By In 2016, Taylor Swift was interviewed by Vogue for their 73 Questions YouTube series. The premise of the series is that Joe Sabia shows up to celebrities’ houses and asks them questions. As you may imagine, these faux-unrehearsed interactions tend to be strange and stilted—a swagless MTV Cribs. Strange and stilted environments do not suit the similarly attributed Swift, a blank slate of a person who speaks in interviews with the ease and comfort of a person throwing a football with their non-dominant hand. As Swift meanders through the Williams Sonoma showroom she calls home, Sabia asks all manner of innocuous questions. The weirdness of the 73 Questions series is heightened tremendously by Sabia’s voice, which is seemingly studio recorded and dubbed in place of the actual audio recorded on site. I, for the life of me, cannot figure out why they made this choice—it does not do Swift any favors. For a pop star who’s spent half her life in the limelight, Swift still spends much of her time in the public eye looking like a deer that is only somewhat acclimated to the headlights. But don’t mistake uneasiness with dishonesty.
“What’s one song you wish you had written?” Sabia asks. Swift has her answer ready to go, she’s thought of this before.
“The FRIENDS theme song,” Swift replies. “Because of those royalties.”
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Seven years later, in a fractured media landscape still processing the death of the monoculture, Taylor Swift is a monolith. Her Eras Tour is the highest-grossing tour of all time and has been a genuine force in geopolitics. Her re-released albums routinely top the charts. Swift is TIME Magazine‘s Person of the Year. Christ the Redeemer donned a custom t-shirt to welcome her to Brazil. She is not just the most famous person alive—Taylor Swift is the most famous person in human history.
But why?
Is the fact that Taylor Swift is uncool part of the charm? The music is plain, she is a void of personality, and her tabloid exploits are not even salacious enough to warrant a PG rating.
Is it the record-breaking financial figures? Is that providing fans the same dopamine rush as when a retail investor opens Robinhood to see their meme stocks have surged? Surely a record doesn’t sound better once it hits Platinum, right? How is that Olivia Rodrigo has had a far more interesting career before being legally allowed to drink? Is it as simple as it’s easier for Swift’s fans to imagine being Taylor’s friend than Beyonce, Drake, or Bad Bunny’s?
The whole package reads so milquetoast.
I mean, what is going on in that TIME photoshoot? A mannequin would make those clothes look more lived-in. Her quotes in the accompanying profile are equally wooden; she talks like if ChatGPT was trying to fit in at the cool kids table:
On dating Travis Kelce: “This all started when Travis very adorably put me on blast on his podcast, which I thought was metal as Hell.”
On her album REPUTATION: “It’s a goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure”
How did we get here?
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“It’s not lost on me that the two great catalysts for this happening were two horrendous things that happened to me,” Swift tells TIME Magazine. “The first was getting canceled within an inch of my life and sanity,” she says plainly.
In the wake of these two great catalysts, Swift has wrested complete and total control of her narrative and mythmaking. The public goodwill in response to her masters being bought by the widely loathed Scooter Braun paired with the parasocial vacuum created by COVID lockdowns supercharged Swift from pop star to something beyond classification. In lieu of any kind of reckoning with this, the music press has opted to hitch themselves to her wagon, eager to catch whatever revenue can be collected in her wake. Gannett, a mass media holding company that owns USA Today and a variety of local newspapers around the country, has hired a dedicated reporter for the Taylor Swift beat. This garnered headlines not for the astounding fact that the job exists, but for the fact that Gannett opted to hire a man for the job. Girlbossing dies in darkness.
But let’s back up a bit to “I was canceled within an inch of my life.”
What?
Taylor Swift did not lose any record deals or endorsements. She was never exiled from polite society. She never stopped receiving offers to promote or collaborate or star in projects. She, by her own admission, moved to a foreign country and didn’t leave her rental house for a year, pushing away most people in her life because she didn’t trust anyone anymore. That is not being canceled! That is voluntarily taking a hiatus amidst a mental health crisis. This did not have an adverse effect on any of her business holdings and did not drop her down in the social pecking order. Even Sam Lansky, in his fawning profile of Swift, recognizes this but cannot bring himself to say it, at least not without couching it to the point of cosigning:
“I do not say to her, in our conversation, that it did not always look that way from the outside—that, for example, when REPUTATION’s lead single ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ reached No. 1 on the charts, or when the album sold 1.3 million albums in the first week, second only to 1989, she did not look like someone whose career had died. She looked like a superstar who was mining her personal experience as successfully as ever. I am tempted to say this.
“But then I think, Who am I to challenge it, if that’s how she felt? The point is: she felt canceled. She felt as if her career had been taken from her. Something in her had been lost, and she was grieving it. Maybe this is the real Taylor Swift effect: That she gives people, many of them women, particularly girls, who have been conditioned to accept dismissal, gaslighting, and mistreatment from a society that treats their emotions as inconsequential, permission to believe that their interior lives matter. That for your heart to break, whether it’s from being kicked off a tour or by the memory of a scarf still sitting in a drawer somewhere or because somebody else controls your life’s work, is a valid wound, and no, you’re not crazy for being upset about it, or for wanting your story to be told.”
Why let this slide?
Posturing as a once-canceled celebrity isn’t even the shrewd business move! It is far more effective (and relatable!) to frame this, accurately, as a period of mental crisis, something which everyone can relate to and empathize with. That does not in any way change the validity of emotions—in fact, it validates those emotions much more effectively when you aren’t whining about being canceled. Why put yourself in the same bucket as Louis C.K. when you can just be honest? You don’t even have to change a single detail from the story—your fans will still rally behind you and wage war on your enemy. And what on earth is Lansky talking about? Being canceled is not a feeling! Cancellations have material, financial consequences. The deference owed to Swift in this profile is astounding especially for how often Lansky acknowledges the spell Swift has him under, repeatedly talking about how she is a master of not just storytelling, but making sure everyone else is telling her story on her terms. It’s like if THE USUAL SUSPECTS ended with the detectives giving Keyser Söze a standing ovation and keys to the city.
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I sympathize with spiraling from the Kanye beef; it is frankly pretty shocking that more celebrities do not go completely insane with all the media attention they receive. (However, even Elizabeth Warren didn’t leave the public eye after getting the snake emoji treatment. My advice to Taylor: don’t ditch Travis Kelce for Tyler Herro, NBA Twitter will be calling your Grammy’s Mickey Mouse trophies). For all her calculating, Swift seems to miss that this has done untold wonders for her career. There’s no such thing as bad press, the adage goes.
But for an artist of Swift’s stature, with a fan base as massive and feral as hers, the calculus changes a bit: no such thing is better than bad press. Nasty headlines and public feuds are free marketing! In this way, being a blank slate upon which fans project their wildest fantasies becomes a tremendous advantage. Entire factions of her fanbase are steadfast in the belief that she’s gay. Taylor, you have a media literate version of QAnon at your disposal—their predictions even come true! Your obsessed horde of devotees will work themselves into a lather to defend your honor, running up your streaming numbers and clearing out your merchandise shelves. They will bully publications until they submit to showering you with praise. They will label anyone who isn’t your fan an enemy. They will reshape the world in your image, granting you full authorship of your story. Nobody will dare to stand in your way.
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