 This video is brought to you by Nebula. If you head over to the link in the description, you can get an annual Nebula subscription for 40% off, which means a little over 250 a month. That's a cup of coffee a month for all my videos early and ad free, as well as access to a ton of incredible original content. Taylor Swift is one of the most celebrated icons of the modern era. With a professional career beginning as a songwriter at just 14, her ascent to stardom has been an endless climb. She's reached new levels of recognition and greatness through each subsequent release. But along this upward journey, there's one album that stands above the rest, 1989. When that album dropped, it was more than just a new summit for Swift, it was a whole other mountain. Sporting three number one pop singles and no representation in the country charts, it marked her complete crossover from country to pop. And when it came time for Swift to create the visual aesthetic for this era, she led it off with a single striking image, a Polaroid selfie that didn't even show her whole face. Welcome to cover stories. 2013 was a tough year for Taylor Swift. After nearly a decade of being the sweetheart poster child for the country music industry, she was finally getting some negative press. A year earlier, she'd bought a Rhode Island mansion with a decaying seawall that hadn't been updated in nearly a century. She hired a team to renovate it, but some locals accused her of ruining the community beach. Even though the governing body admitted she'd done nothing wrong, it still sat poorly with Swift. There will always be people who grumble about things, she told Rolling Stone in 2015. But it was a problem, so I fixed it. Nothing has changed, except that now my house won't fall on them. So you know, sorry not sorry. This style of petty external negativity was becoming commonplace in the star's life. Her last album, Red, had seen the country star incorporate some overt pop influences, which led to global discussions as to her validity as a country artist. While her work had always been deeply personal, the public breakups immortalized in Red's singles caused the media to question her America's sweetheart image. And as the negativity became commonplace, sorry not sorry became Taylor Swift's maxim. She declared this new attitude to the world with the first single of 1989, Shake It Off. That song was an uptempo, catchy piece produced by pop genius Max Martin. Its lyrics were all about shaking off criticism, and its aesthetics set the tone for the album that was to come. Taylor Swift was ready to go full pop. She'd learned her lesson after the half measures on Red. She told Rolling Stone, if you chase two rabbits, you lose them both. So she dove head first into the pop world and created a style that drew from the synth soundscapes of the 1980s. In a live stream for ABC and Yahoo News, Taylor Swift told fans that she loved the chances that artists were taking in the 80s, and that she saw herself in the idea of the endless potential of the era. Rather than focus on writing songs about heartbreaks and feuds, Taylor Swift decided to prioritize friendship on 1989. Over the months leading up to the album, Swift had taken a break from dating and decided to focus on herself. She developed an entourage of celebrity friends that included fashion model Carly Closs, Selena Gomez, and Lena Dunham. And all these friends had a place literally and figuratively in Swift's Tribeca penthouse. One of the first things that Swift did after moving from Nashville to New York was cover a wall of her den with framed, blown up polaroids of the most important people in her life. Beneath each was a message written in sharpie explaining the significance of the moment. So for Swift, it made perfect sense to make the cover of 1989 a polaroid of herself. That polaroid isn't a clear, glamorous cover shot like the rest of her albums up to that point. It's washed out and obscured. The light beiges and blues of the color scheme are a perfect complement to 1989's dreamy synth pop sound palettes. If you want to be pedantic about things, the photo probably isn't actually a polaroid because polaroids stopped making their film in 2008, but let's not be like that. To pair with the cover, each album came with five extra polaroids with handwritten lyrics from the album. All in all, there were 65 different polaroids that Swift included for the album, and each of them added to the nostalgic, ethereal quality, underlining the lyrics with images of Taylor that seem to be removed from time. While these polaroids are an artifact of a bygone era, they also represented Swift's distinctly modern pop approach. When Swift released 1989, instant film was actually having a huge comeback, thanks in no small part to the rise of Instagram. Taylor Swift herself played a huge role in codifying many of the aesthetics of the early Instagram era, and you can see that just by looking at the moody abstraction of the 1989 cover. The fact that half of Swift's face is obscured in the photo is notable, especially for someone who is dealing with backlash to her fame for the first time. The obscured eyes suggest a cover that wants less focus on Taylor Swift as a person, and more focus on her music. But this obfuscation is paired with the title and Swift's name in her own handwriting. When Swift decided to embrace pop music, live by her own rules and take back the narrative, she needed a strong ally in her corner. She found that ally in herself. The sharpie number 1989 is Swift's birth year. By titling the album after the most important moment of her life, her birth year, she underlines her own message of self-love and empowerment. But there's also a sort of cockiness to it. She's asserting that 1989 isn't just an important year to her personally, but that it's an important year to all of pop music because it was her birth year. The ambiguous nature of the cover of 1989 has brought all sorts of readings into it. It could be meant to evoke a shapeless power, or to shift away from the male gaze and try to thrive free from gender roles. But above all else, the main reason that Swift went with this particular photo as the cover is simple. She liked it. It's the same reason she decided to forsake her country roots and cross over to pop music. And the results of this vision and conviction are staggering. With three number one singles and a certification of over nine times platinum, 1989 represented Taylor Swift's coming out as a totally independent pop star. When she finished the album in its entirety, label head Scott Porchetta came to her and said, this is extraordinary. It's the best album you've ever done. But can you just give me three country songs? Swift spoke her truth and denied the request because clearly the country songs were never needed. 1989 stands to this day as one of the greatest pop albums ever made and has a huge moment in music history. So once again, Taylor Swift can firmly say sorry, not sorry. This is going to be my last video for a little while as I'm taking the summer off and moving across the country. But if you're still hungry for that sweet sweet polyphonic content, then why not take this as a chance to catch up on all of my originals on Nebula. There you can watch my series on Led Zeppelin's epics or polyphonic magazine where I interview smaller artists working right now. You can also watch full continuous cuts of my dark side of the moon and wish you were here project with no interruptions or ads. 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