20 ways Taylor Swift remade pop culture in her image

Released 20 years ago, her debut single was a tribute to the power of music and to how a song can summon memory. She named Tim McGraw after one of her favourite country singers and sang, “When you think Tim McGraw, I hope you think of me.” The immediacy of that songwriting, and the force of her presence, made it clear from the start that Swift could remake culture in her own image.

Beneath the country twang lay almost everything that would define her: a knack for romance, intimate detail — the “little black dress,” the scarf left at an ex’s sister’s house, the moon on the lake and cars parked down back roads — and a habit of rewriting tired narratives.

She tells the first lover “That’s a lie,” and has since inverted archetypes from the small-town ingénue to the man-eater on “Blank Space” and the “mad” woman on “The Last Great American Dynasty.” She protected that authorship by writing her own songs and keeping control of her career.

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