She’s reached yet another peak, but will we let her stay there?
Yesterday, Taylor Swift was announced as TIME Magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year. It was a monumental honor, but it worried me. Not because I think Swift doesn’t deserve it — at this point in her career, you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that she doesn’t deserve literally any award on the planet.
It worried me because Swift has been here before. We all have, and it hasn’t gone all too well. (I promise that’s the only lyric you’re going to see here.) In fact, this isn’t Swift’s first time receiving the TIME Person of the Year award. She received it in 2017, too, as one of the “silence breakers” who inspired women to speak out about sexual harassment. The circumstances are certainly different, but she’s the only woman to ever receive the honor twice.
It’s not just the TIME award that conjures up déjà vu. None of what has happened for Swift (or because of Swift) this year is novel, regardless of how it’s been presented to us: not the awards, nor the frenzied concert attendance, nor the unified media anointment of Swift having reached the peak of her career. It might be on a larger scale this time, but all of it has technically happened before.
We’re at the highest point on the Taylor Swift Ferris wheel, and the view is spectacular — so spectacular that we seem to have forgotten that we’ve been on this ride for decades. So spectacular that we’ve forgotten what happens after you reach the highest point: you descend. The last time Swift was handled by the media with this level of adoration, she was riding the unprecedented critical and commercial success of the 1989 album. What happened next is, at this point, an old and tired history, but to sum it up simply: her career took a nosedive.
And now she’s at the peak again.
This whole thing is a cycle, is my point — and no one person controls it. I consider it a subconscious form of social cannibalism.
In any given Swift season, this feeding cycle looks like this: We listen to music by Swift, we go to her concerts, we take photographs of her walking down the street with a man, and then we spend a while talking about the music and the concerts and the photos and the man. Next comes critiquing: We generate think pieces and post on social media about the music and the concerts and the photos and the men. At this point (eventually, inevitably), we get mad at Swift for making us think so much about her. We write and talk about that, too. Then she disappears, and that anger has nowhere to go but toward one another, so fans bicker among ourselves for a while, rehashing the same arguments again and again. Eventually, Swift comes back looking and sounding a little bit different than she did before. (Exhibit A: Reputation. Exhibit B: Folklore.) The music and the concert and the photos and the men have a different feel to them. The flavor is new. And suddenly we’re Swifties again. The media, her faithful and fair-weather fans, and even her enemies clamor to consume the new version of her. Then we get hungry again, and the cycle starts all over.
I should clarify that I’m an ardent, worshipful, occasionally manic, card-carrying member of the Swiftie universe. I have a fiction newsletter called The Cover Stories that’s devoted to short stories based on music, and nearly every piece is based on one of her songs. I was at the opening night of the Eras Tour — I spent the entire evening watching her perform with my hands involuntarily clasped in prayer.
My relationship with Swift is officially the oldest one in my life, barring the ones with my immediate family members. And because of that, as well as the fact that I’m of a similar age to Swift, I’ve spent the entirety of my adolescent and formative adulthood years (not to mention my career in media) watching Swift, watching the media watch Swift, and watching Swift watch the media watch Swift, and so on.
Here’s what I think after so much careful observation: While it has been sincerely miraculous, in these last few years, to witness a woman manage not only to crawl out of the jaws of the animal that was eating her alive, but climb onto the animal’s back and gain control of it, it has been equally astonishing to witness how completely unchanged the animal in question has remained throughout this process of subversion.
By which I mean: She has changed immeasurably. We have not.
Consider the fanbase. Despite her repeated requests for privacy and respect, we still crowd outside restaurants when she’s eating. We still make wildly invasive assumptions about her personal life and post them publicly online. We still frequently amass ourselves globally into a single faceless bully, writing horrific things about real, living people in the name of…defending Swift? Empowering her? Empowering ourselves? Being assholes? It’s unclear to me whether there even is a true motive, beyond our constant desire to contribute to the narrative.
As for the media ecosystem, which continues to dissect her every move, articles about her (and about famous women in general) are nowhere near as openly baseless as they were in the early 2000s. The blatant slut-shaming is more minimal; the sprinkling of feminist empowerment lingo throughout each sentence is maximal. But this feels to me like less of an indication of a true shift in culture than another example of the cycle, our latest iteration of zeitgeist mumblespeak. (It’s the same kind of superficial shift that has allowed diet culture to rebrand itself as wellness culture, for example.) These shifts in language and positioning do nothing to actually subvert the systems they claim to critique. And they’re not meant to — they’re designed to find a new way to profit from them. Swift, herself, has been outspoken about the exhausting need to reinvent herself to stay relevant, interesting, and (always, it comes back to this) worthy of consumption.
If you’re a longtime fan of Swift’s, you know what I’m talking about when I bring up her changing role as a commodity, because you know she’s been brilliant from the very start, and it’s easier to see the so-called highs and lows of her career for what they are: ups and downs of marketing profitability. (How many times will we be fed the line that she’s done wonders for the American economy in 2023?) This is why the media industry has anointed her and disposed of her, again and again and again, in the ceaseless search for engagement, otherwise known as clicks.
This brings us back to the beginning (cycles!), with the latest anointment: yet another Person of the Year award.
In the most literal sense, Swift fits the bill for receiving the honor — there’s no denying that she dominates our culture right now. What’s less clear to me is whether she’s ever truly changed it, in any permanent sense — or whether we’ve ever been willing to let her change us.
I’ll learn the answer to this question soon. For now, Swift’s riding the umpteenth wave of momentum in her career, to the umpteenth, ever-higher peak. If I’m correct in my belief that we have not been culturally and politically influenced by her nearly as much as the media leads us to believe, then I know what happens next: We get frustrated and impatient, and we push her off the ride.
It didn’t shock me to see the world put Swift back on top this year, nor does it surprise me that each time she’s allowed to ascend, it’s to a greater height than what she previously reached. What would shock me — what would signify, to me, an actual cultural shift of seismic proportions — would be if we finally allowed her to stay up there.
I want her to stay up there. That’s why I wrote this piece. Or maybe I just wrote it because I’m hungry for more, and I know you are too. So I gave you the kind of headline that would make you want to click.
