🤔 Ann Powers on Taylor Swift

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It was Swift who threw out the “we” for the “I.” She didn’t do it with her words, mostly. Swift is ever-gracious in her awards acceptance speeches, always enthusiastically crediting her collaborators and acknowledging her competition. But as she stands in the eye of a hurricane of popular fetishization and media hype, Swift can’t help but block out everything and everyone around her. She knows it, or at least the attack of the 50-foot Tay in the “Anti-Hero” video suggests she does. But that doesn’t stop it from being true. She wants to continue to present herself as an ordinary musician who loves the studio more than the spotlight, but crowd hunger – for a distraction from the world’s horrors, a hero who doesn’t wield weapons, a boost to the economy, a symbolic antidote to the shrinking of women’s rights – has turned her into the strangest kind of star: a mutli-dimensional monolith. In popular culture right now, Taylor Swift stands for everything, yet she also stands firmly for the center, unmoving, unable to share the light.

Source: February 18th 2024 by Ann Powers