At the same time, I’ve never felt so alienated by my favourite artist. This year I have felt not so much a Swiftie as a conscript, roped into some broader project of streaming, spending and posting so as to cement and grow her cultural dominance – though it’s hard to imagine who, now, could possibly dislodge her.
Barclays estimated that the average Eras tour attender spent nearly £850 on tickets, travel, accommodation and expenses, including £79 on official merchandise. More than one city playing host to the tour has been renamed in her honour. The Beatles joked about being bigger than Jesus, but Swift really is bigger than music. She is spoken about in terms more commonly used for land masses, like GDP or earthquake magnitude.
The cultural tide behind Swift is so sweeping and powerful that I’ve struggled to hang on to my fandom, and the personal relationship to her music that’s always underpinned it. This may sound like I’m holding Swift’s success against her, that I liked her better before she got big (though, it bears repeating, no pop star has ever been this big). But I’ve been perturbed by signs that Swift is not just being overexposed, but actively tightening her grip on the spotlight.
Eras is already the highest grossing tour in history, generating $1bn last year and a further $261m from the concert film in cinemas. Yet Swift hasn’t stopped hustling, even after more than 100 sold-out shows. (...)
Swift is the biggest celebrity in the world and a billionaire, on track to make $2bn by Eras’ end. The suggestion that she is somehow dissatisfied or threatened is offputting, and raises very human questions about her motivation. Even five-star reviews of the tour have wondered about Swift’s endgame, where she possibly goes from here. (...)
But without any more insight into what is driving her, you’re left to assume it’s just money, or maybe revenge. Neither makes me feel more connected to her as an artist. Her songwriting may be personal, but seeing Swift perform I felt as though I was being engaged in a brand activation by a global behemoth like Nike or Apple, delivering focus-group-tested excellence. Even the friendship bracelets being hawked seemed less like a groundswell of fan camaraderie than brisk, industrial trade.
My uneasy feelings were later articulated by the culture writer Jonah Weiner, describing the insidious “co-opting of ‘community’ into a sales strategy”. Weiner was talking about luxury fashion brands, and the exploitation we are willing to overlook to feel part of a club. But his point about how our human desire for connection and belonging is hijacked and reduced by corporate interests seemed to me an apt description of the Eras tour, the economy that’s sprung up around it and our enthusiasm to participate in it.
The show’s supposed community is built on a basis of economic productivity; like a queue for a new Apple product or a sneaker, it “contains the possibility for meaningful interpersonal connection only in spite of itself,” Weiner writes. Not only that, it is actively at odds with building relationships and communities that might nourish us for the long term.
My uneasy feelings were later articulated by the culture writer Jonah Weiner, describing the insidious “co-opting of ‘community’ into a sales strategy”. Weiner was talking about luxury fashion brands, and the exploitation we are willing to overlook to feel part of a club. But his point about how our human desire for connection and belonging is hijacked and reduced by corporate interests seemed to me an apt description of the Eras tour, the economy that’s sprung up around it and our enthusiasm to participate in it.
The show’s supposed community is built on a basis of economic productivity; like a queue for a new Apple product or a sneaker, it “contains the possibility for meaningful interpersonal connection only in spite of itself,” Weiner writes. Not only that, it is actively at odds with building relationships and communities that might nourish us for the long term.
by Elle Hunt, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Ennio Leanza/EPA[ed. From the marketing/branding/money-making juggernaut of the Eras Tour, to an overwrought/tortured argument in favor of keeping up with new fashion styles, to a short essay describing one of the gayest sissies in modern history (Stephan Tennant - The Man Who Stayed in Bed). All in three easy jumps! What a world. By the way, 1950 feature film referenced in the second fashion link, Munekata Sisters, by Yasujirō Ozu is in fact a knock off of Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's Makioka Sisters (excellent):]
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SERIOUS PLEASURES The Life of Stephen Tennant. By Philip Hoare. Illustrated. 463 pp. New York: Hamish Hamilton/Viking. $29.95.In 1910, when Stephen Tennant was 4 years old, he ran through the gardens of his family's Wiltshire estate, Wilsford Manor, and was literally stopped in his tracks when he came face to face with the beauty of the "blossom of a pansy." Thirty years later, so precious and high-strung that he sometimes took to his bed for months at a time, he was coaxed outside by a friend for a ride in the car on the condition that his eyes be bandaged, since passing scenery might make him too "giddy." Aubrey Beardsley, Ronald Firbank, Denton Welch -- believe me, Stephen Tennant made them all seem butch.
According to Philip Hoare, the author of "Serious Pleasures," the witty and amazing life story of this great sissy, Cecil Beaton was one of the first to encourage Tennant's eccentric vocation of doing nothing in life -- but doing it with great originality and flamboyance. Completely protected by class, Stephen Tennant couldn't care less what people thought of his finger waves, his Charles James leopard pajamas, his makeup ("I want to have bee-stung lips like Mae Murray") or his dyed hair dusted with gold. Who would dare criticize this "aristocratic privilege," this self-described "fatal gift of beauty"? As The London Daily Express, in 1928, so succinctly summed up Tennant's attitude toward life, "you . . . feel that condescension, indeed, can go no further."
Although many who knew Tennant later in life maintained that they "could hardly believe the physical act possible for him," the one real love affair of his adult life was with Siegfried Sassoon, the masculine, renowned pacifist poet old enough to be his father. Sassoon brought to their relationship "his fame, his talent, his position," while Tennant's only daily activities were "dressing-up" and reading about himself in the gossip columns. Looking at the photos of the two lovers in Mr. Hoare's book, Tennant posing languidly (vogueing, really), way-too-thin and way-too-rich, as Sassoon looks on proudly, even the most radical Act-Up militant might mutter a private "Oh, brother!" But the author makes us see that Tennant's extreme elegance was close to sexual terrorism, as it flabbergasted society on both sides of the Atlantic for half a century. (...)
To confuse things further, Tennant's idol and great friend was Willa Cather(!). It is hard to imagine the notoriously no-fun author of "O Pioneers!" hanging out with a man whose beauty tips included "an absolute ban on facial grimacing or harsh, wrinkle-forming laughter," but Cather, Tennant's "surrogate mother/nanny figure," always encouraged him to write, even though "Lascar," the novel that obsessed him for the last 50 years of his life, remained unfinished at his death.
After World War II, Tennant became, in the words of Osbert Sitwell, "the last professional beauty." From then on, it was time to hit the sack big time. (...)
After World War II, Tennant became, in the words of Osbert Sitwell, "the last professional beauty." From then on, it was time to hit the sack big time. (...)
"Reeking of perfume," "covered with foundation," with ribbons hanging from his dyed comb-over hairdo, he rested "non-stop" for the next 17 years in "decorative reclusion." Unconcerned about his grossly overweight figure (" 'But I'm beautiful,' he would reason, 'and the more of me there is the better I like it!' "), he lay in bed surrounded by his jewelry, drawings and Elvis Presley postcards while, as Mr. Hoare puts it, his "decorative fantasies were running amok" (the pink and gold statues in the overgrown garden, the fishnets and seashells everywhere, the tiny uncaged pet lizards, the bursting pipes and rotting carpets, the mice still in the traps). Happily re-creating the "perfervid environment" of his youth, Tennant calmly painted the tops of his legs with pancake makeup and proudly showed his "suntan" to astonished visitors like Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. David Bailey, Christopher Isherwood, David Hockney, even Kenneth Anger all made pilgrimages and, though they may have laughed good-naturedly afterward, none laughed as hard as Tennant himself, who, after all, was in on the joke from the beginning. "To call Stephen affected," the artist Michael Wishart recalled, "would be like calling an acrobat a show-off, or a golden pheasant vulgar."
In his later years, as the antiques dealers circled outside his estate like vultures, waiting for the end, Tennant would sometimes stop traffic in nearby country towns by going shopping wearing tight pink shorts or a tablecloth as a skirt. His family had given up on him long before, exhibiting only "bemused resignation," a wonderful English trait sorely missing in America today. V. S. Naipaul may have described Tennant best when he noticed "the shyness that wasn't so much a wish not to be seen as a wish to be applauded on sight."
