Why I’ve always liked Taylor Swift & don’t think she will marry in front of 1k people
When I saw Taylor Swift’s bountiful engagement photo pop up on my phone, I felt a genuine breeze of pleasure.
This is no usual response – I’m pretty neutral as to the lives of celebrities and having worked with a handful of public figures, am sensible to the fact that they all have very trad hopes and insecurities as well as, like many of us, weirdnesses. But this was different. The event felt like it meant something for my Millennial generation of women, and it looked like hope.
Swift bounced onto my radar in the RED album era – I was living in a bedsit, graduating from a Creative Writing MA, and inviting in a roll-call of preppily pretty, occasionally charismatic and consistently ambivalent/non-committal hipsters into my burgeoning world. In other words, I understood her ‘type’ – it wasn’t dissimilar to my own, and the way she articulated the vulnerabilities of millennial situationships was refreshingly honest and needed. ‘We hadn’t seen each other for a month when you said we needed space, What?’ and ‘It’s supposed to be fun turning twenty-one’ being stand-out lyrics for me.
This honesty came with other bold but aesthetically luxuriant things – a commitment to melody and an unusually smart sense of style. Back in 2012, it seemed that real melodies were only the provenance of monster folk groups like Mumford and Sons, and that all other music had been relegated to electronic beats (I couldn’t be arsed with) and R&B. Suddenly a self-possessed, feminine young woman was singing lyrics that resonated, using her own ‘voice quality’ and it didn’t seem derived from the fantasies of male producers.
The sentiments of Britanny Spears’ ‘Baby One More Time’ video and Taylor jumping up and down in pyjamas in ‘We are Never Ever Getting Back Together’ couldn’t be more antithetical. I was rooting for this smart pyjama girl, and the clothes were a subtle but important part of it. For a long chapter of time, it seemed like women in music videos were, in the main, bringing customized fetishes into the frame – S&M lingerie, booty all over the shop. Thinking back to my female peers at university and during post-grads, the interest in dressing like fetishized sexual commodities outside of (perhaps) private lives with partners was low to non-existent. In ‘brief’ – I couldn’t relate to that; and I wasn’t alone. If someone had suggested to my friends and I that we go to a club in latex bikinis, we would have, deadpan, told them to fuck off.
The classiness of Taylor’s brand fully embraced the revival of fifties skirts and peddle-pushers, bringing old fashioned romance front and centre in songs like ‘Begin Again,’ with just the right amount of irony. Dating Connor Kennedy and existing in crisp white New England mansions by the sea was entirely consistent with this aesthetic, that seemed both personally restrained and professionally expressive at the same time.
When Swift caved under the weight of gossip column headlines in 2016 and disappeared to make ‘Reputation,’ it was a loss. Her narrative that the press ‘hated’ her didn’t feel accurate, so much as she provided reliable content for Editors to prove click-through-rates. I have no idea what her reputation manager was advising, but it seems – something along the lines of ‘your image is fair game.’ The new-sound album itself was so far removed from her established and much loved country-pop crossover, that it smelled faintly of trying hard to please a fickle beast. Although, it was commercially successful.
Remaining lower profile for a few years during COVID and covertly developing a relationship with Joe Alwyn amassed more boundaries and respect between Swift and the media-sphere at large, while producing two records (Folklore and Evermore) that oozed lyricism, storytelling and personal mythos. This era was a class-act of discernment and reconnected old audiences and new with her voice, in a pared-down and undeniable way.
Feeling jaded in 2020, I remember tweeting ‘I just want to live in a lake-house with an adoring Labrador and delicious husband and write’ and as if authored by the magical Zeitgeist itself, The Lakes was released as a bonus track to Folklore later that summer. This is the Taylor that I connect with…one that captured a yearning for something more honest and timeless for a generation of women.
So when (interestingly) major news outlets started live blogs on the progress of Taylor Swift’s wedding this July, I was slightly non-plussed about the idea of the Madison Square Garden arena as a venue, and a rehearsal dinner in what sounds like a corporate conference suite – ‘infosys Theatre.’ (I know someone who works at infosys – they give you a branded flask and pen when you join.) Making one of the most intimate and ancient promises you can make, while mic’d-up in an arena holding 1000 people is not traditionally ‘Swifty.’ Sure – MSG has excellent security opportunities and will act as a nucleus for professional friends that may already be in and around the city, but it doesn’t trump the high romance, mythos and beauty of Swift’s Watch Hill estate in Rhode Island does it? ‘The Last Great American Dynasty’ isn’t born and doesn’t die in a corporate events suite.
Granted, Swift’s star has become louder, more boisterous since partnering with NFL ‘God’ Travis Kelce. There she is, in the stands, wrapping her arms around popcorn, his family and all-American culture. Swift has publicised how her guard has dropped in this relationship, perfectly illustrated by her casual appearance, riding shotgun, in Kelce’s open-top car. And, as if orchestrated by a Rom-Com writer, Swift and Kelce’s love story has been as close to a digital-age Romance as one might get…Kelce gallantly turns up at one of Swift’s shows to offer her a friendship bracelet with his number on it. Thwarted in his efforts to see her, he expresses being ‘butt hurt’ on the Kelce brothers’ podcast, to an audience of Millions. And just like that – Taylor’s Mum steps in to set it up like a true fairy Godmother. Given Swift’s experiences of pretty, ambivalent hipsters, I can fully imagine that Kelce’s publically committal and jock-ish chutzpah stopped her in her tracks.
So, perhaps Madison Square Garden and an audience of 1000 contacts isn’t so far removed from Swift’s romantic and well crafted ‘lore.’ Perhaps the poised class-act of Swift in her Red and Folklore/Evermore eras is now simply letting her hair down and enjoying the sheer scale and reach of her larger-than-life relationship, which started with a ‘public service announcement’ on New Heights and will surely maintain volume as the couple settle into the world of family in Ohio…
But here’s my real inkling – the girl who wrote Invisible String and cleverly spun away affronts from Kanye West and the tabloid media with the help of Tree Paine, isn’t going to make the most solemn promise of her life in a stadium, with a microphone. At least not for the first time!
There’s a surprise footnote to this genuine, albeit twenty-first century ‘Love Story’ and I can’t wait to see how this 4th of July weekend reveals it.
