A brief bonus post; a long post on a very pretentious topic (namely, James Joyce) is coming tomorrow.
There is a common tension in discussions about pop culture, that has often erupted into unproductive fights both online and in person, but which (if we take a step back) can be productive to consider—can tell us something important about our ignorance of the forces forming popular culture today.
On the one side of this tension is the figure of the Swiftie. For the Swiftie, Taylor Swift is the most significant popular culture figure of our era, perhaps of any era. She is a celebrity in a class of her own—and she deserves to be so celebrated, given that she is the greatest songwriter and musician of the day.
On the other side is a figure who I will call ‘the Normie’. The Normie understands that Taylor Swift is famous, sure; probably knows a few of her songs, maybe knows a little bit about the celebrity gossip that surrounds her. But for the Normie, the obsession with Swift that the Swifties exhibit is rather unhinged. ‘She’s not actually that big, that important, that central to pop culture,’ says the Normie. And hence, arguments between the Swiftie and the Normie occur.
The issue is that—to use a little jargon—the Normie is normatively correct, while the Swiftie is descriptively correct.
The Normie typically cannot understand or accept the idea that Swift is in a league of her own in terms of fame and celebrity. They will accept her A-list status, sure, but they think it is bizarre to attribute her any more than that. As such, the Normie will tend to downplay Swift’s celebrity, and interpret those who are obsessed with her—people like the Swiftie—as members of a rather weird and over-excited subculture.
The problem is that Swift is, as a matter of fact, much more than an A-list celebrity. It is (or ought to be) undeniable that Swift is the most famous celebrity in today’s West, the central figure in the current dramas of our pop culture. The Eras tour is an international phenomenon, already easily the biggest music tour in history, and it’s not even over yet. Swift’s presence at American football games has boosted viewership, (more significantly) boosted sponsorships by around 20%, and (even more significantly) noticeably altered the culture around the game. She was (correctly!) awarded TIME Person of the Year last year. As I write this sentence, I am listening to an item on a BBC news bulletin (sandwiched between news about Palestine and British climate change policy) reporting on Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department. Taylor Swift really is a sui generis figure in popular culture, the first celebrity since the Beatles to whom ‘bigger than Jesus’ applies.
The Swiftie knows all of this; the Swiftie understands Taylor Swift’s fame. But they understand it only because they believe that it is right and just. They believe that Swift is famous because she ought to be; she is a transcendentally accomplished musician, her popularity a simple reflection of her artistic prowess and ability to connect with fans.
The Normie is right to react to this with disbelief. Swift is (I’m sorry to say) mid, in the strictest sense of the word. She has some great songs, of course, but her career as a whole has been uneven, and she’s been on a downward trajectory for a while.1 Her abilities in themselves are no explanation for her fame. The Normie has the right priors about Swift’s fame; they have just failed to update those priors in the light of new information.
The thing is, before the last five years or so, Swift really was ‘just’ an A-list celebrity. After all, she’s been around for two decades: she's a familiar face, a familiar voice, with familiar controversies. Before the pandemic, I would have compared her level of fame to someone like Beyoncé, or maybe just below that level.2 But while Beyoncé today is making very popular albums (as befits an A-lister), Swift is directing the entire course of popular culture. Something has happened since (roughly) the pandemic to transfigure Taylor Swift. What is it?
I am afraid to say that we simply do not know. Maybe it has something to do with her ‘Taylor’s Versions’ statement of artistic freedom–cum–wealth management strategy. Maybe it has to do with her pandemic pivot to folk and subsequent post-pandemic pivot away from the genre. It certainly has to do with the exigencies and trends of social media, where Swift has been promoted and promoted until her fan tags act like a TikTok Katamari.
But none of these are actual answers, actual explanations; they just push the questions back a level, to ‘why were these strategies successful?’ and ‘what conditions allowed her online popularity to spike?’ Nobody actually has a complete, coherent, explanatory story of what has happened with Taylor Swift. Even ostensibly critical and analytical pieces (like this Vox article) are reduced to empty tautologies when they try to explain her fame:
Whatever’s happening and whatever she’s doing, it’s working.
The issue is that, without being able to explain what is happening and what Swift is doing, we don’t actually understand her fame. The phenomenon of Swift’s celebrity is the most central phenomenon of today’s pop culture. Yet we do not actually have a theoretical handle on how this phenomenon functions: where it has emerged from, what sentiments and relationships it is sustained by, how ideas and attitudes propagate through her community of fans and (indeed) her community of haters, etc.
One thing we can know is that the Swifties do not have the answers. They are, as it were, too close to their subject. Indeed they cannot offer us useful explanans precisely because the existence of so many Swifties is a function of Swift’s fame: they are the explanandum. Even considered independently from Swift herself, Swifties are a prolific and powerful presence in our popular culture, as (inter alia) Infinite Scroll has explored in the past. Considered together with Swift, Swifties significantly enhance the need to understand this phenomenon.
Yet, although we can be sure that Swifties do not have the answers to this question, they are the only ones even trying to answer it. Most others have either taken Swift’s fame for granted, or—like the Normie—refused to accept the truth. If the existence of so many Swifties is a function of Taylor Swift’s immense fame, the existence of so many Normies is a function of the fact that we cannot explain her fame or make it explicable, such that many people who do not follow pop culture forensically refuse to believe it.
I think this is just one instance of a broader trend. Previously, if you wanted to understand a pop cultural phenomenon, you at least knew where to start looking: look high to the gatekeeper institutions and influential reviewers, look low to the fanzines, and look in-between to incidental discussion in other cultural contexts. Pop culture largely propagated through these intermediaries, and insofar as it propagated through in-person connections, these were recorded in legible fora.
But today, pop culture propagates through deeply-decentralised social media connections, in communities that splinter easily and are often completely illegible (indeed, not even known about) to outsiders. The result is bizarre emergent phenomena that occur with no clear explanation. ‘No clear explanation’ is not the same as ‘no explanation whatsoever’: be it algorithmic changes, cultural readiness, demand-driven production, there is always a reason for pop cultural changes. But it is so much harder to understand these reasons.
Taylor Swift should be an easy case. She’s the biggest, most obvious, most important, most discussed pop cultural phenomenon of the last half-decade; it should be clear what caused her rise and why. If we can’t understand her, what does that say about our ability to understand anything about the culture we live in?
The ‘sexy baby’ line from ‘Anti-Hero’ is so bad that my body physically tenses up when it is about to play.
I make this analogy not solely because of the Kanye link.