Image source: Photo by Lisett Kruusimäe on Pexels
Imagine this. A 48-year-old woman sitting on her couch typing up her daily blog post and listening to “...Ready for It?” from Taylor Swift’s Reputation album. She’s tapping her toe to the chest-thumping bass that opens up the song. Not so surprising, right? Now imagine this, that same middle-aged woman listening to that song on repeat wading through all of the online easter eggs that Taylor Swift may or may not have left for fans indicating when she’s going to announce the release of Taylor’s Version re-recording of said album. Maybe just a teensy bit obsessive.
I admit it, I’m a recent Swiftie convert. Much later into the process than my 14-year-old daughter, of course. She went with her father, who was branded as a Swiftie dad with a homemade shirt, to Taylor’s Eras concert tour when it made it to Gillette stadium. And my mom has also admitted to liking Taylor’s songs, though she’s not nearly as enamored with Taylor as she is with Peter Cetera. Three generations of Swifties in one household. That’s the power that this media mogul has, and it’s no small reason for why she was selected by Time as its person of the year. Some of the runner ups for this year included the Hollywood Strikers, Chinese President Xi Jinping, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the Trump prosecutors, Barbie, and, horror of horrors, Vladimir Putin. World-movers and powerbrokers, and Ms. Taylor Alison Swift beat them all.
Why Taylor? Well, with the kickoff of her monumental Eras tour, she seems to be a mastermind of marketing and she seems to be everywhere. From torrential rain tours in Boston to sweltering heat waves in Brazil to VIP boxes at Kansas City Chiefs football games. In addition to her record-breaking billion-dollar tour, she released her re-recorded version of her album, 1989, breaking records on streaming services that she herself set. Her tour has been so successful (a 5 billion dollar boon to the US economy, according to some sources) that it is literally lifting up economies in the cities that she visits, and officials around the world have been begging for her to bring her tour to their cities.
And she’s a shining and powerful example of modern feminism. Instead of being chewed up and spit out by a good-old-boys music industry that refused to let her own her own song masters and sold it to the last person she wanted to sell in the world, she instead decided to re-record all of her old albums, with her legions of fans vowing only to listen to and buy the TV (Taylor’s Version) of her songs from now on. She counter-sued a slime of a man who sexually assaulted her for 1 dollar and won. Unlike so many high-powered celebrities who will stay silent about political topics, she spoke out in support of a democratic Tennessee candidate who supported women’s rights in the documentary Miss Americana. And when Taylor speaks, her fans listen. When she posted about signing up to vote on Instagram this year, more than 30,000 people registered.
I watched Time officials explain in a TikTok about why they selected her to be their person of the year. In this year of light and dark, a time of immense strife and tragedy, she was a force for joy. Just watch the tens of thousands of fans singing every lyric of her songs at her concerts and pass around friendship bracelets, and you can see why she manages to bring her magic to people across generations. She’s a master storyteller and entertainer. Listen to her music and her lyrics, and you’ll find yourself thinking not of her storied love life but of your own life’s ups and downs. And that is her power; she somehow manages to poetically express emotions and stories that expand so large to encompass the entire world and shrink down to each person’s own individual experience at the same time.
And now, I end this post while listening to “You’re On Your Own, Kid” off of her Midnights album, a song so powerful that Stevie Nicks said that listening to it helped her to get through her grief at losing Christine McVie.
So make the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it
You've got no reason to be afraid
You're on your own, kid
Yeah you can face this
– "You're On Your Own, Kid" from Midnights
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