I cannot remember a time in my life when anybody was as famous as Taylor Swift currently is – and I’ve tried, I really have.
She’s everywhere, all at once. Totally ubiquitous and omnipresent. And her celebrity possesses a particular quality that’s not shared by other – also incredibly famous – pop stars or musicians or actors or reality TV personalities.
That is, she’s lavished with fawning praise from every conceivable quarter. She simply isn’t criticised; and nor are there many people advocating for a little restraint or perspective in the media.
The critical and popular consensus that’s crystallised around her is impregnable and no amount of coverage or praise is deemed sufficient, never mind extravagant.
Ultimately, I feel like I’m being forced to hear about Taylor Swift and to think about her, too.
She’s yet to feature in any of my dreams, but I tend to think it’s only a matter of time before she breaches my subconscious and the relative quietude of even my most private moments.
And what I keep pondering is this: even if I were one of her most fervent fans, one of her staunchest defenders, wouldn't even I be bored by the sheer magnitude of her prevalence by now?
Swift is not merely an extremely popular singer and songwriter – the most streamed artist on Spotify this year, despite not having released an album of original songs in 2023 – she’s also critically lauded. Even the re-recorded versions of her albums – Speak Now, Red, 1989 – which are designed to sound as similar to the originals as possible (albeit for good reason) – are met with extraordinarily generous reviews.
So, when TIME Magazine announced it had chosen Swift as its “Person of the Year”, I found that I was actually irritated.
Does Taylor Swift really need more coverage at this point? More praise?
But, from a different perspective, the assignation makes total sense: of course Taylor Swift is “Person of the Year”. And she is “Person of the Year” for precisely the same reasons I’ve grown so weary of her hearing about her.
With all that said, I want to draw a distinction here between Swift as a brand and her music itself.
I’m a moderate fan of hers. I think Folklore is a great album and I love the ten-minute version of her song “All Too Well” – a genuinely brilliant retrospective breakup song containing some superb couplets and wordplay. Her duet with Bon Iver, “Exile”, is gorgeous.
There’s no doubt she’s talented.
But there’s just something “off” about the way she’s being discussed and written about in the media at the moment; even some of the journalists who cover her appear to acknowledge this – and I’m doing the same thing myself right here, albeit on a much smaller scale.
Take the profile of Swift, by Sam Lansky, that accompanied her end-of-year crowning by TIME. While it’s extremely well-written it’s also repellently obsequious.
She tells him about “getting cancelled within an inch of my life and sanity” and this prompts a moment of reflection for the author; he’s tempted to contest her narrative:
“But then I think, Who am I to challenge it, if that’s how she felt? The point is: she felt cancelled. She felt as if her career had been taken from her. Something in her had been lost, and she was grieving it.”
This strikes me as a profoundly strange way to conduct what purports to be an interview. Taylor said it. And that’s sufficient.
The profile, as a whole, hums and brims with praise as Lansky tells us that:
“Swift’s accomplishments as an artist—culturally, critically, and commercially—are so legion that to recount them seems almost beside the point. As a pop star, she sits in rarefied company, alongside Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna; as a songwriter, she has been compared to Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Joni Mitchell. As a businesswoman, she has built an empire worth, by some estimates, over $1 billion.”
Joni Mitchell? Really?
To his credit, it’s not as though Lansky is unaware that Swift is being treated by the press in a very different way from other celebrities. In fact, he puts it even more starkly – noting that, “something unusual is happening with Swift, without a contemporary precedent.”
Another piece, in the same edition of the magazine, is titled “TIME Person of the Year 2023: How We Chose”, in which the publication makes its case for why Swift deserves the accolade in question. And it is an accolade now, in a way it hasn’t always been; after all, Hitler was named “Man of the Year” in 1938, and that wasn’t because he was being lauded for his watercolours.
More recently, Donald Trump received the title in 2016 – the year he won the presidency.
So, even then, the assignation was not necessarily an honour per se; but more a recognition of the most culturally significant person of that particular year. As TIME itself puts it, it’s “a tradition that dates back to 1927, TIME’s Person of the Year is the annual designation for the person, group or concept that most shaped the headlines, for good or ill.”
What’s interesting about Taylor Swift, as a brand and a phenomenon (and that word seems entirely apt in this instance), is that she offers a firm rebuttal to a commonly expressed perspective about our changing habits in terms of cultural consumption.
Namely, that the internet – and especially streaming services like Netflix and Spotify – has had the effect of atomising our tastes; with fewer people listening to music on the radio or watching MTV, and with almost all the music, film, television – and even literature – we could possibly want at our disposal, we tend to curate quite personal, discrete cultural lives for ourselves.
And while it’s not clear whether this mode of consumption is either better or worse than what came before it – according to this line of thought, this shift means that we no longer experience huge cultural events in unison anymore. Or at least, not in the way we used to.
To me, this feels like a fairly uncontentious observation and not something I think about all that much.
But Taylor Swift’s very existence, her inescapable ubiquity, is all the more puzzling and impressive when considered in this context. This year – “The Year of Taylor Swift”, as The New York Times podcast, The Daily, has dubbed it – shouldn’t be a year in which a single artist is so utterly dominant. And yet, she is.
In his profile, Lanksy acknowledges this, too: “she’s the last monoculture left in our stratified world.”
Only yesterday, The Daily dedicated a whole episode to the subject of Swift’s colossal ascendance this year. The guest was Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a Times writer and the author of the excellent novel Fleishman is in Trouble. As I listened, I was so staggered by the way she spoke about Swift that I looked up the podcast’s transcript to be sure I’d heard her correctly.1
Again, I have simply never heard a journalist – and, in this instance, someone I have a considerable amount of admiration for – talk about a mainstream pop star in this way. Or anybody at all, really.
She tells the show’s host, Michael Barbaro, that Swift’s Eras Tour amounts to nothing less than “the cultural event of my lifetime”.
It’s worth noting, I think, that even the way Swift announced this tour sounded like a presidential address: “Good Morning America, it's Taylor. I wanted to tell you something that I've been so excited about for a really long time and I've been planning for ages, and I finally get to tell you I'm going back on tour.”2
Back to The Daily and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s thoughts on Swift. For her, the Eras Tour is comparable to Woodstock.
As she puts it:
“I remember the way my parents used to talk about Woodstock, which they didn’t go to, but they talked about it. And I knew about it.
And as this summer went on, it was all around me in a way that I don’t think anything has ever been all around me. And I began to see, first, that it was going to be Woodstock, and then it was going to be bigger than Woodstock. Then it was going to be something – like everything else about her – that we don’t have words to compare to. And that is what Taylor Swift is.
And then suddenly – I don’t want to say out of nowhere because it’s not out of nowhere – she is everywhere. The only thing that exists in any of my feeds – even in certain parts of the newspaper, on television, in conversation – is Taylor Swift. And the tour itself becomes a phenomenon. It becomes its own news cycle.”
There’s no other way for me to put this: it’s insane.
The Daily is an excellent podcast. I listen to it pretty often (perhaps not quite daily) and it covers a broad range of subjects. It’s been an indispensable source of news to me, particularly around the travails and indictments of Donald Trump, the byzantine machinations of the U.S. Republican Party’s primaries and various caucuses, and the ongoing opioid crisis blighting America.
And I have no objection at all to a daily podcast covering Taylor Swift. She is a news story. And more than that, the fact that she is a news story is itself a news story.
Swift has been named “Person of the Year” by TIME Magazine because she is so famous. And the accolade itself has become a news story, too.
As I say, it was really that moment – that award – that broke the spell for me. I found it maddening – and yet, it also makes perfect sense: who else could it be? I drew some comfort from the swivel-eyed, deranged response from Trump and his acolytes, but not enough to suppress the desire to shout, “Fucking stop, that’s enough!”
At no-one in particular. Or, perhaps, at the whole world, the universe. How big an audience do I need myself, to convey my reaction to what I see as complete madness, when Taylor Swift’s audience seems to encompass every sentient creature on the planet?
In fact, her performance in Seattle in July of this year caused an earthquake. Literally, an actual earthquake.3
I give up.
nytimes.com/2023/12/15/podcasts/the-daily/the-year-of-taylor-swift.html?
goodmorningamerica.com/culture/story/taylor-swift-announces-eras-tour-journey-musical-eras-92453666
bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66347361