Mega pop star cultural icon Taylor Swift.
I listened to her 1989 album often when it came out and I don’t switch her songs when the Spotify algorithm serves them up to me these days.
I think she’s a clever songwriter. I'm impressed with her dedication to her craft.
I thought it was a badass move to re-record all of her earlier albums in an effort to reclaim her work from the unfair record deal she was caught in.
Generally speaking, I consider myself to have a pretty average person’s awareness of Taylor Swift and what she's about but I would not call myself a Swiftie by any stretch.
Accordingly, I had not heard of her song “Karma” from the 2022 album Midnights until very recently.
Here it is if you haven’t heard it either:
A student sent me a reaction video of a woman listening to this song and in the reaction video, the listener shakes her head solemnly before adding the hashtag #thatsnotwhatitmeans.
“What do you think?” my student asked and then continued:
“Maybe ‘Karma’ is this generation’s version of Alanis Morissette’s ‘Ironic’!”
As you probably know (or you will know as soon as you listen to it!) Morissette’s song “Ironic” is simply a list of unfortunate happenings that aren’t at all ironic.
With that comment from my student, I was expecting Swift’s song to be just a bunch of things that are happy or unhappy coincidences not actually related to the yoga concept of karma.
But I was pleasantly surprised.
Before I start to unpack the song, I think it’s helpful to back up a little.
The main goal of yoga is to connect with the impermanent unchanging part of ourselves.
The process of connecting with the unchanging helps us to see all of the suffering caused by our attachments to the changing things and when we let go of all of that, we are free from suffering.
While it sounds simple, it's not easy at all because our ultimate freedom will only happen once we’ve cleared up all of the results of our actions in our past and current lives.
Karma is the Sanskrit word that means action, as well as the logical follow up that all actions have consequences.
Now, back to the song:
"'Cause karma is my boyfriend
Karma is a god
Karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend
Karma's a relaxing thought
Aren't you envious that for you it's not?
Sweet like honey, karma is a cat
Purring in my lap 'cause it loves me"
Well, karma is most definitely not a god. And while the cat lover in me appreciates the imagery in the lines “...karma is a cat / Purring in my lap 'cause it loves me”, karma is completely indiscriminate and doesn’t play favorites, certainly not the way my cat Gandalf does. While we are at it, karma would not be a desirable significant other.
"It's coming back around"
"Karma's on your scent like a bounty hunter
Karma's gonna track you down"
On the other hand, the lines “It’s coming back around” as well as “Karma's on your scent like a bounty hunter / Karma's gonna track you down” get it right. We cannot escape the results of our actions.
For many, many years I’ve had two notes tacked up at my desk. One says “It’s not that there are recurring themes in our life, it’s that we get recurring choices.” The other says “Do your best until you know better then do better.”
These are ultimately reminders about karma: we are going to be presented with the same choices over and over again until we do better. In yoga philosophy, these multiple tries come by way of the cycle known as samsara: birth, life, death, rebirth, etc.
"Karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend
Karma's a relaxing thought
Aren't you envious that for you it's not?"
Another way to think about karma is referenced in Swift’s lyrics “Karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend / Karma's a relaxing thought”.
Your current conditions - physically, mentally, emotionally - have been created by the choices you’ve made in the past.
That pleasant breeze? The sense of relaxation that comes from knowing your actions are and have been motivated by virtue? Yes, the ripples of consequence are smaller and create less of a mess of attachments to impermanences for you to clean up later. If you, like Swift suggests in these lyrics, are feeling confident that you’ve been moving through the world in accordance with high integrity, that is as close to so-called good karma as there can be.
Here's where we get a little bit of the not-at-all-ironic vibes of Morissette's song:
If you do a good deed and then something good happens to you, that is not good karma. Yoga philosophy would say that’s just a happy coincidence.
The same goes for so-called bad karma. If Ronnie breaks up with you and then gets in a car crash, that’s simply bad luck for Ronnie.
The kicker? If you are feeling a sense of satisfaction that Ronnie got in that car crash, that negative thought accumulates karma for you that will take more work for you to clear up on your path to enlightenment.
So when Swift’s lyrics are “Aren't you envious that for you it's not?” I think she sounds a bit smug. The rules of karma say if you are living a great life now as a product of the virtuous life you’ve lived in the past, you are in a position of privilege. You must use your good fortune to improve conditions and lessen suffering for others. Otherwise, your wonderful life in this present iteration might result in an unfavorable situation for your future self.
Ultimately, karma is a tool for self-reflection and introspection.
You aren't meant to use the concept of karma to criticizing the behavior of others.
"And I keep my side of the street clean
You wouldn't know what I mean"
That sounds like some boasting self-satisfaction that might end up creating some extra karmic mess for Swift to clean up before she will reach nirvana.
The bottom line is that if we are looking at this song as a doctoral thesis on karma according to the eastern wisdom traditions, there is no way Taylor Swift would earn her degree. However, if we read Taylor Swift's lyrics as the clever poetic metaphors I suspect they are meant to be, she does okay.
As I was writing this, I kept thinking of other songs about karma. As a die-hard Radiohead fan, my first thought was “Karma Police” but I don’t think the compelling parts of that song are in the lyrics. “Karma's Payment” by Modest Mouse would be a fun one to consider. I appreciate the idea of a karma payment plan. That feels like what all of us are doing these days!
If this sort of nerdy stuff piques your interest and gives your mind something to consider as a relief from the constant barrage of distress in the current news cycle, check out my Yoga Book Club. We read original texts and meet up online to determine how the ancient wisdom of yoga can help us all make it through our modern day quests for self-mastery and co-creation.
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