Why people are tired of Taylor Swift

And how we can add nuance back into the conversation

Kevin Winter, Getty Images for The Recording Academy

By Tess GC

Like a lot of you, I’m pretty tired of think pieces and the unrelenting media coverage of Taylor Swift, and this is coming from me, a girl who Spotify notified earlier this year that she’s in the top five percent of Taylor listeners worldwide (My friend and I just spent a road trip re-listening to every album in order and ranking them). But the constant presence of Swiftie fan pages haunting my feed, and the predictability of new think pieces about Taylor popping up in every publication in the country (the irony isn’t lost on me right now), is starting to wear on me. I wanted to throw a couple thoughts into the ring when it comes to political, nuanced understanding about phenomenons like Taylor’s reign of wins and media attention, and how we’re all engaging with the multifaceted spectacle that she presents. 

There are two main sides to the Taylor debate in progressive circles – first, there’s defending her against sexism, combined with Taylor Swift as a representation, however loose, of how women are treated in our society. Her long career is a clear example of dealing with blatant and egregious sexism, a constant barrage of sexist devaluing and belittling attacks on her and her work, and by extension of femininity itself. Second are the critiques of her as an extremely wealthy person, a massive environmental polluter, an extremely influential public figure who will discuss politics only when it benefits her brand, and a representation of the success you can have under capitalism when you’re a woman who still ticks most of the right boxes – white, pretty, young, ideal body type, and crucially, rich.

What I want to discuss has to do with where we often end up when we want to reject black and white thinking – gray areas, the both/and, nuance – and how in some cases, just because something is a both/and kind of situation doesn’t mean it’s really helpful. Just because both sides of this discourse have truth to them, doesn’t mean one or the other, or even holding both at the same time, is the most accurate way to understand what’s going on in a case like Taylor Swift.

Gray areas aren’t always just holding some of the black and some of the white, some of one side and some of the other. It reminds me of the example of the red and white flowers that my high school biology textbook used to explain genetics to us: sometimes the combined DNA of a red and a white flower make a red and white speckled flower, and other times they make a pink flower. There’s the possibility that both things are true, the red and white flower, and sometimes there’s a more complicated third thing that becomes true, the pink flower. In the case of Taylor Swift, I think people’s interest in her and the slightly changing tide of public approval (As Anne Helen Peterson notes, “Swift’s image didn’t collapse at the Grammys this past Sunday, not even close. But it did show signs of strain”) really transcends both the critique of her and the defense. 

I think a lot of public conversation about Taylor Swift right now has to do with how we understand the politics of oppression and representation when the forces that give rise to one boat are also implicated in holding down everyone else’s. There’s something tricky here when it comes to oppression and identity when they’re discussed within the bounds of wealth and privilege (and in Taylor’s case, extreme wealth and privilege). In the case of Taylor Swift and public opinion, one of the pink flowers is that she both has grievances with the way the world works – patriarchy and sexism in particular – and she’ll only address those problems as they relate to her and a few others. And she’s addressed them very successfully, helping her float to the top of an unfair music industry and a rotten economic and social system in general. 

I think a lot of us see ourselves represented in celebrities and public figures who share a marginalized identity with us, but that’s about where our commonalities with them end. With Taylor Swift in particular, many people have noted that a big part of her brand and success has been fostering parasocial relationships with her fans. Ben, my fellow writer here at Spirit of Solidarity, sent me this fascinating and insightful Reddit thread about Taylor and parasocial relationships that speaks to this connection that some of us feel with her. However, the thing about parasocial relationships is that they’re not based on really knowing people, and as many of the Reddit posters note, they create standards for people like Taylor that she will inevitably fail to meet.

There’s also the twofold reality of how hard it is to see people with a marginalized identity or experience, in this case being a woman in a sexist industry, becoming the face of capitalist, unfair industries and systems. First, I’m thinking about how many times we’ve seen these celebrities and high profile people maintain the chip on their shoulder that experiencing marginalization can give you, and suddenly we’re looking at a millionaire or billionaire who thinks, or at least acts like they can do no wrong because of their marginalization. Second, there’s the reality that they often fail to be activists for other people, or they totally fail to question the system itself. Then we’re left feeling let down by their acceptance into the system, however partial or unsatisfactory it may be to them, while we’re still being rejected or exploited by it. To have negative opinions about Taylor doesn’t mean you aren’t engaging in some degree of sexism, but that’s so far from the end of the story. It seems only natural to me that living in the conditions we’re living in, it only takes so many instances of a celebrity being treated like the most important person in society for us to snap a little bit, not find it so charming or harmless anymore.

There’s also something going on with the similarity between the concentration of resources in this society and the concentration of power and attention. It’s like billionaires hoarding wealth while we all have less and less, even while our markets and homes are being flooded with cheap goods that make it seem like we have more than anyone before in human history. We have more and more so-called choices in our consumer products while those products are actually startlingly similar to one another – and also while fewer and fewer of us can afford most of the options anyway. The abundance is really only for the few, and it cuts down actual choice for the rest of us. When it comes to celebrity, attention, and the wealth that comes with them, even though more and more people have social media followings, the monetary benefit of that following is going down for the many while becoming hyper concentrated – both in wealth-making and in public fixation – for a few, like Taylor Swift. 

Scott Eisen, Getty Images for TAS Rights Management

I think it’s particularly notable that the Swift’s coverage felt a lot more fun this spring and summer, partially because it came after a period in which we didn’t see much of her (also a point noted by Anne Helen Peterson), but also because her tour felt like it matched the vibes of this past summer: Femininity, participation, and fun. Taylor hits a little different when we’re no longer in the fun summer mood, and instead are exposed to images of her flying across the country every weekend to see her boyfriend, and making her way through the awards show season in fancy gowns. All of this is happening while we’ve watched a genocide play out live on our feeds for the past four months while celebrities, Swift being one of the most visible right now, go on living their best lives of opulence and have little or nothing to say about it. I think Swift and her team are marketing geniuses, as many people have noted, but unfortunately for them they’ve maintained her limelight into a period where a lot of us are becoming increasingly jaded about the rich and powerful. 

Finally, I think there’s something worth noting in the ‘nuance’ conversation that’s not about Taylor Swift, but about how we talk about nuance. There’s a bigger conversation about how appeals to nuance are used cynically by the ruling class and its cheerleaders to gaslight the rest of us. They often use legitimate concepts in blatantly disingenuous or false ways, like spending the last four months saying that people who support Palestinian freedom are being antisemitic. But I also think a lot of us use ‘nuance’ really genuinely, but could think a little more about how the situations we use it for may not be so formulaic, such as in the case of Taylor Swift. In this case, sure there’s the sexism, sure there’s the problematic rich person behavior, but I think a lot of the nuance isn’t in using her for feminist purposes or as the prime example of wealthy excess. Her current success and the way the public reacts to her can be a harbinger for the rest of us, useful information about what the systems we’re traversing are doing to us – how badly they’re exploiting, and more importantly distracting us from our real problems with an attention circus and false displays of social change and progressiveness.

Anyway, thanks for listening to these thoughts, I’d love to hear some genuine responses below.

And P.S., a piece on the state of feminism coming soon. Talk to you then!