The Old Taylor's Not Dead

Since she was 16, when her first hit, "Tim McGraw," explored how a girl's pop-star crush could enhance a high school romance with a boy not quite up to the task, Taylor Swift has been tracing the way her generation thinks, talks and texts about love. She's particularly gifted at connecting what young women consume with the ways in which they build their relationships. Over the eleven years of her stardom, Swift has documented and encouraged the millennial journey from Disney to YouTube, making poignant, personal and relatable music steeped in her peers' fashion choices, modes of gossip, dating habits and dreams of a comfortable middle-class life. "Delicate," one of the most memorable tracks on her just-released sixth album , exemplifies this. Swift meets a brand new lover in a downtown New York bar; she notices approvingly that he's wearing Nikes. It seems like a banal detail, until you realize that the mere mention of that familiar manufacturer has conjured an array of associations that shapes the meaning of the-century America, "Nikes" is as evocative a word as "heartache" or "promise." Swift understands the heart that beats beneath the brand name.