Séamas O'Reilly: Hating on Taylor Swift is just a case of history repeating
Taylor Swift during the Eras Tour.
It’s strange now to look back and see the baffled disdain with which The Beatles were once received.
“There are some things that just aren’t done,” quipped Sean Connery’s Bond in Goldfinger, when his paramour suggests drinking un-chilled champagne. “That’s as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs.”
That film came out nine weeks after the release of the third Beatles album , and was clearly a prominent enough sentiment that Bond could share it without sounding weird. Now it barely makes sense.
By the time I first watched it as a child, my mental image of a Beatles fan was exactly the type of ‘older man with serious musical tastes’ who thought all the music I liked was execrable nonsense.
I think about that quote a lot in the context of Taylor Swift, who lands in Ireland for three dates of her Eras Tour this weekend.
This tour has made Swift the first artist to make $1bn on a single circuit, (with 40+ shows still to play).
She is the only artist to ever win Album of the Year at the Grammies four times, her latest LP had the most launch day Spotify streams ever recorded.
She remains one of only two living musicians to have had four albums in the Billboard Charts Top Ten simultaneously. (The other, the happily long-lived Herb Alpert, did so in 1966.)
At least 10 universities offer Taylor Swift courses. Last year, both USA Today and ITV’s This Morning received side-eyes when they introduced dedicated Taylor Swift correspondents (although in both cases, this news was accompanied with just enough fanfare that we can presume such a reaction was likely intended). Stunt hires or not, these positions are likely justifiable.
In terms of relevance, interest and sheer frequency of news, it arguably makes more sense than having a Vatican correspondent.
If you google “Taylor Swift’s least famous friend” you will get more than three times as many responses (241 million) than you do for “Pope Francis” (68.7 million) which suggests, well not much to be honest, Google is a mess — but it does at least indicate that she’s inhabiting a sphere of globe-annihilating popularity that’s all her own.
Amid the slightly tepid response to her most recent album, , there came a sense that a backlash was bubbling, but little materialised.
All of which gives us a world of near-relentless positivity about pop’s golden children, and a resulting backlash among those who think their emperors naked.
For some of those who feel left out of this global phenomenon, spite has been the only answer.
Two weeks ago, an Evening Standard writer wrote “I physically flinch when adults tell me they love Swift. I see her as the canary in the coalmine, a talisman of our dystopian times where devices have stolen our imagination and ability for critical thought”.
As zingers go, these are not exactly first rate, and it’s hard not to detect within them the hand of an editor demanding a Taylor Swift mention, because that’s one of about five things guaranteed to get clicks no matter what.
I am an increasingly old man whose tastes hue closer to abstruse electronica and 90s drum and bass. I am well used to there being popular things that are not my cup of tea, and the appeal of Swift’s music seems much less puzzling to me than that of many others.
For one thing, she has time on her side — and in both directions. She is still a young woman, with all the relevance and marketability that allows, but her current globe-topping form comes after nearly two decades of steady accumulation.
From a position of huge popularity within country music, to true global stardom in the 2010s, to whatever this current state of ubiquity could even be called. Omni-celebrity? Giga-fame?
She also mints bangers at an astonishing clip. Her 243 songs comprise a back catalogue larger than that of The Beatles or Pink Floyd, let alone more contemporary peers like Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran or Adele — and migrating from country to pop to indie-scented songs about love, heartbreak and friendship has seen her collect demographics like infinity stones.
In fact, thinking of Taylor Swift as a ‘youth craze’ is a a misnomer. In 2023, Statista surveyed self-described American ‘Swifties’ and found that the largest share of her fans were, like Swift herself, Millennials.
At number two, however, were Baby Boomers, followed by Gen X at number 3. So, yes, the kids do love Taylor Swift, it’s just that their parents and grandparents appear to love her even more.
Seen through this lens, her fame is almost tediously explicable. There are certainly more interesting critiques to be had than accusing her fans of being mind-controlled idiots.
Her intermittent and limited engagement with politics is worth analysing for a figure of her immense influence, as are the absurd ticket prices, or the eye-watering carbon footprint of her private jets.
But there is an unshakeable odour of “get off my lawn” to some of the affected bafflement thrown toward her music and its fans, which fails to address the structural roots of music’s increasing uniformity, and ends up echoing the ways pop has been diminished for generations.
“You know it’s all the same,” as a great songwriter once put it, “another time and place, repeating history and you’re getting sick of it.”
