Taylor Swift performs during The Eras Tour on Aug. 7, 2023, at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.Chris Pizzello/The Associated Press
It helps to remember that it isn’t Taylor Swift’s fault she’s this famous.
Like everyone else in the music business, she records albums, she tours them and, in between, she absorbs as much attention as she can manage. On a scale of musical impact, Swift is somewhere north of Barry Manilow and south of Elton John. She’s a less interesting Diana Ross, or a Madonna with better business instincts.
She’s not to blame. It’s us. We’re at fault for the enormous vacant space in cultural history she represents.
The consensus is what tips you off. In a time defined by division, everyone can agree that Taylor Swift is fine. Left, right, the restive working class, rich-kid revolutionaries – none of them are going to turn the dial when All Too Well comes on.
Fine has its place. Every movie that will be nominated for a best picture Oscar this year will be fine.
But fine should not be on a triumphal march around the Earth, rattling local economies and renaming the infrastructure as it passes. Swift has outgrown the natural boundaries her creative output should occupy. She is swamping the new, the weird and the potentially better than fine.
Six nights in Toronto is another portent of mediocrity. Perhaps your first reaction upon hearing it was, “Rhinestone Jesus is coming for a week of shows? Is it possible we’ve arrived?” Sadly, no – it’s that we have a high tolerance for schmaltz and decent air transfer options.
Forty-odd years ago, the Clash played what was then the O’Keefe Centre. It did not go smoothly. The next day, their road manager, Kosmo Vinyl, was in the auditorium assessing the damage. Cameras caught him on stage counting broken seats: “One, two, three, four … 16.” We’re not talking rickety modern Ikea jobs. These were metal-shelled captain’s chairs, bolted to concrete and torn out nonetheless. “Sixteen rock’n’roll fans in North America,” Vinyl said, with more than a hint of curled lip. But whatever its faults as a music town, Toronto then had a little edge.
Now, Toronto is the gig you play when you couldn’t find a decent place to stay in Newark. Swift knows she will find her people here. The ones willing to fork out six months rent for three hours of entertainment for the whole family. She will be – and there can be no higher aspiration for an artist these days – accepted.
Information about her has become inescapable, as happens anywhere Swift travels. She’s in every section of the newspaper, all of the time. She hasn’t set foot here yet and I am no longer aware of anyone else in the city.
No artist has ever experienced this kind of totalizing coverage. Not the Beatles, not no one. As usual, blame the internet. Swift racks up views like no contemporary artist ever has. Hence this essay, and thousands like it.
Popularity isn’t a stain on an artistic record. At least, that’s what people keep saying, which doesn’t make it any less wrong.
Popular is good for business. Unpopular is good for art. We’ve lost track of the distinction.
Contemporary music long ago ran out of ideas. Swiftism represents something more ambitious – the point at which we begin to actively reject them.
She is the first artist to rerecord several albums, and have all those former No. 1s go No. 1 again. We’ve stopped moving in circles so that we can stop moving altogether.
Swift’s natural constituency is the same as any other pop musical act’s – kids. She is a charismatic presence who talks about unserious things on a teenage level. You are meant to like this stuff when you’re 15. Twenty is stretching it. By 25, it’s nostalgia, or should be.
A year-old Morning Consult survey broke down the demographics of Swift fans. Nearly half of them are millennials. One in five are Gen Xers. Nearly a full quarter – 23 per cent – are boomers. Which is not to say young people don’t like Swift, but that too many old people do.
The pure, infectious joy of the Swiftiedom
All the grown-ups who refuse to leave childhood spaces have already ruined fashion, movies and a wild night out. Now they’re tearing down music, using love of Taylor Swift as the jackhammer.
I used to work with a smart guy who would say, “There are no guilty pleasures. Only pleasures.” Which is true, unless all of your pleasures should make you feel a little guilty.
Some of what you absorb should not be for everyone. I’m not talking smut. I’m talking things that are difficult. One must occasionally engage in matters that require effort, and provide no succour. Read some Roberto Bolaño. That’ll make you feel terrible and/or confused, but in a useful way.
Unfortunately, effort is out. A looping cycle of anxiety and comfort are in. We’re all snuggled up at home, rueing where things are headed, self-soothing while history happens around us. What’s the soundtrack to that feeling? A 40,000-person singalong to Bad Blood. The banality of the song is sanctified by the ease with which anyone can memorize the chorus.
Financial Times’ columnist Janan Ganesh calls this “the middlebrow trap” – believing that cultural junk can be redeemed as long as it was thrifted. Its fans are the same people who have bought the conceit that Succession “is what Shakespeare would be writing now instead of King Lear.”
Swift and her contemporaries aren’t middlebrow masquerading as highbrow. They’re something worse. They’re middlebrow done up like lowbrow.
Lowbrow isn’t trying to teach you anything or Make A Big Point. It’s stupid fun. Swift is instead a homeschooling singalong. Today a billionaire is going to remind you that you have no excuse not to love yourself. You’re going to learn something here, whether you’d like to or not.
The hegemonic influence of her increasingly-difficult-to-tell-apart oeuvre represents lassitude and a lack of vitality. She is whatever they were playing in Rome that summer the Visigoths toured Italy.
Again – not Swift’s fault. How could she know that she’d make some perfectly decent modern folk music – the sort Gillian Welch has been doing for years, and better, but no one cares because she doesn’t date actors – and that the whole world would start gathering around her like the oracle at Nashville.
One thing to be said for her catalogue: It is suited to its time and place. People will always associate her chipper, almost-self-aware hits in contrast with the numbing political moment. She’s to Trumpism what Bob Dylan was to the excesses of the sixties – its unwilling spokesperson.
While in other moments of exciting disorder, the Western world has had brutalist opera or hip hop to groove it to the barricades. Now they’ve got Taylor’s Version and maybe they’ll just stay in this weekend. It’s getting scary out there.
The important thing is that you not let the end of civilization 2.0 harsh your vibe. Previous generations believed progress must be won in blood. Today, we engage in that combat via Ticketmaster. Others had their beliefs. We have our buying power.
To be there when Swift shows up on Thursday proves that you were of your time. You danced like no one was watching (while filming yourself so that everyone you know could watch). You knew the holy words. You sang them along with all the other middle-aged converts.
If there were another option out there, it’d be a little sad and kind of funny, but not in the ha-ha way. But there isn’t. It’s wall-to-wall pop without length, breadth or depth.
Is this what socialized democracy was always headed toward – church without the guilt? A place where coolness counts against you? I guess so.
Meanwhile, somewhere out there, away from this grubby mercantilism, something new is brewing. You and I don’t know about it. That’s a good thing, because we’d ruin it. We’d get out our cultural whittling knife and mainstream it until it was smooth, unthreatening and easy to scale. Then we’d send it on tour.
Whatever it is, it won’t be Western. Or, at least, not part of the Western tradition. For now, that one has run its course. It needs to leech some power from elsewhere.
Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats recorded Rocket 88 in 1951. Most people agree that is the start of rock ’n’ roll. As far as the musical arts go, pop music is the youngest of the siblings, and the most beloved. It’s been on a steady upward march since the fifties, redefining, re-redefining and re-re-redefining how we communicate.
There was at some point bound to be a creative collapse. This is it. It’s rolling through town now.
But the momentum built up over years is such that we’re cresting the peak. In lieu of a disturbing, protean music to represent the dissatisfaction felt by every side of the current politics, we’ve gone all in on the shopping mall soundtrack.
Don’t try saying you don’t get the whole thing with Taylor Swift, or that she’s okay, but not for you. It’s not going to work. Unlike with Michael Jackson or the Backstreet Boys, it is no longer possible to define yourself in opposition to the era’s most talked about artist. Nobody’s doing anything different. Nobody who’s even thinking of trying can catch any momentum.
Taylor Swift isn’t to blame for that, but she’s the current cause. As life gets too much for many – as if it wasn’t always thus – she is the single, authoritative act who provides the idea-free binge everyone can get lost in.
Sign up for The Globe’s arts and lifestyle newsletters for more news, columns and advice in your inbox.