The Pop Corporation

Look, Taylor Swift is breathing such rarified air these days that any suggestion that she’s not going to be a commercial success is pretty much laughable. Any idea that she won’t have a hit is really not what we’re talking about here, so if you are a person who only works on the metric of sales, memes, retweets and volume, you’d better walk away from this because this is not what we’re talking about here.

A superstar’s career is always two things in tandem – one is sales, the other is more cultural. What usually happens with a megastar is that the hits begin to subside in a pop sense, and while moving into legacy territory, they either have a desperate cling to popular music or they give their work a bit more substance, usually at the behest of being loved and adored by pop fans, and more into the die-hard fan and record collector dickhead market. For an ex-rocker, they might forgo the hits and say they’re about to start making the music they always wanted to make, or something. There’s a knack to doing things like this with a modicum of grace, while you concern yourself less-and-less with chart positions and appealing more to your devoted fanbase. If they liked the singer-songwriter albums tracks more than the big singles, then you give them more of what they want and look like a maturing artist in the process.

It’s all artifice of course, but it’s the game musicians and pop fans play with each other, until someone taps out. Taylor Swift is something of a veteran now, with 11 studio albums, 4 re-records, 5 EPs and 4 live LPs under her belt. She’s amassed an astonishing 114 million units in sales worldwide and she’s only 34 years old. This is the kind of performance that a dozen bands merged together would give their right arm for.

However, it feels like 2024 is some kind of critical juncture for Swift. A lot has happened in the last few years and we’re looking at someone who is the cycle of her new ‘era’; ‘The Tortured Poets Department.’

In relatively no time at all, she released ‘Midnight’, a documentary, became a billionaire, redone versions of ‘Speak Now’, ‘1989’ and has somehow been utterly ubiquitous and weirdly, simultaneously absent. Her new album, released with a breadcrumb of clues for fans to solve has furthered her reputation as one of pop’s great marketing executives, and it’s difficult to think of any other current artist who even gets close to the stratosphere where she finds herself.

However, we live in a post-Taylor world now, where personal relationships are seemingly reduced to something akin to data-mining exercises for new material, and older relationships repackaged and airbrushed to lose any dodgy lyrics of the past. With this, she’s calculated the situation and sidestepped even the mention of any cancelling. And now, she’s telling us how fickle fame is, on her newest album, comparing it to the gallows and an asylum. There’s nothing particularly new about this take, and Swift certainly isn’t a monster. However, there’s an impermeable membrane around Swift which she’s almost invited her fans into, but not quite.

This is one of the hallmarks of someone seeing themselves at the top. You look at the trappings and the attention and scrutinise it. Certainly nothing that a score of megastars haven’t done before. What is different in 2024 is that, coupled with the ubiquity of stan-culture, we’re faced with a megastar that feels beyond reproach. A sensible criticism of Taylor Swift is met with a fury that Swift herself has done little to quash. She is, in part, a victim of timing because in the past Beatle devotees would simply be stood in the street calling someone an idiot for not getting it. Michael Jackson fans – some of the most downright peculiar and evangelic of fandoms – would speak constantly and quietly about the things ‘Michael’ had done for the world – sometimes to unnerving levels of hagiography. Swift’s fans are, by-and-large, absolutely fine and just really love her music and get a real kick out of her songs old and new. However, they’re at arm’s length from their favourite singer, and that’s certainly intentional.

There is an unnerving judo of a type of Taylor Swift fan that dismisses any justifiable indifference or criticism with calls of sexism, jealousy and the rest. You can’t boo Taylor Swift, or you’re just someone who hates to see a woman being successful. As persuasive as that argument often is – too many women in music are judged poorly by people for doing exactly the things famous men have got away with for decades – there’s still a nagging sense that, while rock musicians are now judged by a different yardstick than they were in the past, when a woman takes on the worst elements of human nature, then the big brained viewer would like to criticise everyone equally.

It stands to reason though, that as megastars go, fans really could’ve chosen worse. How manicured the tone of her missives are, they can still grate – for someone who invites such speculation about her private life through her songs, there’s a regrettable lack of rawness to her performance which you’d get with, say, Stevie Nicks who mined a similar narrative back in the ’70s. Her output is meticulous, and maybe in the days of cancellings and social media, that’s somewhat a necessity. However, this state of near permanent praise is stifling. Her ubiquity is one thing – she’s certainly not the first to have this attention – but the the lack of real criticism from those who like to look at these things is unnerving. A music critic can be critical of a megastar and it doesn’t automatically make it a hatchet job for clicks. No-one is an enemy to Swift’s army of fans just for casting a critical eye over the whole thing while simultaneously underlining her huge and obvious successes. It says a lot that one publication decided to write a critical piece on Swift, but refused to put a byline on it because the last time they did, there were doxxings and threats of harm, and the whole thing is tedious at best and incredibly worrying beyond that.

This dance between all parties is an insufferable situation that no-one really benefits from, and everything is in danger of turning into the most beige of debates.

From the ‘Reputation’, ‘Folklore’ and ‘Evermore’ albums, there’s been a nagging feeling that her releases were more about the celebrity writing them than the music itself. Frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff should shoulder some of that blame too, because as artists move in and out of new periods of music and tone, excitement can often appear with unusual, more risky collaborations. A new breeding ground for ideas, new voices and perspectives can allow for periods of self-reflection and with that, comes a big roll of the dice. The distance between introspection and self-obsession can be Rizla-thin.

That all said, her fans have never felt more seen. Fans young and old are still flocking to Swift to touch the hem of her garment and if you’re not a fan, poo-pooing it is broadly an exercise is not liking the thing that’s omnipresently popular at the moment. Sometimes, you can quietly not like an artist, just as many of Swift’s fans quietly enjoy her music and shows.

Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys and journalist for Smash Hits (ergo, someone who really knows their onions) touched on something in 2016. He impishly referred to Swift as “a sort of Mrs Thatcher of pop music in that she seems to be about economics”, but the following point was more pertinent.

“There’s a problem in pop music in spite of what I’ve just said and that’s the subject matter of pop music and there is only currently one subject matter and that is the singer and possibly their emotional life, or their issues with fame – there is not a lot of role playing going on.”

There is absolutely a truth to that, and it’s not just Swift who is guilty of it. In an environment where everyone’s feelings cancel each other out with cries of mattering the most, this reflects on the utterly uncritical eye in which much of Swift’s music is viewed. It’s okay if she has a dud – so many bazillion-selling musicians have done the same and it’s not affected them in the scheme of things. In fact, it’s important to have the occasional misstep, because that shows that some risks are being taken. Artists, fans, people in general should occasional challenge themselves to see if what they’re connecting with is meaningful. Hopefully, challenging yourself only reveals that you were right all along. Also, should we take a second to think about Taylor’s use of her exes? Rockstars have had their muses, their exes, their infatuations for years – it’s nothing really new, per se.

For our money, it would be genuinely interesting to hear Swift sincerely questioning herself, looking at her decisions and perhaps asking hard questions of her fanbase and the people around her, and putting that into her music. There’s been nods to it, but largely, they’ve been tokenistic. Critics too can take a deep breath – instead of being browbeaten by a perceived backlash from some of pop’s most ardent fans, they could choose their words carefully and offer praise at the same time as a dissection? More to the point, as Swift hopefully matures, wouldn’t it be wonderful for an ugly, raw dissection straight from the person at the centre of this maelstrom of success?

In the past, truly great artists (not, merely popular – it’s not the same thing) have faced thorough and proper scrutiny and they’ve survived it. There’s a sense that the effigy of Taylor Swift that is presented to us is beyond reproach, and that shouldn’t sit easily with anyone. We suspect that, if we put Taylor Swift through the actual wringer, she’d emerge a pretty decent person. Sure, she’s been dubbed an environmental terrorist for her over-reliance on private jets, she’s been been through it with Kanye (and look how that turned out, after much shit-slinging from all camps- for the avoidance of doubt, that’s a win for Team Swift), an unwillingness to get involved in politics when perhaps it was sorely needed from much of her fanbase, songwriting and plagiarism lawsuits – Swift is not a squeaky clean performer by any stretch of the imagination – but sometimes, it seems like she has a tendency to frame herself as a doe-eyed victim, when in actuality, she’s an influential billionaire who sued someone using public information to highlight environmental concerns.

You’re allowed to find that tiresome. It’s not a character assassination. And somehow, Swift has managed to portray herself as suffering the slings and arrows of the world. She’s told us that’s she is vindicated, a villain, a hero against all odds – but even a shred of thinking should leave any right-minded person thinking ‘is that really true?‘ Naturally, she’s capable of being funny in the middle of a hook, joking and being self deprecating while poking fun at previous partners’ apparently self-seriousness, but the metaphors are layered on quite thickly and you’d hope for someone at the top of the tree, there’d be a bit more finesse. We’re not even interested in someone being classy – gossiping through music is one of the funnest things you can buy into on a surface level – but one thing you’d hope to see is some of the sheen getting rubbed off a little. When absolutely everything is a tragedy, when absolutely story is treated as a melodrama – especially over the course of a double album – it’s a schtick that only the most ardent fan will be able to swallow whole. Undeniably, she had an insane work ethic and is American capitalism writ large and a success with it – but there’s a sense that this could well be a turning point in Swift’s career.

Whether the naysayers have a point or not, there’s more of them coming forward. Even some of Swift’s fans have written about how tired they are by the whole thing. Sections of praise have started to feel somewhat hollow and friends of friends who are desperate to tell you why they love her and now being told to tell someone else. Fans themselves have began to turn to designated sub-Reddits, saying things like they felt like they were leaving a cult – a literal support group for fans who feel they need a neutral outlet to talk about a pop star. It’s a crazy scene out there, and no mistake.

And it’s okay to say that Taylor’s cash-grab is annoying you. That you think her merch and output got crappy. That the jets bother you. To say those things is not to say Swift is uniquely awful – there’s a gnawing sense that, by and large, pop stars and rappers and whoever else and slowly being judged by a new yardstick. There’s recessions and turmoil all over the world and it’s reasonable to be bored of listening to someone talk about their troubles while they lead a pampered life. It’s also fine for a fan to be distracted from life’s horrors with a bit of Taylor’s daft celebrity life. She’s also the same artist who has been accused of being cold when faced with the death of a Brazilian fan at one of her shows. Again, not the first to face an issue like this, but no artist is above reproach, especially so when it’s your favourite artist.

She is politically ineffective as a spokesperson, but not the only one. She does put out a lot of variants and tat for fans to buy, but you don’t have to buy it all. The disillusionment of celebrity is perhaps the thing she may have to think about next in her career. She’s clearly isn’t the girl-next-door like she once positioned herself. It’s not a hopeless situation she finds herself in – there’s a number of other artists in her lofty position who seem to navigate these waters. Look at Paul McCartney for example – even if the photos of him sitting alone on public transport mucking around on his phone are staged, they work. For someone who has been a megastar for his entire adult life, McCartney still seems like a person and is still able to resonate with people despite his uniquely lofty position. Swift’s fans are on record as saying that they’re unimpressed to read into her lyrics as blaming them for ‘forcing’ her to have a relationship with the obviously shitty Matty Healy from The 1975.

If the public are splitting into two camp – those against and the stans; those who accept celebrity and those who don’t – 2024 and onward is going to be a fascinating turning point in pop culture. Rappers are going to need new schtick, wealthy country musicians down-on-the-farm missives are going to be ever more transparent, and pop stars are going to have to work out a way of not vanishing entirely up the behind of the music industry. Perhaps the reason we’re focusing on Taylor Swift so keenly at the moment, is because of all of the superstars on the planet right now, she’s the most likely to be able to market herself properly and turn this whole situation on its head.

She’s a master manipulator of her surroundings for better or worse, and as the environment appears to be changing, it’s going to be genuinely fascinating to see what Taylor Swift’s next move is. This album cycle seems to be the most fraught she’s had, even if the sales and ticket stubs won’t reflect that. Will she retreat for a while? Will she show more vulnerability? Will she plough through and just keep doing what she’s doing?

We don’t have the answers, but for anyone invested in such matters, we’re potentially entering a crucial pivot moment for pop culture. Can big-arena stubs continue at this rate and will we continue to indulge the incredibly wealth as we have done for so many years?