I’m not exactly — as the kids say — a “cool daddi-o”. I don’t keep up with pop culture. The last SNL musical guest I recognized was Soundgarden in 1996. I’m aware of pop culture in the same way that I’m aware of my body’s microbiome: I know there’s a boisterous ecosystem just beyond my consciousness, and I’m comfortable simply leaving it there.
It seems like this is how things should be. I’m 43. I’m a dad. The days of me being cool — had they ever arrived — would be long gone. I’m ensconced in the trappings of dad life, e.g. books about submarines and an abiding belief in the benefits of storm windows. It seems natural — nay, appropriate — for me to be broadly unaware of the Pretty Singing Lady Du Jour. Strong opinions about pop stars are for young people, gay best friends on sitcoms, and guys who the FBI should be watching like a hawk.
So why has all of media apparently made it their mission for me to know about Taylor Swift? I can’t use the internet, walk around town, or even watch a fucking football game without encountering this lady. Swift’s Eras Tour is getting the level of coverage I would expect if Christ returned to Earth, resurrected Elvis, and married him. Swift has been mentioned in almost three New York Times articles per day for a month:
Meanwhile, the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, where a campaign of ethnic cleansing might be unfolding, has gotten half as much coverage:
Did this girl cure cancer? Did she win every fucking medal at the Olympics? Did she solve climate change, clear the solar system of asteroids, and then invent the everlasting gobstopper? If so, then that would justify maybe half of the coverage she’s getting. Part of me thinks that the real celebrity here should be Swift’s publicist, who seems to be succeeding at a level that makes Michael Jordan look like an impotent dickweed.
Swift’s tour movie — The Eras Tour — is a smash hit. It grossed $93 million in its first weekend; second place was The Exorcist: Believer at $11 million. Swift’s movie is also getting universal acclaim, and “universal acclaim” isn’t a subjective assessment by me; it’s an official designation on Metacritic.
An 83 on Metacritic might seem good-but-not-great, but here are scores for other movies that put that 83 in context. There are 22 Best Picture winners on this list:
Yes: According to critics, The Eras Tour makes The Sound of Music look like a giant pile of Alpine goat shit. This supports my unprovable-but-definitely-correct theory that film and music criticism has been overrun by people whose singular goal is to not get yelled at on social media.
To be clear: I have nothing against Taylor Swift. I honestly have no opinion of her at all. I don’t really enjoy her music, but I feel that’s like saying “I went to Chuck E Cheese and rode the little space rocket, then I went on the tug boat that plays ‘Five Little Ducks’, and to be honest, I didn’t really enjoy it.” Well, no shit: That stuff is not made for me! I have no opinions about dentures, tampons, or Taylor Swift’s music because those products — though quite important to some people — are not intended for me.
The odd thing here is simply Swift’s level of celebrity. How often are people this ubiquitous? Beyoncé may have had this level of Q Score five years ago, and Genghis Khan perhaps achieved it 800 years before that, but that’s pretty much the list. I also wonder if Swift’s outsized fame is evidence that entertainment is becoming top-heavy.
I don’t know much about the music industry, but television — my once-and-perhaps-future field — is going through a strange time. “Linear” TV — that is, non-streaming TV — is fading fast. Cable, especially, is struggling as people opt out of cable bundles that charge money for channels like The Penmanship Network and C-SPAN Junior. Streaming is ascendant, but, strangely, nobody except for Netflix seems to know how to make money off of streaming. The dynamic is like the automobile replacing the horse if most people who invested in the automobile lost billions of dollars.
One problem is that the explosion of entertainment options has made good stuff hard to find. In the old days, you usually learned about a new TV show because it came on after whatever you were watching. That’s why lead-ins were important; networks put new shows on after hits and hoped that people would be too lazy to get off their asses and change the channel (fortunes were made on this bet). That dynamic doesn’t exist with streaming. Also, fewer people watch ads, which reduces opportunities to promote new shows. This problem is compounded by the fact that my unscientific research finds that 80 percent of ads are that fucking Taylor Swift Capital One ad, anyway.
Music seems to suffer from a similar lack of entry points. People no longer hear a new song because it’s the next thing on the radio or on MTV. They can skip directly to what they want, which is both good (no more suffering through Matchbox 20 songs like I had to) and bad (no encountering new stuff, ever).
That might push a large share of entertainment dollars towards a few mega-hits. Movies are already trending towards a small number of big hits, with middle and low-budget films being squeezed out. TV is producing fewer shows following a period of rapid, streamer-driven expansion; who knows how far the contraction will go? Generally, entertainment has been so thrown into chaos by technological changes that it’s easy to understand why the value of a bankable star like Swift has gone through the roof.
At any rate: You win, media. I know who Taylor Swift is. With a few more years of this level of exposure, I may even know the name of one of her songs. Hopefully, a sliver of the money made from Swift’s tour will be invested in the kind of music I like, e.g. old men with steel guitars singing about dead cowboys and rappers who begin each song by telling you what their name is and what they’re here to say. Record companies should do this for diversity, they should do it for art, but most of all: They should do it because I’m in my 40s and have disposable income, so I can drop big money on concert tickets if I have a good enough reason. But I’m not dropping four figures — or for that matter any figures — on Taylor Swift tickets. And that’s how it should be.
Right there with you, buddy. It doesn’t make me feel old and beatdown that I don’t know who Taylor Swift is. It makes me feel old and beatdown that I’m inordinately proud of not knowing who Taylor Swift is. My finest accomplishment.
Taylor began her rise to prominence starting about 12 years ago. She wrote catchy pop tunes about boys that girls like. She was in the country music bucket but always had more of a pop sound. I totally get her appeal to adolescent girls because I used to be one. What has happened since she first caught on is her complete capitulation to the conventional wisdom of our day. She has all the correct, vaguely lefty opinions. So not only is she a darling of the music market, she’s a good conduit for politically correct ideas. She has a certain kind of power that I’m sure is recognized and cultivated by other powerful people. I’d say she got where she is because kids love a catchy pop song. But her status at the top of the heap is certainly helped by the fact that her ideas align with current ruling class views. Watch. You’ll see her say things that let her audience know what it’s cool to believe. I’m not saying she’s a puppet, just that nobody with her reach will be untouched by influencers that seek to use her cultural power.