In a controversy that makes me want to strap on a suicide vest, Taylor Swift is now feuding with MAGA world, or I guess they’re now feuding with her. This makes me very, very tired, but I do admit it’s a good vehicle for observing the ever-quickening decay of American empire. The story represents so much of the detritus of a broken culture: you’ve got the replacement of a nuthouse Jesus-is-coming right wing with a paranoiac and obsessive the-Jews-are-coming right wing, the increasingly deranged worship of celebrity, the endless retreat into a exhausting political binarism, the contemporary liberal urge to treat immensely powerful people as underdogs, the era of mandated artistic populism, the triviality of American collapse, the overwhelming fear people in the media have of looking old. But I want to focus specifically on a topic related to all of that, which is treating consumption as a substitute for politics. This is one of the clearer examples of the way that many people, many political people, now unthinkingly presume that their politics is simply a function of their capitalist consumption, their brand affinities. Who you are is what you buy.
The great conservative freakout at Bud Light is prototypical consumption-as-politics. Conservatives were already mad that trans people have become more visible and accepted, then Bud Light hired transwoman Dylan Mulvaney as a spokesperson, so those conservatives had a fit and made their attitude towards Bud Light core to their political identity. There was a bit of a Streisand effect at play in that whole controversy; I never saw a single ad with Mulvaney in it, and might have never known about the campaign, were it not for conservative snowflake tears. But either way, Anheuser Busch at least partially pulled back.
All of this was profoundly stupid. You can buy whatever beer you want, including beer that tastes like dirty water, for whatever reasons you want. You can of course consume things in a way that you think is reflective of your political values. (...) Hating Bud Light is not a political identity. Not buying Bud Light is not a political action. In fact, I would say that the ostentatious, preening refusal to buy Bud Light is an example of something the right-of-center complains about all the time, virtue signaling. They just happen to be signaling a different set of virtues. The embedded critique in the term “virtue signaling” functions just as well for them, which is that they’re engaged in ostensibly political actions or attitudes that in fact have no material consequence and are thus done purely for optics, as a form of self-marketing. (...)
Well, here we have the same thing breaking out, only now almost no one is being coy about it: you’re a liberal if you support Swift, you’re a conservative if you don’t. Conservatives, for their part, will… I don’t know, get vaguely mad about her and yell about it on “X” like a doofus? There’s zero stakes here, but the fact that so many people are so animated about zero stakes reveals a rot that is itself genuinely high-stakes. I tell people all the time that politics is a thing you do, not a thing you are. It gets a little more bleak when all you are is all you buy.
Perhaps it’s worth saying that this was all written. All of it was predicted. Left theorists have been saying for a very long time that the ultimate outcome of “markets in everything” is a citizenry that can conceive of itself as nothing but consumers in a marketplace. With the labor movement devastated by decades of hostile legislation and the two-party system reducing electoral politics to a farce of limited bad choices, many Americans feel entirely disempowered and disenfranchised. Meanwhile our culture industry, eager for any financial reason to go on existing, sells them on the idea that (say) watching RuPaul’s Drag Race is the same as personally throwing a brick at Stonewall. (...)
Personally, I don’t care for Taylor Swift or her music or her boyfriend’s stupid overly-sculpted En Vogue-backup-dancer beard. That’s just me! Taste is, of course, only taste. I have to make this clear every time this stuff comes up, but I don’t have any ill will towards Swift and am perfectly happy that she’s a pop star. I simply don’t care for her music, myself. I realize that legally speaking I just committed a crime against humanity, by uttering those words, but I’m a 42-year-old man and must live my truth. But so what? If she was normal famous, normal rich, I wouldn’t have any problem with any of it. What I do object to, though, is that her fame has rendered her literally unavoidable, no matter how hard I try; that the devotion of her fans has inspired behavior I find truly unhealthy and concerning, like literally putting off surgery to pay for concert tickets; that with the anti-MAGA narrative having taken hold, her rabid, vengeful stans now have even more pretext for declaring that if you aren’t a Swiftie you must be a fascist. Growing tired of an overexposed celebrity is an entirely common and unobjectionable affair. It’s my right as an American. And yet there’s this whole new genre out there suggesting that there’s no legitimate reason to feel that way.
Yes, it’s true - I was one of those people who was annoyed by the shots of Swift during Chiefs games! Is that really so hard to understand, such that the entire sports media feels it must lock hands to defend the fair maiden? I just want to watch a fucking football game. Does that really make me a reactionary?
I am not a joiner. I instinctively hate any group or movement people are pushing me to become a part of. And lately I’ve been chafing a little bit at the Kelce Family Involuntary Fan Club, which the entire advertising industry seems intent on forcing me into. (...) I just want to be left the fuck alone, for this woman to entertain her fans and then go count her stacks of million-dollar bills in one of her forty palaces, where I can’t see it. Go with God. But every time a liberal says “hahaha, those conservatives, so triggered by a simple pop star,” they’re engaging in sophistry. Something deeper and weirder has been happening with this phenomenon and you know it.
This isn’t cute. It’s fucking lunacy. It’s toxic and corrosive. Stop celebrating it. (...)
That’s the sort of thing I mean when I say that Swift’s dominance of American headspace is not normal, the way everyone seems constantly eager to bend the rules in service of her mythos. In the piece I linked to at the top, James Poniewozik admits that “Since 2020, it’s true that her fame level has risen from ‘star’ to ‘molten cosmic supercluster from which galaxies are born.’” He does not tell us whether this is normal or not normal, good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, which are precisely the questions that are the most interesting and the most necessary. The media writ large seems divided by those who are already hopelessly devoted to Swift and those who know better than to be seen as getting in her way.
by Freddie deBoer, FdB | Read more:
Image: Luiz Edvardo|Flickr
[ed. Media navel-gazing again, same as it ever was. Happy Super Bowl weekend everybody. God help us. See also: Taylor Swift, the NFL, and two routes to cultural dominance; and, Everyone’s being weird about Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” (Vox).]
"Swift’s Eras Tour is the highest-grossing concert tour ever, taking in more than the next two biggest 2023 tours combined. She broke the record for most global streams ever on Spotify at more than 26.1 billion in 2023 — or more than three streams for every human on Earth — and had four of the 10 most-consumed albums this year, all without actually releasing an album of new music. When she made history with her fourth Album of the Year Grammy last week, it was just one more jewel in the tiara.
On the other side, the NFL is to the rest of the entertainment industry what 6-foot-8, 365-pound Philadelphia Eagles left tackle Jordan Mailata would be to a peewee football player. Of the 100 most-watched broadcasts in 2023, NFL games accounted for 93 of them, up from 82 in 2023 and 72 in 2020. The NFL pulls in about as much revenue as the NBA and MLB combined. Of the 50 most valuable sports franchises in the world, 30 of them are NFL teams. By just about every metric, the already dominant NFL is going up and to the right."
"Swift’s Eras Tour is the highest-grossing concert tour ever, taking in more than the next two biggest 2023 tours combined. She broke the record for most global streams ever on Spotify at more than 26.1 billion in 2023 — or more than three streams for every human on Earth — and had four of the 10 most-consumed albums this year, all without actually releasing an album of new music. When she made history with her fourth Album of the Year Grammy last week, it was just one more jewel in the tiara.
On the other side, the NFL is to the rest of the entertainment industry what 6-foot-8, 365-pound Philadelphia Eagles left tackle Jordan Mailata would be to a peewee football player. Of the 100 most-watched broadcasts in 2023, NFL games accounted for 93 of them, up from 82 in 2023 and 72 in 2020. The NFL pulls in about as much revenue as the NBA and MLB combined. Of the 50 most valuable sports franchises in the world, 30 of them are NFL teams. By just about every metric, the already dominant NFL is going up and to the right."
