Swifties Are a Community of Easily Amused Children
They have subsumed her creative talent into the ever-expanding and ever-mutating object of capital, and they have done so with her help.
“My personal therapist”, they call Taylor Swift, as she offers a sermon in the style of cliched self help instagram infographics to presumably thousands, if not tens of thousands, of stadium audience members who presumably paid hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to be there.1 “Mother”, she is routinely called, in an indelicate effort to obfuscate the necessarily transactional business-empire-building relationship she has with her fans.2 Nick Levine describes this term as “the ultimate accolade that queer Twitter can bestow on you”. 3 While it isn’t a moral failure to be mildly or even gravely ignorant of the term’s origins in Black ballroom communities, it is a bit distasteful, and, let’s be honest, very annoying, to project the associations of historically politically vulnerable lineage and kinship onto a white almost-billionaire. Why does this happen?
When Taylor Swift is criticised (be it in terms of her artistry or her carbon footprint), Swifties most often respond with a sense of preparedness, as if they have been waiting their whole lives for someone to let them retort in the vitriolic way they are just about to. They have stats, receipts, news articles, quotes from that one time someone else did something bad, all ready to go. The curious thing is that they rarely ever refute the criticism being offered, and simultaneously are really horrified and indignant at the fact of it, ignoring the content completely. If you say she is a bad lyricist, you are informed how many weeks her music has spent on the charts. If you say she is very absurdly obnoxiously rich, you are dared to face the shocking fact that she pays her employees big bonuses. None of these responses ever contradict what is being said, just offer an alternate tangent of obsession masquerading as analysis.
It is an indisputable fact that Taylor Swift makes music that is adored by many, and in the absence of any objective theory of aesthetics, this must be taken that she is a good and talented musician. What now? She is still an extraordinarily wealthy woman with a view towards political engagement that is tepid at best and horrifyingly cowardly at worst. I am cautious, here, of the very heightened visibility and vulnerability she experiences, and the uniquely dangerous position that puts her in with regards to making any sort of political statement. But when her documented (and documentary-featured) meltdown about wanting to post an Instagram caption about Marsha Blackburn is brought up (rightfully) as being in very poor taste, somehow Swifties never seem to talk about the danger that Swift could be exposing herself to, the very real fear of her parents and loved ones. Instead, you are pointed to the pathetic (politically and aesthetically) music video for You Need to Calm Down, which arguably just recycles her same political (and moral) failings in shinier colours, allowing her to pretend that being gaudy is the same as being outspoken.
The thing is, Taylor Swift is first and foremost a musician. Yet somehow, when defending her success (or her worthiness of it), her fans always seem to refer to everything but her music: her business acumen, the supposed economic impact of the Eras Tour, her alleged kindness to her fans, her hyper successful album re-recordings, and above all, her impossibly huge fanbase.4 Rather than rejoice in the genuinely beautiful feeling of community as a source of joy and togetherness and understanding, the majority of vocal Swifties seem to have instead forced their ‘community’ to reimagine itself, instead, as an economic and financial resource that serves as the popularising and sustaining mechanism for every possible “creative” or other output from Taylor Swift. To them, sharing friendship bracelets at concerts isn’t valuable solely because it creates a tangible and memorable artefact from an important experience, but because it makes beads manufacturers’ revenues shoot up. Taylor Swift’s music isn’t good because of anything artistic or critical they can articulate about it, or even an emotion that they can point to, but because it is topping the charts, and hence it must be good.
This mirrors the way in which they engage with Swift herself: the Eras Tour setlist spans 3+ hours, involving a host of costume changes and probably a lot more mind boggling logistics that we can’t really imagine. As a result, she is constantly spoken of in terms of her ‘stamina’ and ‘dedication’, reflecting a kind of perceived follow-through to her fans that she is seen as granting out of the goodwill of her heart. Her performances themselves though, seem really boring unless you’re deeply emotionally invested in her life and personhood — which, it appears, many people are. She dances awkwardly, she wears really glitzy bodysuits that are quite frankly very unimaginative, and for some reason frequently wears a whole ballgown which in my opinion creates a look of disjointedness and incoherence against the backdrop of electronic microphones and jarring purple lighting. Maybe that’s what she’s going for, I don’t know. She is not a very effortless or comfortable performer, and is often very noticeably afraid of deviating from a very precise, choreographed sequence of movements and actions. Even in one of her most evocative stage performances (her medley of cardigan, august, and willow at the Grammys two years go) every last movement was constrained by pre-planned and pre-orchestrated lines of acceptability, her hands erratically winding around her in an overly-staged manner.
Her performances, then, reveal a great deal of stamina and a great deal of (misguided, in my opinion) creativity, and are used as fodder for her public image by her fans. How could she possibly be criticised, when she went 3 hours without peeing? When she did this every night for months on end? How dare you say her personal carbon emissions are absurd? Her fans do her a disservice by forcing her to be presented as morally unimpeachable by virtue of her ‘talent’ (while actually just referring to her vast resources and her commitment to putting on a good show). Her actual talent lies in her music (so much of which is truly so extraordinary and definitional of the current period in pop), which nobody seems to want to talk about.
Instead, they have subsumed her creative talent into the ever-expanding and ever-mutating object of capital, and they have done so with her help. If you are a person looking to make money, why wouldn’t you release 5 different vinyls of your re-recorded albums in different pastel-adjacent shades featuring boring, unimaginative covers with your face in sunglasses? You know that people will buy them. If you are a person unhealthily obsessed with everything Taylor Swift has touched, everything she repackages as a creative product, every commercial event she presents as a personal embrace, why wouldn’t you pay? She’s using you for money? God forbid a woman has hobbies, right? Who cares if she has more money than she knows what to do with? You have to buy a vinyl and yell at someone on Twitter for daring to say that “karma is a cat” is a stupid lyric and then wait for the next gimmick that will have you opening your wallet, ready to tap dance to the tune of ivy if that’s what she wanted.
Swifties have latched onto Taylor Swift as a lightning rod for their frustrations, and while the term ‘parasocial relationships’ is often reserved for influencers who don’t follow you back, it would be very accurate here. She said no to a fan asking for a picture, and people tweeted about how they were ‘proud’ of her for upholding her ‘boundaries’. This level of obsessive investment in the low-stakes mental wellbeing of a stranger is disarming, and is often shrouded in hyperbolic exclamations of fondness and additional moral perfection — “mother!”, they continue to scream, while begging her for the chance to pay her hundreds of dollars, all for the pleasure of saying they did (and watching her dance, for 3 hours, without peeing).
https://www.gaytimes.co.uk/originals/mother-a-queer-term-centuries-in-the-making/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_Eras_Tour#Economy_and_commerce