it happened, die if it happened to me
Down Bad | In a field in my same old town, that somehow seems so hollow now
Clara Bow | No one in my small town thought, I'd see the lights of Manhattan/thought I'd meet these suits in LA
Clara Bow | This town is fake but you're the real thing
Down Bad | Down bad, wakin' up in blood (Wakin' up in blood), Starin' at the sky, come back and pick me up
Clara Bow | Flesh and blood amongst war machines, you're the new god we're worshipping
You're On Your Own Kid (bonus) | My friends from home don't know what to say, I looked around in a blood-soaked gown…
Down Bad | For a moment I was heavenstruck
Clara Bow | It's hell on earth to be heavenly
Midnight Rain (bonus) | My town was a wasteland…but for some it was paradise

When each part of a person's life and work is scrutinized through the music industry, stan culture, and celebrity gossip, we're testing what parts of them can tolerate the worst of us. When a celebrity displeases the masses, or the entities that finance them, they're discarded and replaced by a new iteration. They then tumble into obscurity and only 20 years later do we ask: what happened to them? Perhaps these fallen stars ask themselves if the experience was even really real. When you consider it this way, are alien abductions really so different from fame?

Fame, and all that it encompasses, may have dropped Taylor many times, she's used to that. A lover dropping her because of it? Unfathomable. She further laments her fate in The Prophecy. She begs for a way to change her fate. Her fame is a prison that her lovers want no part of; no matter how much she gives of herself, she can’t find someone who wants to stay.

The Tortured Poets Department is Taylor’s analysis of her own life, with all the evidence and perspectives packaged so we can see how fame’s gilded cage shaped her. Down Bad may take us out of this world, but it’s just one of the many complex reflections Taylor has made about her life on the ground.

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