She didn’t get an Oscar nomination for the Cats song, but Taylor Swift is not giving up on that Best Original Song award. Taylor Swift’s upcoming Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, chronicles her pivot to politics and shows Swift writing “an anthem for millennials who might have come away disillusioned with the political process,” Variety reports, called “Only the Young.” The song is heard in the documentary and plays over the end credits. It’ll officially drop the same day as the film, January 31. (Miss Americana premieres at Sundance later this week.) “You did all that you could do / The game was rigged, the ref got tricked/ The wrong ones think they’re right / We were outnumbered — this time,” Swift sings, per Variety.
It was only a matter of time before Swift’s new take on politics entered her music. The singer was famously apolitical to the public until the 2018 midterm elections in Tennessee. One of her latest singles, “You Need to Calm Down,” calls out homophobes and shouts out GLAAD. Swift says that being openly supportive of gay rights is a priority for her. “To celebrate but not advocate felt wrong for me,” she told Variety. “Using my voice to try to advocate was the only choice to make. Because I’ve talked about equality and sung about it in songs like ‘Welcome to New York,’ but we are at a point where human rights are being violated. When you’re saying that certain people can be kicked out of a restaurant because of who they love or how they identify, and these are actual policies that certain politicians vocally stand behind, and they disguise them as family values, that is sinister. So, so dark.” With “Only the Young,” Swift is aligning herself with all the other millennials frustrated with the state of politics, just through song instead of a series of increasingly incomprehensible tweets.
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