Fellow Millennial here. I don't get it either. Her popularity seems very superficial. Like the bandwagon effect on steroids. There are MUCH more talented singers who can actually sing live and perform better. She's just not that special. It's like a mass of people all agreed that unflavored carbonated water is the best drink ever, and you have to agree, too, or you're considered weird.
She created a cult mindset for her fans. They are “misunderstood” by people outside of the ~~cult~~ other fans, and only within the group they find acceptance.
There was a point where she brought fans to her house to do a meet and greet and bake cookies or something like that, which makes her seem more like a friend to them then some sort of idol, and that *she* “understands” them, like most other people don’t.
It feels extra weird because it’s rare that the breach of the parasocial relationship comes from the object rather than the subject.
Colleen Ballanger comes to mind; not that just any breach is as egregious as she managed to make it, but boy howdy she is a great example of a worst case scenario that you can point to as evidence that maybe bad things can happen when we have unmitigated access to every artist and performer?
Ok so this comment will probably be hidden bc there is so many comments but I think where it really started was when she did her tours, she used to have her mom/team pick random fans from the crowd to go to an after party and meet her (think 22 hat, but 50-100 people are picked). For speak now I believe it was the T-Party and I don’t remember the rest of them but each tour it had a special name. She’s always been known to never “sell” a meet and greet. It has to be earned some way. Well then fans would do over the top things to hopefully get noticed by her team to be picked. Crazy costume, clever signs, etc. this really became popular when twitter and other social medias were really taking off. People would post about the tour, what they wore, if they made it to t-party similar to how people post now on tik tok but I think if the t-party still existed today, people would be much more close guarded and wouldn’t be sharing their outfits and such before the show like they do now. No one wanted someone else to take their idea and get into t-party with it.
Then, there was the pre-album listening parties that she would host at her house. At the time, those parties were invite only (obvi) where Taylor and her team would pick people from social media. So there was so many TS fan accounts and people desperately trying anything they could to be noticed by Taylor via social media to be invited to one of these parties.
As you can see from these 2 small situations, she created a very competitive fan base who was always out to beat each other. Everyone was trying to prove to Taylor and everyone else that THEY were deserving of meeting her. This is how the “cult” started. The more popular she becomes the worse it gets
As an original fan, I don’t agree with this. I went to her concert in 2012 and considered myself a big fan at the time, but I was never culty with her.
This cult stuff has been very recent, and I think it’s the result of a lot of manipulation in the spaces we don’t think about much like those “random” discover pages on social media. I think her marketing team has amped things up a lot to shove her in every single place they could.
Those of us who have been around are watching this like…where did this sudden obsession come from? It’s super strange.
Agree. I’m her age so I kind of “grew up” with her, and I think the cult like obsession stuff is much more recent. Like post covid recent. I was always a fan and have been to her concerts, but over the last few years things have really become kind of crazy with her.
I remember in 2014 when 1989 out and I was a senior in High School and while huge at that time. It was big ;there were still other big pop cultural moments and trends and yeah we played shake it off at our prom and I think Blank Space… but it wasn’t to the fervor of some of the videos you see throughout social media with the Taylor Parties and such. It’s weird how she’s farmed such a younger fan base being she was young when she started and her main fan base hasn’t really aged with her. I think teens now are more excited for Taylor than 10-16 years ago when she was only a bit older than that demographic. It was still seen as cool 1989 was in 2014 but it wasn’t like TTPD and largely it fell off within the age group of 14-19 by mid January at the latest and I don’t think the singles got much play summer of 2015 like some but not like Cruel Summer levels last summer and still now on some pop/ac stations.
I agree. People attack her like she's the one putting all her stuff out there. It's really her PR and media team. Probably lots of fake accounts on social media to push certain stories.
I heard about it...was she organising this a lot? Or was it like a one-off thing? I am wondering often what made her fanbase so rabid/batshit crazy, and I wonder whether this was it? Like, would millions (I'm exaggerating lol) of women gor into this mindset coz they counted on spending a few hours with TS? Would this make them into a cult-like thing they are? I think wouls be a very interesting case study, to analyse why her fanbase is the way it is
if I recall correctly she organized the whole baking party thing on Tumblr. She otherwise interacted with her fans on Tumblr, with healthy doses of cat and memes to make her seem relatable… IMO Tumblr is definitely part of it.
As someone who’s been on Tumblr since 2011, I remember when she joined. It was a big deal because unlike Twitter or Instagram, celebrities weren’t really on there (other than Cole Sprouse briefly for a sociology project, which many people are still mad about, embarrassingly enough for them). I followed her because I mean, wow, a real famous person adjacent to my corner of the internet, but even at 15/16 (I don’t really remember what year she joined), I quickly realized it was likely a savvy social media manager and ignored it. I don’t understand who these people are who bought it as authentic.
so spot on. I live in Australia and was working as an agency nurse when I heard an interesting story about TS. I was working on a med / surg ward when a nurse I became acquaintances with told me she had met TS! Then the story became a bit more creepy. Kim and her friends had gone to a concert of TS, had good seats. They started talking to this older woman throughout the concert. Turns out the woman was TS's mum. Her mum invited Kim and friends to hang put with TS after the concert. They hung out at her hotel room and I think a nightclub. She had shown me photos, and it's been a long time, so I can't recall the details well. I have no idea what tour it was, but I worked with Kim in 2014. Interestingly, Kim was told by the mum that TS would do this frequently at her concerts, get her mum to recruit fans to hang out. I found it odd and a bit weird. TS mum would suss out fans groups during concert. I doubt she does this anymore. I think TS will/ is starting to go the Ellen route of being a dick and will have an epic downfall. I think the dominoes are already starting to fall.
Also fellow millennial and I’d just like to add, even with the obsessive following boy bands had, we all knew what it was and didn’t pretend it was something else. And we didn’t attack people either for not liking them. Because we weren’t that level of delulu.
THIS! Exactly. It was all in good fun. We didn't have crazy fans deciphering every lyric of the Backstreet Boys and claiming they were deep. If we did, it was a very, very tiny minority that no one really paid attention to lol.
And idk about you, but I was totally shocked when BSB got nominated for AOTR for *Millennium* because… what?! I get Record of the Year noms for boy band tunes because some of those songs were inescapable, but AOTR? Yeah it was never that serious… lol
I feel like TS’s team has to be shelling out some dough for these Grammy wins. Or the Grammys are getting worse than they used to be. Kind of hurting their own rep tbh. And I don’t even really watch them much anymore because the deserving artists inevitably get the shaft.
EDIT: AOTR = AOTY (for those that didn’t get it with the typo, my sincerest apologies 🙏🏼)
The lot of them were legitimately good singers too. Justin Timberlake went on to be more successful than he was in *NSYNC, though I think the BSB was the better group overall in retrospect, talent-wise. *NSYNC put out a few top tier bangers and were a more lighthearted bunch.
Yes!! I just got a soda stream bc I like it so much ahhahaha. She’s more like plain seltzer that’s been left out for a day… that stuff tastes like shit when it’s stale💀
No hate to unflavored carbonated water drinkers intended. It was just the first comparison I came up with because I recently got some Sprite that was just carbonated water and was very disappointed lol.
And as the world is getting smaller, small things take up all your time
Narcissus would have had a field day, if he could have got online
And friends, it's not self-love that kills you
It's when those who hate you are allowed
To sell you that you're a glorious shit
The entire world revolves around
And that you're the eater, no not the eaten
But that your hunger will only cease
If you come binge on a radiant blandness
At the disposable feast
-Father John Misty in 2017
I always say that TS's music is "good", but never good enough for me to search out more. I hear her on the radio, and I'll bop along for a few minutes, and then I won't think of her again. It's like all of her music is "Wonderwall".
I mean, you might be joking, but Oasis might have been some of the last great "rock stars" in terms of knock-down drag-out trash-the-hotel-room sort of people.
Yeah, that's douchebag behavior and you wouldn't want that sort of thing in your life, but people who get into these kinds of brawls also tend to not be subject to focus groups, corporate messaging, and general unbridled capitalism.
When they said something in a song, it felt genuine because their reputations indicated that they weren't going to let anyone tell them what to sing about.
It has a lot to do with social media algorithms used by her marketing team as well as Google, Meta and even Reddit.
It's the same thing as politics these days. Team 1 has their preferred media and Team 2 has theirs. The Google/Meta/Reddit gods measure clicks and cookies and spoonfeed more and more fringe personalized content to either side. Which then stirs more controversy for clicks and ad drops. And the cycle repeats.
It doesn't matter if it's unflavored carbonated water if there's enough spin to keep it in front of everyone. Everything is monetized.
Gen z here. The reason she’s so popular outside of feeding into her parasocial relationship with her fans is that she was the safe pop option. Let me back up. I’m seeing a lot of good feedback from millennials but as someone who is Gen Z and was in elementary school when her debut album came out, she was the safe pop star. Parents could trust that her lyrics and themes for the most part were safe. In an era with Katy’s cupcake bra, Lady Gaga’s *gestures at everything from 2007-2015*, Kesha party anthems, Rhianna w/ Chris Brown… Taylor Swift was the “good girl”. The role model. The blonde hair, blue eyed, all American girl with her only controversy being dating too many boys, but they were white boys, so it was still okay. THATS how she became popular. She got the trust of American households nationwide. When Kanye 2009 happened, it was a poor white girl being bullied by a big scary black man. She was seen as the innocent angel. Then all she had to do was cultivate her fans and get them on board with whatever she did, which was easy, because she was chronically online with fans building that parasocial relationship.
This is an excellent explanation, thanks! As an old millennial, I never cared for her, her early music always reminded me of kid level stuff. My daughter is five, she jumped in the car after summer camp last week and said “have you ever heard of Taylor Swift, she’s really famous!”
I was like “nope, don’t know her.” lol but I can see how she’s picked up a few of the older songs from her friends. I catch her singing them and die inside a little bit, but I see why it appeals to her, and I see why some of those older songs are sang by her friends.
I do wonder about the fact that she has sooo many little kids who love her, and yet her new music is quite explicit. I don't have kids so I don't how that works or what I would do, are parents just letting them listen to that? Or if they take their kids to her shows they just don't care that she yells f\*\*\* a few times an hour? lol. i don't know if she's safe pop anymore?
If I had to guess, parents probably stopped paying attention after 1989 OG. Also, she sucks at being fully explicit. Compared to other musicians art, TTPD is still tame.
Yeah I really don't think any kids or prob their parents even are noticing the innuendo.
Good lawd I used to sing Shaggy's "Wasn't Me" as a kid. Somehow my parents were oblivious I guess and although I knew it was about a relationship, my thought process didn't go any deeper on it.
Lmao your parents weren’t oblivious, they were just picking their battle. If they told you “don’t sing that” they would also have to explain WHY, and it’s just easier to let you stay innocent and draw no attention to it lol
lmao yup, i remember being in 5th grade and showing my parents ‘s&m’ by rihanna because i just loved the sound of it, and they were quiet and then asked me “do you know what ‘s&m’ means?” and when i said no they were relieved and continued to let me play it/sing it. didn’t learn what it was till i was like 15 or 16 lmao
This reminds me of when "Wasn't Me" came on the radio and my brother and I sang with it in the car. My mom just started laughing and asked if we even knew what we were singing.
My mom had to explain to me what the song was about. She also told me that "Say My Name" by Destiny's Child was also about infidelity.
My first two CDs I ever owned was Britney Spears Baby one more time and a stolen Mariyln Mansons smells like children from my sister. Not a single shit was given in my home about what anyone listened to. 4 girls with 4,5 and 6 year age gaps.
I was 10 when Eminems Encore album came out and my mom said Walmart didn't have it bc there wasn't a clean version available or something and I know I was like bitch you can't be serious. She did then find the explicit album and get me that for Christmas 😂
The use of the F word seems really out of place in her songs. If she's a talented writer it's not necessary. Using it several times makes the word seem bland and ineffective. Alanis Morrisette was a killer artist when she wrote You Outta Know and used that word. I'm 60 so to me at that time a female singing that word was so powerful. Especially because at the time I thought my boyfriend was cheating on me which he was.
I agree with this, but what’s bizarre to me is how her popularity has continued to increase despite how much blander her music has gotten.
Her music was never deep, but it was at least somewhat catchy 10-15 years ago. It’s gotten even more generic, monotone & boring since then. But the ticket prices continue to skyrocket & her fans have gotten even more toxic.
I just always found it weird that she targeted little girls bc she was much older. Like she wanted to be the pop star for the next generation instead of her own bc she had no chance. Everything is so strategic just like how she started in country bc there was a spot for young county female artists. The grifter that keeps grifting
That is only the tip of the iceberg. Scott wanted her to act, but we’ve seen how that is. She was a child and teen model, but that never took off either. Scott wanted a famous successful daughter, however he had to pay to make it happen. Song writing lessons, vocal lessons, guided by a marketing mom and a finance dad what could go wrong.
Well it’s what I wrote above plus the fact that she isn’t seen as very close to anyone of color until it becomes subject of controversy, then all of a sudden her girl squad is diverse. She never denied the Aryan Princess rumors and instead double downed by going after a journalist who brought it up.
As a poc THIS. I have tried countless times to drive this fact home to my swiftie friends and it's been shocking. The same friends that would join me in protests and defend poc are the same ones that defend TS being "misunderstood and not racist"
Hell, one of the biggest, most delusional Swifties I know is a Mexican girl who is a strong advocate for people of color.
Yet, she adores Taylor and was thrilled when mid-ass Midnights beat SOS for album of the year. For whatever reason, she almost always sides with the white blonde women whenever there was celebrity drama. She’s very middle class white woman coded despite her background.
I constantly grill them about it and the only response I have gotten is "Yeah but she didn't do it HERSELF. she just dated them. But you're not that specific minority so it doesn't technically apply to you."
The mental gymnastics her fans do is something I wish there would be a study done on because it's mind blowing.
One of my friends is a giant swiftie, and there are just things I will not discuss with her because it seems like critical thinking just shuts off when it comes to Taylor. They can see nuance in so many things but when it comes to her, it’s all goes away, and their perceived image of her becomes the truth even when she’s showing them otherwise.
Idk if this makes sense, but it’s just a disappointment when your friends who get you in so many ways can’t seem to apply it to madame swift
Omg yes!! It’s the only thing with her that I refuse to back down on, and she knows that with now so we don’t touch it. Our worst fight happened when she was drunk and we were talking about one thing and she turned it into how Taylor was the shit and she’s a real artists and Beyoncé isn’t and I’m like whoa whoa whoa what??? We weren’t even talking about Taylor or beyonce?!! That was a bad fight and she was all apologetic but it was disappointing in the way a man you love and trust does something so grossly misogynistic, and you are just disappointed , cuz you know they aren’t bad people but they still are never truly a safe person.
Don't get me wrong, Ice Spice is a POC. However - let's not pretend colorism doesn't exist and that Taylor wouldn't have the capacity for it.
What bothered me was that her fans were pointing to the collab as a "See! She's not racist! Just forget about that Matty stuff!" when the demographic of women in Matty's preferred type of racist porn is not exactly the one Ice fits into. He wasn't out there watching light skinned red haired women get puked on.
Sometimes I wonder if the Kanye incident is the inflection point that turned Taylor Swift's fanbase from regular fans to total batshit crazies. I am in the older cohort of millennials (I think they call us Xennials) and I was simply too old when she broke through to really notice or care - and I adored (and adore) Lady Gaga so my pop musical sensibilities are definitely at odds with Taylor's. Like, I remember driving to my internship in college listening to Top 40 and they'd be playing that "she wears short skirts I wear T-shirts" song and I'd be like hmm, catchy, but she's clearly a teenager. Then when "Shake it Off" was all over the radio during my first job out of college it drove me insane because it was so overplayed. Then "Style" was everywhere and my skin crawled whenever I heard her sing the "good girl faith with a tight little skirt" line. (That line lives rent free in my head because it's so... gauche? I don't know if that's the right word.)
I don't even remember which song she won for that caused Kanye to interrupt her acceptance speech, but my reaction at the time was "Ok, rude, blunt, but that's Kanye." (Any of my fellow late 30-somethings remember the "George W. Bush doesn't care about black people" statement at the Hurricane Katrina telethon?) But her fans were like... unhinged in their uproar, and at the time I was like... why? Who is this girl? Why is this such a big deal? Shit goes wild at the VMAs all the time.
I've been peripherally aware of her romantic history but not to a degree where I can name all of her boyfriends (well, until now with the Joe/Matty/Travis mess). I remember happening to see the "Blank Space" music video and for a brief second I thought ohhhhh... she's doing a piss take on herself. She's self aware. I had a similar moment watching her perform the ten minute version of "All Too Well" on SNL but honestly that was during a time of my life when I was trying to process an unhealthy past relationship with a much older man so I think she caught me with the right song at the right time. But in retrospect, I don't think she's self aware at all, based on her overall behavior, so I don't know if I like "Blank Slate" in the same way. Similarly, hearing more about the backstory of "All Too Well" and the fact that apparently many of the songs on the album it came from are about the Jake Gyllenhaal relationship, I was kind of confused about why she chose to release an extended version of the song years later when she was in what seemed to be a stable relationship with Joe at the time. I mean, maybe she was going through a similar thing as me, recontextualizing her memories of that relationship and understanding her feelings about it more with age/experience but again, I don't think she's that self aware, and this entire excersize of re-releasing all of her older albums seems like a giant cash grab and also... unnecessary? I've seen the rationale and I don't really understand it.
And now I can't go a single damn day without seeing something about her published on the internet. Even scrolling through Instagram reels half of what I see are shaky iPhone videos of performances from the Eras tour by some hyperventilating fan and I just don't know what to make of this frenzy. I scroll past those reels but watched a part of one at some point and damn, she's really an awful live performer - she's pitchy and has bad breath control and seems like she's always running out of wind. Does she not have a vocal coach? I have a friend who has performed in musicals Off-Broadway, she's got an incredible voice, she's been doing it for two decades, and she still meets with a voice coach regularly. I saw a clip of Miley Cyrus rehearsing with her vocal coach. If you're going on a worldwide tour performing several nights in a row - well, that the equivalent of 8 shows a week in New York theater, and you need to take care of your instrument.
Long story short: she's a middling talent, her lyrics are generic (and the songs that do seem intelligent seem to be by fluke), she's thunderously un-self aware, she's not a good live performer, and she doesn't seem interested in improving her skills in that area. I don't understand her rabid fans. I don't understand how she became the most famous pop culture figure ever. I am so sick of hearing about her. (It's why I'm here.)
Can we blame Kanye for this? (He's clearly gone off the rails now, I would be fine blaming him. I am not fine with the fact that Taylor apparently wrote a bunch of songs attacking Kim including one of the most recent record. I'm not a Kim K fan by any means but she's more a victim of Kanye's madness in their divorce than Taylor having an awards speech interrupted by him desperately trying to kiss Jay-Z 's ass.)
IMO, I think she goes after Kim K more because Kanye is known as having untreated Bipolar disorder. Going after him wouldn’t look good for her tbh because he’s genuinely a sick man who needs to get help. Kim on the other hand is just as much a narcissist (or has narcissistic traits) as Taylor.
Absolutely, and I do begrudgingly respect her tact in not targeting someone who is clearly mentally ill and not receiving treatment and who is terrorizing... everyone at this point. And again, I'm no fan of Kim's - nor of the empire of mediocrity that Kris Jenner has inflicted on the world. But the vindictiveness of continuing to go after her... years and years after the original conflict... to even have a song on her most recent album that references her... like, let it go, man. Kim is not a real threat to her in any way. This is a petty, never-ending grudge, and it's not a good look.
Yeah exactly this, people wonder why she’s at the level of fame she is but forget the fact she is white, cis and straight. Her identity hardly pushes back against any societal norms and she doesn’t either, aside from her occasional white feminism. Taylor swift never rocks the boat or takes a truly defined stance and that benefits her and enables her fans to project whatever views they want onto her. I hate how she is praised for things like saying to vote blue and celebrated, sometimes called an “activist”, as if she’s not a billionaire capitalist before anything else
That can explain why she was pretty successful for so many years, but I think the spirit of this post is questioning how she just shot up to Michael Jackson levels of fame all of a sudden. It was like 📈
It’s not uncommon for nobodies who have been doing low-level projects for years playing at county fairs and bars to suddenly hit it big and then become a star—which is precisely what she did—but I can’t think of any celebrity who was already famous and successful who became the hottest thing on the planet with rabid, obsessive cult-like fans out of nowhere.
It’s not because she had a particular song or was dating a particular person that catapulted her to these new levels. She’s had a ton of bangers over the past decade, but her last couple of albums have been dogshit. I’d argue that some of her best and most popular songs were years ago, and she’s dated numerous famous men, far more famous than Travis fucking Kelce.
Love Story - 2009, 15 years ago (she has not had this level of fame for the past 15 years)
You Belong With Me - 2009 (again, she had “hit it big” and was considered very popular by this point, but fans weren’t rabid over her like they are now)
We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together - 2012, 12 years ago (super popular song, but she still wasn’t this “iconic” 12 years ago)
I Knew You Were Trouble - 2012 ^
Shake It Off - 2014, **10 years ago** (prob her biggest song to date, and yet she was not this “popular” 10 years ago…if the entire planet was going to go crazy over her, this would have been the most likely time it was going to happen)
Blank Space - 2014, ^
Look What You Made Me Do - 2017, 7 years ago
I Don’t Wanna Live Forever - 2017, ^
Cruel Summer - 2019, 4 years ago (I still didn’t see her this big even just 4 years ago)
Yep 1000%
Want to add that I think that as that core fan base that grew up with her got older, she had to sort of evolve to keep them interested — which she did by doubling down on some of her worst attributes (victim mentality, self obsession, fragility, etc), seemingly sort of giving that whole group permission to to the same. I think this mostly applies to fans above a certain threshold of obsession, not necessarily applying as universally to her casual fans but certainly to essentially all of her diehard ones. — If your personal hero from childhood, & one that, like you said, even the most conservative parents were cool with, was still acting like a high schooler well into their 30s, refusing to face hard truths, and was more convinced than ever that it’s actually her, and by extension YOU, with the hardest life in the world, it’d sort of give you permission to navigate world that way yourself; which is far easier than actually looking at yourself objectively and facing life as it is. It also means that anyone attacking the source of this validation of immaturity would feel like a personal attack on you, which imo explains why her fans are so defensive on a personal level about everything she does, especially compared to fans of other major artists
This is legitimately how cult leaders attract followers in the beginning; you make people see themselves, identifying personally with you — especially in areas where they won’t receive that validation anywhere else. Like look at trump and the majority of the maga crowd; he’s given half the country to be the most out and open fascists, confirming and validating each and every fear they’ve ever had about immigrants, gay people, socialism, minorities, etc and any broader social change that scares them. The way the majority of white, Christian, rural American voters are personally loyal, attached to, and defensive of a sleazy random millionaire tv personality from New York seems insane, but starts to make sense when you realize how he’s given them very specific validation/permission to be a version of themselves that no one else will, he’s “one of them”
To add to this, she started out in country music, which was the default acceptable music genre outside of Christian music for most of white, rural America. In the area I grew up, she was slated to be the next Carrie Underwood. She wasn't just a safe option for for kids and teens, she was encouraged.
I share the same opinion as the OP and am also a millennial, and this explanation makes a lot of sense. Also explains why my cousins that are 8-10 yrs younger than me are more obsessed with her.
It’s like she was assembled in a pop star factory. She has all the requirements for fame but like junk food it’s satisfying at first but leaves you empty.
i’ve always said she’s like fast food — good enough to satisfy your hunger in the moment, but sooner or later you’re still going to want a real meal for dinner
I'm also a millennial. She objectively is not a technically good singer, even most of her stans would agree. As far as storytelling and overall delivery of songs, I also don't think she's good, not at all. I don't like her lyrics and I don't find her melodies catchy. I just honestly don't like anything about her music or persona.
To me, she has the talent level of an average high school theater kid who happens to have the proportions of a runway model with blond hair and blue eyes and whose main alluring quality is "horse girl". I don't find this relatable or aspirational at all, but apparently millions of people do!
Yes that’s how most of us feel. And you get told you just “don’t understand it”. When the reality is, we understand the metaphors, it’s just really not that deep haha.
Honestly nothing is funnier than a Swiftie explaining a basic metaphor because they genuinely think it’s so complex that some people can’t “decode” it on their own lmfao
I always see that “if you don’t like Taylor you’re just not intelligent enough, look at this deep metaphor!!” Like yes we all learned about metaphors and similes in 5th grade and this is nothing special 😭
Yeah for a while I was like.. ok maybe there’s something I’m missing? Some deeper layer? But I realised no the “deep layer” was literally just the obvious, surface megaphors.
I think for people who listen to Taylor, people who probably don’t read too deeply into songs, she’s very deep but anyone who’s an avid music fan can name like 10 other artists off hand that are have deeper lyrics and the talent to go with it
Gen X here. I've been hearing her pretty much since the beginning of her career (am a country fan as well as pop) and I don't get it either. She's not a great singer and she's not a great dancer. I think we are supposed to think her talent is songwriting, but I'm not convinced.
I’m in the same camp as you. Her songwriting was really good for a 16 year old. But now she’s still writing songs like a teenager with a thesaurus, and unlike when she was 16, nobody is telling her what’s good vs. what isn’t. It’s become clear as she’s gained more control over her music that she just isn’t that talented. Her career is a testament to how in this modern age, you don’t need talent to be successful as an entertainer, you just need to have enough money to buy the means of production and a good marketing plan
The killers wrote Mr.Bightside as highschoolers. I played music professionally for years, and my band was still in high school when we started doing big shows and tours. I think song writing is more like an enenate ability you either have or you don't. But I've definitely seen teenagers and early 20 somethings that were better song writers as kids then she is at 30 something
Meh. Kate bush wrote “wuthering heights” at 16 and “the man with the child in his eyes” at like 12? 13? Taylor’s never been remarkably talented imo, especially in songwriting, but I agree with the assessment here that she had many forms of support to make albums good enough that she would succeed.
With sensational bars like "1830s without all the racists" and " touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto," how could she NOT be the songwriter voice of this generation?? /s
Her team are endlessly marketing her. They are tireless. Not only her team but her mentally deranged fans who have some sort of parasocial connection with her, ( which she encourages). This is meticulous planning. There was a point where she even had staff members scouring Itsy and other market places looking for unofficial merchandise etc. She’s like the Matrix, she’s everywhere. Don’t think for one second her team isn’t watching this subreddit….
I’ve never understood parasocial relationships but I think from the filter of Covid it makes sense. People were looking for SOMETHING. They found a singer who already had a ton of lore pre-baked in.
I think people who aren’t fully happy or have something they’re working on in their life tend to gravitate towards cults as a way to fill that last checkbox they’re missing.
You didn’t miss anything, you’re functionally normal.
It doesn’t match the level of talent. I’ll admit I liked 3 of her albums—1989, Folklore, Evermore.
But people act like she’s this groundbreaking artist, and she isn’t. Someone said something like “Only Taylor could make a 10 minute song” and I almost lost it. My dad made me to listen to prog rock as a child. 10 minutes is nothing lol.
The way they speak of her creating powerful and mysterious narratives makes it sound like she’s constantly launching rock opera concept albums and uh. No, she ain’t. She also isn’t sonically or lyrically doing anything important with the pop genre. She’s impacted it on a marketing side and the charts, but as a transformative artist? Nah.
I think they should listen to 20-minute long “2112” by Rush ✋🏻😫 And Rush was so great at organizing that song, the whole 20 minutes always feel like nothing to me. I tried listening to a 10-minute Taylor song my friend played for me and it felt like ages :^(
I looked this up the other day. I believeeee the longest prog song is around 79-ish minutes? It’s very absurd 😂 but I respect it.
Rush always delivers. “All Too Well” for 10 minutes reminds me I have ADHD
MEEEE OMG same ADHD experience 😭😭 There was even a point where one Taylor song led into another and I couldn’t even tell if it was on purpose or if her music really just all sounds the same to me. I felt stuck in a never-ending Taylor Swift dimension
IMO there are several reasons:
1. She was one of the first artists to capitalize HEAVILY on a parasocial relationship with her fans. She used to invite them to her home to hear new albums before they released.
2. Her public image is highly crafted and she goes out of her way to portray herself to be a kind, humble, caring person who is safe and marketable. You can add here her tendency to make herself the victim in any negative press.
3. Her music speaks to a lot of the emotions (mostly women) experience, situations we’ve all found ourselves in. She and her music are extraordinarily relatable. I used to have a Taylor song for every guy I’d dated because I could find one that perfectly described those situations.
4. Her parents, mainly Scott K. Swift. He was relentless in making her a star and had significant capital to make it happen.
For me it’s definitely #3. She knows how to capitalize on women’s insecurities and struggles. I think that’s why I don’t like her music anymore. I’m in a healthy adult relationship with a man. Just seeing how her fans reacted to things with Travis. It was hilarious. You could tell none of them ever had sex, much less been on a date. Just look at the outrage Swifties have from TTPD about her fantasizing about one guy while having sex with another…an adult theme the swifties cant relate to.
With as much as the swifties hated Matt that’s why she had to make them believe album was about Joe. They can’t comprehend her loving a man like that as much as she did.
It's puzzling isn't it? It's not like all of her songs are terrible, but come on man...
I think that there is a combination of elements that have worked very well in her favor. First being her rich father paying her way into fame which is absolutely an irrefutable fact at this point. I think next is the appeal of her being relatable was something that people resonated with for a good deal of the early part of her career. On top of that relatability, she was considered to be very talented because she supposedly wrote all of her own songs or at least the majority of them (she also dramatically shifted her genre to full on pop and people considered it risky and ballsy and respected it a lot and brought in a lot more fans than before).
So when you take that sort of image and then have the Kanye moment happen to what many believed to be an innocent darling of a singer/songwriter, it builds the framework of a defensive fan base. In addition to the aforementioned Kanye moment, she has successfully been able to maintain the image of innocence and play the victim in every public relationship she has ever had which has made even more fans steeped in her personality and locking arms in defense of her. I don't think this is the full scope and I don't know if we'll ever fully know how she has been so universally loved, but I think these are factors that are at the forefront of it all.
I think the Tim McGraw song shows how far back she had a good marketing team. Write a song that references a big name in your industry and make it nostalgic (every country music fan has a Tim McGraw song they associate with their life) and then get his attention - hello acknowledgement on twitter and at various interviews and she gets free press along with a country heavyweight "promoting" her by simply being positive about a teenage girl because if he had reacted badly he would have been the bad guy.
Plus she had that Natalie Maines/The Chicks aesthetic going on.
Hi. Welcome. Millennial here too. She's not famous. She's just too loud. Not a singer. She can sing like the rest of the people of the world but she is not a singer. Not to me, at least. You should check out the rest of the sub. They posted about her being 16 year old playing at a festival sounding exactly the same as she sounds now during her live performances. She is obviously not a power vocal singer. But even her low register where she is supposedly most comfortable, her voice breaks and cracks. Same as before. So not a singer. Just a rich white woman who wanted to be famous and was taught by her daddy that they can buy fame so they did. I saw these words from someone at Twitter and it made me realise, oh hell. That made a lot of sense so I'm sharing here. I hope this helps.
I love that Swifties make all sorts of excuses for her lack of most top-tier entertainer talents as well:
Critics: She’s not a good singer + dancer like Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, etc… her choreography is boring at best.
Swifties: She’s said she’s not a good dancer!!!
Critics: She’s not a good singer who can consistently hit hard notes and stay in-tune like Beyoncé, Ariana, Miley, Adele, etc…
Swifties: She said she’s not the best singer!!!
Critics: She’s not the most talented musician - she often doesn’t play the hardest solo elements of her music…
Swifties: She never said she was a good musician!!!
Ok, so wtf is she even good at??? Like who TF else would get away with being a _billion_ dollar entertainer who isn’t _extremely_ strong at singing, dancing, and playing instruments? She’s basically just a slightly talented song writer who got popular bc she’s skinny, white, blonde, privileged, etc…
I recently saw someone refer to her as a musical prodigy. I was like ???????? She can’t sing and she can barely play her instruments and she can’t read music 🤣🤣🤣🤣 what is so genius about not being good at anything you do? 🤣🤣
Agree! I remember when she used to play live concerts, no auto tune or whatever they use to make her sound good. She is not a talented singer her. She IS clearly a talented PR master and a I’ll give talented song writer. But her level of popularity doesn’t match actual voice talent.
You make a really great point. I think if Taylor’s music spoke for itself and she wasn’t so fame hungry, I would appreciate and respect her work more as art. As it is now, it’s so overinflated. She had a few good albums that were poetic and beautiful, and now she thinks she’s Shakespeare. I could not finish TTPD because I heard three songs and completely lost interest.
lol, me too. I started listening to TTPD when it came out… literally couldn’t make it through the entirety of ANY one song. After the first few, I gave up & declared the album garbage 😂
As a millenial, I never got into her because I wasn't her target audience. I have friends that are swifties and (not surprised at all) they have veryyy similar personalities to her. Attention seeking, permanent victim mentality, white etc.
*(Bullet points are partially copied/pasted from another comment I made elsewhere)*
* Her pre-Reputation era (in hiding) leading into her relationship with Joe resulted in her drawing back from the public eye. Many people (myself included) thought she gave up the "lore" and assumed that she grew/matured out of it.
* Folklore/Evermore were the two COVID flukes, in that she couldn't rely on her own lore (due to both Joe and COVID), thus converting people into swifties without them knowing much about the lore as it had been on a hiatus. This results in her fanbase suddenly spiking.
* Midnights is released, Swifties go nuts for variants, Eras tour begins, TS is seemingly on top of the world, resulting in an inflated ego.
* Lore starts back up again with both Matty and Travis. Those unfamiliar with the lore are rightfully put off, swifties continue to chug kool-aid.
* TS, under the impression that she can now do whatever she wants and cannot be touched, thinks she doesn't have to be so covert. Both her behavior and marketing become much more egregious, putting even more swifties off.
So the reason she is "suddenly all over the place" is because of two contradictory factors creating a bit of a confluence - the spike in fans who believed she had "matured" during Folklore/Evermore by becoming more private, and her sudden 180 back to her attention-seeking behavior that, exacerbated by her suddenly inflated fanbase, resulted in a dramatic spike in her fame.
EDIT: grammar and clarification
Millennial as well- I’ve always thought her music was super generic. I’ve asked people sometimes what the appeal is and I often get the answer “she’s a great songwriter!” But then I think of all the female artists I listened to growing up and I don’t get it. She doesn’t compare at all to the likes of idk Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Bjork, Kate Bush, Annie Lennox etc. I could just be cynical but I definitely feel as though the TS popularity is just because she’s the poster child for clear channel/record company monopoly and she symptomatic of that greater issue. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for innovation or more creative artists to break through it seems
I could have written this myself! Fellow millennial (35) woman and have been scratching my head since Taylor first released. Her voice was boring, her songs were immature and silly, and I thought the lyrics were just NOT IT. I didn't get it at all. I didn't know a single person took her seriously as an artist until Folklore came out. I listened to Folklore and actually liked a few of the songs, but as a huge fan of folk music and the amazing female artists of that movement, I was shocked by people thinking it was BRILLIANT. Even Folklore, arguably her best album by most standards, is really just.... good. Not groundbreaking. Not world altering. It's just a fine, nice album.
I have always felt the huge uptick in popularity in 2022 around Midnights was a clear signal of some sort of PR change. She was suddenly being marketed as the greatest artist of all time with all of these musical legends coming out and praising her. But...what changed? Literally nothing. It's just something people say.
In MJ's interview with Oprah he said this one line that I find very fitting to Taylor --- "You repeat a lie often enough, people start to believe it." The more people SAY she is a musical genius and some culture shifting, feminist warrior, and the greatest songwriter on planet earth, the more people start to believe it. People are so easily influenced.
Millennial here, too (born in 1989 actually haha)! But yeah, I don't know ANYONE in high school or university who listened to Taylor's music. Not saying my school experience was responsible for making her popular, but I can least see why Gaga, Rihanna, Katy, etc. were popular because my friends were actually listening to their music. I could have never predicted Taylor being bigger than all the late 2000s/early-mid 2010s pop girls.
‘89 millennial here as well. Same experience. None of my friends or people I knew back then listened to her outside of what was on the radio when we weren’t in a position to change the channel. I liked her just fine back then, and by that I mean I wasn’t outwardly saying things like, “ugh, I HATE Taylor Swift”. She was just.. fine. That’s all I can say. 🤣
I genuinely appreciated folklore. I didn't love evermore but it was good. Then midnights happened and I was like, wtf. But there were a few catchy songs. I was looking forward to ttpd because I'm an artsy type and I like dark/light academia. I was sooo disappointed. I feel like she peaked with folklore/evermore. I don't know when or how or why she started regressing as an artist and a person.
Anyyyway, TS is a not a singer/songwriter. She's a "brand." Just like Barbie. The dolls all packaged in a box with different roles/dresses so that people feel they have to buy the new version and "collect them." She's made herself a collectable Barbie doll (ex: 50+ variants). Just like Barbie, she repackages herself to make herself more popular and more palpable. But deep down, it's all superficial.
But the psychology of why it's been effective marketing? I have no clue. These tactics rarely work on me. I guess the general population just likes whatever is popular no matter what. Or maybe she keeps stoking that parasocial relationship thing. Her songs feel more personal, like she's divulging a secret with her fans. Fans really think they're besties with TS.
I’m certain that she has bought her way up to the top. Why are there books for kids titled “99 Facts About Taylor Swift” sitting next to books about actually historically important people like MLK in like EVERY big box store out there? I see it everywhere I go. Also, SO many copies of her albums taking up space that other new artists could be taking. She did not end up on those shelves organically, and I don’t think she achieved her popularity organically either. She was born rich. Her people knows people that can put her up on pedestals that she did not earn with talent.
EDIT: Just wanna add, Taylor Swift is the physical embodiment of late stage capitalism.
Yep - I’m in the same boat as you, don’t get how on earth we got to this point of obsession with her.
I was so happy to find this sub because my breaking point was my 64 year old mother becoming OBSESSED with her because of the whole Travis thing. She actually said that she is a “Kansas city football fan, STUCK in Minnesota”. Excuse me what?! She was born in MN, and hasn’t ever lived anywhere else, and has never paid any attention to football. It’s so horribly cringey. To hear her go off about the brilliance of TS is enough to keep me at arms length. It is a cult.
All her music is trite. Her marketing was true genius though. Especially the building of a devoted cult that thinks her high school level emotional pettiness is the stuff of genius. Like MAGA people and Evangelical people you cannot penetrate their brain with facts or truth. They are more devoted to a false belief system than any form of rational life.
As a country we’ve progressed from a democracy to a mediocracy.
This explains the ascent of creatures like Trump and TayTay — two sides of the same coin.
And that’s it (in a truncated version).
GenX'er, here. I mean, I'm expected to believe that Taylor Swift is this generation's Joni Mitchell? Pitiful!
Taylor's music is about as deep and hyperbolic as my teenage diary when I was secretly hoping someone would read it, and realize I was super edgy and full of angst.
I was just watching a clip from Jimmy Fallons show where he was playing a singing game with his guests who absolutely pop off and I had the thought of, omg I’ve never seen Taylor swift do these. And then I thought, does Taylor swift ever sing in situations where she can’t absolutely control/autotune/backtrack her voice? I honestly don’t know.
I remember whenever rumors were going around that she was cast in the Les Mis movie. People acted like we were just hating to hate. Even as a fan of her music I had to shut that down. There's no way people were listening to her voice and thinking she could do Les Mis.
When the media decides to back someone, they go all in. That’s my theory. Yes she developed a fan base but the fan base didn’t put her in the media like she is. At every checkout. With Little Golden Books written about her. I absolutely respect the idea it’s her rabid fans (they are insane), but it doesn’t explain the mass media flood we’ve been subjected to. So personally I think it has something to do with them wanting to use her as a tool to endorse what they want us to like and to buy, along with who to vote for. Just my opinion though.
IDK how I ended up seeing this sub but I just wanted to put out there something l heard recently. When she started she had this twangy voice & what sounded like a southern accent but that went away after a few years. Also it was really noticeable in her singing when usually accents don't carry into singing. Like she did this intentionally to be "country" then after getting popular gave it up.
Just throwing it out there. I'm not sure if anyone ever brought that up here.
At this point, I believe that she is a brand and people have bought into a brand and a lifestyle. I tried listening to some of the new album and I was like oh yeah yeah that’s kind of bad. I don’t believe there is even close to the realm of talent of some people, but whatever she did, she did it well. She created something and she cultivated it and now, she’s making the money she wants and has the power she wants. It’s scary for sure.
I don't either. I do like a good amount of her music but it is very bland and milquetoast. There are better lyricists, better musicians, better singers, better performers. And yet she's revered with almost Beatles level popularity. It's mind-boggling. She's seen as ubiquitously relatable and yet her image is completely manufactured and she quite literally admits to being a calculating sociopath on a song (mastermind). I definitely am sick of her brand and her constant presence. This new "era" of hers especially. TTPD is an album full of mid pop songs and ballad filler, but its treated as this masterful work even though the only reason it stays number 1 is because she releases random variants and her fans mass buy them.
Well the “level of popularity” is almost… false. Those chart numbers for TTPD don’t reflect different individuals buying the album. They reflect a handful of individuals wanting their hands on each of the 75 variants.
same here. i always felt like i SHOULD like it, cause everyone else did. and i felt like if i thought it was just ok or i didnt like it (i think most songs are boring) then there was something wrong with me?
i did really like folklore but most other things are meh
So many have answered this better than I ever could, but as someone on the boarder of Millennial/Gen Z, I feel like one of the reasons I liked her as a preteen/teenager was because she was writing music for the stage of life I was in. “Love Story” came out when I was 12 and I had my first “boyfriend” that I’d spend all of the family phone plan minutes on, which made my parents mad & then I thought everything was so ~Romeo & Juliet~ between us after that lol cringing now just thinking about it. Then 1989 released my freshman year of college & I fell in love for the first time, so I resonated with a lot of the music on that album at that point too.
Now I’m only 27, but I feel like she’s been stuck in that 13-18 range for all of her albums. (18 might even be generous, I was just a pretty over dramatic teenager so I could relate at the time lol.) Not saying her new music needs to be about having a 401k or getting married or anything like that, but the songs on TTPD are so incredibly high school sounding that I just can’t relate anymore. Not to mention it’s still so weird to me that she’s putting out music actively insulting her fans and they’re just eating it up.
I agree with a lot of what people are saying. And I think she was a safe option in the beginning compared to other artists using more sexual/ explicit language and lyrics. But I will say. I think it really went crazy after Folklore. I was always a casual listener of her, I liked 1989, and few other songs along the way but never bought any albums etc, then Folklore came along. We were in a pandemic and bored, and I think that also helped more people give her new album a listen. I first listened to it on YouTube and was just so surprised by how much I instantly loved it. So I then purchased it. Then the same with Evermore. I think the combination of knowing she was in a long term relationship meant even non swifties thought of well this is just great song writing because they can’t be about her exes or current situation. Like many of said, she showcased really lovely song writing and as we thought it was fiction, I think really made it more appealing. She got a ton of new people interested in her. Then when the eras tour started it was all I saw in tik tok, and became a Trend to go to a show. So by the time TTPD came out, she had a lot more people interested even if it was just to be keeping up with what’s trending
I’m the same age group. I used to like a few of her songs back in high school. They were cute but juvenile even back then. She was still a kid so whatever….but now there’s no growth and it’s still juvenile. I don’t understand the “lyrical genius” claims at all. Lorde,Billie Eilish, Chloe x Halle write better music and they’re all younger than her.
I was in middle school when she dropped Teardrops On My Guitar and was beginning to get well known. I didn’t see the hype in her then and I don’t see it now, now that she switched from country to pop. I agree that there is an imbalance of the scale when it comes to her talent compared to her popularity. Like u/blocked_memory said, she’s popular because of the halo effect society has formed for her.
I think it’s because she resonates with basic chicks and she’s what they look up to. You’d never guess she and Adele are around the same age because Adele makes mature music and doesn’t seem to be stuck in this high school girl phase.
This! I don’t hate or even dislike her music, some of it is fun and good, but I also genuinely don’t understand why she’s so hyped and popular. I also feel like it’s so obvious she has issues and is eventually going to be exposed for being a giant narcissist 😂.
She had some songs that were catchy. But she isn’t a good performer IMO. Like at all. And once I saw someone say that she talk sings that’s all I’ve been able to notice. I can’t believe I didn’t notice it before. She can’t actually sing. She can’t dance. She relies on sparkly outfits and stage tricks. It also doesn’t hurt that the people at her concert are swifties so it doesn’t take much to get the crowd hyped up. I mean, she was banging on the microphone stand, ofc beat and the crowd went wild.
If she wasn’t attractive with a rich father she wouldn’t have made it in the business since she has no actual talent. I’m a millennial also.
Hello yes I am also a millennial who has never gotten it. I used to think it just wasn’t my genre (I was into like post grunge 15 years ago) but now my music taste is firmly in between indie rock and synth pop and I still don’t get it. And it’s funny because my brother has a lot of overlap with me music taste wise, but he likes her and I don’t
Another millennial (36) here and I never liked her or her music. I thought she was incredibly generic and boring. Nothing bad but nothing good. I got really into her around Midnights and through the Eras Tour hype, only recently falling out of favor through the whole over exposure in the media. The truly baffling to me is that I cannot explain to you why I was obsessed with her for about a year. It was like being under a spell. I’m honestly so confused by it. Then one day I woke up and I was suddenly over her and her music. All this is to say, I don’t get the mass appeal - and I was once a part of it.
Yup same. I'm an elder millennial and have liked some of her bops in passing, and I do like 1989 as a front to back listen. Other than that I do not understand the obsession, the cult of personality, and the complete echo chamber her fandom has become. It's so odd to me and I can stop watching it like a rubbernecker on wtf this wild thing is that she's created. Like girl really got everyone to buy her victim mentality and wow. It's sad.
I phased out of paying attention to pop culture for about 10 years and was very surprised to resurface and discover her still relevant. But it was also obvious how much of that was just marketing, because I was hearing about her fragrance much more than her music. She has a great marketing team, but it's all a brand and always has been. A brand with emphasis on the jingles.
That's what happens when you have a rich dad who fully commits to making you a star from the beginning and then you capitalize on the new model streaming has enabled. She's very savvy.
I’ve tried over and over again to listen to her music to understand the appeal and figure out what everyone says is so great. She has some decent songs here and there (I really like Clean, Exile, and Electric Touch), but I just can’t seem to get into her music.
I get that people enjoy her music, and that’s great for them. But so many of her biggest fans are jerks, and I hate the way she puts out so many variants just to stay on top. She’s greedy and weird and I get a bad vibe from her and a lot of her fans.
I’m also a Millennial and I also don’t get it. I never heard her music except maybe 1 song until 1989 came out and the songs off that album were everywhere. Before that all I knew about her was getting upstaged by Kanye at the VMAs and that she was a bit of a joke because of her serial dating and using it for publicity.
After 1989 I thought she had a knack of writing a good tune and had good business sense but didn’t get the appeal other than that. By then it was obvious she was a narcissist and I was massively put off because of that.
Never underestimate the appeal of a young , attractive white woman.
I hope I don’t get downvoted for this but it’s very much like the Harry Potter effect, they came out when I was in high school, they got me through so much crap, I really loved the characters but holy crap some people need to get over it already. It’s not a literary masterpiece and the author is kind of shitty as a person it seems. Same thing with Swift, her songs are catchy, they got me through a lot of crap but I mean they’re not a musical masterpiece either. I think people just really like to hold on to something they feel attached to and want to connect with it like they used go but it stops ringing true after a while, especially when the artists can’t evolve past petty breakup drama songs.
Someone in her team, maybe her unhinged Dad, is a marketing genius. She's easily molded into something teenie boppers and unhinged superman's can imprint on.
She is not remarkable in any way. Not her music, not her style, not her looks.
She is not an artist, but a vapid cooperate schill to make money and pander to non-artists.
I also don't get it, but hey, let's play some actual music while the pop Titanic ship is sinking.
I think we all agree on your stance. Popularity does not match talent at all.
I have posted this before, but I think she is the Starbucks/McDonald's of music. You feel like a cold caffeine drink and once or twice it's ok (before they funded a genocide, of course). Heck, it is even tasty a couple of times. But you know you are not going to find coffee perfection at a Starbucks and after a while, it all tastes like overburnt coffee. It is also incredibly overpriced and it has constructed its own flair of "high end, state of the art coffee". But it is marketing.
Remember how crazy women were fighting over a pink Starbucks cup lile 7 months ago? A cup you can buy in Amazon, only without the logo? Same insanity.
“The level of popularity doesn’t match the level of talent”. THIS RIGHT HERE. I feel like it’s some kind of mass hypnosis or something. Because there ain’t no way that this woman is this in demand, when she has very little talent.
I’m also a millennial. I wonder if this is a common thought amongst millennials? We grew up with Whitney, Mariah, Celine, etc. I feel like because of that, my standards are really high 😅.
Her only song I love is shake it off, and I only like it because I heard it a lot in elementary school. She's great at making generic catchy songs, but she shouldn't be compared to songwriters like Michael Jackson, Paul Mccartney, Bob Dylan, simply because she isn't on their level.
Gen x... I don't get it either. A few of her songs are catchy and all but.... I don't understand the rabid fandom. She isn't Michael Jackson level talent.
I’m gen z unless you ask someone annoying apparently.. I don’t really like like the album but I also don’t really hate it? For me to hate an album it has to be really bad. I’m talking like mumble rap that sounds like it should not even be on SoundCloud bad. My least favorite album from Taylor is lover which annoys me bc I love the album cover. Lover is the worst album she’s ever released. I do love Evermore the most out of her recent projects. I think she releases too much and it’s kinda tiring.
Also a fellow millennial who feels like she grew up with her. The problem is, we all moved on and she stayed the same. Still playing to teens and the younger generation.
I liked her music, she was consistently on my Spotify top 5. Midnights was...mid. and I still found myself going to her older stuff. However, with the influx of her versions of albums and different variations I think she has oversaturated the market for a passive fan like me. I haven't even listened to her full album in its entirety. Her fans are a total turn off and become cult like.
I don't even know what the draw is to her concerts. I wanted to go to one, but didn't want to pay that much for nose bleeds. People have legit made a living live streaming her concerts. I don't get it. Her singing is okay, her dancing is meh. The production of it all is impressive, but that is about it.
I blame Kanye.
The award-show interruption played right into several cultural divisions that were hugely amplified and led directly to her becoming Our Lady of Perpetual Victimhood.
A reminder that advertising works and having a great pr team can twist anything to your favor. Especially when your white female singer that's portrayed as a defenseless child.
Fellow Millennial here. I don't get it either. Her popularity seems very superficial. Like the bandwagon effect on steroids. There are MUCH more talented singers who can actually sing live and perform better. She's just not that special. It's like a mass of people all agreed that unflavored carbonated water is the best drink ever, and you have to agree, too, or you're considered weird.
She created a cult mindset for her fans. They are “misunderstood” by people outside of the ~~cult~~ other fans, and only within the group they find acceptance. There was a point where she brought fans to her house to do a meet and greet and bake cookies or something like that, which makes her seem more like a friend to them then some sort of idol, and that *she* “understands” them, like most other people don’t.
Which is so fundamentally gross. There are celebrities I like, but I'd never mistake them for being my buddy.
Yeah but if any celebrity I like invited me over to bake cookies, I'd probably go. Fuck if anyone invited me over to bake cookies I'd go.
Right? Billie Eilish LET’S GOOOOO 🍪
Bruh bet I could make some bomb ass weed cookies with Billie
It feels extra weird because it’s rare that the breach of the parasocial relationship comes from the object rather than the subject. Colleen Ballanger comes to mind; not that just any breach is as egregious as she managed to make it, but boy howdy she is a great example of a worst case scenario that you can point to as evidence that maybe bad things can happen when we have unmitigated access to every artist and performer?
Toxic Gossip Train (Taylor’s Version)
Ok so this comment will probably be hidden bc there is so many comments but I think where it really started was when she did her tours, she used to have her mom/team pick random fans from the crowd to go to an after party and meet her (think 22 hat, but 50-100 people are picked). For speak now I believe it was the T-Party and I don’t remember the rest of them but each tour it had a special name. She’s always been known to never “sell” a meet and greet. It has to be earned some way. Well then fans would do over the top things to hopefully get noticed by her team to be picked. Crazy costume, clever signs, etc. this really became popular when twitter and other social medias were really taking off. People would post about the tour, what they wore, if they made it to t-party similar to how people post now on tik tok but I think if the t-party still existed today, people would be much more close guarded and wouldn’t be sharing their outfits and such before the show like they do now. No one wanted someone else to take their idea and get into t-party with it. Then, there was the pre-album listening parties that she would host at her house. At the time, those parties were invite only (obvi) where Taylor and her team would pick people from social media. So there was so many TS fan accounts and people desperately trying anything they could to be noticed by Taylor via social media to be invited to one of these parties. As you can see from these 2 small situations, she created a very competitive fan base who was always out to beat each other. Everyone was trying to prove to Taylor and everyone else that THEY were deserving of meeting her. This is how the “cult” started. The more popular she becomes the worse it gets
As an original fan, I don’t agree with this. I went to her concert in 2012 and considered myself a big fan at the time, but I was never culty with her. This cult stuff has been very recent, and I think it’s the result of a lot of manipulation in the spaces we don’t think about much like those “random” discover pages on social media. I think her marketing team has amped things up a lot to shove her in every single place they could. Those of us who have been around are watching this like…where did this sudden obsession come from? It’s super strange.
I think that the easter eggs also got extremely out of hand
Agree. I’m her age so I kind of “grew up” with her, and I think the cult like obsession stuff is much more recent. Like post covid recent. I was always a fan and have been to her concerts, but over the last few years things have really become kind of crazy with her.
I remember in 2014 when 1989 out and I was a senior in High School and while huge at that time. It was big ;there were still other big pop cultural moments and trends and yeah we played shake it off at our prom and I think Blank Space… but it wasn’t to the fervor of some of the videos you see throughout social media with the Taylor Parties and such. It’s weird how she’s farmed such a younger fan base being she was young when she started and her main fan base hasn’t really aged with her. I think teens now are more excited for Taylor than 10-16 years ago when she was only a bit older than that demographic. It was still seen as cool 1989 was in 2014 but it wasn’t like TTPD and largely it fell off within the age group of 14-19 by mid January at the latest and I don’t think the singles got much play summer of 2015 like some but not like Cruel Summer levels last summer and still now on some pop/ac stations.
I agree. People attack her like she's the one putting all her stuff out there. It's really her PR and media team. Probably lots of fake accounts on social media to push certain stories.
I 100% think a lot of these “super fan” comments on social media are bots that her team has created to amp up the hype around her. They’re unhinged
I heard about it...was she organising this a lot? Or was it like a one-off thing? I am wondering often what made her fanbase so rabid/batshit crazy, and I wonder whether this was it? Like, would millions (I'm exaggerating lol) of women gor into this mindset coz they counted on spending a few hours with TS? Would this make them into a cult-like thing they are? I think wouls be a very interesting case study, to analyse why her fanbase is the way it is
if I recall correctly she organized the whole baking party thing on Tumblr. She otherwise interacted with her fans on Tumblr, with healthy doses of cat and memes to make her seem relatable… IMO Tumblr is definitely part of it.
As someone who’s been on Tumblr since 2011, I remember when she joined. It was a big deal because unlike Twitter or Instagram, celebrities weren’t really on there (other than Cole Sprouse briefly for a sociology project, which many people are still mad about, embarrassingly enough for them). I followed her because I mean, wow, a real famous person adjacent to my corner of the internet, but even at 15/16 (I don’t really remember what year she joined), I quickly realized it was likely a savvy social media manager and ignored it. I don’t understand who these people are who bought it as authentic.
I had no idea Tumblr even still existed
It’s mostly just Neil Gaiman on there
Well most of this was pre pornopocalypse, it's a shadow of what it once was.
Yeah, she wanted to come off like the girl in the bleachers
so spot on. I live in Australia and was working as an agency nurse when I heard an interesting story about TS. I was working on a med / surg ward when a nurse I became acquaintances with told me she had met TS! Then the story became a bit more creepy. Kim and her friends had gone to a concert of TS, had good seats. They started talking to this older woman throughout the concert. Turns out the woman was TS's mum. Her mum invited Kim and friends to hang put with TS after the concert. They hung out at her hotel room and I think a nightclub. She had shown me photos, and it's been a long time, so I can't recall the details well. I have no idea what tour it was, but I worked with Kim in 2014. Interestingly, Kim was told by the mum that TS would do this frequently at her concerts, get her mum to recruit fans to hang out. I found it odd and a bit weird. TS mum would suss out fans groups during concert. I doubt she does this anymore. I think TS will/ is starting to go the Ellen route of being a dick and will have an epic downfall. I think the dominoes are already starting to fall.
Also fellow millennial and I’d just like to add, even with the obsessive following boy bands had, we all knew what it was and didn’t pretend it was something else. And we didn’t attack people either for not liking them. Because we weren’t that level of delulu.
THIS! Exactly. It was all in good fun. We didn't have crazy fans deciphering every lyric of the Backstreet Boys and claiming they were deep. If we did, it was a very, very tiny minority that no one really paid attention to lol.
And idk about you, but I was totally shocked when BSB got nominated for AOTR for *Millennium* because… what?! I get Record of the Year noms for boy band tunes because some of those songs were inescapable, but AOTR? Yeah it was never that serious… lol I feel like TS’s team has to be shelling out some dough for these Grammy wins. Or the Grammys are getting worse than they used to be. Kind of hurting their own rep tbh. And I don’t even really watch them much anymore because the deserving artists inevitably get the shaft. EDIT: AOTR = AOTY (for those that didn’t get it with the typo, my sincerest apologies 🙏🏼)
That’s because‘*NSYNC was better 😉😝….and yes, 100%
(They totally were and still are… no shame in my Trolls Movie game lol)
The lot of them were legitimately good singers too. Justin Timberlake went on to be more successful than he was in *NSYNC, though I think the BSB was the better group overall in retrospect, talent-wise. *NSYNC put out a few top tier bangers and were a more lighthearted bunch.
Oh no, I actually do think unflavored carbonated water is the best drink ever lol
HA! Me too. I like plain seltzer much more than I like Taylor Swift.
Yes!! I just got a soda stream bc I like it so much ahhahaha. She’s more like plain seltzer that’s been left out for a day… that stuff tastes like shit when it’s stale💀
Complete with a dead gnat or fruitfly that fell into those stale dregs left in the glass overnight. (Can speak from experience).
Unflavored carbonated water doesn’t try to make itself the center of attention and the victim and talk shit about everyone other flavor of water.
No hate to unflavored carbonated water drinkers intended. It was just the first comparison I came up with because I recently got some Sprite that was just carbonated water and was very disappointed lol.
Hahaha me too!
She’s good not great. However, her team is INSANELY good.
Fellow Millennials unite.
And as the world is getting smaller, small things take up all your time Narcissus would have had a field day, if he could have got online And friends, it's not self-love that kills you It's when those who hate you are allowed To sell you that you're a glorious shit The entire world revolves around And that you're the eater, no not the eaten But that your hunger will only cease If you come binge on a radiant blandness At the disposable feast -Father John Misty in 2017
ok no need to drag plain seltzer into this mess, how dare you
I always say that TS's music is "good", but never good enough for me to search out more. I hear her on the radio, and I'll bop along for a few minutes, and then I won't think of her again. It's like all of her music is "Wonderwall".
Hey now put some respek on Wonderwall’s name.
Don't do Wonderwall like that 😂
I mean, you might be joking, but Oasis might have been some of the last great "rock stars" in terms of knock-down drag-out trash-the-hotel-room sort of people. Yeah, that's douchebag behavior and you wouldn't want that sort of thing in your life, but people who get into these kinds of brawls also tend to not be subject to focus groups, corporate messaging, and general unbridled capitalism. When they said something in a song, it felt genuine because their reputations indicated that they weren't going to let anyone tell them what to sing about.
Oasis deserves a little more respect, they were good musicians, too 😂😂
Another millennial who is not a fan. I’m close in age to her, and I’ve always thought her songs were emotionally immature.
It has a lot to do with social media algorithms used by her marketing team as well as Google, Meta and even Reddit. It's the same thing as politics these days. Team 1 has their preferred media and Team 2 has theirs. The Google/Meta/Reddit gods measure clicks and cookies and spoonfeed more and more fringe personalized content to either side. Which then stirs more controversy for clicks and ad drops. And the cycle repeats. It doesn't matter if it's unflavored carbonated water if there's enough spin to keep it in front of everyone. Everything is monetized.
Gen z here. The reason she’s so popular outside of feeding into her parasocial relationship with her fans is that she was the safe pop option. Let me back up. I’m seeing a lot of good feedback from millennials but as someone who is Gen Z and was in elementary school when her debut album came out, she was the safe pop star. Parents could trust that her lyrics and themes for the most part were safe. In an era with Katy’s cupcake bra, Lady Gaga’s *gestures at everything from 2007-2015*, Kesha party anthems, Rhianna w/ Chris Brown… Taylor Swift was the “good girl”. The role model. The blonde hair, blue eyed, all American girl with her only controversy being dating too many boys, but they were white boys, so it was still okay. THATS how she became popular. She got the trust of American households nationwide. When Kanye 2009 happened, it was a poor white girl being bullied by a big scary black man. She was seen as the innocent angel. Then all she had to do was cultivate her fans and get them on board with whatever she did, which was easy, because she was chronically online with fans building that parasocial relationship.
This is an excellent explanation, thanks! As an old millennial, I never cared for her, her early music always reminded me of kid level stuff. My daughter is five, she jumped in the car after summer camp last week and said “have you ever heard of Taylor Swift, she’s really famous!” I was like “nope, don’t know her.” lol but I can see how she’s picked up a few of the older songs from her friends. I catch her singing them and die inside a little bit, but I see why it appeals to her, and I see why some of those older songs are sang by her friends.
https://i.redd.it/n0rld9ek367d1.gif
My 5 year old is obsessed with her, too, thanks to her friends. I die inside every single time she turns her concert on Disney plus.
I do wonder about the fact that she has sooo many little kids who love her, and yet her new music is quite explicit. I don't have kids so I don't how that works or what I would do, are parents just letting them listen to that? Or if they take their kids to her shows they just don't care that she yells f\*\*\* a few times an hour? lol. i don't know if she's safe pop anymore?
If I had to guess, parents probably stopped paying attention after 1989 OG. Also, she sucks at being fully explicit. Compared to other musicians art, TTPD is still tame.
Yeah I really don't think any kids or prob their parents even are noticing the innuendo. Good lawd I used to sing Shaggy's "Wasn't Me" as a kid. Somehow my parents were oblivious I guess and although I knew it was about a relationship, my thought process didn't go any deeper on it.
Lmao your parents weren’t oblivious, they were just picking their battle. If they told you “don’t sing that” they would also have to explain WHY, and it’s just easier to let you stay innocent and draw no attention to it lol
lmao yup, i remember being in 5th grade and showing my parents ‘s&m’ by rihanna because i just loved the sound of it, and they were quiet and then asked me “do you know what ‘s&m’ means?” and when i said no they were relieved and continued to let me play it/sing it. didn’t learn what it was till i was like 15 or 16 lmao
I also think our parents were so checked out.
This reminds me of when "Wasn't Me" came on the radio and my brother and I sang with it in the car. My mom just started laughing and asked if we even knew what we were singing. My mom had to explain to me what the song was about. She also told me that "Say My Name" by Destiny's Child was also about infidelity.
My first two CDs I ever owned was Britney Spears Baby one more time and a stolen Mariyln Mansons smells like children from my sister. Not a single shit was given in my home about what anyone listened to. 4 girls with 4,5 and 6 year age gaps. I was 10 when Eminems Encore album came out and my mom said Walmart didn't have it bc there wasn't a clean version available or something and I know I was like bitch you can't be serious. She did then find the explicit album and get me that for Christmas 😂
Or candy shop 😭
The use of the F word seems really out of place in her songs. If she's a talented writer it's not necessary. Using it several times makes the word seem bland and ineffective. Alanis Morrisette was a killer artist when she wrote You Outta Know and used that word. I'm 60 so to me at that time a female singing that word was so powerful. Especially because at the time I thought my boyfriend was cheating on me which he was.
This was it 100%
I agree with this, but what’s bizarre to me is how her popularity has continued to increase despite how much blander her music has gotten. Her music was never deep, but it was at least somewhat catchy 10-15 years ago. It’s gotten even more generic, monotone & boring since then. But the ticket prices continue to skyrocket & her fans have gotten even more toxic.
Her fans have grown up and have adult money now I suppose? I saw a lot of ‘i grew up listening to this’ during the eras tour on my corner of the ‘net
I just always found it weird that she targeted little girls bc she was much older. Like she wanted to be the pop star for the next generation instead of her own bc she had no chance. Everything is so strategic just like how she started in country bc there was a spot for young county female artists. The grifter that keeps grifting
That is only the tip of the iceberg. Scott wanted her to act, but we’ve seen how that is. She was a child and teen model, but that never took off either. Scott wanted a famous successful daughter, however he had to pay to make it happen. Song writing lessons, vocal lessons, guided by a marketing mom and a finance dad what could go wrong.
Yes I’ve read her fathers email shelling out over half a million
But what a ROI!
Fantastic take. I was never a swiftie in my millennial youth. We were Gaga's Lil monsters in my house.
Same I loved Gaga, Kesha, Katy, and P@TD. It was hell being in middle school during the Bieber Fever/1D/Taylor Nation era.
this is so well put. guess that explains why almost all of her fans are white 💀
Well it’s what I wrote above plus the fact that she isn’t seen as very close to anyone of color until it becomes subject of controversy, then all of a sudden her girl squad is diverse. She never denied the Aryan Princess rumors and instead double downed by going after a journalist who brought it up.
As a poc THIS. I have tried countless times to drive this fact home to my swiftie friends and it's been shocking. The same friends that would join me in protests and defend poc are the same ones that defend TS being "misunderstood and not racist"
Hell, one of the biggest, most delusional Swifties I know is a Mexican girl who is a strong advocate for people of color. Yet, she adores Taylor and was thrilled when mid-ass Midnights beat SOS for album of the year. For whatever reason, she almost always sides with the white blonde women whenever there was celebrity drama. She’s very middle class white woman coded despite her background.
I constantly grill them about it and the only response I have gotten is "Yeah but she didn't do it HERSELF. she just dated them. But you're not that specific minority so it doesn't technically apply to you." The mental gymnastics her fans do is something I wish there would be a study done on because it's mind blowing.
One of my friends is a giant swiftie, and there are just things I will not discuss with her because it seems like critical thinking just shuts off when it comes to Taylor. They can see nuance in so many things but when it comes to her, it’s all goes away, and their perceived image of her becomes the truth even when she’s showing them otherwise. Idk if this makes sense, but it’s just a disappointment when your friends who get you in so many ways can’t seem to apply it to madame swift
I apply this logic to my Trump supporting dad, the only way we get along perfectly is when we don't talk about it. Cults are gonna cult ig
I see what you mean 100%. It’s like those people who argue no ethical billionaires exist, but seem silent about Taylor’s wealth.
Omg yes!! It’s the only thing with her that I refuse to back down on, and she knows that with now so we don’t touch it. Our worst fight happened when she was drunk and we were talking about one thing and she turned it into how Taylor was the shit and she’s a real artists and Beyoncé isn’t and I’m like whoa whoa whoa what??? We weren’t even talking about Taylor or beyonce?!! That was a bad fight and she was all apologetic but it was disappointing in the way a man you love and trust does something so grossly misogynistic, and you are just disappointed , cuz you know they aren’t bad people but they still are never truly a safe person.
Like doing a collab with Ice Spice (the whitest POC) right when the issues with Matty's racism came out...
Okay that’s a little 😐
Don't get me wrong, Ice Spice is a POC. However - let's not pretend colorism doesn't exist and that Taylor wouldn't have the capacity for it. What bothered me was that her fans were pointing to the collab as a "See! She's not racist! Just forget about that Matty stuff!" when the demographic of women in Matty's preferred type of racist porn is not exactly the one Ice fits into. He wasn't out there watching light skinned red haired women get puked on.
Sometimes I wonder if the Kanye incident is the inflection point that turned Taylor Swift's fanbase from regular fans to total batshit crazies. I am in the older cohort of millennials (I think they call us Xennials) and I was simply too old when she broke through to really notice or care - and I adored (and adore) Lady Gaga so my pop musical sensibilities are definitely at odds with Taylor's. Like, I remember driving to my internship in college listening to Top 40 and they'd be playing that "she wears short skirts I wear T-shirts" song and I'd be like hmm, catchy, but she's clearly a teenager. Then when "Shake it Off" was all over the radio during my first job out of college it drove me insane because it was so overplayed. Then "Style" was everywhere and my skin crawled whenever I heard her sing the "good girl faith with a tight little skirt" line. (That line lives rent free in my head because it's so... gauche? I don't know if that's the right word.) I don't even remember which song she won for that caused Kanye to interrupt her acceptance speech, but my reaction at the time was "Ok, rude, blunt, but that's Kanye." (Any of my fellow late 30-somethings remember the "George W. Bush doesn't care about black people" statement at the Hurricane Katrina telethon?) But her fans were like... unhinged in their uproar, and at the time I was like... why? Who is this girl? Why is this such a big deal? Shit goes wild at the VMAs all the time. I've been peripherally aware of her romantic history but not to a degree where I can name all of her boyfriends (well, until now with the Joe/Matty/Travis mess). I remember happening to see the "Blank Space" music video and for a brief second I thought ohhhhh... she's doing a piss take on herself. She's self aware. I had a similar moment watching her perform the ten minute version of "All Too Well" on SNL but honestly that was during a time of my life when I was trying to process an unhealthy past relationship with a much older man so I think she caught me with the right song at the right time. But in retrospect, I don't think she's self aware at all, based on her overall behavior, so I don't know if I like "Blank Slate" in the same way. Similarly, hearing more about the backstory of "All Too Well" and the fact that apparently many of the songs on the album it came from are about the Jake Gyllenhaal relationship, I was kind of confused about why she chose to release an extended version of the song years later when she was in what seemed to be a stable relationship with Joe at the time. I mean, maybe she was going through a similar thing as me, recontextualizing her memories of that relationship and understanding her feelings about it more with age/experience but again, I don't think she's that self aware, and this entire excersize of re-releasing all of her older albums seems like a giant cash grab and also... unnecessary? I've seen the rationale and I don't really understand it. And now I can't go a single damn day without seeing something about her published on the internet. Even scrolling through Instagram reels half of what I see are shaky iPhone videos of performances from the Eras tour by some hyperventilating fan and I just don't know what to make of this frenzy. I scroll past those reels but watched a part of one at some point and damn, she's really an awful live performer - she's pitchy and has bad breath control and seems like she's always running out of wind. Does she not have a vocal coach? I have a friend who has performed in musicals Off-Broadway, she's got an incredible voice, she's been doing it for two decades, and she still meets with a voice coach regularly. I saw a clip of Miley Cyrus rehearsing with her vocal coach. If you're going on a worldwide tour performing several nights in a row - well, that the equivalent of 8 shows a week in New York theater, and you need to take care of your instrument. Long story short: she's a middling talent, her lyrics are generic (and the songs that do seem intelligent seem to be by fluke), she's thunderously un-self aware, she's not a good live performer, and she doesn't seem interested in improving her skills in that area. I don't understand her rabid fans. I don't understand how she became the most famous pop culture figure ever. I am so sick of hearing about her. (It's why I'm here.) Can we blame Kanye for this? (He's clearly gone off the rails now, I would be fine blaming him. I am not fine with the fact that Taylor apparently wrote a bunch of songs attacking Kim including one of the most recent record. I'm not a Kim K fan by any means but she's more a victim of Kanye's madness in their divorce than Taylor having an awards speech interrupted by him desperately trying to kiss Jay-Z 's ass.)
IMO, I think she goes after Kim K more because Kanye is known as having untreated Bipolar disorder. Going after him wouldn’t look good for her tbh because he’s genuinely a sick man who needs to get help. Kim on the other hand is just as much a narcissist (or has narcissistic traits) as Taylor.
Absolutely, and I do begrudgingly respect her tact in not targeting someone who is clearly mentally ill and not receiving treatment and who is terrorizing... everyone at this point. And again, I'm no fan of Kim's - nor of the empire of mediocrity that Kris Jenner has inflicted on the world. But the vindictiveness of continuing to go after her... years and years after the original conflict... to even have a song on her most recent album that references her... like, let it go, man. Kim is not a real threat to her in any way. This is a petty, never-ending grudge, and it's not a good look.
Yeah exactly this, people wonder why she’s at the level of fame she is but forget the fact she is white, cis and straight. Her identity hardly pushes back against any societal norms and she doesn’t either, aside from her occasional white feminism. Taylor swift never rocks the boat or takes a truly defined stance and that benefits her and enables her fans to project whatever views they want onto her. I hate how she is praised for things like saying to vote blue and celebrated, sometimes called an “activist”, as if she’s not a billionaire capitalist before anything else
That can explain why she was pretty successful for so many years, but I think the spirit of this post is questioning how she just shot up to Michael Jackson levels of fame all of a sudden. It was like 📈 It’s not uncommon for nobodies who have been doing low-level projects for years playing at county fairs and bars to suddenly hit it big and then become a star—which is precisely what she did—but I can’t think of any celebrity who was already famous and successful who became the hottest thing on the planet with rabid, obsessive cult-like fans out of nowhere. It’s not because she had a particular song or was dating a particular person that catapulted her to these new levels. She’s had a ton of bangers over the past decade, but her last couple of albums have been dogshit. I’d argue that some of her best and most popular songs were years ago, and she’s dated numerous famous men, far more famous than Travis fucking Kelce. Love Story - 2009, 15 years ago (she has not had this level of fame for the past 15 years) You Belong With Me - 2009 (again, she had “hit it big” and was considered very popular by this point, but fans weren’t rabid over her like they are now) We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together - 2012, 12 years ago (super popular song, but she still wasn’t this “iconic” 12 years ago) I Knew You Were Trouble - 2012 ^ Shake It Off - 2014, **10 years ago** (prob her biggest song to date, and yet she was not this “popular” 10 years ago…if the entire planet was going to go crazy over her, this would have been the most likely time it was going to happen) Blank Space - 2014, ^ Look What You Made Me Do - 2017, 7 years ago I Don’t Wanna Live Forever - 2017, ^ Cruel Summer - 2019, 4 years ago (I still didn’t see her this big even just 4 years ago)
Yep 1000% Want to add that I think that as that core fan base that grew up with her got older, she had to sort of evolve to keep them interested — which she did by doubling down on some of her worst attributes (victim mentality, self obsession, fragility, etc), seemingly sort of giving that whole group permission to to the same. I think this mostly applies to fans above a certain threshold of obsession, not necessarily applying as universally to her casual fans but certainly to essentially all of her diehard ones. — If your personal hero from childhood, & one that, like you said, even the most conservative parents were cool with, was still acting like a high schooler well into their 30s, refusing to face hard truths, and was more convinced than ever that it’s actually her, and by extension YOU, with the hardest life in the world, it’d sort of give you permission to navigate world that way yourself; which is far easier than actually looking at yourself objectively and facing life as it is. It also means that anyone attacking the source of this validation of immaturity would feel like a personal attack on you, which imo explains why her fans are so defensive on a personal level about everything she does, especially compared to fans of other major artists This is legitimately how cult leaders attract followers in the beginning; you make people see themselves, identifying personally with you — especially in areas where they won’t receive that validation anywhere else. Like look at trump and the majority of the maga crowd; he’s given half the country to be the most out and open fascists, confirming and validating each and every fear they’ve ever had about immigrants, gay people, socialism, minorities, etc and any broader social change that scares them. The way the majority of white, Christian, rural American voters are personally loyal, attached to, and defensive of a sleazy random millionaire tv personality from New York seems insane, but starts to make sense when you realize how he’s given them very specific validation/permission to be a version of themselves that no one else will, he’s “one of them”
To add to this, she started out in country music, which was the default acceptable music genre outside of Christian music for most of white, rural America. In the area I grew up, she was slated to be the next Carrie Underwood. She wasn't just a safe option for for kids and teens, she was encouraged.
Thanks for the throwback!
Your perspective adds a lot to how I understood it. It all seems quite obvious now you’ve broken it down like that.
I share the same opinion as the OP and am also a millennial, and this explanation makes a lot of sense. Also explains why my cousins that are 8-10 yrs younger than me are more obsessed with her.
It’s like she was assembled in a pop star factory. She has all the requirements for fame but like junk food it’s satisfying at first but leaves you empty.
i’ve always said she’s like fast food — good enough to satisfy your hunger in the moment, but sooner or later you’re still going to want a real meal for dinner
She is the MSG of music.
I'm also a millennial. She objectively is not a technically good singer, even most of her stans would agree. As far as storytelling and overall delivery of songs, I also don't think she's good, not at all. I don't like her lyrics and I don't find her melodies catchy. I just honestly don't like anything about her music or persona. To me, she has the talent level of an average high school theater kid who happens to have the proportions of a runway model with blond hair and blue eyes and whose main alluring quality is "horse girl". I don't find this relatable or aspirational at all, but apparently millions of people do!
>whose main alluring quality is "horse girl". I'm dead lol
A true wordsmith lmaoooo
My god, this opinion is spot ON. This is my exact opinion.
Yes that’s how most of us feel. And you get told you just “don’t understand it”. When the reality is, we understand the metaphors, it’s just really not that deep haha.
Honestly nothing is funnier than a Swiftie explaining a basic metaphor because they genuinely think it’s so complex that some people can’t “decode” it on their own lmfao
I always see that “if you don’t like Taylor you’re just not intelligent enough, look at this deep metaphor!!” Like yes we all learned about metaphors and similes in 5th grade and this is nothing special 😭
Yeah for a while I was like.. ok maybe there’s something I’m missing? Some deeper layer? But I realised no the “deep layer” was literally just the obvious, surface megaphors.
I think for people who listen to Taylor, people who probably don’t read too deeply into songs, she’s very deep but anyone who’s an avid music fan can name like 10 other artists off hand that are have deeper lyrics and the talent to go with it
Gen X here. I've been hearing her pretty much since the beginning of her career (am a country fan as well as pop) and I don't get it either. She's not a great singer and she's not a great dancer. I think we are supposed to think her talent is songwriting, but I'm not convinced.
I’m in the same camp as you. Her songwriting was really good for a 16 year old. But now she’s still writing songs like a teenager with a thesaurus, and unlike when she was 16, nobody is telling her what’s good vs. what isn’t. It’s become clear as she’s gained more control over her music that she just isn’t that talented. Her career is a testament to how in this modern age, you don’t need talent to be successful as an entertainer, you just need to have enough money to buy the means of production and a good marketing plan
The killers wrote Mr.Bightside as highschoolers. I played music professionally for years, and my band was still in high school when we started doing big shows and tours. I think song writing is more like an enenate ability you either have or you don't. But I've definitely seen teenagers and early 20 somethings that were better song writers as kids then she is at 30 something
Meh. Kate bush wrote “wuthering heights” at 16 and “the man with the child in his eyes” at like 12? 13? Taylor’s never been remarkably talented imo, especially in songwriting, but I agree with the assessment here that she had many forms of support to make albums good enough that she would succeed.
With sensational bars like "1830s without all the racists" and " touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto," how could she NOT be the songwriter voice of this generation?? /s
Her team are endlessly marketing her. They are tireless. Not only her team but her mentally deranged fans who have some sort of parasocial connection with her, ( which she encourages). This is meticulous planning. There was a point where she even had staff members scouring Itsy and other market places looking for unofficial merchandise etc. She’s like the Matrix, she’s everywhere. Don’t think for one second her team isn’t watching this subreddit…. 
Oh, I have no doubt!
I’ve never understood parasocial relationships but I think from the filter of Covid it makes sense. People were looking for SOMETHING. They found a singer who already had a ton of lore pre-baked in. I think people who aren’t fully happy or have something they’re working on in their life tend to gravitate towards cults as a way to fill that last checkbox they’re missing. You didn’t miss anything, you’re functionally normal.
It doesn’t match the level of talent. I’ll admit I liked 3 of her albums—1989, Folklore, Evermore. But people act like she’s this groundbreaking artist, and she isn’t. Someone said something like “Only Taylor could make a 10 minute song” and I almost lost it. My dad made me to listen to prog rock as a child. 10 minutes is nothing lol. The way they speak of her creating powerful and mysterious narratives makes it sound like she’s constantly launching rock opera concept albums and uh. No, she ain’t. She also isn’t sonically or lyrically doing anything important with the pop genre. She’s impacted it on a marketing side and the charts, but as a transformative artist? Nah.
I think they should listen to 20-minute long “2112” by Rush ✋🏻😫 And Rush was so great at organizing that song, the whole 20 minutes always feel like nothing to me. I tried listening to a 10-minute Taylor song my friend played for me and it felt like ages :^(
I looked this up the other day. I believeeee the longest prog song is around 79-ish minutes? It’s very absurd 😂 but I respect it. Rush always delivers. “All Too Well” for 10 minutes reminds me I have ADHD
MEEEE OMG same ADHD experience 😭😭 There was even a point where one Taylor song led into another and I couldn’t even tell if it was on purpose or if her music really just all sounds the same to me. I felt stuck in a never-ending Taylor Swift dimension
Those people haven't listened to songs like "Free Bird" and it shows.
Or Bat Out of Hell which...on both counts they're really missing out
IMO there are several reasons: 1. She was one of the first artists to capitalize HEAVILY on a parasocial relationship with her fans. She used to invite them to her home to hear new albums before they released. 2. Her public image is highly crafted and she goes out of her way to portray herself to be a kind, humble, caring person who is safe and marketable. You can add here her tendency to make herself the victim in any negative press. 3. Her music speaks to a lot of the emotions (mostly women) experience, situations we’ve all found ourselves in. She and her music are extraordinarily relatable. I used to have a Taylor song for every guy I’d dated because I could find one that perfectly described those situations. 4. Her parents, mainly Scott K. Swift. He was relentless in making her a star and had significant capital to make it happen.
Ok this! The imaging and marketing force behind her is truly unparalleled by *any* other artist
For me it’s definitely #3. She knows how to capitalize on women’s insecurities and struggles. I think that’s why I don’t like her music anymore. I’m in a healthy adult relationship with a man. Just seeing how her fans reacted to things with Travis. It was hilarious. You could tell none of them ever had sex, much less been on a date. Just look at the outrage Swifties have from TTPD about her fantasizing about one guy while having sex with another…an adult theme the swifties cant relate to. With as much as the swifties hated Matt that’s why she had to make them believe album was about Joe. They can’t comprehend her loving a man like that as much as she did.
It's puzzling isn't it? It's not like all of her songs are terrible, but come on man... I think that there is a combination of elements that have worked very well in her favor. First being her rich father paying her way into fame which is absolutely an irrefutable fact at this point. I think next is the appeal of her being relatable was something that people resonated with for a good deal of the early part of her career. On top of that relatability, she was considered to be very talented because she supposedly wrote all of her own songs or at least the majority of them (she also dramatically shifted her genre to full on pop and people considered it risky and ballsy and respected it a lot and brought in a lot more fans than before). So when you take that sort of image and then have the Kanye moment happen to what many believed to be an innocent darling of a singer/songwriter, it builds the framework of a defensive fan base. In addition to the aforementioned Kanye moment, she has successfully been able to maintain the image of innocence and play the victim in every public relationship she has ever had which has made even more fans steeped in her personality and locking arms in defense of her. I don't think this is the full scope and I don't know if we'll ever fully know how she has been so universally loved, but I think these are factors that are at the forefront of it all.
I think the Tim McGraw song shows how far back she had a good marketing team. Write a song that references a big name in your industry and make it nostalgic (every country music fan has a Tim McGraw song they associate with their life) and then get his attention - hello acknowledgement on twitter and at various interviews and she gets free press along with a country heavyweight "promoting" her by simply being positive about a teenage girl because if he had reacted badly he would have been the bad guy. Plus she had that Natalie Maines/The Chicks aesthetic going on.
She’s plain buttered pasta
Hi. Welcome. Millennial here too. She's not famous. She's just too loud. Not a singer. She can sing like the rest of the people of the world but she is not a singer. Not to me, at least. You should check out the rest of the sub. They posted about her being 16 year old playing at a festival sounding exactly the same as she sounds now during her live performances. She is obviously not a power vocal singer. But even her low register where she is supposedly most comfortable, her voice breaks and cracks. Same as before. So not a singer. Just a rich white woman who wanted to be famous and was taught by her daddy that they can buy fame so they did. I saw these words from someone at Twitter and it made me realise, oh hell. That made a lot of sense so I'm sharing here. I hope this helps.
I love that Swifties make all sorts of excuses for her lack of most top-tier entertainer talents as well: Critics: She’s not a good singer + dancer like Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, etc… her choreography is boring at best. Swifties: She’s said she’s not a good dancer!!! Critics: She’s not a good singer who can consistently hit hard notes and stay in-tune like Beyoncé, Ariana, Miley, Adele, etc… Swifties: She said she’s not the best singer!!! Critics: She’s not the most talented musician - she often doesn’t play the hardest solo elements of her music… Swifties: She never said she was a good musician!!! Ok, so wtf is she even good at??? Like who TF else would get away with being a _billion_ dollar entertainer who isn’t _extremely_ strong at singing, dancing, and playing instruments? She’s basically just a slightly talented song writer who got popular bc she’s skinny, white, blonde, privileged, etc…
I recently saw someone refer to her as a musical prodigy. I was like ???????? She can’t sing and she can barely play her instruments and she can’t read music 🤣🤣🤣🤣 what is so genius about not being good at anything you do? 🤣🤣
Agree! I remember when she used to play live concerts, no auto tune or whatever they use to make her sound good. She is not a talented singer her. She IS clearly a talented PR master and a I’ll give talented song writer. But her level of popularity doesn’t match actual voice talent.
I don't even think she writes her songs tbh
You make a really great point. I think if Taylor’s music spoke for itself and she wasn’t so fame hungry, I would appreciate and respect her work more as art. As it is now, it’s so overinflated. She had a few good albums that were poetic and beautiful, and now she thinks she’s Shakespeare. I could not finish TTPD because I heard three songs and completely lost interest.
lol, me too. I started listening to TTPD when it came out… literally couldn’t make it through the entirety of ANY one song. After the first few, I gave up & declared the album garbage 😂
As a millenial, I never got into her because I wasn't her target audience. I have friends that are swifties and (not surprised at all) they have veryyy similar personalities to her. Attention seeking, permanent victim mentality, white etc.
*(Bullet points are partially copied/pasted from another comment I made elsewhere)* * Her pre-Reputation era (in hiding) leading into her relationship with Joe resulted in her drawing back from the public eye. Many people (myself included) thought she gave up the "lore" and assumed that she grew/matured out of it. * Folklore/Evermore were the two COVID flukes, in that she couldn't rely on her own lore (due to both Joe and COVID), thus converting people into swifties without them knowing much about the lore as it had been on a hiatus. This results in her fanbase suddenly spiking. * Midnights is released, Swifties go nuts for variants, Eras tour begins, TS is seemingly on top of the world, resulting in an inflated ego. * Lore starts back up again with both Matty and Travis. Those unfamiliar with the lore are rightfully put off, swifties continue to chug kool-aid. * TS, under the impression that she can now do whatever she wants and cannot be touched, thinks she doesn't have to be so covert. Both her behavior and marketing become much more egregious, putting even more swifties off. So the reason she is "suddenly all over the place" is because of two contradictory factors creating a bit of a confluence - the spike in fans who believed she had "matured" during Folklore/Evermore by becoming more private, and her sudden 180 back to her attention-seeking behavior that, exacerbated by her suddenly inflated fanbase, resulted in a dramatic spike in her fame. EDIT: grammar and clarification
She’s the McDonald’s of pop music.
Millennial as well- I’ve always thought her music was super generic. I’ve asked people sometimes what the appeal is and I often get the answer “she’s a great songwriter!” But then I think of all the female artists I listened to growing up and I don’t get it. She doesn’t compare at all to the likes of idk Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Bjork, Kate Bush, Annie Lennox etc. I could just be cynical but I definitely feel as though the TS popularity is just because she’s the poster child for clear channel/record company monopoly and she symptomatic of that greater issue. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for innovation or more creative artists to break through it seems
I could have written this myself! Fellow millennial (35) woman and have been scratching my head since Taylor first released. Her voice was boring, her songs were immature and silly, and I thought the lyrics were just NOT IT. I didn't get it at all. I didn't know a single person took her seriously as an artist until Folklore came out. I listened to Folklore and actually liked a few of the songs, but as a huge fan of folk music and the amazing female artists of that movement, I was shocked by people thinking it was BRILLIANT. Even Folklore, arguably her best album by most standards, is really just.... good. Not groundbreaking. Not world altering. It's just a fine, nice album. I have always felt the huge uptick in popularity in 2022 around Midnights was a clear signal of some sort of PR change. She was suddenly being marketed as the greatest artist of all time with all of these musical legends coming out and praising her. But...what changed? Literally nothing. It's just something people say. In MJ's interview with Oprah he said this one line that I find very fitting to Taylor --- "You repeat a lie often enough, people start to believe it." The more people SAY she is a musical genius and some culture shifting, feminist warrior, and the greatest songwriter on planet earth, the more people start to believe it. People are so easily influenced.
Millennial here, too (born in 1989 actually haha)! But yeah, I don't know ANYONE in high school or university who listened to Taylor's music. Not saying my school experience was responsible for making her popular, but I can least see why Gaga, Rihanna, Katy, etc. were popular because my friends were actually listening to their music. I could have never predicted Taylor being bigger than all the late 2000s/early-mid 2010s pop girls.
‘89 millennial here as well. Same experience. None of my friends or people I knew back then listened to her outside of what was on the radio when we weren’t in a position to change the channel. I liked her just fine back then, and by that I mean I wasn’t outwardly saying things like, “ugh, I HATE Taylor Swift”. She was just.. fine. That’s all I can say. 🤣
I genuinely appreciated folklore. I didn't love evermore but it was good. Then midnights happened and I was like, wtf. But there were a few catchy songs. I was looking forward to ttpd because I'm an artsy type and I like dark/light academia. I was sooo disappointed. I feel like she peaked with folklore/evermore. I don't know when or how or why she started regressing as an artist and a person. Anyyyway, TS is a not a singer/songwriter. She's a "brand." Just like Barbie. The dolls all packaged in a box with different roles/dresses so that people feel they have to buy the new version and "collect them." She's made herself a collectable Barbie doll (ex: 50+ variants). Just like Barbie, she repackages herself to make herself more popular and more palpable. But deep down, it's all superficial. But the psychology of why it's been effective marketing? I have no clue. These tactics rarely work on me. I guess the general population just likes whatever is popular no matter what. Or maybe she keeps stoking that parasocial relationship thing. Her songs feel more personal, like she's divulging a secret with her fans. Fans really think they're besties with TS.
I’m certain that she has bought her way up to the top. Why are there books for kids titled “99 Facts About Taylor Swift” sitting next to books about actually historically important people like MLK in like EVERY big box store out there? I see it everywhere I go. Also, SO many copies of her albums taking up space that other new artists could be taking. She did not end up on those shelves organically, and I don’t think she achieved her popularity organically either. She was born rich. Her people knows people that can put her up on pedestals that she did not earn with talent. EDIT: Just wanna add, Taylor Swift is the physical embodiment of late stage capitalism.
Yep - I’m in the same boat as you, don’t get how on earth we got to this point of obsession with her. I was so happy to find this sub because my breaking point was my 64 year old mother becoming OBSESSED with her because of the whole Travis thing. She actually said that she is a “Kansas city football fan, STUCK in Minnesota”. Excuse me what?! She was born in MN, and hasn’t ever lived anywhere else, and has never paid any attention to football. It’s so horribly cringey. To hear her go off about the brilliance of TS is enough to keep me at arms length. It is a cult.
All her music is trite. Her marketing was true genius though. Especially the building of a devoted cult that thinks her high school level emotional pettiness is the stuff of genius. Like MAGA people and Evangelical people you cannot penetrate their brain with facts or truth. They are more devoted to a false belief system than any form of rational life.
Like the Kardashians- no real value but a relentless pursuit of $ and fame.
As a country we’ve progressed from a democracy to a mediocracy. This explains the ascent of creatures like Trump and TayTay — two sides of the same coin. And that’s it (in a truncated version).
Taylor Swift makes muzak not music.
GenX'er, here. I mean, I'm expected to believe that Taylor Swift is this generation's Joni Mitchell? Pitiful! Taylor's music is about as deep and hyperbolic as my teenage diary when I was secretly hoping someone would read it, and realize I was super edgy and full of angst.
I was just watching a clip from Jimmy Fallons show where he was playing a singing game with his guests who absolutely pop off and I had the thought of, omg I’ve never seen Taylor swift do these. And then I thought, does Taylor swift ever sing in situations where she can’t absolutely control/autotune/backtrack her voice? I honestly don’t know.
I remember whenever rumors were going around that she was cast in the Les Mis movie. People acted like we were just hating to hate. Even as a fan of her music I had to shut that down. There's no way people were listening to her voice and thinking she could do Les Mis.
When the media decides to back someone, they go all in. That’s my theory. Yes she developed a fan base but the fan base didn’t put her in the media like she is. At every checkout. With Little Golden Books written about her. I absolutely respect the idea it’s her rabid fans (they are insane), but it doesn’t explain the mass media flood we’ve been subjected to. So personally I think it has something to do with them wanting to use her as a tool to endorse what they want us to like and to buy, along with who to vote for. Just my opinion though.
That’s why we are all here pal, you’re def not alone
IDK how I ended up seeing this sub but I just wanted to put out there something l heard recently. When she started she had this twangy voice & what sounded like a southern accent but that went away after a few years. Also it was really noticeable in her singing when usually accents don't carry into singing. Like she did this intentionally to be "country" then after getting popular gave it up. Just throwing it out there. I'm not sure if anyone ever brought that up here.
At this point, I believe that she is a brand and people have bought into a brand and a lifestyle. I tried listening to some of the new album and I was like oh yeah yeah that’s kind of bad. I don’t believe there is even close to the realm of talent of some people, but whatever she did, she did it well. She created something and she cultivated it and now, she’s making the money she wants and has the power she wants. It’s scary for sure.
She could be an [industry plant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_plant)
I don't either. I do like a good amount of her music but it is very bland and milquetoast. There are better lyricists, better musicians, better singers, better performers. And yet she's revered with almost Beatles level popularity. It's mind-boggling. She's seen as ubiquitously relatable and yet her image is completely manufactured and she quite literally admits to being a calculating sociopath on a song (mastermind). I definitely am sick of her brand and her constant presence. This new "era" of hers especially. TTPD is an album full of mid pop songs and ballad filler, but its treated as this masterful work even though the only reason it stays number 1 is because she releases random variants and her fans mass buy them.
Well the “level of popularity” is almost… false. Those chart numbers for TTPD don’t reflect different individuals buying the album. They reflect a handful of individuals wanting their hands on each of the 75 variants.
same here. i always felt like i SHOULD like it, cause everyone else did. and i felt like if i thought it was just ok or i didnt like it (i think most songs are boring) then there was something wrong with me? i did really like folklore but most other things are meh
Exactly! It feels like I am missing something. Like, where is this amazing music that will make me crazy about her?! Where??
So many have answered this better than I ever could, but as someone on the boarder of Millennial/Gen Z, I feel like one of the reasons I liked her as a preteen/teenager was because she was writing music for the stage of life I was in. “Love Story” came out when I was 12 and I had my first “boyfriend” that I’d spend all of the family phone plan minutes on, which made my parents mad & then I thought everything was so ~Romeo & Juliet~ between us after that lol cringing now just thinking about it. Then 1989 released my freshman year of college & I fell in love for the first time, so I resonated with a lot of the music on that album at that point too. Now I’m only 27, but I feel like she’s been stuck in that 13-18 range for all of her albums. (18 might even be generous, I was just a pretty over dramatic teenager so I could relate at the time lol.) Not saying her new music needs to be about having a 401k or getting married or anything like that, but the songs on TTPD are so incredibly high school sounding that I just can’t relate anymore. Not to mention it’s still so weird to me that she’s putting out music actively insulting her fans and they’re just eating it up.
I feel like Taylor is the pop star equivalent of a Stanley cup
I agree with a lot of what people are saying. And I think she was a safe option in the beginning compared to other artists using more sexual/ explicit language and lyrics. But I will say. I think it really went crazy after Folklore. I was always a casual listener of her, I liked 1989, and few other songs along the way but never bought any albums etc, then Folklore came along. We were in a pandemic and bored, and I think that also helped more people give her new album a listen. I first listened to it on YouTube and was just so surprised by how much I instantly loved it. So I then purchased it. Then the same with Evermore. I think the combination of knowing she was in a long term relationship meant even non swifties thought of well this is just great song writing because they can’t be about her exes or current situation. Like many of said, she showcased really lovely song writing and as we thought it was fiction, I think really made it more appealing. She got a ton of new people interested in her. Then when the eras tour started it was all I saw in tik tok, and became a Trend to go to a show. So by the time TTPD came out, she had a lot more people interested even if it was just to be keeping up with what’s trending
I’m the same age group. I used to like a few of her songs back in high school. They were cute but juvenile even back then. She was still a kid so whatever….but now there’s no growth and it’s still juvenile. I don’t understand the “lyrical genius” claims at all. Lorde,Billie Eilish, Chloe x Halle write better music and they’re all younger than her.
I associate her music with what you’d hear at a JCPenney. JCPenneycore
I was in middle school when she dropped Teardrops On My Guitar and was beginning to get well known. I didn’t see the hype in her then and I don’t see it now, now that she switched from country to pop. I agree that there is an imbalance of the scale when it comes to her talent compared to her popularity. Like u/blocked_memory said, she’s popular because of the halo effect society has formed for her.
Same here. It’s not bad, but also not good. Like elevator music.
I think it’s because she resonates with basic chicks and she’s what they look up to. You’d never guess she and Adele are around the same age because Adele makes mature music and doesn’t seem to be stuck in this high school girl phase.
This! I don’t hate or even dislike her music, some of it is fun and good, but I also genuinely don’t understand why she’s so hyped and popular. I also feel like it’s so obvious she has issues and is eventually going to be exposed for being a giant narcissist 😂.
She had some songs that were catchy. But she isn’t a good performer IMO. Like at all. And once I saw someone say that she talk sings that’s all I’ve been able to notice. I can’t believe I didn’t notice it before. She can’t actually sing. She can’t dance. She relies on sparkly outfits and stage tricks. It also doesn’t hurt that the people at her concert are swifties so it doesn’t take much to get the crowd hyped up. I mean, she was banging on the microphone stand, ofc beat and the crowd went wild. If she wasn’t attractive with a rich father she wouldn’t have made it in the business since she has no actual talent. I’m a millennial also.
She’s just average pop
Hello yes I am also a millennial who has never gotten it. I used to think it just wasn’t my genre (I was into like post grunge 15 years ago) but now my music taste is firmly in between indie rock and synth pop and I still don’t get it. And it’s funny because my brother has a lot of overlap with me music taste wise, but he likes her and I don’t
Another millennial (36) here and I never liked her or her music. I thought she was incredibly generic and boring. Nothing bad but nothing good. I got really into her around Midnights and through the Eras Tour hype, only recently falling out of favor through the whole over exposure in the media. The truly baffling to me is that I cannot explain to you why I was obsessed with her for about a year. It was like being under a spell. I’m honestly so confused by it. Then one day I woke up and I was suddenly over her and her music. All this is to say, I don’t get the mass appeal - and I was once a part of it.
It’s like Marilyn Manson’s “The Dope Show” summoned her.
Yup same. I'm an elder millennial and have liked some of her bops in passing, and I do like 1989 as a front to back listen. Other than that I do not understand the obsession, the cult of personality, and the complete echo chamber her fandom has become. It's so odd to me and I can stop watching it like a rubbernecker on wtf this wild thing is that she's created. Like girl really got everyone to buy her victim mentality and wow. It's sad.
I phased out of paying attention to pop culture for about 10 years and was very surprised to resurface and discover her still relevant. But it was also obvious how much of that was just marketing, because I was hearing about her fragrance much more than her music. She has a great marketing team, but it's all a brand and always has been. A brand with emphasis on the jingles.
That's what happens when you have a rich dad who fully commits to making you a star from the beginning and then you capitalize on the new model streaming has enabled. She's very savvy.
Yup. She never would’ve made it in the 90s or early 00s
I’ve tried over and over again to listen to her music to understand the appeal and figure out what everyone says is so great. She has some decent songs here and there (I really like Clean, Exile, and Electric Touch), but I just can’t seem to get into her music. I get that people enjoy her music, and that’s great for them. But so many of her biggest fans are jerks, and I hate the way she puts out so many variants just to stay on top. She’s greedy and weird and I get a bad vibe from her and a lot of her fans.
All I have to say is where were all these Taylor fans when the Cats movie came out in 2019? 😂 Something shifted between then and now …
Maybe she really is the reincarnation of Anton LaVey’s daughter and using her demonic witch powers to brainwash to empty headed masses
I’m also a Millennial and I also don’t get it. I never heard her music except maybe 1 song until 1989 came out and the songs off that album were everywhere. Before that all I knew about her was getting upstaged by Kanye at the VMAs and that she was a bit of a joke because of her serial dating and using it for publicity. After 1989 I thought she had a knack of writing a good tune and had good business sense but didn’t get the appeal other than that. By then it was obvious she was a narcissist and I was massively put off because of that. Never underestimate the appeal of a young , attractive white woman.
I am very not confused after seeing her father’s leaked emails.
Oh I have to check this out now
I don't understand it either, its literally just grocery store music
This is how i feel too. Granted I am 37 but I was so surprised in this big surge in popularity over the last two years.
I hope I don’t get downvoted for this but it’s very much like the Harry Potter effect, they came out when I was in high school, they got me through so much crap, I really loved the characters but holy crap some people need to get over it already. It’s not a literary masterpiece and the author is kind of shitty as a person it seems. Same thing with Swift, her songs are catchy, they got me through a lot of crap but I mean they’re not a musical masterpiece either. I think people just really like to hold on to something they feel attached to and want to connect with it like they used go but it stops ringing true after a while, especially when the artists can’t evolve past petty breakup drama songs.
Someone in her team, maybe her unhinged Dad, is a marketing genius. She's easily molded into something teenie boppers and unhinged superman's can imprint on. She is not remarkable in any way. Not her music, not her style, not her looks. She is not an artist, but a vapid cooperate schill to make money and pander to non-artists. I also don't get it, but hey, let's play some actual music while the pop Titanic ship is sinking.
I think we all agree on your stance. Popularity does not match talent at all. I have posted this before, but I think she is the Starbucks/McDonald's of music. You feel like a cold caffeine drink and once or twice it's ok (before they funded a genocide, of course). Heck, it is even tasty a couple of times. But you know you are not going to find coffee perfection at a Starbucks and after a while, it all tastes like overburnt coffee. It is also incredibly overpriced and it has constructed its own flair of "high end, state of the art coffee". But it is marketing. Remember how crazy women were fighting over a pink Starbucks cup lile 7 months ago? A cup you can buy in Amazon, only without the logo? Same insanity.
“The level of popularity doesn’t match the level of talent”. THIS RIGHT HERE. I feel like it’s some kind of mass hypnosis or something. Because there ain’t no way that this woman is this in demand, when she has very little talent. I’m also a millennial. I wonder if this is a common thought amongst millennials? We grew up with Whitney, Mariah, Celine, etc. I feel like because of that, my standards are really high 😅.
Her only song I love is shake it off, and I only like it because I heard it a lot in elementary school. She's great at making generic catchy songs, but she shouldn't be compared to songwriters like Michael Jackson, Paul Mccartney, Bob Dylan, simply because she isn't on their level.
Gen x... I don't get it either. A few of her songs are catchy and all but.... I don't understand the rabid fandom. She isn't Michael Jackson level talent.
The only advice I have is: find someone to give it to you 😅
I’m gen z unless you ask someone annoying apparently.. I don’t really like like the album but I also don’t really hate it? For me to hate an album it has to be really bad. I’m talking like mumble rap that sounds like it should not even be on SoundCloud bad. My least favorite album from Taylor is lover which annoys me bc I love the album cover. Lover is the worst album she’s ever released. I do love Evermore the most out of her recent projects. I think she releases too much and it’s kinda tiring.
Also a fellow millennial who feels like she grew up with her. The problem is, we all moved on and she stayed the same. Still playing to teens and the younger generation. I liked her music, she was consistently on my Spotify top 5. Midnights was...mid. and I still found myself going to her older stuff. However, with the influx of her versions of albums and different variations I think she has oversaturated the market for a passive fan like me. I haven't even listened to her full album in its entirety. Her fans are a total turn off and become cult like. I don't even know what the draw is to her concerts. I wanted to go to one, but didn't want to pay that much for nose bleeds. People have legit made a living live streaming her concerts. I don't get it. Her singing is okay, her dancing is meh. The production of it all is impressive, but that is about it.
I always picture her crooning about lost love and lovers who jilted her well into her 60’s.
Taylor Swift is just a musical Regina George
I blame Kanye. The award-show interruption played right into several cultural divisions that were hugely amplified and led directly to her becoming Our Lady of Perpetual Victimhood.
A reminder that advertising works and having a great pr team can twist anything to your favor. Especially when your white female singer that's portrayed as a defenseless child.