She became the main character of the world.
Today, after reading writer Sam Lansky’s TIME profile of Taylor Swift for the 2023 Person of the Year, I DM’d him saying, “Your piece was beautiful and historic. Too many smart lines to pull one. Using this platform to highlight not only Taylor, but as you said, history unfolding before our eyes, is something women will be grateful for, for years to come!!!” And I consider myself something of an expert: I’ve been a Swiftie for more than a decade.
We’ve all watched as Swift has shattered record after record. (To name just a few: the Eras tour is the highest-grossing tour of all time, her Glendale shows generated more revenue for the city than the 2022 Super Bowl, the Eras movie gave AMC its highest single-day sales, she has more No. 1 records than any other woman, and she’s the first person to become a billionaire from her tour and music sales alone.) But as I wrote over the summer, I still find myself having to justify the Swift craze or try to “prove” she’s worth the attention.
But Lansky made my point in one paragraph:
“If you’re skeptical, consider it: How many conversations did you have about Taylor Swift this year? How many times did you see a photo of her while scrolling on your phone? Were you one of the people who made a pilgrimage to a city where she played? Did you buy a ticket to her concert film? Did you double-tap an Instagram post, or laugh at a tweet, or click on a headline about her? Did you find yourself humming ‘Cruel Summer’ while waiting in line at the grocery store? Did a friend confess that they watched clips of the Eras Tour night after night on TikTok? Or did you?”
Needless to say, Swift’s TIME honor is well-deserved. Lansky’s piece contained so many compelling insights, some of which come from the singer herself, via an in-depth interview. Here are my favorites — I hope you’re as moved by them as I was. (And just in case you haven’t seen it yourself, you can check out the full interview and the striking photographer on a handful of covers right here.)
ON HER WIDESPREAD INFLUENCE
- Sam Lansky: “To discuss her movements felt like discussing politics or the weather — a language spoken so widely it needed no context. She became the main character of the world.”
- Sam Lansky: “She’s the last monoculture left in our stratified world.”
- Sam Lansky: “It’s hard to see history when you’re in the middle of it, harder still to distinguish Swift’s impact on the culture from her celebrity, which emits so much light it can be blinding. But something unusual is happening with Swift, without a contemporary precedent. She deploys the most efficient medium of the day — the pop song — to tell her story. Yet over time, she has harnessed the power of the media, both traditional and new, to create something wholly unique — a narrative world, in which her music is just one piece in an interactive, shape-shifting story. Swift is that story’s architect and hero, protagonist and narrator.”
ON THE IMPACT OF THE ERAS TOUR:
- Swift’s friend and collaborator Phoebe Bridgers: “Standing in the arena, it’s not hard to understand why this is the biggest thing in the world. Beatlemania and Thriller have nothing on these shows.” – Swift’s friend and collaborator Phoebe Bridgers.”
- Ed Tiryakian, a finance professor at Duke University: “When the Federal Reserve mentions you as the reason economic growth is up, that’s a big deal.”
ON KANYE’S LIES:
- Taylor Swift: “You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar. That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
ON RESILIENCE:
- Taylor Swift: “It’s all in how you deal with loss. I respond to extreme pain with defiance.”
ON HER CURRENT STARDOM:
- Taylor Swift: “Nothing is permanent. So I’m very careful to be grateful every second that I get to be doing this at this level, because I’ve had it taken away from me before. There is one thing I’ve learned: My response to anything that happens, good or bad, is to keep making things. Keep making art. But I’ve also learned there’s no point in actively trying to quote unquote ‘defeat your enemies.’ Trash takes itself out every single time.’”
ON DATING TRAVIS KELCE AND GOING TO CHIEFS GAMES:
- Taylor Swift: “There’s a camera, like, a half-mile away, and you don’t know where it is, and you have no idea when the camera is putting you in the broadcast, so I don’t know if I’m being shown 17 times or once…. I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads.”
ON PITTING WOMEN AGAINST EACH OTHER:
- Taylor Swift: “There were so many stadium tours this summer, but the only ones that were compared were me and Beyoncé. Clearly it’s very lucrative for the media and stan culture to pit two women against each other, even when those two artists in question refuse to participate in that discussion.”
ON REPUTATION (TAYLOR’S VERSION):
- Taylor Swift: “It’s a goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure. think a lot of people see it and they’re just like, ‘Sick snakes and strobe lights.'” (And she added that the upcoming vault tracks for Reputation will be “fire.”)
ON SWIFT’S LEGACY:
- Sam Lansky: “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.”
