How Taylor Swift was able to turn half the world into her community

Is he there? Or can he not be there at all? On February 10 at 6 p.m. local time, Taylor Swift, who has just set a new record for the best album of the year with her fourth Grammy, will play a concert from her “Eras” tour at the Tokyo Dome in Japan – on February 11 at At 3:30 p.m. local time, her boyfriend Travis Kelce will take the field in Las Vegas with the Kansas City Chiefs and play in the Super Bowl for the NFL championship.

(Swift's) fans are so worried about whether Swift will be able to cheer on her boyfriend in person that even the Japanese embassy in Washington D.C. assured X that the global star can definitely support her friend.

“Despite the 12-hour flight and 17-hour time difference, the Embassy can confidently say that if it leaves Tokyo on the night of the concert, it can comfortably arrive in Las Vegas before the Super Bowl begins.” that last tremors with the worldwide hype surrounding Taylor Swift.

The secret to her success: Taylor Swift's charisma seems boundless

Will there be an earthquake in Gelsenkirchen in the third week of July 2024? Last summer, seismologists measured 2.4 on the Richter scale when Taylor Swift had 70,000 fans singing along to “Shake It Off” in Seattle. The Gelsenkirchen arena has room for around 80,000 swifts – you have to be ready for anything.

Taylor Swift will perform seven times in Germany this summer on her groundbreaking tour “The Eras” (the other concerts are in Hamburg and Munich), and of course her mega-shows with 40 songs from ten albums or “eras” were like the rest. sold out worldwide in minutes. Those left behind stormed the theaters, with Swift's tour film of the same name being the most successful concert film of all time, grossing over $250 million. According to Time magazine, “Person of the Year 2023” bypassed distributors and brought the 3-hour spectacle to cinemas without intermediaries. Control is important to him.

It's the tenth record the 34-year-old has broken in her career (the first was in 2010 as the youngest Grammy winner for album of the year, the eleventh was just this week when she won the award for the fourth time and more times than any other artist before her) , he's definitely working on the next one.

After the billionaire began dating football player Travis Kelce, interest in the NFL among young female viewers has skyrocketed. No one knows what will happen when a new love becomes more than just song inspiration. It's quite likely that a new Super Bowl era is just beginning.

Swift's appeal seems boundless. Forget the private jet (whose emissions @taylorswiftjets keeps track of on Instagram) when the end of the tour has rained down billions of dollars on the cities they played. Swifts do not skimp on consumption. Because your idol does something for money.

Taylor Swift is more verbose than Bob Dylan

Literature professors praise the extraordinary literalness of Taylor's lyrics — “more than Bob Dylan's” — and her gift for catchy verses while avoiding hackneyed phrases. The AI ​​couldn't match any of Swift's lines to find the right words for the feelings. How does he do it?

Years ago, she claimed to just type on her phone when she thought of a catchy song, but of course, Taylor Swift isn't a girl who writes her heartache off her chest anymore.

Julia Roberts, who's not exactly unknown, summed up what an estimated 50 percent of Americans have in common in an Instagram post after attending the concert: “Thank you for being everything we ever needed! Ever.”

Taylor Swift is all we need. Young fans need him because he creates a community. They wear friendship bracelets with Taylor's words on them, communicating in a kind of secret language of hidden clues in liner notes, lyrics and videos. A linguist identified this Taylor language as a “Lect”-like dialect.

Outsiders don't get a thing when Swifties whisper about a red scarf (something to do with Jake Gyllenhaal, one of their countless exes). Only advanced readers knew when she wore a light blue dress in the video for “Out Of The Woods”; In just one of them, the paparazzi photographed her alone on a yacht after Harry Styles left her. Insider knowledge connects.

Learning from Taylor Swift: It's even happening at elite US universities

Yeah, doesn't the world have anything better to do? No one asks. Instead, Taylor Swift seminars will be offered for the first time this year at Harvard, an elite American university. There are already similar ones in Austin, New York and Berkeley. “It's fortunate that such a great artist is also the most famous person in the world,” says Harvard professor and poet Stephanie Burt.

From Taylor, you can learn not only to rhyme, but also to stand up to bullies: for example, Kanye West (long story) or music manager Scooter Brown, who bought the rights to the songs of his first six albums and sold them. to the investor.

How he re-recorded all the lost songs in the original, with minor changes, as the “Taylor Version” and thereby achieved eight top ten spots on the Billboards at the same time in 2023, is a lesson in art entrepreneurship that is actually on the agenda. University of Berkeley.

Donald Trump likes it, too, who says he only likes Taylor Swift “25 percent less” because the artist who supposedly lived up to the “Make America Great Again” ideal in her early days as a blonde folk singer voted for Joe Biden and railed against gun ownership.

Taylor Swift is perhaps the least common denominator that America, if not the world, can come to terms with right now. Taylor for the Nobel Peace Prize? Doesn't sound so utopian.

By Brigitte Steinmetz

This post How Taylor Swift Made Half the World Her Community was originally posted on Playboy.