Getting Lost in the Labyrinth of Taylor Swift
Writer’s Note: First, hello! Either “you’re welcome, enjoy!” or “Sorry! See you next week”.
Next: given that new Taylor Swift news comes out at a rapid and untenable pace right now, this article had to be somewhat frozen in time in order to be able to get it done. Thus, this sentence is the only time you’ll see the name Travis Kelce. The tragic event at one of her Brazil concerts happened too late into this writing to get into. As fun as seeing the potential demise of Deuxmoi at her hands has been, I just had no time to mention it directly in the article. Whatever you may think about any of those topics, let’s just assume I agree with you.
Okay, I think that’s it. Again, have a good time!
I. The moment I knew
“When did you first get into Taylor Swift?”
The extremely nice woman sitting next to us on the floor of SoFi Stadium on August 7th, her young daughter in tow, had asked my wife and I a fairly straightforward question. My wife had a fairly straightforward answer: although she had been a fan since the “White Horse” days, she officially took the plunge after buying the 1989 album and never really looked back; by the time REPUTATION hit, she was a fan for life.
For me, it was a little more complicated.
The answer I provided to this lovely woman on the 7th went as follows: “my lightbulb moment was when Taylor performed ‘All Too Well (Ten Minute Version)’ on SNL”. Now, this wasn’t not the truth. For reasons that still remain unclear to me*, November 13th, 2021 was the first time in her fifteen-year career that I really went, “oh, I get this now”, although even that was already sort of a lie. In truth, Taylor’s particular and unique gravity really started hitting me for the first time earlier that same night, when her mere appearance in a Please Don’t Destroy pre-tape bumped them up an entire hour in the show’s lineup, pulling the sketch group from their typical end-of-show spot to one of the first sketches of the night.
*My best guess? Outside of two Weekend Update guest spots (Aristotle Athari’s lone appearance as stand-up comedian robot Laughintosh 3000 and Sarah Sherman roasting Colin Jost for the first time), Taylor was the bright spot of a pretty dismal Jonathan Majors-hosted night. This was long before the allegations of domestic violence against him had become public, mind you; Majors was just a visibly uncomfortable sketch participant, clearing the way for Taylor to walk away with the show, salting the earth on her way out.
The problem is that citing that night at all is also kind of a lie. It’s not like I wasn’t already sort of a fan before 2021. Through my beautiful, funny, smart and always insightful wife Trina, I’ve become well-versed in the intricacies and metaphors of both folklore and evermore. MISS AMERICANA, THE REPUTATION TOUR and FOLKLORE: THE LONG POND SESSIONS have been screened multiple times in our house. I fondly remember the full breakdown I received from her on what each frame of the “Look What You Made Me Do” music video symbolized and/or represented (at the time, an exercise roughly equivalent to providing a chimpanzee a seminar on the intricacies of alternative dispute resolution). Taylor Swift’s music had been in the background of our lives for the past few years. In a very real sense, I had already been assimilated by proxy.
Except….well….there really was a first for-real, real moment where I first remember thinking, “hey, Taylor Swift’s pretty good”. It was when I heard “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” on the radio for the first time. I even have written, quantifiable proof that I liked this song when it first came out! I listed it rather high in a “Best Songs of 2012” article I wrote in an earlier iteration of this blog, which I link to you for the sake of receipts, but also for the sake of comedy. It was a rough re-read for me; really, I declared a Karmin song the number one tune of the year? I bumped Carly Rae Jepsen to an honorable mention? I put a Phillip Phillips song on there? Even Taylor’s entry feels unnecessarily backhanded. So, go ahead, laugh away! I sure did.
Regardless, I still mark that 2021 SNL performance as the day I became a “Taylor Swift Fan”, the night I lost sleep later wondering, “what have I been missing out on this whole time?” And it would have been better for the sake of the story if Trina and I had found ourselves at Night 4 of the Los Angeles leg of The Eras Tour on the exact two-year anniversary of that fateful performance. Instead, we attended during the much-less monumental (and, given the subject matter, just short of any sort of symbolic significance) almost-twenty-one month anniversary.
Still, finding our way at what will almost certainly go down as one of the most popular tours of the decade generated many moments of reflection for me. Well, that and a lot of smiles, a weird anxiety, and a random tear or two. But, for the purposes of this article, lots and lots of reflection about the last twenty-one months or so, when I officially decided to take the plunge into the magical world of Taylor Swift, working my way through her discography from start to finish. Even bolder, I’ve been dipping my toes in something that feels simultaneously like a broad monoculture and a very specific and splintered sub-culture, the complicated fandom known as Swifties.
Just because she’s so ubiquitous in pop culture (even more so than ten years ago, if that even seemed possible at the time) as well as the fact that, frankly, writing and promoting an article about Taylor Swift practically guarantees clicks and views, I’ve been wanting to write something about her for a long time. Except…how do you possibly come up with a fresh angle on one of the most written-about humans on the face of the earth? I’m not sure you really can.
I wanted to avoid just doing a “top five songs” ranking list* or a “favorite album” article** and calling it a day. I could go track by track and give my views and opinions on her discography, videography and live performances from the perspective of a relative outsider…except that’s already been done, and quite brilliantly; if you haven’t seen the work of this particular glorious madman on Reddit (a work, I should say, that inspired me to keep pushing forward with this several times), you must do so.
*Although for the record, in no order, my five favorite songs as of this writing: “Cruel Summer”, “August”, “Exile”, “Style”, “New Romantics”.
** Gun to my head, it’s a three-way tie between folklore (her most revelatory), 1989 (her most fun) and RED (her most consistent).
But what nobody’s done yet is provide my personal observations as a guy in his mid-thirties diving into Swiftie-dom head-first for the past year and a half to see if there’s anything to take away. It turns out, as often happens when diving into something or someone with a massive following and self-created mythology, there’s quite a lot to take in! So I apologize in advance for the collection of essays you’re about to read. But consider this my outlet to expound on the beautiful, frustrating, elating, confounding, and slightly disturbing things you reckon with when navigating a fanbase and body of work as large and expansive as Taylor Swift’s.
In short, I can’t imagine bothering my actual friends or family with all of this information, so I’m passing the savings on to you, dear reader.
You might be reading this as a lifelong Taylor Swift fan, eager to hear what a relative outsider has to say. You may be a new fan looking for commonalities in our experiences. There’s an excellent chance you’re a more regular reader thinking to yourself, “Ryan, what the fuck? Can you just get back to writing about 70’s movies?” In due time, my friend, and sooner than you think. But this article is for you, as well. It’s for everyone, at least as much as I can muster.
And maybe, just maybe, I can even try to definitively answer the question that has probably been on the minds of those still on the outside this year….
….what’s the big deal about Taylor Swift, anyway?
II. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.
To become a fan of Taylor Swift is to willingly accept a series of contradictions. One of the most fundamental is that her music tends to feel somewhat timeless in terms of its sound and content, yet is completely tied to the time in which they were released.
Taylor’s real superpower is her ability to capture a particular feeling, either through produced sound or (more often) through lyric. Whether it be elation, heartbreak, petty revenge, reflection, or just good old fashioned anxiety, there’s inevitably a Taylor Swift song for everybody. And even though her songs very often tend to be about something or someone extremely specific (half the fun for most fans is determining exactly what or who that is), the feelings behind them are typically expressed so acutely that it’s very easy to draw a straight line between her experiences and your own. Her songs about very public-facing feuds and breakups can be applied to your falling-outs, your regrets, your successes. It’s a neat trick: what should feel like a barrier to entry ends up something that makes her music kind of timeless.
Despite this, the majority of Taylor Swift’s discography is undeniably tied to each album’s particular release year. Most of her major hits were completely unavoidable in their prime. You couldn’t escape “Blank Space” in 2014 even if you tried. As a result, when listening to them again, you can’t help but be transported back to a specific place and time. Many of the singles off of RED take me right back to the commute to my job as a luggage handler at a local airport. I can perfectly visualize the apartment parking space I was in when Trina played me this new song called “Shake it Off” the first time. Working my way through ten sequential Taylor Swift albums largely served as a walk through the greatest hits of the 2010’s (insomuch as there are any to walk through*), but it also served as a walk through the first era of my adulthood. It was a real treat.
*This is perhaps a cranky take, but most of the Top 40’s tunes in the first half of the 2010’s were fairly rancid, more so than the historical average. Once, in conversation, I referred to the EDM onslaught as a second disco era and I still stand by that.
The even bigger treat, though, is going through her discography in full and realizing…wait, these album tracks I’ve never heard before are all way better! This gets to another contradiction, this one essential to Taylor Swift’s work. It’s a fact that her most popular songs are humongous and ubiquitous. “Blank Space”. “Love Story”. “Shake It Off”. “You Belong With Me”. It is impossible to deny the profound legacy of these songs, if only because everyone and their cat has heard them. It’s just a fact.
It’s also a fact that she easily has fifty songs better than any of those. This is an open secret amongst her fanbase, but I’m here to confirm to those on the outside: if your knowledge of Taylor Swift consists of what you’ve heard on the radio, you likely haven’t heard Taylor Swift’s best work.
This isn’t remotely your fault, by the way. For whatever reason, she struggles with selecting singles, which I think is an occasional barrier to people giving her a fair shot. The vast majority of Taylor Swift’s best songs never got released as singles, or barely played on the radio, if at all. One of her very best (“New Romantics”, off of 1989) didn’t even make the fucking album the first time around; it had to wait for a Target exclusive release to have its day.
This can cause unintentional damage! For instance, 2019’s LOVER might be her overall most underrated album, bloated and somewhat unfocused though it may be. A big, bright, lush, pink album that followed the dark theatrics of 2017’s REPUTATION, LOVER contains some of her sexiest (“False God”), most confessional (“The Archer”), romantic (its title track) and insightful (“Afterglow”) work in her entire oeuvre. It also prominently features one of her most well-crafted pieces of pop ever, the partially-St. Vincent-penned “Cruel Summer”. Naturally, the first single off of the album was “ME!”, a wildly annoying song that prominently showcased all of her worst instincts. Although it got plenty of radio play (and it does have its supporters), it was eventually derided enough by the fanbase that it didn’t even make the 40+ song batting order on the Era Tour.
This is likely why the more Taylor-skeptic among the population have a hard time with people awarding her such intense flowers as, “she’s the premier lyricist of our time” even though…well, it might be true. It’s hard to square a sincere comparison between Taylor Swift and someone like Paul McCartney against a constant blaring of “Me-hee-hee/hoo-hoo-hoo”*. I get it. You can only work with what you’re exposed to. For whatever it’s worth, I was there at one point, too.
*Although I’d point out not all of McCartney’s work has exactly been brilliant, either.
This is why I think her famous ongoing re-recording project has been particularly well-timed (for those who don’t know the background behind the re-records, we’ll get into it. It’s complicated). In the post-pandemic era, when she seemingly picks up new fans exponentially with every passing week, it’s remarkably well-timed that the conversation around Taylor Swift has consistently been about her actual albums lately, as opposed to just a collection of songs from various years.
Take a rube like me, watching Trina get extremely excited when RED (TAYLOR’S VERSION) finally hit Spotify on November 12, 2021. I pulled it up myself out of curiosity and clicked around aimlessly before listening to half of WANEGBT (TV)* and calling it a night. Meanwhile, Trina, wizened fan that she is, immediately zeroed in on the main event: the ten-minute version of a song I was only vaguely familiar with, but is possibly Taylor Swift’s signature song, “All Too Well”. I, of course, hadn’t really heard of it. Trina and I were just working on different levels back then.
*Another side effect of becoming a Taylor Swift fan: your brain has to get used to lots of insane acronyms.
But, as a result of RED getting another day in the sun, I got an opportunity to really absorb that particular album and what it meant to fans both then and now. Turns out it’s a heckuva album, with an unusually laser-locked thematic focus, even for her. With reflection, it’s possible that this re-release planted the seed that blossomed into my Manchurian Candidate-esque activation during that SNL episode later in the month. Whether it did or not, RED (TAYLOR’S VERSION) undeniably changed the way I thought about her work.
Speaking of lyrics….
III. Oh my god, she’s insane, she wrote a song about me.
I’m not the type of person to really absorb music through its lyrics. I’ve never really been sure why, since a lot of my life has revolved around words, either via writing or reading or performing them. I’m also not much of a musician, and lack knowledge as to how songs are typically put together sonically, so it would make sense if I focused more on lyrics than on the music itself.
Nope, it’s just not the case for me. If the song makes me feel good, I’m usually in, regardless of content. I’m the dude that went, “wait, ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ is about a school shooting?” ten years ago. I’m a vibe guy at the end of the day. Unfortunately, this lack of lyrical appreciation puts me at a significant disadvantage when it comes to attending services at the Church of Taylor Swift.
To put it mildly, the lyrics are the lifeblood of the fandom. One of the reasons the “friendship bracelet” concept took off in conjunction with the Eras Tour is that a lot of her lyrics convey a ton of information and emotion in just a few short words, which is perfect for an art project where space is limited. Heck, it should be noted that the “friendship bracelet” trading thing is, in itself, a reference to a lyric, this one off of “You’re On Your Own, Kid” from her recent MIDNIGHTS.
There have been a lot of criticisms towards her artistry, the primary being her quality as a vocalist, which is not a completely unfounded criticism (or at least, it used to be*). However, her most clear claim to her legacy has been her ability as a lyricist. Thus, it’s worth it for me to at least try to dig into this aspect of her body of work.
*This is another reason why I think the re-recordings have been such a net-positive; hearing her perform her old songs in the present displays so clearly how exponentially she’s grown as a singer over the past ten-plus years.
The lyrics of hers that stand out to me the most tend to fall into three categories:
1) The simple and devastating. She’s often at her very best when delivering a verbal gut punch in as few words as possible. This might be why folklore and evermore took off the way it did in 2020; it’s an album full of these types of lines. Take “tolerate it”, a song from evermore about a woman who is much more invested in her crumbling relationship than her unnamed partner is: “I made you my temple/my mural/my sky/now I’m begging for footnotes in the story of your life”.
Also consider this passage from folklore’s “august”, one entry in a trilogy of songs about a love triangle. This one gives the perspective of the girl being cheated with, a smitten teenager who spent the summer maybe thinking this would become something more than it was destined to: “back when we were still changing for the better/wanting was enough/for me, it was enough”.
Finally, there’s this line from the bridge of folklore’s “illicit affairs”, another song in the same vein as “august” that digs into the effects of being the “other woman” in an affair: “don’t call me ‘kid’/don’t call me ‘baby’/look at this idiotic fool that you made me/you showed me colors you know I can’t see with anyone else”.
(folklore and evermore are great albums.)
2) The deeply romantic. Obviously something like “Lover” has become a wedding first dance staple for the last couple of years, and considering the simple domesticity of its opening line “we could leave the Christmas lights up ‘til January/this is our place/we make the rules”, it should. But there’s also a little line buried in one of the last songs off of MIDNIGHTS’ “Sweet Nothing”: “On the way home/I wrote a poem/You said ‘what a mind’/this happens all the time”. It’s a powerful testament to how her words can stir you that the simple power of that line sticks in the brain, even as the relationship that spurred the observation is, uh, no longer active.
This is also a domain where Taylor tends to get downright poetic. Take a line like you see in “ivy”, another song about a secret affair, this time off evermore (I don’t think I put together how much folklore and evermore are about shenanigans until this moment): “I can’t/stop you putting roots in my dreamland/my house of stone/your ivy grows/and now I’m covered in you”.
3) The abruptly blunt. Sometimes, poetry just has no place when it comes to making a point. Whether it’s a sing-songy “all you’re gonna be is mean/and a liar/and pathetic/and alone in life” (“Mean”) or a brutal “I was never good at telling jokes/but the punchline goes/I get older but your lovers stay my age” (“All Too Well (10-Minute Version”)), Taylor Swift has had, from the jump, an unnatural ability to unload a full clip into someone she already killed a couple of minutes ago.
Actually, that last line about not being “good at telling jokes” gets to an interesting question that gets asked often….
IV. I think it’s strange that you think I’m funny
Is Taylor Swift funny?
It’s a question that seems to haunt her career and one that seems to be of great personal import. Someone who may or may not have played the title character in 2001’s DONNIE DARKO, it would appear, had at some point implied to her that she wasn’t. The topic comes up on at least two songs on RED (TAYLOR’S VERSION). It’s clearly a very real point of contention for her.
So….is she funny?
My answer: yes, she absolutely can be!
I mean, if she crashed the Slipper Room one night to do twenty minutes of stand up and then tried to banter with Kumail Nanjiani or something (not that anybody in the greater Taylor Swift Mythology would have ever done this), I don’t know that there would be an imminent career change on the way. But she’s survived the SNL double-billing gauntlet before (and actually did pretty well, at least in relation to others who have tried). I think she’s gotten in some pretty funny off-the-cuff remarks during this most recent tour, and they’re often even lightly at her fan base’s expense, which I think is a little bold. It’s not a core part of the experience, but she can be funny!
More than just “joke-telling”, though, I think there’s an inherent, and purposeful, silliness to her and her onstage persona that actually makes her endearing. We’ll get into general Era Tour takeaways shortly, but one of the biggest observations I made while finally getting a chance to see her perform live is…
…well, Taylor Swift is completely and utterly swagless.
This is not an insult, I promise! She might even agree with me: she said roughly as much back in 2014 during an interview with Gayle King on CBS This Morning:
“My life doesn't naturally gravitate towards being 'edgy,' 'sexy,' or 'cool' - I just naturally am not any of those things.”
More than her just not being naturally “cool”, though, her vague but palpable uncoolness is actually a key part of her persona and her success (at least in my opinion). For instance, if she were a slightly more graceful dancer, I think something like the music video for “Delicate” would lose a lot of its oddball power. If she were cooler, if she were less of a dork at her core? The video wouldn’t work.
I can’t truly draw any comparisons between her and other major live acts, because I just haven’t seen them in person. But it seems to me that, whereas there are other acts that absolutely focus on the precision of their every dance move, beautiful movement isn’t necessarily a major tenet of a Taylor Swift show. Yes, there is dancing and lots of it, but it’s all cut with this deep subtext that she might start bursting into laughter at any moment.
What this ends up doing is making her feel….well, relatable. This is unfathomably important to The Taylor Swift Brand. Her presumed relatability is a core aspect to her popularity. But I think that vaguely silly stage persona is a major part of that. Seeing her live, she doesn’t exactly have the feel of a goddess who’s come down to Earth to bless us with her once-in-a-lifetime talent. Instead, she feels for all the world like our goofy friend from high school who managed to turn herself into an institution. We don’t actually know her, but it feels like we could. There’s more joy to be wrung from that than you might think.
All of this gets to the most obvious answer to, “why do people care about Taylor Swift so goddamn much?”….
V. Just think of the fun things we could do
It’s fun! Sometimes, in our pursuit of seeking individuality and creating personal legacy in a world that seems intent on snuffing it out, we way overthink the appeal of monoculture. It can be fun being into something that everyone else is! It’s fun being into Taylor Swift! There’s a thrill in being able to say something insane like, “John Mayer better pray” to a coworker and there being a non-zero chance they’ll know what you’re talking about. It’s identical to the thrill everybody got ten years ago yelling “HODOR” at each other. It’s the same reason AVENGERS: ENDGAME became the overwhelming in-person theater experience that it was. It’s fun to be able to share something together! That’s what society is!
Come to think of it, being a Taylor Swift fan is actually not terribly unlike being a Marvel Cinematic Universe fan, in the sense that the longer you take to join up, the more homework you’re going to have to do, and some of it is going to involve Tom Hiddleston. Oh, and you’ll also end up having to assume a fair amount of embarrassment as other fans get overly defensive over something that doesn’t really matter. But mostly the homework thing.
But, man, what fun homework it is to do! As alluded to near the beginning of this article, just going through her discography and live performances is, if nothing else, a trip down memory lane. But there’s all this ancillary material that you’ll inevitably come across that can trigger all new rabbit holes to go down. One of the most obvious is the rush to figure out who or what a specific song is talking about, which leads to jumping around into events of her life and the various friends and lovers she’s held over the years. It helps that many of her former flames were, and continue to be, pretty famous, which leads to all these other expansions of the Extended Taylor Universe. Whether you find this kind of thing inherently interesting is in the eye of the beholder (full disclosure: her dating history is one of those things I’ve never found all that fascinating, even before I became a fan), but it also becomes an inevitability when consuming her music. The music is her, and she is the music.
It can get so much more granular, and tangential, than that. Clothing is important; the mere mention of the word “scarf” can activate a Taylor Swift fan like they were the Winter Soldier. There’s mythology that revolves around just the different-colored dresses she wears during the secret songs on the Eras Tour. Become a fan for long enough, and you might even start watching horrific filth like VALENTINE’S DAY and CATS, two noxious ensemble films that bookended the 2010’s, just to be able to jump into the “is Taylor Swift a good actor?*” discourse. If you’re committed to this kind of thing, you will never, ever be bored.
*The answer, I’m afraid, is no, not really.
You can even find yourself blindsided with her songs used in different ways. Taylor Swift’s music is used in media all the time, and 90% of the time, it’s the trailer of an Amazon Prime series you’ve never heard of and will never watch. Sometimes, though, you get a moment like in the latest season of THE BEAR. If you haven’t seen it, I can’t even link to the scene I’m talking about because I don’t dare step on it. You just need to watch the show. Suffice it to say, though, a major Taylor Swift tune scores one of the most remarkable and satisfying turning points in a character I’ve seen in forever. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you’ll know it when you get there. And as a fan, does it make it sweeter that it’s her music specifically? Look, it helps.
As another example, earlier this year, my wife and I devoured Jenny Nicholson’s four-hour magnum opus all about the doomed Evermore theme park in Utah. For those who haven’t seen it, you may still have sussed out the relevancy here; upon the release of the completely unrelated album evermore, the fantasy sort-of-role-playing theme park sued Taylor Swift in 2021 for…well, it’s not exactly clear; the stealing of their name, I guess? It sure looked like a desperate attempt at a quick influx of cash to me, but I am no lawyer. It backfired; they were counter-sued for the unlicensed usage of Swift’s music, and that was that. A beautiful example of shooting yourself in the foot to get a day off of work.
ANYWAY, at the very end, the video closes everything out with an Evermore-based version of the title track of evermore that plays over the credits. And it’s great. It manages to sum up the entire video in a couple of minutes while still being a near-faithful rendition of one of Taylor Swift’s best songs. It actually made me appreciate the beauty of the original that much more. You don’t need to be a fan to get everything you need out of this amazing YouTube doc, but goddamn, it doesn’t hurt.
You even start finding yourself cackling at viral videos that include her material in some way, shape, or form, even if it’s not especially positive. As an example, around the release of her most recent original album MIDNIGHTS, Caleb Gamman released a video where he goes track by track and attempts to identify, as quickly as possible, which tracks were produced by Jack Antonoff based on how annoying it sounds. Spoilers: he does well. It’s great*. It casts a massive amount of shade, but it’s great. I watch it, like, once a week.
*Even better is this parody/response video by Sam Fishell.
I could go on and on and on, and to be honest, this could be applied to any sort of fandom. I'm sure there’s hilarious Carley Rae Jepsen content out there. It’s just that there are so many goddamn Taylor Swift fans. The numbers are in their favor here. As her base grows larger and larger and ever larger, being able to share that language unlocks more and more around you in online spaces. You can lose yourself quickly in this stuff. But it gives you things to talk about with other people. That’s become a precious commodity these days.
This gets us to my actual experience at The Eras Tour.
VI. The best people in life are free
It was August 7th 2023, also known as LA Night 4. Gracie Abrams opened first, which made me wonder if her dad J.J. was in the house*. HAIM followed, and it should be said they were fucking incredible (if you ever get the opportunity to see HAIM, please take it). After this followed one of the most emotionally overwhelming three and a half hours of my life, followed by ninety minutes of traffic back to our hotel (that we should mention was less than five miles away). All in all, a pretty decent Monday night.
*(For context, J.J. Abrams and I have had beef ever since RISE OF SKYWALKER. Let’s just say you got lucky that night, you coward.)
For several reasons, this section isn't really going to be a formal “review” of The Eras Tour per se, the primary one being the famous Ticketmaster debacle that shot ticket prices way up and prevented many, many, many longtime fans from even being able to entertain the idea of going. I recognize that attendance was an immense privilege and I hate the idea of anybody reading this potentially feeling like that’s being rubbed in their faces. So I’m going to keep a lot of setlist stuff to a bare minimum.
(Alright, I’ll gush just once. Our secret songs that night were “Dress” and “Exile”, an evil combination if ever one existed. It was amazing. Okay, that’s it.)
That said, it must be stated that it is a unique and downright flabbergasting experience seeing 70,000 people all gather for one specific purpose and one only: worship at the altar of their chosen queen.
It’s here I should mention that big, loud, bright pop concerts are not my typical forte. I have no real aversion to them; it’s just that the type of artists I tend to like seeing in concert are just more likely to find themselves in San Francisco music halls* and amphitheaters than they are football stadiums. And, yeah, I’ve been fortunate enough to see live concerts of artists that are probably more important to the actual foundational history of music when all is said and done (Fleetwood Mac, James Taylor, and Crosby, Stills and Nash, just to name a couple). But this is the first, and possibly only, time I’ve seen an internationally famous pop star at the absolute crest of their popularity (so far).
*For the hell of it, some of my all-time favorite artists currently working include Ben Folds, The Strokes, Ingrid Michaelson, Leon Bridges and Kate Miller-Heidke.
And, suffice it to say that Taylor puts on a great show. It’s been said over and over that she’s currently going for roughly the length of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, performing somewhere around forty-ish of, yes, some of her greatest hits (“Love Story”, “Shake It Off”, “Blank Space”) but also some relatively deep album cuts that will likely never be performed again* (“tolerate it”, “Midnight Rain”, “illicit affairs”, to name a couple). But it should be noted that this is all done seemingly without her breaking a sweat, an astounding professional human performance trick that one doesn’t see all that often in an era where “showing the work” is often elevated as a virtue.
*This is why I slightly push back on the common characterization of The Eras Tour as a “greatest hits” show, per se. It is until it isn’t.
But that’s not the loopiest thing about being there at a Taylor Swift concert. No, the most unique aspect of The Eras Tour is the palpable socialization that permeates the air. Now, again, my experience with major pop tours is very limited, so I don’t have a ton to compare The Eras Tour to in order to gauge whether the level of dedication to look, vibe, and aesthetic the average Swiftie maintains is usual or not (although I have my doubts). But, given the costumes, the ancillary props, the signs, the gatherings, the general positive vibes….the closest thing I can compare it to is the year I attended the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con.
Even then, though, Comic-Con by that point was just not this specific. It was a confluence of hundreds, maybe thousands, of various and disparate fandoms, which included certain mainstream movie and television franchises, actors, and studios. You could walk down the halls of the San Diego Convention Center and see at any given point a Dalek, a Terminator, Tony Stark, Spider-Man, Invader Zim, a hobbit…there were lots and lots of potential sources to pull from.
Walking around SoFi that night was like attending a Comic-Con in celebration of just a single person.
Now, look, obviously rabid enthusiasm for a popular music star was not invented with Taylor Swift; you could track that all the way back to at least Franz Listz. One even imagines there might have been a particularly charismatic caveman banging rocks together in a way that caused other Neanderthals to camp out in front of their cave. It can also get sooooo much more intense than what your average* Swiftie is capable of; for instance, there was nobody swooning or fainting in the aisles like it’s a February 1964 episode of Ed Sullivan, at least not the night we were there. Still, there’s something almost vaguely nonsensical from the outside as to just how fiercely loyal even that hypothetical average Taylor Swift fan can get.
*Please note I said “average”.
You don’t need me to tell you that Swifties can get intense about seemingly nothing. At times, hearing someone spew out a theory about a song or album that may or may not even exist starts to take on the tone of a Q-Anon faithful, or maybe someone standing on a street corner. Numerology often comes into play, and you see a lot of effort to connect dots that may or may not fit. You don’t quite get this with any other fan base of almost anything, at least not to my observation; it’s hard to imagine a Harry Styles fan firing up Google Maps in order to prove a weird point.
So….what’s up? What’s the obsession all about? What about her is drawing out people like this? Why are they like this?
Like all interesting questions, there are a couple of answers. Let’s start with a good one.
VII. I know places we can hide
Ever since the start of the pandemic, there’s been a lot of talk about the loss of “third spaces”. It’s a social theory that’s existed since at least the late-80’s, when Ray Oldenburg coined it in his book THE GREAT GOOD PLACE, released in….1989 (what does this mean???). It basically posits that a person’s first place is their home, with their second being the workplace. For the good of fostering a community, creativity, and society, a third place that’s neither of those spaces is a necessity. It’s a place to connect with others, whether they be friends or strangers.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but churches used to fill this space for many; now, there are a lot of good reasons why there’s been a shift from that in recent decades, but it was a legitimate source of interaction for earlier generations*. However, a third space could be almost anything. It could be parks, record stores, gyms, cafes…all things which have either eroded, disappeared, or have been replaced in one way or another, even before March of 2020.
*Not to put too fine a point on this, but the only times I’ve ever really considered entering a church on purpose was for the possibility of meeting other people.
You probably see where I’m going with this, but to make it official: I think fandoms have definitively taken the place of traditional third spaces in the 2020’s. This is both good in the sense that there are a lot of worse spaces to be in, and bad in the sense that fandom spheres mostly exist online, which can lead to trouble quickly if not properly monitored. However, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Taylor Swift’s star has continued to rise as third spaces continue to erode. In fact, it may be the key thesis statement to Explaining The Whole Thing.
I’m willing to guess that the vast majority of her fanbase, both those who managed to get in on the ground floor back in 2006 as well as those who started listening to her last week, don’t have much in the way of a third space anymore, if they ever did. This isn’t a value judgment, I barely have one myself (I think it’s why I’m writing more often these days; it’s out of a need for creating a third space out of thin air). Especially starting with my generation (millennials), many of us don’t.
So, yes, I think you could chalk this very obvious explosion in her popularity in the 2020’s as a result of the release of folklore (perhaps her magnum opus) and evermore (the ultimate red-headed stepchild in her discography that has a fiercely loyal fanbase all of its own). But I also think it’s because the pandemic decimated a lot of second spaces too, as the workplace and the home either became as one, or got eliminated altogether.
Frankly, there was nowhere else for people to go. So they got online and talked about Taylor Swift.
This loss, combined with living through the paradox of increased social media connection driving an inability to communicate about….uh, I guess fucking anything at this point (people can’t even agree on why they like the things they have in common), the relative universality of Taylor’s work provided a Rosetta stone for those stuck in their own personal Tower of Babel.
We can’t really talk about politics, religion, social issues, TV, movies, the past, or the future. But we can talk Taylor.
To that end, easily the most fun aspect of attending The Eras Tour was the socializing. Again, I’m a 35-year-old straight male relative newcomer to all of this. I’m actively trying not to make too fine a point of my age, gender and/or sexuality, I promise. I’ve found Swifties to be way more inclusive than their reputation suggests, but a large portion of her fanbase are women and members of the LGBTQIA community. No value statement there, it’s just….take a look around. There’s not always an abundance of spaces to accommodate people in those groups, and I don’t want my goofy straight ass to crash them too much.
Needless to say, I wasn’t swapping friendship bracelets or anything that night; the handful of guys I talked to that night didn’t seem like the bracelet-swapping type, and approaching groups of young women with bracelets felt like an excellent way to get pepper-sprayed. But being able to see my wife jump in and socialize with strangers, all of whom she now shares a language with in an age of stark division…it was awesome.
People even seemed to find a way to connect with other fans after getting priced out of the building. It turns out that there’s a whole system and culture revolving around tailgating outside the stadiums Taylor performed at during the North American leg of the Eras Tour (to the point where some stadiums towards the end had to clamp down on it). Fans still dressed up. They still swapped friendship bracelets. They danced with each other to all 40+ songs that got played every night. The fact that this became a thing implies this might not all be about the concert experience for everybody. It sounds to me like sharing the language was the ultimate point.
It should be said, though, that in the pursuit of learning this specific language, sometimes people get lost in it and lose their mind. This gets us to the second reason people seem obsessed with Taylor Swift.
To some degree, it’s specifically incentivized.
VIII. This is why we can’t have nice things.
In order to really explain the particular sway Taylor Swift holds over her fans, we should talk about the secret sessions.
The secret sessions are the kind of thing that doesn’t really make the leap into general pop culture, but was a big deal in Swiftie circles. To that end, I only found out that secret sessions were ever a thing via Reddit comments and articles from people who managed to attend one. They’re….really something. Or at least, they were.
For the uninitiated, secret sessions were…well, secret listening parties that were held in conjunction with a new album release hosted by Taylor Swift herself, often at one of her actual homes, with invitations going out to the most dedicated fans in the pool. Everyone would sit around, she would come out and talk to the hand-selected crowd, she would play several tracks from her soon-to-be-released album, she would make cookies for everyone, there would be photo ops, there would be NDAs signed….it was a whole thing.
The determination criteria as to who got in for this hasn’t been explicitly revealed, to my knowledge. However, invites from Taylor Nation (the official name of Taylor’s marketing/PR team) generally seemed to go out to young, dedicated fans who a) had a robust social media presence (presumably the better to extensively vet them and ensure they were who they said they were) and b) used that presence to talk mostly about Taylor Swift.
For a period of about ten years, though, it really did seem like there was a real incentive to post exclusively about Taylor Swift all day on Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter. Every new uploaded picture, lengthy lyrical breakdown, and homemade craft project was a potential lottery ticket, and the Mega Millions jackpot was Taylor Swift baking you a cookie and providing you the photo op to end all photo ops*.
*Imagine knowing someone who went to one of these things and got a photo with her? Would you be able to tell them anything ever again? Isn’t that, like, the ultimate trump card? “Oh, you developed the pill that cured Alzheimer’s? Nice, dude! Here’s a photo of me with Taylor Swift at her house.” This would arguably be more of a conversation-ender than taking a photo with any president in our lifetimes not named Barack Obama. Maybe even Obama.
You can see where obvious peril may lie in this system. To hear people tell it, this practice caused friction within the fandom almost immediately. Although the intention wasn’t to put certain fans in a specific hierarchy, it became difficult not to view fans who scored a trip to Taylor Swift’s house as “fanning better” from ones who didn’t. Also, it won’t surprise you to hear that people acted badly almost immediately; there are reports of people yelling out names of Taylor’s ex-boyfriends during the 1989 secret session and people stealing bathroom soaps and, oddly, Scrabble scoresheets during the LOVER secret session.
The lasting effect was that there really was (maybe still is?) a genuine incentive for that insane Taylor Swift fan in your life who only seems to be able to talk about lyrics from folklore and make Photoshopped collages based off of SPEAK NOW’s color schemes to be the way he or she is. There exists a non-zero chance that this dedication could leverage them into the homes and arms of their favorite artist. It absolutely won’t….but it could. It has. Who knows?
My instant reaction in my head to hearing about all of this for the first time was a simple, “Is she insane?” That this unusual amount of access to a star who has been on various levels of “extremely famous” for roughly thirteen years cooked a lot of fans’ brains was a little like the boat sinking at the end of TITANIC; at the end of the day, no other result was likely. The one thing you can’t depend on people to do is behave.
To be clear, I am not blaming her for this. The intention was to do something amazing for fans who may not have the opportunity to pay their way into this kind of access. It’s kind of beautiful if you think about it. But it speaks to the essential “people-pleasing” aspect of Taylor Swift’s personality that she continued these for years, even after it became clear that people’s expectations as to what celebrities “owe us” have shifted into a very dark area, and as it became equally clear that there’s something about Taylor Swift that make people literally go insane.
It also, unfortunately, served as a central tenet of her brand, that being “Taylor Swift is your best friend”, a brand that inherently had to shift given everything that the last few years have become. Maybe the secret sessions were always doomed to end the way they did; there doesn’t appear to be any intention of bringing them back. But considering that Taylor can’t seem to shake that need, you never know what will happen next.
IX. I did something bad.
It becomes difficult to talk about Taylor Swift without eventually talking, at least a little bit, about capitalism.
Simply put, there may be no public figure in the world who has better harnessed the levers of the American machine quite like her. Like all brands that yield a popular output, this is both good and bad.
On the good end, it can be a marvel to see her marketing instincts at work. For instance, consider how easily she’s gotten everyone to use the word “era” to replace the word “album”. An era is really just referring to one of her records! Even folklore and evermore, two of her most intrinsically linked albums, borne from essentially the same creative kiln, are somehow two separate “eras”. Who knew?
Part of that stems from another bit of genius that seems to have been seeded from the very beginning: every album getting a distinct associated color. SPEAK NOW is purple, folklore is gray, 1989 is light blue, RED is cerulean. This is a particular boon for those who like to dress up for her concerts, but aren’t feeling all that creative. You could easily get away with throwing on something amber and stating you’re in your "Evermore era” without anyone interrogating you.
Submitting yourself to well-crafted marketing really can be fun. As bleak as late-stage capitalism can be, we typically don’t mind putting our money towards something that we can presumably get something out of, even if it’s just a little emotional charge.
On the other hand….
If you type the phrase “capitalist queen” into Google, you’ll get a lot of Taylor Swift-related TikToks. It’s a descriptor that I sense is mostly used ironically by her fanbase, although one also starts to suspect it’s also a way of distancing oneself from easily the hardest thing to square away about being a Swiftie.
I worry I’m opening myself up to accusations here of being unfair or a secret hater or something, and I hope I’ve bought myself some credibility as to the good faith I enter this section with. My ultimate position is this: if we can praise Taylor for her generous donations to the food banks of her various stops across the country this year (and we should! It’s amazing!), or for the fat bonuses she wrote for the people on her team doing a lot of the grunt work (and we ought to! It’s life-altering stuff and exactly what all people in Taylor’s position ought to be doing), we should be able to talk about the less savory maneuvers that have defined her as a brand.
Essentially, for those who have never been able to get on board with her, to those who have always sniffed something vaguely disingenuous about her, it’s likely because of those capitalist tendencies. And it’s not completely unwarranted.
You might remember that Swift recently received negative press when her extensive usage of private jets became public. You might also remember that, on the list of top ten carbon emittors, she ranked number one by a lot. Her team responded by pointing out that her jets were often loaned out to others. This is a disastrous answer for a couple of reasons, the primary being that it misses the point of the controversy entirely. Her team has also pointed out her various carbon offsets that she purchased (almost double the amount needed to cover her usage for the entire Eras Tour), which also doesn’t really mean much in the grand scheme of things. These are frustratingly bad responses to a very obvious problem. They just are.
However, the private jet controversy hasn’t seemed to really stick as a major mainstream point of contention, if only because, all “eat the rich” rhetoric aside, the reason for her flying private is plainly obvious (at least in my opinion). She’s already one of the most* stalked human beings on the planet. I just don’t think simply flying first-class on Virgin is an option for her at this point in time, despite people online insisting that she should. We can argue all day whether it’s right that the possibility exists for someone to be so well-known that destroying the environment in her wake is a necessity for survival, but the toothpaste can’t be put back into the tube at this point. It’s what it is.
*”Most” in the sense of pure numbers, as opposed to “the most intensely”. That honor might still belong to Bjork.
Whether she really needs two private jets (one is allegedly for just friends and family) is a whole different thing, and ditching the second one at least feels like an easy way for her to address the issue directly. However, the whole conversation kind of makes me uneasy since the only reason we even know she has two jets, and how often they fly and where they go to, and for how long is because…well, people follow her every move.
It’s all publicly available information, which I guess it probably should be in the interest of accountability. And I honestly understand the argument that tracking this is specifically a public good, especially since carbon emissions (much like recycling) is fundamentally a corporate issue that’s been pushed onto the consumer as our responsibility for some reason. I get why people get pissed about having to use paper straws while Taylor Swift gets to privately fly her siblings and family members around every day. I get it. I’m annoyed just writing it out. But I don’t know that stalking her every step as a way to prove that she should be flying commercial is a super compelling argument. That’s all.
The private plane usage is a real issue, but I think both the people who love Taylor and those who hate her are zeroing in on this and intentionally leaving out information in order to maintain their positions, making the conversation really difficult to parse through. I do think to her average fan, though, this topic more than anything else is what cuts against the “Taylor is your best friend” marketing angle the most. How could your best friend emit so much carbon? It turns out, she has her reasons, and there are undeniable consequences to it that we are left to reckon with. It’s what it is.
A bigger point of contention, at least for me, is her near-obsessive need to keep releasing purchasable content. I cannot speak to how things used to be on this front; what I can tell you is that easily the worst part of the MIDNIGHTS era was the constant rollouts of unnecessary “Anti-Hero” remixes and confusing re-releases of the original album, some of which could only be purchased by those fortunate enough to find themselves around the right truck in the MetLife stadium parking lot.
It all feels borne from the same instinct that led to the secret sessions, that desire to create special experiences for some as a way to forge a bond. There are those out there who now own a copy of MIDNIGHTS that most others don’t. That’s special! But it can’t shake the feeling of it all being a cash grab, which ruins some of the specialness of it all. It doesn’t seem right that you would need to own multiple copies of the same album in order to have every associated song. It sure helps juice the sales numbers, though.
So, yes, the Taylor Swift Experience can feel a little hollow at times, and it’s all just part and parcel of what it is. For as long as she inches toward billionaire status and has the level of fame and adoration that she has, she’s going to contribute to the heat death of the planet. She’ll never not be obsessed with stats, numbers, and legacy; therefore, there will always be more corporate and transparently capitalist moves to be made to give her more Spotify streams and hard album sales. It doesn’t override the art or joy in any real way, but it’s not fair to dismiss any and all criticism as “people who just hate her for no reason”. It’s important to at least acknowledge it, even if it can’t really be reconciled.
There’s an even darker side to the whole Swiftie experience that gives me real pause as well, and this time the call is coming from within….
X. Hunters with cell phones
The thing that I’ve been talking around this whole time is that, for as positive an experience I’ve had with Taylor Swift fans in the real world, there are also a lot of real bad actors out there, and they have a tendency for messing things up for everybody else.
(This doesn’t even include the bevy of stalkers that have gotten frighteningly close to being able to do something evil to her. It’s worth noting, though, that very few of them have ever expressed an active hatred of her. On the contrary, they often sound like fans, minus the part where they try to sleep in her bed. One has even said she seems “nice and cool”. The pipeline between fan and stalker is often much shorter than people want to admit.)
Over the course of writing this, the infamous Jack Antonoff rehearsal dinner incident came and went. And, to be honest, it was a real splash of cold water to my face after the euphoria of The Eras Tour. It was to the point where I almost hit “delete” on this whole thing, so scared and nervous was I to associate myself to a fanbase that can get so dangerous.
For those not in the know, somehow, someway, word got out that Taylor Swift was at Long Beach Island in New Jersey attending a rehearsal dinner in advance of Antonoff’s nuptials. In no time at all, hundreds of people started swarming around outside of the restaurant in question, then eventually across the street (which feels pretty pointless to me, but whatever). Just sort of hovering. Waiting for her to…eventually come back out, I guess? I think the purpose for most was just to get footage of her, however brief, in order to upload the precious seconds of footage onto TikTok and get those sweet, sweet likes. For this, she gets treated like a zoo animal. At least with paparazzi, there’s a financial incentive.
Again, I know the instinct is to say, “this is what she wanted!”, which feels like another distancing tactic in order to avoid grappling with the fact that people are rapidly losing their minds. Yes, Taylor has an obvious pathological need to be public-facing (she’s literally called herself a “pathological people-pleaser” in the recent track ‘You’re Losing Me’). However, I think even people who hate her guts can probably agree that she’s at least owed the right to attend the wedding for a friend (an attendance she didn’t announce herself) without attracting a crowd. Yet, that’s apparently beyond the scope of reason in 2023. But people want her to fly first class on Delta.
It seems like a strange event in isolation. But then you couple it with the fact that people who think they’re married to her can find her house, break in and sleep in her bed, or apparently be able to get into the lobby of her apartment complex and just walk around. A rag like the New York Post can even interview you. You can say, “can’t she just have a secret garage to enter into her residences in?” And, she does! Want to guess how we know that?
You just sort of get this bad feeling in your stomach when you dwell on it all for too long. Even giving airspace to any of it at all kind of makes me feel guilty. I reflect back on a diary entry she wrote ten years ago about being anxious about people with phones and cameras camping outside her home:
The hunters will always outnumber me. The spectators will stand by, shaking their heads, going “that poor girl”.
But the point is, they’re still watching. Everyone loves to watch a good hunt.
Hmmm. Fuck.
Let’s ease our way towards the end of this thing with a topic a little less crazy.
XI. Karma is my boyfriend
Taylor Swift is the closest I’ve ever come to believing the Illuminati is real.
Like most nasty conspiracy theories, the Illuminati has deep Germanic roots. The Bavarian Illuminati was a very real society in the late 18th century that stood in opposition to perceived injustices, and sought to control the unjust without dominating them. The Catholic Church loved this about as much as you might imagine, and the Illuminati were quickly outlawed. Although some argue they stoked the initial fires that eventually grew into the French Revolution, how much control they really held appears up for debate.
But the idea of the Illuminati has persisted ever since. And, given its inherent secretive, cloak-and-dagger nature, you can accuse almost anybody of being Illuminati, even when they’re extremely public and frequently-tracked figures whose ability to fit in multiple secret meetings in order to control the world is presumably limited. I once got into an increasingly-sincere conversation with an old coworker during my aforementioned job at the airport about how Jay-Z and Nicki Minaj were members of the Illuminati, although he never seemed to express a tangible reason as to why. To him, they just were, and that was proof enough.
Now, it should be stated, I don’t really believe in the Illuminati, any more than I believe in a secret deep state, adjustment bureau, or a cabal of lizard people. But I’ve also spent the last ten years seeing every Taylor Swift-related controversy break right for her eventually, that I just have to wonder sometimes.
Obviously, the infamous 2009 VMA’s incident sort of spoke for itself. Whether you believed Beyonce truly had made one of the best videos of all time or not, it was hard to find someone who didn’t find it off-putting that Kanye West felt the need to make that particular point at that particular time in that particular way*. It was a plainly evident inappropriate moment that promptly ended Kanye’s career a scant thirteen years later for unrelated reasons, but not before getting excoriated for it the next day by Jay Leno on the first episode of the former Tonight Show host’s 10 pm talk show (2009 was a bizarre, wild time). The worst thing about the interruption that night, though, was its subsequent launching of eight million extremely unfunny “Imma let you finish” jokes that lingered for years.
*Fun fact about the 2009 VMAs; this was also the night Lil Mama made the ill-advised decision to crash the stage and perform “Empire State of Mind” with Jay-Z and Alicia Keys, neither of whom had a clue this was happening. The pop star who desperately tried to pull Lil Mama back from ending her career? Beyonce. Yep, she managed to find herself in the middle of two of the craziest ever VMA moments on the same night, despite doing nothing but sit there both times.
But Taylor’s second run-in with Kanye in 2016 was a little more complicated, at least at the time; it felt like public sentiment was roughly split on who was in the right. The exact timeline of what exactly happened is a little detail-heavy, and can sometimes be tedious. The brass tacks of it, however, are that Kanye West slept in a bed with a bunch of celebrity wax nude figurines for the music video for his song “Famous” off of THE LIFE OF PABLO. There were many notable figures who “appeared” here, including West himself, but also Bill Cosby, Rihanna, Chris Brown, Donald Trump, George W. Bush and….Taylor Swift, who also had a lyric all about her that was the center of the controversy: “I think me and Taylor might still have sex.”
The line was allegedly cleared with and approved by Swift herself. For a long time, though, it was genuinely unclear who knew about what and who approved of which. The key misstep, though, was Taylor’s public assertion that she hadn’t given approval of the line in question. The downfall came when Kim Kardashian, Kanye’s then-wife, released a snippet of audio of a phone conversation that seemed to reveal that she had. Now, the clip conveniently leaves out the part of the conversation where Taylor goes on to say “I thought you were going to call me a bitch or something”, a troubling omission considering the song goes on to contain the line “I made that bitch famous”. It would be a few years before the truth came to light that this snippet was edited, but the damage in 2016 was done. If the trending hashtag was any indication, Taylor Swift, it appeared, was over.
It does seem, with hindsight, that the #taylorswiftisoverparty crew had been making plans for years, and were simply waiting for the right opportunity to leap out from behind the couch and turn on the lights. As mentioned, there’s been a contingent that has just never vibed with Taylor, and likely never will*. As we’ve already discussed, some of those reasons are very legitimate, some of them aren’t, but it is what it is. The immediacy of her downfall after Kim Kardashian posted the phone call audio on Snapchat (there’s a 2016 sentence if ever there was one) indicates that there were lots of folks out there waiting for something, anything to validate their inherent gut instincts.
*I don’t know that I’ve explicitly said this yet, but…this is okay, by the way! We don’t all need to like the same things all of the time.
As time has marched on, however, history has vindicated her on this front (if you think people hate Taylor Swift, you should solicit some opinions about Kanye and Kim nowadays). It didn’t hurt that in 2020, the full phone call hit the internet, which revealed that Kimye were full of shit after all. The real consequence, though, is that something very legitimate like the private plane stuff no longer sticks. Taylor Swift has already been tied to a stake, burned to a crisp, and resurrected as something stronger than before, and it was over something tenuous at best. The snake shit has been internalized as a key piece of imagery on her tours. The Kanye subreddit briefly became a Taylor Swift subreddit last year. It’s over. She won. She won so definitively, in fact, that things that could take her down now are graded on an invisible curve.
So it just makes me wonder. Maybe the Illuminati is real. Who knows? What am I to think when I see the Scooter Braun empire begin to crumble out of nowhere? It’s been years since Taylor’s contract with Big Machine expired, spurring her to jump over to Republic Records. It’s been years since grown man Scooter Braun bought Big Machine and, with it, her masters and allegedly refused to sell them back to her. It’s been years since Taylor subsequently announced a massive project to re-record her first six albums (the ones made under Big Machine) in order to lessen the value of those old masters, And now, as I sit here writing this and everyone from Ariana Grande to Carly Rae Jepsen to (maybe) Justin Bieber mysteriously cutting ties with the 42-year-old guy who calls himself Scooter on purpose?
Let’s just say I want to believe.
XII. It’s nice to have a friend
The whole Kimye incident does cut to one of the other seminal truths about Taylor Swift.
As mentioned, here’s something about her that’s never sat quite right to many. A phony, artificial quality, something vaguely insincere and hollow. It’s plagued her since the very beginning (remember people making fun of the “surprised face” she used to do at awards shows? Doesn’t that feel like a million years ago now?) So, in a sense, anything that finally seemed to validate that gut instinct was going to get hopped on with vigor, even if it meant taking the word of another music star who’s been more known for being grandiose than strictly honest.
This is a characterization that is supported by at least a little evidence (see Section IX), as unfair as the loyal want to paint it as. Taylor undeniably conducts herself as a Brand, even if she’s a Brand that seems to speak with unusual frankness, has a genuine adoration for her fans even when they’re being freaks, and has an unending energy for passionately defending herself, even if this can sometimes lead to obvious consequences. For instance, her public criticism of an admittedly extremely corny (and arguably sexist) joke at her expense on the Netflix show Ginny & Georgia mostly just led to some of her fans sending racist comments to the show’s teenage star on Instagram. That’s not good! Again, we can’t just take in the good and conveniently ignore all the bad!
And yet…it’s a constant temptation. It’s still hard to square all of the above away with the passion, poetry, and bouncy fun inherent to her music. With the undeniable kindness she has shown to both friends, family and strangers. With the constant vindication she experiences with enough time and distance. Having both good and bad within you ... .doesn't that make her inherently more of a human being than a brand? So which is she?
This all leads to the ultimate, final, essential contradiction to Taylor Swift.
She’s simultaneously both a person and a brand. At least to us. Beyond that, we don’t know. We’ll never know. Taylor Swift is our friend, except that she isn’t. She’s intimately familiar, yet quite literally unknowable.
To be a Fan of her work is to be, at least in some small part, inherently tied up in her, too. It’s impossible to separate the art from the artist because, in her case, the art is the artist. Even folklore and evermore, which she has specifically described as “story time” with songs sold as less-than-confessional, still contain nuggets of information towards her personal life; does anybody think “mad woman” isn’t about her fight with Scooter Braun? Even “the last great american dynasty”, a lovely folklore song about the life and times of Rebekah Harkness, winds up being about Taylor Swift at the end. This isn’t a complaint or an indictment, it’s just an essential truth about her work; even when she’s talking about someone else, she winds up reflecting back on herself.
And why shouldn’t she? She’s consciously built herself up as The Brand. She never adopted a stage name (why would you when your name is already something as eloquent and melodic as Taylor Swift). Up until relatively recently, her social media presence wasn’t all that super-corporate (even the major Ginny & Georgia fuck-up implied a human being on the other end of that phone. An undeniably flawed one, but a human nonetheless). Hell, if Christina Grimmie hadn’t been murdered during a meet-and-greet, there’s a possibility Taylor would still be inviting people over to her house to this day. She is The Whole Thing. For all of its consequences, she’s achieved everything she’s wanted to achieve.
Furthermore, to be a fan is to sort of accept this. It’s why people passionately defend her honor if someone goes, “eh, that Shake it Off song….I dunno”. It’s why Swifties seem to talk about her and her life just as much as her individual songs (if not more). Frankly, it’s why weirdos think they’re secretly married to her. It all feels personal, even though there’s just no way it really can be. She constantly puts herself in her music, and people respond to it because they see themselves in her. It’s a 1:1 translation.
So that’s why I think she’s such a Big Deal to people. And, yeah, to put yourself in your art is Basic Artistry 101. But I’m not sure we’ve ever seen it so explicitly marketed, in ways both thrilling and chilling, before she showed up. And in a very specific time in the world, where basic tenets of society appear to be stretching or disappearing right before our eyes? It doesn’t really surprise me that people cling to her more than ever before. Tie that in with the constant Easter Egg hunt that her work often can be (even if I think her hints are way more obvious than people act sometimes), and you can see why people start sounding like moon men when talking about her songs.
It’s fun. Like all fun things, it gets taken way too far way too often, and usually publicly so. Yet, most Swifties, at least the ones I’ve interacted with, are fairly normal. In another lifetime, most of them might be passionate fans of almost anything else. But, in this timeline, they chose Taylor.
So it goes.
XIII. Long live.
Consider, if you will, the number thirteen.
On the simple face of it, it’s a number that is not particularly special, outside of its status as a prime number. However, it’s possibly the number with the most folklore attached to it, due to its stigma as “unlucky”. The reason for this is surprisingly unclear; it could be connected to Judas Escariot’s status as the “thirteenth” person at the Last Supper, it could trace back to the Code of Hammurabi. However, there’s no real consensus theory as to why. This has not stopped buildings from excluding a thirteen floor to this day, anyway. The number has meaning because somebody important decided it did, and everybody agreed to go with it.
The number thirteen is also a seminal piece of Taylor Swift lore (I did mention numerology comes into play in the fandom, didn’t I?), mostly because…well, it’s her favorite number. For as much as people cram the number into every one of their weird, ragged theories on TikTok, there’s honestly nothing else really to it than that. Taylor likes the number, so it has value. The number has meaning because somebody important decided it did, and everybody agreed to go with it.
I mention this somewhat tangential fact because a phrase that keeps reappearing over and over in this article is “my wife”. This isn’t a coincidence.
At the end of the day, there’s little chance I would have entered into any of this at all without her. She’s the one who’s been playing her music this whole time, who stood by one of her favorite artists through the REPUTATION era (at a time when Taylor’s stock was low), who was caping up for “False God” when seemingly nobody else was talking about it, who excitedly sat next to me as Johnathan Majors introduced the “All Too Well” performance that kicked all of this off.
Simply speaking, it’s been something for us to bond over the past couple of years. It’s that social aspect that the Taylor Swift fandom provides, but in microcosm. It’s a blast to have a shared language with a million disparate people, yes, but it’s life-affirming to have a shared language with the person you’ve chosen to spend your life with. It’s cool that, in a pinch, a conversation can get some grease by one of us simply pulling up a crazy T-Anon TikTok and going from there. It’s amazing that she no longer has to watch her concert films when I’m not around, out of perceived potential embarrassment.
Ultimately, “Taylor Swift” has meaning because somebody important (to me) decided she did, and I agreed to go with it.
And now here I am, at the end of easily the longest article I’ve ever written, realizing that THAT is what is going to endure. Taylor Swift could retire tomorrow, and finally run off to the lakes, never to be heard from again, and the net value I gained from diving into her work would have been a positive. Regardless of how she decides to conduct her business and life, regardless of how the worst actors in her fanbase choose to spend their precious time, she’s given my wife and I a new commonality, one that I imagine will endure.
So, when the extremely nice woman (whose name I desperately wish I had gotten; if anybody reading this remembers talking to a guy on the floor of SoFi about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, comment below!) asked me, “when did you become a fan of Taylor Swift?”, I gave my answer. Later that night, and into the week that followed, I then ruminated over the potential other answers I could have given.
Now, with a few weeks looking back, the real answer is “the same day she became important to my wife”. It took me years to get caught up, but the trap was set that day, whatever day it was. And what a lovely trap it turned out to be.
I genuinely thought going to The Eras Tour and writing this article would effectively close the book on Taylor Swift for me, at least for a little while, not unlike people walking out of AVENGERS: ENDGAME and going, “I think I’m good. I’ve gotten what I wanted out of this.” Then, 1989 (TAYLOR’S VERSION) got announced a couple of days after we got home. Not long after that, it turned out The Eras Tour was going into movie theaters as well. And as we sat there, trying to decide what weekend we wanted to get our tickets for (do we do opening weekend and increase the chances of a fun and raucous friendship-bracelet-swapping crowd? Do we wait a couple of weeks and hope we miss the people who want to scream-sing in the movie theater? Decisions, decisions!) I realized what was already plainly obvious.
As long as we’re doing it together, the train will continue ever on.
And I’m ready for it.