When Taylor Swift’s whirlwind summer fling with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy fizzled out last year, sources dismissed it as a mere “fun little thing.” But if the lyrics on her new album The Tortured Poets Department are any indication, that romance clearly inflicted deeper emotional shrapnel than anyone realized.
On the searing track “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” Swift seems to direct a full-blown lyrical artillery strike at Healy, her notorious ex-boyfriend. With her trademark knack for burying resonant personal details amidst vivid storytelling, the 10-minute epic plays like an extraordinarily unsparing portrait of their ill-fated relationship’s implosion.
From mocking insinuations about Healy’s controversies with substance abuse to scathing indictments of his self-involved ego, “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” emerges as one of Swift’s most vicious musical vendettas against a former flame. It’s the kind of vindicating self-preservational aria only an artist of her generational talents could construct.
The Dead Giveaways
While Swift is never one for literalism, “Smallest Man” is littered with unmistakable signposts pointing directly at Healy. The song’s very title appears to mock the singer’s alleged insecurity over his 5’10” height. “Everyone in [the 1975] is 6’4″ and I’m 5’10”, so everyone thinks that I’m 5’5″,” Healy once grumbled to The Fader, saying he was “sick to fucking death” of the misconception.
Swift conspicuously paints her subject “gazing at me, starry-eyed in your Jehovah’s Witness suit” – an obvious nod to Healy’s affinity for wearing skinny ties and slim-cut suits reminiscent of the evangelical church’s traditional garb. As The New Yorker put it, the Brit’s look of “taut suits and ties” has been his trademark for years, arguably making him resemble a young Witness missionary.
From there, the litany of lyrical grenades only escalates. Swift accuses her ex of “trying to buy some pills” – a stinging reference to Healy’s public battles with drug addiction over the years. She sneers that once his “queen had come,” Healy treated Swift as insignificant, “an also-ran” unworthy of his attention.
The bridge is most haunting of all, as Swift descends into a surreal inner panic: “Were you sent by someone who wanted me dead? Did you sleep with a gun underneath our bed? Were you writing a book? Were you a sleeper cell spy?” It cuts to the very heart of her persecution complex – accusations that Healy was not only using Swift for headlines and infamy, but potentially posed an active threat to her well-being and security.
A Match Lit From Both Ends
Of course, this vortex of fear and paranoia shouldn’t be entirely surprising considering the controversial controversies that have trailed Healy for years. From making misogynistic comments about actresses to liberally tossing around racial slurs, the 1975 singer has long exhibited a self-destructive flare for making incendiary public statements.
Swifties, notoriously protective of their Queen, sounded alarm bells from the start about the dangers of her cozying up to such a problematic figure. So while their summer tryst was initially downplayed as a mere “fun fling,” “Smallest Man” paints a far more sinister picture of toxicity and disillusionment behind the scenes.
Even more scathing is the notion that Swift is flipping the script on Healy’s own dissolute rockstar pigeonholing. She scathingly dismisses him as a performing fraud, accusing him of craving the “forbidden” thrill of dating her before growing bored and disappearing. “You kicked out the stage lights but you’re still performing,” she shrugs of his rock antics.
It’s a brutal punch at the hollow, duplicitous core she’s unmasking in her ex who so desperately wanted to be seen as an authentic outlaw and rebel. Swift makes it clear she saw straight through the transparent affectations – Healy was nothing more than a clichéd cad chasing a vapid, ephemeral high before discarding her heartlessly when the thrill faded.
Ultimately, “The Smallest Man” is an exorcism of all Swift’s anxieties about this monumentally ill-conceived match. A tortured meditation on how the intense public speculation and scrutiny slowly metastasized into legitimate fears that Healy posed a legitimate threat to her safety and privacy.
“You’ll slide into inboxes and slip through the bars,” she seethes, warning of his eternal ability to wreak havoc from the peripheries as an inescapable presence is always looming. It crystallizes how their summer fling’s demise left her feeling vulnerable, unmoored, and frantically questioning Healy’s very motives for ever pursuing her.
The Redefinition of a Narrative
As mastermind storytellers go, few match Swift’s preternatural gift for methodically reshaping public perception. We’ve seen her weaponize her pen repeatedly to recast herself first as a spurned victim, then a serpentine lupine huntress, before her recent reascension as a radiant phoenix rising from the ashes of her own self-mythologizing.
In that sense, “Smallest Man” is simply the latest surgical strike in her self-preservational arsenal. Where initial reports dismissed her romance with Healy as a throwaway dalliance, Swift seems intent on redefining the narrative as something far more insidious and psychologically scarring.
By distilling the experience into an epic confessional, she reclaims agency to immortalize it forever on her terms – something to be studied alongside her most complex, emotionally fraught works. It’s an exquisite takedown not merely levied at Healy himself, but the entire cottage industry of rumor-mongering gossip culture that fuels perceptions around her personal life.
At 33, Swift has experienced enough heartaches and controversies to recognize the merciless societal forces that lay in wait to misrepresent or diminish her. So she’s reasserted control in the only manner she knows – by using the cold, hard reality of her lyricism to enshrine her lived truth.
When future scholars seek to understand Taylor’s summer of 2023, it won’t be the fading whispers of unnamed “sources” they’ll study. It will be “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” – a lyrical epitaph accompanying her most scathing musical rebuke to any former partner yet. As ever, the woman whose first name means “Unwavering” has the final word.
