Right at the beginning of the concert, after she’d only played a few songs, she told me to remember. “I wrote these songs about my life,” she said, “and maybe that’s how you think about them, but after tonight I hope you’ll think about us, and the memories we’ve made in Paris tonight.” And then, right at the end, she returned to the same theme. “We’ve had the most unforgettable time in Paris,” she said. “Thank you for one of the most magical, memorable experiences.” She performs the exact same show four times a week. Each week there’s a different arena in a different country, and all those arenas are exactly the same. I don’t think that night was particularly magical or unforgettable for her. She was giving us our orders. She was trying to give those orders in a way that made it sound like she and I were somehow friends, but it was still a command. Remember me, she was saying. Enthrone me in your memory. This is the most important night of your life, because you got to see me. But just under the surface, I felt something sad in there. Don’t let me vanish, she was saying. Let me live a little longer inside your mind. Don’t let me fade.
Taylor Swift had released a new album, The Tortured Poets Department. That album was supposed to be a kind of victory lap. At the end of 2023, Taylor Swift had been omnipresent and unimpeachable; she was Time’s person of the year, and had also—as far as I can tell—somehow become the first woman to single-handedly win the Super Bowl.
And the album did well. The Tortured Poets Society broke Spotify’s record for the most album streams in a single day: three hundred and eighty million. Still, somehow, that wasn’t enough. Something had broken. The world at large looked at her offering—and shrugged. Everything’s still there, the arenas, the huge crowds, but noontime is passed and the shadows are just starting, almost imperceptibly, to lengthen.
Like June, he believed Taylor Swift should run for president; unlike June, he was incredibly serious about this. “In maybe ten years I would love to see her go into politics,” he said. “I genuinely, genuinely would love that. She’s the only one who can unify America. Look—she’s progressive, she believes in women’s rights, but she’s also white, she even started as a country star. I just came here from California. You don’t know what it’s like over there. The country’s so divided, everyone has so much hatred for each other. I really worry they’ll start killing each other soon. It’s apocalyptic in America. Only Taylor can bring them together.” Alex believed that Taylor Swift was the most significant literary figure of our time. “In fifty years,” he said, “all her lyrics will be taught in literature classes in college.” He’d been a fan of hers for well over a decade, but he’d started really getting into her music after dabbling in the online culture of obsessive Swifties who pore over her lyrics to untangle the complex web of allusions and coded references they believe is hidden inside. “Her words, her genius, everything springs out of there,” he said. “It’s like having the Q text.” He was referring to a hypothesized collection of Jesus’s sayings, now lost, that’s believed to have been the source material for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
There, lit up in the darkness, was the tiny human figure of tiny Taylor Swift. She looked like the spinning ballerina in a music box. It felt insane that so many hundreds of thousands of people should be packed in here to stare in rapture at something so small. I tried crouching down a little, so I could see what the show would be like for someone less gangly than myself. Instantly, the tiny doll disappeared beneath a thicket of heads. None of these people, I realized, were actually looking at Taylor Swift
Paris is the glittering image of everything America is not. America is ugly; Paris is beautiful. America is practical; Paris is sensuous. America is shallow; Paris is sophisticated. In America, what matters is money; in Paris, what matters is style. America had barely even founded its new utopian republic, derived from the austere principles of liberty and reason, before Ben Franklin crossed the Atlantic to settle in feudal, monarchical Paris.
When I stepped outside in the morning, though, I found that every other car on the street was an old Citroën 2CV, puttering around with a tour guide in the front and two grinning Americans in the back. There were Americans in all the cafés, saying things like “Doesn’t Paris have such an indefinable je ne sais quoi?” The worst spectacle was outside Shakespeare and Company, the venerable English-language bookshop on the Left Bank, where there was a line stretching out the door and almost to the river. A line of American women all exactly the same age as me, patiently waiting their turn to browse through the same books they could get at their local Barnes & Noble.
Thanks to a dispute with her former record label, she’s currently re-recording and re-releasing her entire back catalog. You can listen to split-audio comparisons of the original tracks and the new versions on YouTube. They’re exactly the same. Taylor Swift is a Taylor Swift tribute act.
Taylor Swift is supposed to be so popular because her music expresses a universal experience, or at least universal among white Millennial-or-younger women in developed countries. The caricature of Taylor Swift is that all her songs are about exes and breakups, and from what I heard in Paris that caricature is pretty much accurate. She talks a lot about being alone in an apartment, drinking wine on a sofa covered in cat hair. Her music is about bitterness and heartbreak, feeling vengeful, feeling unjustly victimized by the consequences of your own actions, wallowing in your own pettiness and self-delusions and regret. This isn’t a bad thing! There’s this totemic figure hovering around in our culture, the crazy ex-girlfriend, and if art is how we give structure to life maybe it’s good to have someone out there who can give that figure an articulate voice. Unfortunately, Taylor Swift is simply not that voice.
Specifically, I recognized the same lifeless clichéd therapy-speak that’s swirling around everywhere. The woman is a walking Instagram infographic. She says things like “Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism like some kind of congressman,” or “I cut off my nose just to spite my face, then I hate my reflection for years and years,” or “I’m so depressed I act like it’s my birthday every day,” or “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, strategy sets the scene for the tale.” If people are finding any emotional resonance in this stuff, it’s because they’ve already been trained to think about themselves and their inner lives in the same clinical, bloodless register of traumas and disorders.
For the serious fans, her songs are more like crossword puzzles: the point is to untangle them, extract the hidden meanings inside every line, and use all these clues to work out exactly which one of her ex-boyfriends she’s shit-talking here. This is the game Alex had been getting into. Recently, the New Yorker gave over a few column inches to Sinéad O’Sullivan—formerly of Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness—to explain how it works. O’Sullivan picks up on a line from Taylor Swift’s recent song “imgonnagetyouback,” in which she says that she hasn’t yet decided “whether I’m gonna be your wife or gonna smash up your bike.” These sound, she admits, like bad lyrics. “Even the most novice editor should have pushed Swift toward the more obvious rhyme: ‘whether I’m gonna be your wife or gonna smash up your life.’” But in fact, the fans have decided that this is a reference to “Fallingforyou,” a song by the 1975, in which the lead singer, Matty Healy—who is supposed to have dated Taylor Swift for a few weeks in 2023—mentions having a bike. O’Sullivan continues: the lack of spaces in the song’s title is a reference to her earlier hit “Blank Space,” and in the video for that song she smashes up a car. Meanwhile, if you write the song’s title in a circle, the letters k and im are right next to each other, which looks like a jab at Kim Kardashian, another of Taylor Swift’s enemies. An endlessly looping circle is an ouroboros, the ouroboros is a snake; Kim Kardashian once disparagingly called Taylor a snake. See how the pieces fit together? It’s impossible, O’Sullivan concludes, to judge Taylor Swift’s work according to the standards of ordinary art; what she’s doing is so much more. Everything that seems clunky or cliché is actually part of a “fan universe, filled with complex, in-sequence narratives that have been contextualized through multiple perspectives.”
When she insisted in one song that “you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me,” a lot of people were no longer willing to indulge the fantasy that this person—the world’s default pop singer, the audio equivalent of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, or sliced white bread—was actually some kind of Batman villain. You were not raised in an asylum! Your father is a Merrill Lynch asset manager, and when you got your first record deal he bought a three-percent stake in the label.
The Great Replacement is real, but it’s not Arabs or Africans. It’s Americans coming to Paris to see Taylor Swift.
Americans visit a different Paris. They built this city as a dream and a negative of their own society
she performed forty-six songs with all their accompanying dances, running up and down the stage maybe two hundred times, and going through sixteen nearly seamless costume changes. By the end, her face was as flawless and unflustered as it had been at the beginning. There were, admittedly, a few strands of hair sweatily plastered to her forehead. But that was it. The really amazing thing, though, was how minutely choreographed every second of the performance was. Every line in every song had some particular motion associated with it: sticking up one hand, or twirling her hair, or throwing back her head so we could see the lizard-like gulp down her very slightly shiny neck. Later, I checked the routines I’d seen against the 2023 concert film of the Eras Tour. They were exactly the same: every glance, every twitch. Maybe if you filmed her whole performance again you could line up the periods between each time she blinks
Niche Internet