It may be a little early to determine what will swing the election in America. If a week is a long time in politics, ten months feels like an eternity, and the voters have to endure all this just for a re-run of the last election.
What’s it to be this time? Can the Democrats pull off a repeat victory and turn the White House into an elephant graveyard? Or will the Republicans evict the incumbent from his donkey sanctuary?
Whichever candidate wins, the gerontocracy is sure to triumph.
Thank goodness, then, for a completely different question to take the voters’ minds off the least electrifying presidential election since records began: endorsement.
And not, in the traditional way, endorsement by an actual politician, or of some faceless corporation or other, but by a celebrity, the biggest celebrity of her kind, of one of the old duffers still barely managing to stand.
She is not even a celebrity solely famous for being a celebrity like Kim Kardashian. This woman has immense talent. She’s smart, and in songs like ‘Blank Space’ or ‘Anti Hero’, she’s witty and melodious, and her voice has matured since the days when she was a squeaky country star.
She even has a soft spot for British English. She also has a massive following, more devoted than Trump’s or Biden’s: the Swifties.
These look like turbulent times for Taylor Swift, though I doubt she will mind much. One thing you pick up on from the most cursory glance at this particular pop star is her supreme self-assurance.
In just the past few weeks, she has suffered intrusive speculation about her relationship with a famous football player and had deepfake sexual images of herself broadcast to millions – before, that is, the president expressed his ‘alarm’ and the photos were taken down.
Now, there are people on the extreme right of the political spectrum in the US who claim she is serving the Democrats’ agenda and is the Pentagon’s ‘psyop asset’.
There may even be an element of chagrin that she is not a good, upstanding Republican. According to Jill Filipovic, ‘her blond hair, blue eyes and country music roots once led white supremacists to turn her into an icon of white Aryan womanhood’.
You can easily hear what she thinks about that kind of role. In ‘Lavender Haze’, she refers to the ‘1950s stuff they want from me.’
I don’t have the same cool and calm as Taylor Swift, so for me it’s hard to deal with this barrage without getting confused. Let me take the New York Times article first and what has become known as Gaylor, or the conviction that this particular gay icon is, well, gay.
This explosive claim in a broadsheet newspaper was a curious instance of friendly fire since the writer – one Anna Marks – is clearly a big fan. She is also given, like so many Swifties, to meticulously unpicking the songwriter’s lyrics.
To be fair, Swift only has herself to blame. She openly encourages her fans to examine her lyrics, as well as the aesthetics of her videos and her public pronouncements in general, in search of what she calls ‘Easter eggs.’
As Marks puts it, ‘Her work is a feast laid specifically for the close listener.’ Yep, she doesn’t just hide them; she lays them.
According to Bruce Arthur of the Toronto Star, ‘Swift is followed by fans whose dedication to her mythology is Byzantine and layered and complex and messianic.’
A female messiah, then. Quite a novelty.
