Diogenes the Dragon: Battling Cynicism in Long Live

The Basics:

Taylor Swift sings about a moment when an unlikely band of heroes ruled the world, successfully fighting dragons and smashing through walls to take over a kingdom. Swift encourages her partners-in-crime to contextualize the current moment within the past – recalling “the years that we stood there on the sidelines / wishing for right now” – as well as the future. Swift repeatedly advises everyone to “remember this moment” and the song ends by insisting “we will be remembered.” 

Literary Device: Allegory

Throughout Fearless and Speak Now, Swift has utilized imagery from medieval legends – invoking imagery of princes and horses, ballgowns and balconies. In Long Live, Swift returns to the same imagery to create an allegory (an extended metaphor) about her success as an artist. Swift frames the song by describing her actual, current situation (“The time we stood with our shaking hands / The crowds in stands went wild”) before launching into a fantastic tale. Elements from Swift’s career, on the left, are replaced with elements from a fairy tale, on the right: 

A pop singer and her band	“We were the kings and the queens”
A member of her band	“A hero / On a history book page”
Obstacles to success	“Walls we crashed through”
More obstacles	“Mountains we moved”
Proving critics wrong	“Fighting dragons”
Stadium lights	“Kingdom lights”
Performance	“Magic we made”

By allegorizing her rise to fame, Swift elevates the struggles she has faced to mythological proportions. She thus also elevates her stadium tour to an epic victory celebration that is the culmination of this mythological struggle. Swift includes her audience in the band of heroes – always using inclusive language such as “we” and “with you” to describe how they fought together. 

Analysis:

We know from Swift’s later work that she was a noted scholar of Greek philosophy during this era of her life “You know how to ball / I know Aristotle” (So High School). It is thus worth digging into Swift name dropping a group of people who were deeply upset by her success – the world-denying philosophers known as the Cynics. Swift recalls: The cynics were outraged / screaming ‘this is absurd’ / ‘Cause for a moment, a band of thieves / In ripped up jeans got to rule the world.” While we do not have much direct evidence of Cynical beliefs, what we do know aligns closely with the language that Swift uses. Briefly, the Cynics were a group of unhoused, pedants who chose to live, sleep, and eat outdoors in order to live in harmony with nature rather than observe convention. Cynics such as Diogenes considered money, success, and even love to be “absurd”. They scorn those who strive for success – “derid[ing] the attention paid to the ‘big thieves’ who run the temple” as well as the “little thieves” who pray for “things such as fame and fortune”. This remark about the Cynics is thus no casual mention – it is a clue to understanding how the young Grecophile Swift conceptualized her own success. 

While Swift has allegorized her success as an epic victory, the inclusion of Cynic philosophy as well as her comparison of her band to a “band of thieves” indicates a level of unease. During this moment of achievement, Swift hints at an anxiety that her success is absurd, unnatural, or even stolen. Swift may have been pursuing the wrong goal, leading to this one fleeting moment that will ultimately be taken away. Just as Swift took over the kingdom, it will one day be taken away from her. Swift repeatedly refers to her success as “this moment” or “a moment.” Within the song, this moment is bookended by both a past and a future in which she is not successful. She sings about one day when: “God forbid, fate should step in / And force us into a goodbye / If you have children someday / When they point to the pictures / Please tell them my name / Tell them how the crowds went wild.” Swift is unable to fully live in this moment because she knows that it is just that – a moment. One day it will be a memory. 

Throughout Swift’s first three albums, we have seen her anxiety about the passage of time and how love and youth are fleeting. Swift ends Speak Now by applying the same theme to her success as an artist. However, although bittersweet and tinged with cynicism about her own success, the tone is ultimately one of triumph. Swift knows that even if this victory only lasts a moment, it was an epic moment that everyone will remember. She refers to a “history book page” how they “read off our names.” She describes the “trophies” that they “held up” and the “pictures” that people will show their children. Swift’s imperative to remember this moment is not one of sadness, but of victory. She writes “may these memories break our fall” and ends with the confident statement that “we will be remembered.” No matter what happens after Speak Now, Swift and her fans will always have that Now – that moment of epic victory will live long through everyone who was there.