With a brand-new, record-breaking #1 album, Taylor Swift is once again taking her place at the head of the table.
With a brand-new, record-breaking #1 album, Taylor Swift is once again taking her place at the head of the table.
There is absolutely no doubt about it. The year is 2015 and pop’s reigning monarch has a stronger hold than ever on her empire of straight-to-platinum records. The world belongs to Taylor Swift. And us? We’re just living in it. And boy, are we listening.
“Meteoric” is a word that tends to get thrown around quite a bit when describing the ascent of any half-decent, B-grade artiste, but there really is nobody else whose rise to superstardom has gone quite as exponentially as that of Taylor’s.
Her latest album, 1989, was released in October last year and went straight to platinum, hitting first-week sales of 1.3 million copies in the United States alone, a feat that hasn’t been accomplished by any artiste since 2002. Her first single off the album, “Shake It Off ”, took the top spot on iTunes in a whopping 95 countries, and the video for her second single, “Blank Space”, became the fastest to hit a billion views on Vevo, ever.
Since the songbird broke into the scene with her eponymous 2006 debut, she’s spent much of the next nine years growing her cult of Swifties, as her fans are called. With her brand of pop-laced country music, she first courted the girls with her highly-relatable underdog ethos – she’s been jilted, she’s been sidelined and she’s even got teardrops on her guitar to show for it.
Today, Taylor occupies a wholly unique spot where her appeal has gone mass like we haven’t seen since the days of Michael Jackson. While the 25-yearold has long since cornered the girlsand- their-mums slice of the market, her influence today stretches beyond – even 30-year-old hipsters unabashedly proclaim their adoration for the pop star with the same lack of emotional restraint that Taylor herself brandishes in her music.
Perhaps part of the magic comes from how Taylor takes pains to let you know that she’s just a dork, despite possibly being the biggest celebrity on the face of the planet. As glimpsed from the media – mainstream, social and otherwise – she walks into doors, is weirdly competitive about her family Easter egg hunts, dances goofily at award shows and is pretty much your best friend. “I’m incapable of telling when food is on my face,” she once told Rolling Stone, “It’s like I don’t have nerves in my skin. So if I get, like, a heinous piece of chocolate on my face, please let me know.”
The Taylor Swift that we see on display is always painfully relatable and never too distanced from the childhood insecurities that everyone has dealt with on some level. When she appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman back in January, she dropped on us the story of how she and Girls creator Lena Dunham came to be buddies – it started when she looked up the
writer-director-actor on Twitter and saw her own lyrics quoted on the
feed. “At first I thought she has to be doing that ironically, she’s
clearly making fun of me, because I have this big loser complex from
school.”
Taylor’s strength draws from the idea that she’s this goofball
who has never quite fit in, but who somehow stumbled upon colossal fame
and wealth doing what she loves while being exactly who she’s always
been. It’s a universal message of empowerment for anyone – young or old,
male or female – who’s ever been made to feel like they aren’t good enough. If Rihanna’s irreverent cool has put her on pop’s pedestal, Taylor’s endearing awkwardness has won her the crown.
Her video for “Shake It Off ” is a visual echo of this ideology. Directed by the acclaimed Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo, Never Let Me Go), the video is “a sort of paean to the awkward ones, the ‘uncool’ kids that are actually cooler than the ‘cool’ kids,” Mark tells Vulture. “She wanted to make sure that the message of the video came through clearly. This notion that not fitting in is more than OK.”
The four-minute video shows Taylor dancing to her own beat, fumbling through dance genres like ballet and ribbon dancing amongst seasoned pros: “I’m essentially doing all the worst mum-and-dad dance moves you could ever think of in the midst of these incredibly disciplined, beautiful, sophisticated creatures,” she gleefully explains on one of the outtakes. “It’s heaven.”
Showbiz is a game that requires constant reinvention for an audience as fickle as they are bored, and Taylor has managed to pivot accordingly and keep on top of the heap. Just two years ago, her name was synonymous with being a boy-crazy serial-dater who used her romantic escapades as material for music. But that eventually became tiresome for both artiste and audience.
She tells Rolling Stone: “I feel like watching my dating life has become a bit of a national pastime. And I’m just not comfortable providing that kind of entertainment anymore. I don’t like seeing slide shows of guys I’ve apparently dated. I don’t like giving comedians the opportunity to make jokes about me at awards shows. I don’t like it when headlines read ‘Careful, Bro, She’ll Write a Song About You,’ because it trivialises my work. And most of all, I don’t like how all these factors add up to build the pressure so high in a new relationship that it gets snuffed out before it even has a chance to start.”
And so, she took a romantic sabbatical for two years while she worked on 1989. Until she paired up with DJ-producer Calvin Harris in March this year, Taylor spent the time between building her new girl gang of famous friends, which now includes Cara Delevingne, Lena Dunham, Ellie Goulding, Karlie Kloss, Selena Gomez and Lorde – all heavyweights in their own right.
The turnabout probably counts as one of Taylor’s best career moves, lifting her up and away from frivolous tabloid headlines to her new status as a proponent of feminism alongside her power posse.
And if Taylor needed to cement her Queen Bee status, the deal was sealed when her squad showed up in full force and helped her put out what was possibly the most star-studded of music video cameos for “Bad Blood” – we’re talking Cindy Crawford, Ellen Pompeo, Gigi Hadid, Cara Delevingne, Jessica Alba, and that’s not even all of them.
Even as Taylor continues to reach new heights with her already-spectacular career, she takes care to keep her fans close. As part of her promotions for 1989, she invited select fans to her homes in Rhode Island, California, New York, Nashville and a hotel room in London for secret sessions where they hung out and listened to her yetto- be-released album before anyone else did. She trawls social media to personally interact with her fans, leaving comments on their Instagram accounts and sending them into a oncein- a-lifetime frenzy. She’s been known to send her fans presents, but not before she goes online and finds out what their likes and dislikes are so she can make informed choices. You may choose to be impervious to Taylor’s charms, but she sure isn’t going to make it easy for you.
“I want to make the most of this cultural relevance or success or whatever you want to call it,” she tells The Telegraph, “because it’s not going to last. I have to be as good a person [as I can] while my name matters to them. Because it’s not always going to matter to kids who are 15 and really struggling with who they want to be or [because] their friends were brutal to them at school that day. That’s actual turmoil. I have to do everything I can to make their day better while I still can.” Spoken like a Queen.
