PicoBlog

In today’s issue:

• A look at the media’s shift in tone around Taylor Swift.

• Why the criticism of her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, is fair and fine.

• Loose Threads, including a review of Taylor Swift’s style, Zendaya on the “terrifying” Met Gala, and more

For the better part of the last year, the media has ceaselessly told us how incredible Taylor Swift is. She’s currently on the Eras tour, the highest-grossing of all time. Eras is the first-ever tour to gross $1 billion in ticket sales. It also created $5 billion in consumer spending in the U.S. At the end of 2023, Taylor was credited with ushering in “the Era of the Girl.” She was Time magazine’s Person of the Year. She was a (the?) star of the Super Bowl. Her Eras tour movie earned nearly $100 million at the box office in the U.S. and Canada in its opening weekend alone. She won Album of the Year at the Grammys and used her acceptance speech to announce the release of the latest addition to her canon, The Tortured Poets Department. The 31-track album came out on Friday. (Though a media friend passed me a Dropbox link of the leaked songs a full day in advance, so a lot of people probably heard it earlier.)

Taylor Swift is incredible. She has had remarkable staying power as a celebrity and pop star. She has made her art — rather than product lines or endorsement deals — her primary revenue-driver. In an age of shameless celebrity beauty line cash grabs, this is impressive! She is a billionaire now. Her publicist, Tree Paine, is a celebrity and legend in her own right, the subject of a recent profile in WSJ. For many of us, the last year in culture media has felt like Taylor’s world, we’re just living in it.

Yet a lot of music critics (many of them Taylor fans) haven’t loved this album as much as everything else she did in the last year. And many online commenters’ reaction to their critiques has been to proclaim that, after building her up for so long, the media is just tearing her down: This is what we do to famous women, don’t you dare do it to Taylor Swift!

Now, this is true! The media has historically loved to build up famous women only to tear them down. For examples of this, look no further than Britney Spears in the aughts, Anna Wintour at various periods of her 36-year run as Vogue editor-in-chief, or any number of best supporting actress Oscar winners who succumbed to the supposed “curse” of winning that particular award.

However, it’s OK to critique Taylor’s album and the context in which it entered the world! That is not in and of itself a sexist act. Yet polarized online discourse fueled by rabid fandoms have managed to confuse fair cultural criticism for something that it’s not.

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