And now I'm dreading football season. Someone please please PLEASE beat the Chiefs and keep Swifty Mania out. The hype surrounding the most recent Super Bowl was physically painful to endure.
I actually find her presence much less annoying than the sudden elevation of the Kelce clan. Obviously you'd always take Travis on your fantasy team over the last few years if you could get him but who wanted this guy or even worse his mediocre brother from the trashiest team in the league on every other damn commercial? Now in fairness I am a middle aged father of boys, meaning that there is no Taylor mania in my household to drive me insane but nevertheless. If I had to vote which ones were on my TV for reasons other than actively participating in a football game less often it would be the lunkheads over her.
I have a related complaint about sports media. Zach Lowe, who I generally like very much, often acts like he’s the arbiter of respectable NBA opinion and personally aggrieved by the bad opinions he has to encounter. But, where does he think the money comes from? He could be a high school teacher or local crime reporter blogging as a hobby about his niche interest, or he could make a good living watching and talking about basketball full time, but the latter option doesn’t exist without millions of people who care passionately about the sport and are full of opinions, good and bad.
Isn't gatekeeping/signaling acceptable bounds for discourse part of the job of influencers and commentators to keep the shitty opinions in the bad parts of the internet town where you know you're sleezy for participating.
Like the Taylor Swift Reddit is a masterpiece of this. In an ideal world to engage in really shitty commentary it would look like going to a piracy website. Yeah it's there and you can participate if you really want to but it feels gross you know you're up to no good just going to the site.
Lowe is groundbreaking both as someone who broke nerdy basketblogging to a mass audience and made coverage genuinely smarter, and also as a herald of the sports version of poptimism where the sport being "fun" in some faux-childlike way is the marker of true sophistication.
Then this blends with the actually existing internet over the 2020's and having embedded clips breaking down defensive coverages in ESPN blogs atrophies into middle aged white men having strong opinions about Angel Reese.
(The even worse version of this are the guys - always guys - for whom championing bat flips is the center of their obsessive engagement with baseball)
The original promise of sports blogs was that common fans could add their own analysis and not be beholden to the fairly uniform opinions of the sports media of the 70s and 80s. It promised diverse opinion.
The problem is, once the bloggers became the most powerful media voice, they became just as intolerant of divergent opinions as the previous gatekeepers, only now they pretend to represent the little guy.
I like analytics in small doses, but this idea there is only one way to play the game, any game, is just silly. Basketball analytics central theme, "3 is worth more than 2" is one of those things that sounds smart and obvious but is actually kind of dumb. Three-point shooting has been stable for about 30 years, NBA players hit roughly 33% of them. They also hit roughly 50% of two-point shots. 3*.33 = 1. 2*.5 = 1. The shots are the same value once you factor in how likely you are to make the shot. And taking a long 3 when you have a free 2 on the fast break will never not make me want to break my TV. (OK, unless its Steph Curry, but he's just amazing)
Baseball analytics long campaign against speed and running is the same way. Even if they are right... stolen bases are fun! Station to station baseball is plodding and boring. But most importantly, there are multiple ways to build a winner. Stop being a copycat, which was the whole point in the first place. And stop telling me the correct way to be a fan.
It's funny, I find JJ Redick to be the embodiment of this *much* more than Lowe - coincidentally, I less than an hour ago texted this to my friends in the wake of Dan Hurley turning down the Lakers:
"Even worse, JJ doesn't have a single original thought, he just repeats what Zach Lowe and Basketball Analytics Twitter say and acts like it makes him so much more enlightened than the "common fan" who he very clearly hates.
You definitely see the same things in sports media, where columnists clutch their pearls about fans who have negative opinions on rival players, or players who left their favourite teams. The whole reason the sports ecosystem exists is because people have an outsized emotional investment in sports. You can't expect them to go back to "Oh, it's just a game" the second it would lead to something negative.
I know some of her songs but very little else. My daughter is a fan, definitely not a stan.
I like a good break up song. Pictures to Burn hit the mark. When I had a nasty break up with my first husband after 18 years, I burned a lot of pictures.
Country western really does angry women break up songs well.
I have to wonder if Swift and her fans get a pass because they are female and women are a protected class in liberal political orthodoxy.
I don't think I have heard a single Swift song but I have a male friend who is (disgustingly) a Katy Perry fan so I have heard some of her stuff and I imagine Swift's repertoire is comparable. Generic, banal plastic shit for the lowest common denominator. Yet somehow it has inspired rabid fanaticism.
"I have a male friend who is (disgustingly) a Katy Perry fan so I have heard some of her stuff and I imagine Swift's repertoire is comparable."
I would recommend that if you haven't heard a Taylor Swift song that you refrain from guessing about its content. I have heard an occasional one in passing, and while I haven't been particularly impressed, my taste in music tends toward the weird and silly (preferably both), so I'm not the best one to judge.
No, it's not. I'm not an expert or a big fan, but Swift has genuine talent as a song writer. She can do interesting things with melody. Her lyrics are occasionally inspired even though her themes are banal. Katy Perry is not remotely in her league.
If Swift had pursued her career differently––produced fewer records, concentrated on craft rather than swinging for the fences for sales and grammy awards––she could have acquired more cred from critics and probably a better legacy. But that's not what she is doing with pop music. She very successful exploited the ability that pop music has to create a kind of secular transcendence for a mass audience.
There are millions of people in the world with genuine musical talent. Is she exceptional, enough to warrant a listen from somebody who has no interest in mass market pop?
Dunno, it depends on one's taste. But if someone appreciates the pleasures that are possible in pop music, her best songs can deliver. The songs on Folklore, which are a little closer to folk rock than her usual brand of pop, can give a sense of what she can do with storytelling and melody. I've noticed that I sometimes admire her songwriting ability more when another artist covers a Swift song––covers of Cruel Summer, for instance.
"But if someone appreciates the pleasures that are possible in pop music..."
It's not even all teenagers though, is it? By and large it's just teen girls while teen boys listen to whatever they listen to.
I would say that Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" is pretty poppy and it enjoyed a fair amount of chart success. It's also a great song. And there's obviously Bruce Springsteen, Sinead O'Connor, etc. Is Swift comparable? Nothing that I've read (or presumably heard since I'm sure I've encountered her music while shopping or in the elevator) gives me that impression.
Taylor Swift's (insane) popularity derives from being a talented storyteller in both her work and her personal life, which are pretty inextricable at this point. Her fans aren't just into her music (which ranges from bad to good, but doesn't deserve her level of popularity in a vacuum), but how it interacts with the Taylor Swift Extended Universe of lore.
For example, her most recent album was not very good, but provides a wealth of information about her dramatic, controversial relationship with fellow musician Matty Healy of The 1975. The Taylor Swift Scholars went into The 1975's back catalogue to see if her songs reference his songs and if they're in conversation with each other, and from there can paint a whole picture of star-crossed lovers spanning a decade -- essentially, writing fanfic about them.
It also helps that she is good at being both very specific in her lyrics (to feed into the feeling that you're reading her diary, and if you close read the lyrics enough, you can become a scholar in her life) while also being general (enough that people can map it onto their own lives and experiences).
She's very deliberately cultivated this relationship with her fans since the beginning. She was a heavy Tumblr user back in the day, would stalk the internet for her most devoted fans and invite them to her house for secret listening sessions, has little confessional-type segments during her shows where she addresses the audience like they're her friends, etc etc.
She has plenty of fans in their 30s who are around her age and grew up with her. She writes primarily about her own / her friends' experiences, so of course teenagers are going to relate to her song "Fifteen" when it came out in 2008 and then grow up and relate to her songs about divorce, her mom getting cancer, miscarriage, and anxieties around aging that she releases in her late twenties/early thirties.
I mean, Drake is one of the most popular artists for men and much of his music is bitching about women who broke his heart, hyping up his #squad, or going over his beefs, which is not that different than Taylor Swift's music. The Kendrick-Drake feud was like the 2024 version of the Kanye/Kim-Taylor feud, except with more accusations of pedophilia. People just love drama and narratives.
It's not the subject matter, it's the perspective. Look at the recent spate of action movies that have flopped because the female leads did not appeal to the primarily male demographic that drives action movie sales.
Her older stuff was really bubblegum trash pop, but her stuff over the past 10 years is pop for sure, but she definitely shows songwriting talent. I’m not a Swiftie by any means, but there are a few of her songs over the past decade that I like.
Alexandra Petri from WaPo did a funny satirical take on this phenomenon a few years ago, but about hate-obsession rather than love-obsession. "I am sick of hearing about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from myself, talking about her." https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/06/i-am-sick-hearing-about-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-myself-talking-about-her/ It's this bizarre two-step where very visible, very popular media commentators act like they're outside observers of the thing they're critiquing and not at all part of the beast itself.
I thought about Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" when reading this. Less the stuff about mass produced art and more the part about art's "aura" and the religious underpinnings of it. Basically, the aura is what makes a CD more than just a CD. Celebrity has always been closely tied with religious devotion, it's nothing new. Taylor Swift has become something of a saint, the various forms of media representing her people purchase resembling religious icons. The hostility towards criticism (and this certainly isn't specific to Swift, she's just the most popular public figure of today) is akin to going after blasphemers and heretics. Once you get the idea that this is less about art and more just a manifestation of secularized religion it all makes a lot more sense. People debate the pregnancy the same way they talk about the actions of the current Pope.
There was a second thought about Pierre Bourdieu and symbolic capital lurking, but I've rambled long enough as is. Short version is when people invest enough cultural capital in something, attacks on it are experienced as symbolic violence. This is not a trivial injury. The more you've invested into Taylor Swift, the more you have to lose if her star and celebrity start sinking. It's not much different than buying stock in a corporation and watching it lose value on the NYSE
I have always wondered why an original cd is seen as "better" than a copy (sonically, they are exactly the same) or why an original work of art is a transcendent masterpiece that humans ooh and aw over, but a well-executed copy is not, even if the viewer could not tell the copy from the original..
That's an interesting question. I suspect there is some kind of psychology going on there that is beyond simply "quality." It's for the same reason that things like NFTs (which make no sense to me at all) have value. And that if you create a "set" of prints of some artistic piece and number them, and those are the "original" that those somehow have a value beyond what another simple print would have, that has the same fidelity. There is some kind of value we place on "the thing itself" vs. a copy of the thing itself. Of course, with digital music, there is no "the thing itself" other than the performance.
Part of it can probably be explained by experience: your reference to a copied CD (which I used to do regularly with CD burners), despite the theoretically perfect fidelity of the copy to the original (digitally verifiable), frequently the original disc was more likely to work in a player, and would last for MUCH longer than the copy. I suspect that has to do with both the materials and the process of creating the original CD vs. the burned CD.
This was a great comment. I was listening to an “On Being” interview today with an Arendt scholar who said, brilliantly, “A culture of loneliness will get rid of space for solitude, where I can discover myself.”
I think a lot of this shit — all shit, maybe — comes from a place of deep loneliness.
I feel like there's some truth here but like I think this is much more a personal problem than it is a social problem. Like the overwhelming number of fans, and even super fans manage this tension between being obsessed with an artist without going overboard into being obsessed with the private person behind the public one, or otherwise carrying on any creepy behavior.
I think influencers and moderators can drive down wackadoo behavior at the margin pretty well. If we look at Reddit while there are really creepy weird TS posters there shutting them out of /r/Taylorswift really drives this further down the rabbit hole and gets less people exposed to crappy stuff. If someone wanted to do some data collection I think we could see how much of a difference she herself could make by tracking the frequency of Gaylorism (the idea that she's secretly bisexual or a lesbian) around her statement about it near the release of midnights. Granted she wasn't so direct as to totally shut it down completely but it did seem to recede to where the wild things are.
Like I think ultimately though most of the cure for this is old fashioned incredibly normal stuff like having an identity and norms rooted in real world interactions with people and self discipline not some sort of from 20,000 foot view that manages how everyone consumes media.
I feel like you're overstating the proportion of super Fans who make up the lunatic fringe and letting that fringe off the hook for their bad behavior by pretending this is mostly a social problem and not a personal one.
I sort of agree but if you take super fans, an already tiny sliver of the population and a small percentage of those people are weird and violate the norms of polite society that's really not an indictment of the culture in my view it's a few broken people need some measure of help not something that we need highly paternalistic norms to control how anyone likes things.
I have to wonder if the few maniacs have an outsize impact on much larger swaths of fandom because the culture facilitates that.
Ted Gioia has a post today on his SS discussing anomie and the gulf of meaning in modern life. Looking at obsessive fandom I can't help but wonder if it's people cast adrift in a universe without purpose looking for something.
I don’t know I think the internet is just wired for depth more than breath the way old media was mostly the opposite.
We could do more stuff to give people sources of meaning, but I meet a lot of gen z people teaching and careers and families seem to still do this for people who like sports or pop music.
I dunno. Sports fan culture seems similar... mostly harmless with some bad stuff sprinkled in. The existence of entire tv networks devoted to sport is bonkers to me. (We have ESPN, we don’t have a Taylor Swift network.) People traveling to games. People making a life goal of traveling to every US baseball field. People spending thousands to watch the superbowl. People rioting and setting cars on fire when their team loses. The Taylor fandom seems mild to me. As pop music goes, she’s mostly good. Dear Reader. The Prophecy. The Man. Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me (if you’re gonna write a revenge song, this is a good way to do it. Improves with every listen. Her Kim K revenge song is pretty lousy, though, both musically and lyrically.) I was deeply not interested in Swift until last summer when I decided to see what the fuss was about and... surprise, there are many fun, smart, bright spots in her songs. The intense hatred of her is as weird to me as the intense fandom.
That’s excellent. Was this a one-time specific sport-related goal or do you have another project to follow? (Some other “collect them all” type of goal?)
Hell, I hear sports fans make better reasoned and more fact-based arguments why they support one team versus another than I hear from most politics followers as to why they cheer on republicans or democrats.
Why do you think I call them "Team R" and "Team D" respectively?
Both the intense fandom and the intense hatred make sense to me. They are social responses frequently driven from the same insecurity.
Many people feel the satisfaction and validation for loving a thing that many other people love, and that shared sense intensifies their own love for the thing.
And for the hate side, there is a social reaction to any large phenomenon that produces a large mass of love that rejects that phenomenon (or at least rejects the mass of love for it) from some sense of insecurity, a reaction to the insecure perception that culture so highly values this thing that isn't that special (and thus, the culture disagrees with my assessment, thus the culture is criticizing me personally...how absurd, but feelings often are). For two examples, I have a sort of odd hate for Star Wars and The Beatles because I saw so much obsession with both, and the level of obsession was (to me) unjustified by the quality of the object of that obsession. That reaction isn't healthy, but it is common.
I think you're definitely right about the types of sports fans who riot or can't put things into perspective. Beyond that though, I think you're mixing apples and oranges a bit. A number of sports teams are a deep part of the cultural bedrock of entire regions (think the Packers to Green Bay or the Red Sox to Boston). Each individual football team has 53 active players, plus coaches, while the NFL has nearly 1,700 active players on a roster at any one time. ESPN is dedicated to major American sports that have thousands of active players and coaches, so then saying "we don’t have a Taylor Swift network" is missing the point since we're comparing a fandom around one person to fandoms that encompass entire cities. (ESPN is also shedding money and slowly dying.)
The fact that a individual pop act who writes break-up songs has reached the point of being named Time's Person of the Year for a successful concert tour is weird. The fact that the NYT Opinion page publishes fan fiction trying to force her to be queer is weird. You didn't see this with or Madonna or even Beyonce just a few years ago. You don't see if with female performers in other genres like Hole (to take an example de Boer cited). The level of devotion and obsession is unhealthy. Obsessive fandom was already unhealthy, but at least there were breaks on it, like how people obsessed with Star Wars were made fun of when they let it take over their lives. The fact that the internet has helped to turn the most obsessive fandoms into something socially permissible is gross.
Freddie is right. Many people who lack some sort of anchoring structure or positive authority figures in their lives are trying to fill the gaping void with easily accessible crap. Jonathan Haidt has just recently published his latest book The Anxious Generation based on painstaking international research of screen addiction that span over the last 15 years. He concluded that so called Millennials, Gen Zets and whichever silly marketing way of segmenting shopping behaviours comes after are practically fucked. There is still hope for those in their infancy, or just born, but only if parents and schools get their act together and help kids reclaim their childhood and brains. There is hope. https://www.afterbabel.com/
Good work. Here’s something to consider for further reading: almost 30 years ago Camille Paglia wrote an essay, “Diana Regina”, about the cultish aspect of Princess Di fandom / obsession. However one may feel about CP, it’s an insightful piece and a strong effort to plumb the depths of celebrity and its venerable history among us higher primates. It also ends with what amounts to a chilling prophecy about her fate, which arrived a few years later. I was already a Paglia fan when I read it well after the fact, but the sad outcome of Diana’s story and the way Paglia nailed it was astonishing, and confirmed for me the legitimacy of her insights. Anyone seriously interested in fame and fanaticism should give it a look.
In 1994, I wrote an article titled "Elvis sighted in ancient Rome!" This piece, published in the relatively obscure Whole Earth Review, generated a modest amount of traction.
My thesis was very simple: Celebrities have psychological power because they key into collective archetypes. These archetypes represent niches that are embedded into some deep substrate of ontological thought. Liz Taylor—remember! this was 1994—was only the most recent embodiment of Helen of Troy. Elvis was just another reboot of those beautiful Greek boys who died staring at themselves in reflecting surfaces and who, oddly, inevitably, were transformed into flowers.
Taylor Swift, I'd reckon, is Artemis.
You wanna template for contemporary culture? Read Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
For several weeks after its publication, national radio shows clamored to get interviews with me. This was considerably post-Liz-and-Dick – which we enlightened anthropologists from the planet Mars now recognize as the first manifestation of unadulterated “celebrity” in modern times – but before the Internet had become a state-of-the-art celebrity stamping machine. The National Enquirer was still held in contempt by most intellectuals, and my cheerful admission that not only did I study it scrupulously every week but that I also studied The Globe and Star immediately made me a suspicious character to the eggheads who were interviewing me.
Of course, celebrity is gonna metastasize in the age of the Internet.
Browsing the Internet feels intimate. There you sit in some kind of reverie, engaging in one-on-one communion with your computer/iPad/smartphone/whatever. It’s hard to shake the subconscious belief that what you’re reading, watching, hearing on that little LED screen isn’t your own mind talking back to you. Your own weird little accretion of interests and obsessions made manifest.
When all is said and done, the Internet isn’t a channel for the dissemination of information or a facilitator of human communication. No. It’s a tremendously efficient niche-marketing engine.
And celebrity is the ultimate niche market stratification mechanism.
"Browsing the Internet feels intimate. There you sit in some kind of reverie, engaging in one-on-one communion with your computer/iPad/smartphone/whatever. It’s hard to shake the subconscious belief that what you’re reading, watching, hearing on that little LED screen isn’t your own mind talking back to you. Your own weird little accretion of interests and obsessions made manifest.
When all is said and done, the Internet isn’t a channel for the dissemination of information or a facilitator of human communication. No. It’s a tremendously efficient niche-marketing engine."
____________________________
I mean, it can and is all three at once. There are still a lot of us out in the internet ether who still primarily use it for the first two. Perhaps we are a dying breed, hard to say. Maybe when the last Gen Xer dies?
Your top section I cited interested me. I'm not sure I've ever thought that 'surfing' is really just my own mind talking back at me. I'm obviously trying to find out things I don't know, and of course my own interests and biases channel that surfing (zing!). But if what you say is true, isn't that true for any kind of information gathering, digital or analog? Aren't the same preferences and interests at work when one is physically window shopping? I guess I fail to see how this is an internet thing, and not just a human or sentient thing.
>>>I'm not sure I've ever thought that 'surfing' is really just my own mind talking back at me.<<<
Of course, it could just be me. 😀 But when I'm acquiring information from a book or a how-to YouTube video, for example, the information-gathering process feels external. But when I grab info from the Internet, it feels like that info is echoing in some secret chamber of my brain, heretofore only accessible to me. Hard to describe.
At a mechanical level, it sounds like the difference between learning something you didn't know and discovering your own priors through seeing someone else articulate them.
Great piece. For music podcasts you might care about (depending on your tastes), check out Andrew Hickey's A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs and Tyler Mahan Coe's Cocaine & Rhinestones, both superb social histories told via music commentary.
And now I'm dreading football season. Someone please please PLEASE beat the Chiefs and keep Swifty Mania out. The hype surrounding the most recent Super Bowl was physically painful to endure.
It’s easy to ignore most of it if you just don’t watch anything but the games. Halftime shows stink anyway, so you’re not giving up much.
I actually find her presence much less annoying than the sudden elevation of the Kelce clan. Obviously you'd always take Travis on your fantasy team over the last few years if you could get him but who wanted this guy or even worse his mediocre brother from the trashiest team in the league on every other damn commercial? Now in fairness I am a middle aged father of boys, meaning that there is no Taylor mania in my household to drive me insane but nevertheless. If I had to vote which ones were on my TV for reasons other than actively participating in a football game less often it would be the lunkheads over her.
Try being a 49ers fan while enduring it. Kill me
I have a related complaint about sports media. Zach Lowe, who I generally like very much, often acts like he’s the arbiter of respectable NBA opinion and personally aggrieved by the bad opinions he has to encounter. But, where does he think the money comes from? He could be a high school teacher or local crime reporter blogging as a hobby about his niche interest, or he could make a good living watching and talking about basketball full time, but the latter option doesn’t exist without millions of people who care passionately about the sport and are full of opinions, good and bad.
Isn't gatekeeping/signaling acceptable bounds for discourse part of the job of influencers and commentators to keep the shitty opinions in the bad parts of the internet town where you know you're sleezy for participating.
Like the Taylor Swift Reddit is a masterpiece of this. In an ideal world to engage in really shitty commentary it would look like going to a piracy website. Yeah it's there and you can participate if you really want to but it feels gross you know you're up to no good just going to the site.
Lowe is groundbreaking both as someone who broke nerdy basketblogging to a mass audience and made coverage genuinely smarter, and also as a herald of the sports version of poptimism where the sport being "fun" in some faux-childlike way is the marker of true sophistication.
Then this blends with the actually existing internet over the 2020's and having embedded clips breaking down defensive coverages in ESPN blogs atrophies into middle aged white men having strong opinions about Angel Reese.
(The even worse version of this are the guys - always guys - for whom championing bat flips is the center of their obsessive engagement with baseball)
The original promise of sports blogs was that common fans could add their own analysis and not be beholden to the fairly uniform opinions of the sports media of the 70s and 80s. It promised diverse opinion.
The problem is, once the bloggers became the most powerful media voice, they became just as intolerant of divergent opinions as the previous gatekeepers, only now they pretend to represent the little guy.
I like analytics in small doses, but this idea there is only one way to play the game, any game, is just silly. Basketball analytics central theme, "3 is worth more than 2" is one of those things that sounds smart and obvious but is actually kind of dumb. Three-point shooting has been stable for about 30 years, NBA players hit roughly 33% of them. They also hit roughly 50% of two-point shots. 3*.33 = 1. 2*.5 = 1. The shots are the same value once you factor in how likely you are to make the shot. And taking a long 3 when you have a free 2 on the fast break will never not make me want to break my TV. (OK, unless its Steph Curry, but he's just amazing)
Baseball analytics long campaign against speed and running is the same way. Even if they are right... stolen bases are fun! Station to station baseball is plodding and boring. But most importantly, there are multiple ways to build a winner. Stop being a copycat, which was the whole point in the first place. And stop telling me the correct way to be a fan.
It's funny, I find JJ Redick to be the embodiment of this *much* more than Lowe - coincidentally, I less than an hour ago texted this to my friends in the wake of Dan Hurley turning down the Lakers:
"Even worse, JJ doesn't have a single original thought, he just repeats what Zach Lowe and Basketball Analytics Twitter say and acts like it makes him so much more enlightened than the "common fan" who he very clearly hates.
You definitely see the same things in sports media, where columnists clutch their pearls about fans who have negative opinions on rival players, or players who left their favourite teams. The whole reason the sports ecosystem exists is because people have an outsized emotional investment in sports. You can't expect them to go back to "Oh, it's just a game" the second it would lead to something negative.
“one thing that’s indisputable is that Swift has made personal vengeance a bizarrely central part of her mythology”
Buying a bunch of shit.
Traveling to live performances as a lifestyle.
Online and in person harassment of critics, including use of deep fakes.
Indulging in an ethos of vengeance.
I’m not the only one seeing the parallels here, am I?
Interesting observation. Fascinating, Captain.
I know some of her songs but very little else. My daughter is a fan, definitely not a stan.
I like a good break up song. Pictures to Burn hit the mark. When I had a nasty break up with my first husband after 18 years, I burned a lot of pictures.
Country western really does angry women break up songs well.
This made that late 80s song “Cult of Personality” into an earworm today thx 🙄😂
I have to wonder if Swift and her fans get a pass because they are female and women are a protected class in liberal political orthodoxy.
I don't think I have heard a single Swift song but I have a male friend who is (disgustingly) a Katy Perry fan so I have heard some of her stuff and I imagine Swift's repertoire is comparable. Generic, banal plastic shit for the lowest common denominator. Yet somehow it has inspired rabid fanaticism.
"I have a male friend who is (disgustingly) a Katy Perry fan so I have heard some of her stuff and I imagine Swift's repertoire is comparable."
I would recommend that if you haven't heard a Taylor Swift song that you refrain from guessing about its content. I have heard an occasional one in passing, and while I haven't been particularly impressed, my taste in music tends toward the weird and silly (preferably both), so I'm not the best one to judge.
It's just generic, Top 40 pop crap, isn't it?
No, it's not. I'm not an expert or a big fan, but Swift has genuine talent as a song writer. She can do interesting things with melody. Her lyrics are occasionally inspired even though her themes are banal. Katy Perry is not remotely in her league.
If Swift had pursued her career differently––produced fewer records, concentrated on craft rather than swinging for the fences for sales and grammy awards––she could have acquired more cred from critics and probably a better legacy. But that's not what she is doing with pop music. She very successful exploited the ability that pop music has to create a kind of secular transcendence for a mass audience.
There are millions of people in the world with genuine musical talent. Is she exceptional, enough to warrant a listen from somebody who has no interest in mass market pop?
Dunno, it depends on one's taste. But if someone appreciates the pleasures that are possible in pop music, her best songs can deliver. The songs on Folklore, which are a little closer to folk rock than her usual brand of pop, can give a sense of what she can do with storytelling and melody. I've noticed that I sometimes admire her songwriting ability more when another artist covers a Swift song––covers of Cruel Summer, for instance.
"But if someone appreciates the pleasures that are possible in pop music..."
It's not even all teenagers though, is it? By and large it's just teen girls while teen boys listen to whatever they listen to.
I would say that Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" is pretty poppy and it enjoyed a fair amount of chart success. It's also a great song. And there's obviously Bruce Springsteen, Sinead O'Connor, etc. Is Swift comparable? Nothing that I've read (or presumably heard since I'm sure I've encountered her music while shopping or in the elevator) gives me that impression.
It would've taken less time to listen to a song or two than you spent discussing whether you should.
But how much pain would I have suffered?
It's solid pop music.
So as somebody with almost nothing in common with teenage girls I am going to guess I should give it a pass.
I'm sure you have heard Swiftsongs, just you wouldn't know it.
I do set foot in malls occasionally.
I don't, but I still hear humans playing TS.
I ride elevators too.
Taylor Swift's (insane) popularity derives from being a talented storyteller in both her work and her personal life, which are pretty inextricable at this point. Her fans aren't just into her music (which ranges from bad to good, but doesn't deserve her level of popularity in a vacuum), but how it interacts with the Taylor Swift Extended Universe of lore.
For example, her most recent album was not very good, but provides a wealth of information about her dramatic, controversial relationship with fellow musician Matty Healy of The 1975. The Taylor Swift Scholars went into The 1975's back catalogue to see if her songs reference his songs and if they're in conversation with each other, and from there can paint a whole picture of star-crossed lovers spanning a decade -- essentially, writing fanfic about them.
It also helps that she is good at being both very specific in her lyrics (to feed into the feeling that you're reading her diary, and if you close read the lyrics enough, you can become a scholar in her life) while also being general (enough that people can map it onto their own lives and experiences).
She's very deliberately cultivated this relationship with her fans since the beginning. She was a heavy Tumblr user back in the day, would stalk the internet for her most devoted fans and invite them to her house for secret listening sessions, has little confessional-type segments during her shows where she addresses the audience like they're her friends, etc etc.
I pointed out in another comment that it's probably no coincidence that her audience is teen girls and not teen boys.
She has plenty of fans in their 30s who are around her age and grew up with her. She writes primarily about her own / her friends' experiences, so of course teenagers are going to relate to her song "Fifteen" when it came out in 2008 and then grow up and relate to her songs about divorce, her mom getting cancer, miscarriage, and anxieties around aging that she releases in her late twenties/early thirties.
As an example, the primary audience for soap operas is female. I am sure some of them are well written but not all stories are for all people.
I mean, Drake is one of the most popular artists for men and much of his music is bitching about women who broke his heart, hyping up his #squad, or going over his beefs, which is not that different than Taylor Swift's music. The Kendrick-Drake feud was like the 2024 version of the Kanye/Kim-Taylor feud, except with more accusations of pedophilia. People just love drama and narratives.
It's not the subject matter, it's the perspective. Look at the recent spate of action movies that have flopped because the female leads did not appeal to the primarily male demographic that drives action movie sales.
Her older stuff was really bubblegum trash pop, but her stuff over the past 10 years is pop for sure, but she definitely shows songwriting talent. I’m not a Swiftie by any means, but there are a few of her songs over the past decade that I like.
Taylor Swift fans should check out the great new record by Margarita Witch Cult. "Diabolical Influence" is a killer track, Swifties!
Alexandra Petri from WaPo did a funny satirical take on this phenomenon a few years ago, but about hate-obsession rather than love-obsession. "I am sick of hearing about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from myself, talking about her." https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/06/i-am-sick-hearing-about-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-myself-talking-about-her/ It's this bizarre two-step where very visible, very popular media commentators act like they're outside observers of the thing they're critiquing and not at all part of the beast itself.
I thought about Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" when reading this. Less the stuff about mass produced art and more the part about art's "aura" and the religious underpinnings of it. Basically, the aura is what makes a CD more than just a CD. Celebrity has always been closely tied with religious devotion, it's nothing new. Taylor Swift has become something of a saint, the various forms of media representing her people purchase resembling religious icons. The hostility towards criticism (and this certainly isn't specific to Swift, she's just the most popular public figure of today) is akin to going after blasphemers and heretics. Once you get the idea that this is less about art and more just a manifestation of secularized religion it all makes a lot more sense. People debate the pregnancy the same way they talk about the actions of the current Pope.
There was a second thought about Pierre Bourdieu and symbolic capital lurking, but I've rambled long enough as is. Short version is when people invest enough cultural capital in something, attacks on it are experienced as symbolic violence. This is not a trivial injury. The more you've invested into Taylor Swift, the more you have to lose if her star and celebrity start sinking. It's not much different than buying stock in a corporation and watching it lose value on the NYSE
I have always wondered why an original cd is seen as "better" than a copy (sonically, they are exactly the same) or why an original work of art is a transcendent masterpiece that humans ooh and aw over, but a well-executed copy is not, even if the viewer could not tell the copy from the original..
That's an interesting question. I suspect there is some kind of psychology going on there that is beyond simply "quality." It's for the same reason that things like NFTs (which make no sense to me at all) have value. And that if you create a "set" of prints of some artistic piece and number them, and those are the "original" that those somehow have a value beyond what another simple print would have, that has the same fidelity. There is some kind of value we place on "the thing itself" vs. a copy of the thing itself. Of course, with digital music, there is no "the thing itself" other than the performance.
Part of it can probably be explained by experience: your reference to a copied CD (which I used to do regularly with CD burners), despite the theoretically perfect fidelity of the copy to the original (digitally verifiable), frequently the original disc was more likely to work in a player, and would last for MUCH longer than the copy. I suspect that has to do with both the materials and the process of creating the original CD vs. the burned CD.
This was a great comment. I was listening to an “On Being” interview today with an Arendt scholar who said, brilliantly, “A culture of loneliness will get rid of space for solitude, where I can discover myself.”
I think a lot of this shit — all shit, maybe — comes from a place of deep loneliness.
Parasocial fandom is not inherent to celebrity
In the age of social media it sure seems like it is.
Great commentary Freddie.
I feel like there's some truth here but like I think this is much more a personal problem than it is a social problem. Like the overwhelming number of fans, and even super fans manage this tension between being obsessed with an artist without going overboard into being obsessed with the private person behind the public one, or otherwise carrying on any creepy behavior.
I think influencers and moderators can drive down wackadoo behavior at the margin pretty well. If we look at Reddit while there are really creepy weird TS posters there shutting them out of /r/Taylorswift really drives this further down the rabbit hole and gets less people exposed to crappy stuff. If someone wanted to do some data collection I think we could see how much of a difference she herself could make by tracking the frequency of Gaylorism (the idea that she's secretly bisexual or a lesbian) around her statement about it near the release of midnights. Granted she wasn't so direct as to totally shut it down completely but it did seem to recede to where the wild things are.
Like I think ultimately though most of the cure for this is old fashioned incredibly normal stuff like having an identity and norms rooted in real world interactions with people and self discipline not some sort of from 20,000 foot view that manages how everyone consumes media.
"having an identity and norms rooted in real world interactions with people and self discipline"
you mean, exactly what we can't inculcate in young people in the smartphone era
I feel like you're overstating the proportion of super Fans who make up the lunatic fringe and letting that fringe off the hook for their bad behavior by pretending this is mostly a social problem and not a personal one.
I don't think there's a hard and fast line between social problems and personal ones.
I sort of agree but if you take super fans, an already tiny sliver of the population and a small percentage of those people are weird and violate the norms of polite society that's really not an indictment of the culture in my view it's a few broken people need some measure of help not something that we need highly paternalistic norms to control how anyone likes things.
I have to wonder if the few maniacs have an outsize impact on much larger swaths of fandom because the culture facilitates that.
Ted Gioia has a post today on his SS discussing anomie and the gulf of meaning in modern life. Looking at obsessive fandom I can't help but wonder if it's people cast adrift in a universe without purpose looking for something.
I don’t know I think the internet is just wired for depth more than breath the way old media was mostly the opposite.
We could do more stuff to give people sources of meaning, but I meet a lot of gen z people teaching and careers and families seem to still do this for people who like sports or pop music.
The fact that it isn't unique to Taylor (Beyonce et al) or American culture (kpop) suggests this is a social problem.
I dunno. Sports fan culture seems similar... mostly harmless with some bad stuff sprinkled in. The existence of entire tv networks devoted to sport is bonkers to me. (We have ESPN, we don’t have a Taylor Swift network.) People traveling to games. People making a life goal of traveling to every US baseball field. People spending thousands to watch the superbowl. People rioting and setting cars on fire when their team loses. The Taylor fandom seems mild to me. As pop music goes, she’s mostly good. Dear Reader. The Prophecy. The Man. Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me (if you’re gonna write a revenge song, this is a good way to do it. Improves with every listen. Her Kim K revenge song is pretty lousy, though, both musically and lyrically.) I was deeply not interested in Swift until last summer when I decided to see what the fuss was about and... surprise, there are many fun, smart, bright spots in her songs. The intense hatred of her is as weird to me as the intense fandom.
“People making a life goal of traveling to every US baseball field.”
As people sometimes said back when I was a kid, “You’ve gone beyond preaching. Now you’re meddling.”
To be clear… I think this is a fine (maybe even delightful?) life goal. Every stadium. Every national park. Whatever. Seems happy and harmless.
I accomplished this last year. I've been to all 30 MLB parks.
That’s excellent. Was this a one-time specific sport-related goal or do you have another project to follow? (Some other “collect them all” type of goal?)
More of a specific sport thing. My dad used to do baseball road trips with a friend in his younger days, and we decided to carry on the tradition.
He never got to all 30 parks though.
Hell, I hear sports fans make better reasoned and more fact-based arguments why they support one team versus another than I hear from most politics followers as to why they cheer on republicans or democrats.
Why do you think I call them "Team R" and "Team D" respectively?
Both the intense fandom and the intense hatred make sense to me. They are social responses frequently driven from the same insecurity.
Many people feel the satisfaction and validation for loving a thing that many other people love, and that shared sense intensifies their own love for the thing.
And for the hate side, there is a social reaction to any large phenomenon that produces a large mass of love that rejects that phenomenon (or at least rejects the mass of love for it) from some sense of insecurity, a reaction to the insecure perception that culture so highly values this thing that isn't that special (and thus, the culture disagrees with my assessment, thus the culture is criticizing me personally...how absurd, but feelings often are). For two examples, I have a sort of odd hate for Star Wars and The Beatles because I saw so much obsession with both, and the level of obsession was (to me) unjustified by the quality of the object of that obsession. That reaction isn't healthy, but it is common.
I think you're definitely right about the types of sports fans who riot or can't put things into perspective. Beyond that though, I think you're mixing apples and oranges a bit. A number of sports teams are a deep part of the cultural bedrock of entire regions (think the Packers to Green Bay or the Red Sox to Boston). Each individual football team has 53 active players, plus coaches, while the NFL has nearly 1,700 active players on a roster at any one time. ESPN is dedicated to major American sports that have thousands of active players and coaches, so then saying "we don’t have a Taylor Swift network" is missing the point since we're comparing a fandom around one person to fandoms that encompass entire cities. (ESPN is also shedding money and slowly dying.)
The fact that a individual pop act who writes break-up songs has reached the point of being named Time's Person of the Year for a successful concert tour is weird. The fact that the NYT Opinion page publishes fan fiction trying to force her to be queer is weird. You didn't see this with or Madonna or even Beyonce just a few years ago. You don't see if with female performers in other genres like Hole (to take an example de Boer cited). The level of devotion and obsession is unhealthy. Obsessive fandom was already unhealthy, but at least there were breaks on it, like how people obsessed with Star Wars were made fun of when they let it take over their lives. The fact that the internet has helped to turn the most obsessive fandoms into something socially permissible is gross.
Ok.
Freddie is right. Many people who lack some sort of anchoring structure or positive authority figures in their lives are trying to fill the gaping void with easily accessible crap. Jonathan Haidt has just recently published his latest book The Anxious Generation based on painstaking international research of screen addiction that span over the last 15 years. He concluded that so called Millennials, Gen Zets and whichever silly marketing way of segmenting shopping behaviours comes after are practically fucked. There is still hope for those in their infancy, or just born, but only if parents and schools get their act together and help kids reclaim their childhood and brains. There is hope. https://www.afterbabel.com/
Bleh. The world needs more stoics around.
Good work. Here’s something to consider for further reading: almost 30 years ago Camille Paglia wrote an essay, “Diana Regina”, about the cultish aspect of Princess Di fandom / obsession. However one may feel about CP, it’s an insightful piece and a strong effort to plumb the depths of celebrity and its venerable history among us higher primates. It also ends with what amounts to a chilling prophecy about her fate, which arrived a few years later. I was already a Paglia fan when I read it well after the fact, but the sad outcome of Diana’s story and the way Paglia nailed it was astonishing, and confirmed for me the legitimacy of her insights. Anyone seriously interested in fame and fanaticism should give it a look.
In 1994, I wrote an article titled "Elvis sighted in ancient Rome!" This piece, published in the relatively obscure Whole Earth Review, generated a modest amount of traction.
My thesis was very simple: Celebrities have psychological power because they key into collective archetypes. These archetypes represent niches that are embedded into some deep substrate of ontological thought. Liz Taylor—remember! this was 1994—was only the most recent embodiment of Helen of Troy. Elvis was just another reboot of those beautiful Greek boys who died staring at themselves in reflecting surfaces and who, oddly, inevitably, were transformed into flowers.
Taylor Swift, I'd reckon, is Artemis.
You wanna template for contemporary culture? Read Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
For several weeks after its publication, national radio shows clamored to get interviews with me. This was considerably post-Liz-and-Dick – which we enlightened anthropologists from the planet Mars now recognize as the first manifestation of unadulterated “celebrity” in modern times – but before the Internet had become a state-of-the-art celebrity stamping machine. The National Enquirer was still held in contempt by most intellectuals, and my cheerful admission that not only did I study it scrupulously every week but that I also studied The Globe and Star immediately made me a suspicious character to the eggheads who were interviewing me.
Of course, celebrity is gonna metastasize in the age of the Internet.
Browsing the Internet feels intimate. There you sit in some kind of reverie, engaging in one-on-one communion with your computer/iPad/smartphone/whatever. It’s hard to shake the subconscious belief that what you’re reading, watching, hearing on that little LED screen isn’t your own mind talking back to you. Your own weird little accretion of interests and obsessions made manifest.
When all is said and done, the Internet isn’t a channel for the dissemination of information or a facilitator of human communication. No. It’s a tremendously efficient niche-marketing engine.
And celebrity is the ultimate niche market stratification mechanism.
"Browsing the Internet feels intimate. There you sit in some kind of reverie, engaging in one-on-one communion with your computer/iPad/smartphone/whatever. It’s hard to shake the subconscious belief that what you’re reading, watching, hearing on that little LED screen isn’t your own mind talking back to you. Your own weird little accretion of interests and obsessions made manifest.
When all is said and done, the Internet isn’t a channel for the dissemination of information or a facilitator of human communication. No. It’s a tremendously efficient niche-marketing engine."
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I mean, it can and is all three at once. There are still a lot of us out in the internet ether who still primarily use it for the first two. Perhaps we are a dying breed, hard to say. Maybe when the last Gen Xer dies?
Your top section I cited interested me. I'm not sure I've ever thought that 'surfing' is really just my own mind talking back at me. I'm obviously trying to find out things I don't know, and of course my own interests and biases channel that surfing (zing!). But if what you say is true, isn't that true for any kind of information gathering, digital or analog? Aren't the same preferences and interests at work when one is physically window shopping? I guess I fail to see how this is an internet thing, and not just a human or sentient thing.
>>>I'm not sure I've ever thought that 'surfing' is really just my own mind talking back at me.<<<
Of course, it could just be me. 😀 But when I'm acquiring information from a book or a how-to YouTube video, for example, the information-gathering process feels external. But when I grab info from the Internet, it feels like that info is echoing in some secret chamber of my brain, heretofore only accessible to me. Hard to describe.
At a mechanical level, it sounds like the difference between learning something you didn't know and discovering your own priors through seeing someone else articulate them.
Huh! Yeah. I think you're on to something.
Great piece. For music podcasts you might care about (depending on your tastes), check out Andrew Hickey's A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs and Tyler Mahan Coe's Cocaine & Rhinestones, both superb social histories told via music commentary.