Pop music in the era of Taylor Swift: what is behind the success of the biggest star of the moment

The Maxwell is a wine bar in Navy Yard, a neighborhood that Washington pulled off around the baseball stadium.

Until the end of the month they have turned it into a monotheistic temple dedicated to the goddess of pop Taylor Swift.

Its owners have literally bejeweled the place, in homage to

one of the songs from

, the latest successful album by the American singer-songwriter.

So the fans line up in the freezing night to, once inside, emulate TikTok choreographies and shout at each other looking into the eyes of the lyrics of her songs, a unique ingredient on the musical menu.

"Nothing else sounds from the time we open until we close," confirms one of the waiters, who can't help but roll his eyes.

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In addition to the bar, December has filled the federal capital with monographic events, cocktail menus inspired by Swift and New Year's Eve parties dedicated to her figure.

Taking into account that this is not, to say it without offending anyone, the most pop city in the United States, the sum of so much tribute could serve to prove Daniel right, who visited the Maxwell a couple of Saturdays ago because he considers that “ Taylor is the most important cultural icon of our time."

Taylor Swift, during her performance at the gala held in Los Angeles. Chris Pizzello (AP)

To surrender to the reach of her global influence, you don't have to be a

like Daniel (the artist, like Dylan, the Grateful Dead or, ahem, Justin Bieber, is one of the few musicians whose fans can boast of a patronymic - in this case, matronymic - own).

That shadow is especially long in the United States, perhaps because, as Greil Marcus, surely the most influential rock critic of all time and a true champion of the metaphor applied to cultural commentary, says in an email, the singer carries the flag American drawing on his face: "red lips, white skin and blue eyes".

Chromatics aside, Swift has spent the fall in the national conversation.

The release of her latest album was a gigantic record-breaking event: Billboard certified sales of almost 1.6 million copies in one week and she became the first artist to reach the top 10 on the charts. .

The album was also crowned the most streamed album in Spotify history on the day it was released, with 185 million clicks.

The first, in a context of atomization and decline of the physical market, describes an extraordinary case of concentration of taste and mastery of the new rules of the game: vinyl sales exceeded half a million, in part, because they were distributed in that format with four covers and five different disc colors, designed for collectors.

10 out of 10 of the Hot 100???

On my 10th album???

I AM IN SHAMBLES.

https://t.co/q1n5Zc6pYA

—Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) October 31, 2022

In August, he announced at some awards the imminence of his tenth work, which, as he later revealed, would be made up of "stories of 13 sleepless nights" throughout his life.

A kind of concept album or, as the musicologist at the University of Southern California Nate Sloan defines it, “a cycle of songs in the manner of romantic composers”.

Then, as usual, he left his fans breadcrumbs on the way to a release that, quite logically, came at midnight.

The conspiracy theories put the rest to fatten the expectation with which he was received.

When the recording intensity had not yet loosened, the singer involuntarily starred in a weeks-long scandal over the management of the multinational Ticketmaster of the pre-sale of tickets for her next tour,

the first in five years.

The regulars of the big live shows have been suffering for years from a system that, in addition to being abusive, does not work, but it took the

to arrive to attract the attention of the Senate, whose antitrust commission has called a hearing on the matter (the problem is old: in the nineties, the rock band Pearl Jam already appeared for him before Congress).

As if that were not enough, last week, in which Swift turned the symbolic age of 33 (symbolic, at least, for Christianity, the faith she professes), she announced, after debuting with a short last year, that she will direct a film written by herself.

The production company bets on her "capacity as a storyteller", while the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has welcomed "a very gifted director".

So much extra-musical merit should not divert the focus from their songs, warns Sloan, who is also co-author of the

(and the book of the same name)

dedicated to the analysis of "the making and meaning of popular music", where Swift is a recurring object of study.

“She has an astonishing knack for writing topics that seem very concrete about universal issues,” she says by email, citing the example of her latest hit, the confessional

number one for six weeks until Mariah Carey came home for Christmas with her Christmas carol every December.

“Beyond the story that she seems to tell, she talks about doubt and vulnerability.

Her melodies are catchy, tend to occupy a small vocal range, and repeat many notes.

Maybe that makes her proposal less complex than that of other artists, but it also makes it easier to digest.

It's like she hands her listeners the keys to her songs."

This "sound signature" is what would explain, according to Sloan, why her fans have been so faithful to her throughout a career that she defines as "a musical chameleon that does a 180-degree turn with each album." .

caught up in their songs

"The music can be simple, which is not simple, but the lyrics are not," says Scarlet Keys, an essayist and composition professor at Berklee University in Boston, one of the most prestigious music schools in the United States.

“In that mix is ​​the secret of its success.

It's easy to get caught up in one of their songs.

And when you're there, you discover the depth of his lyrics, in which he mixes poetry with colloquial language, very much of his time.

She uses more metaphors than usual for a pop star, but she also knows how to be practical and, like in

or

offer solutions to the daily problems of someone like my daughter”.

Keys, who has a

weekly on composition and teaches letter writing to her students, is preparing a course at Berklee on Swift: "My students have a lot to learn from her," she says in a telephone conversation.

The singer-songwriter's themes do not deviate too much from the lyrical pop canon: love and heartbreak, loss, nostalgia, pain... If she were a writer, Keys concedes, her work would have to be divided into two: the diaristic part and the that of the story writer.

"In the first facet is the one in which her fans see themselves more reflected," she adds.

"She's one of the most famous women on the planet, but she talks to you about things that she can relate to."

The story of his life is one of the great themes of his work.

Swift grew up in rural Pennsylvania on a farm dedicated to growing Christmas trees.

Her family moved to Nashville for the girl to pursue her dream of a recording career.

What She Came After Her is the unusual story of a precocious

star who was reincarnated as a global pop diva at the same time that the industry she set her teeth on was transforming.

Her fans refer to each of those script twists as Taylor Swift's “eras,” and talk of her records as Picasso's ages.

In that they resemble those of Madonna.

If

(2017) took her to the dark side of her,

(2019) brought her back to the light.

is a return to the electronic fold—with the help of his friend, producer Jack Antonoff (who has borne the brunt of generally good reviews)—after his “pandemic records,”

and

(both , in lowercase, from 2020).

The latter made him conquer new, more adult audiences, based on acoustic sounds.

Models, actresses and singers like Hayley Gusman, Ruby Rose, Halston Sage, Taylor Swift, Martha Hunt, Este Haim, Uzo Aduba, Blake Lively, Cara Delevingne and Gigi Hadid at a party in 2016.Instagram

In a world like that of current pop, in which the stars and their followers sacrificed intermediaries in a pact sealed on social networks (

such as the critical or promotional departments), Swift dominates that relationship like few others.

“She is always looking out for us,” admits Camila Jiménez, a 20-year-old Spanish student.

“Her public character of hers is very close;

she shares her intimacy on social networks, and sometimes in songs, like when she has written about her romantic relationships, but without revealing herself completely.

It's as if it left us with the illusion of knowing it very well, but then we didn't really know that much, ”she clarifies.

“She is always leaving clues, she calls them 'easter eggs', and they can be hidden in the way she dresses for a gala, in a detail of a video clip, in a statement.

There are people who live to decipher them.

Jiménez does not reach that far.

But he speaks properly: when Spotify sent him that selfie in the form of a summary of the consumption of the year that the platform calls Wrapped, he discovered that he had spent 29,455 minutes of his 2022 in Swift's music company.

That places her in the select group of 0.05% of fans who listened to her the most in the world (to achieve this, she dedicated an hour and twenty minutes on average every day).

Renato Milone, a professor of Contemporary Composition and Production at Berklee, attributes this unusually strong bond in a video call to the fact that many of those fans grew up with her "and have attended live her struggles to be heard as a woman, or to impose herself on the public." industry…".

"We are before a master mind," she says.

“We will never know if it is hers or the group of people who work for her.

It doesn't matter to her: she knows how to combine quality, a quality understood in the old way, with a masterful cultivation of her public persona.

She has forged a new concept of a pop star, different from the model of 10 or 15 years ago.

She thinks of someone like Britney Spears;

then we did not know, nor, in fact, did we care, what was behind the product that they sold us.

As if that were not enough, Swift knows how to read the market,

you get the best sound money can buy, but record so it looks like you did it in your bedroom.

The moment when Kanye West burst onto the stage where Taylor Swift collected her MTV VMA award, in 2009.Cordon Press

Some of those battles Milone talks about have been dramatically public.

Perhaps the most famous is the one against her by Kanye West, who, during an awards show in 2009, took the stage when Swift, then 19, had just been awarded the video of the year award.

West snatched the microphone from her to say that Beyoncé deserved it.

The feud between the two continued for years, including a song by him with a verse that said “I made that bitch famous”, and ended with her walking away from her for a time in public life.

Seeing the rapper's deteriorating image, turned anti-Semite beset by mental illness who dines with Donald Trump, there isn't much of an argument as to which of the two fared better over time.

Swift the movie

That incident, and Swift's subsequent return to life after her retirement, is the starting point for the Netflix documentary

(2020), which follows her on tour for

, her comeback album.

In the film, she presents herself as an artist who is passionate about working in the studio and writing songs, who personally directs her career, but who studies each step with her team, sitting at the head of a table more typical of a listed company. bag.

We also meet the young woman in love with cats, fireplaces and knitwear who, having lost her fear of being herself, is relieved to be able to be vulnerable: she opens up about her eating disorders, her mother's cancer (which is also her “best friend”), the tyranny of perfectionism, and her insecurities.

Miss Americana

talks about the trial that she won against a radio announcer whom she accused of inappropriate touching (the case, resolved months before the outbreak of Me Too, was considered pioneering in this perspective) and pays special attention to her political coming out of the closet, after years of avoiding speaking out.

It was in Trump's midterm elections.

She asked that her supporters not elect Republican Marsha Blackburn as senator from Tennessee for, among other reasons, her anti-LGBTI position (it didn't work: Blackburn took 54.7% of the vote).

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift)

The documentary does not reach the final episode of his empowering moral tale, which marked the break with the star that he once was, raised to please everyone (or, at least, not to piss off anyone).

As a teenager, Swift was signed to a small independent Nashville label, Big Machine, with which she recorded her first six albums, before moving to a larger company.

The value of that inaugural catalog grew with her fame, so the artist wanted to buy it.

Scott Borchetta, owner of Big Machine, proposed a deal: if she went back with him, she would return that material to him at the rate of one disc for each time she recorded a new one.

Swift found the idea outrageous and she made it known on her Tumblr.

Borchetta ended up selling the company to an enemy of the singer's named Scooter Braun.

According to Swift, a "manipulative bully" who, to be more specific, was Kanye West's representative in the lead years between the two.

She responded with the decision to record all six of Discord's albums note by note.

So far, she has completed two.

The covers are different, but the music is practically identical.

The master move isn't so much about altering the past as it is about devaluing her nemesis' $300 million investment.

"Because of how she handled that, today, she

the one that dictates the rules”, considers Professor Milone.

"That's why it will be interesting to see how it evolves in the future, because it will serve to see where the business is going."

The million dollar question right now in American pop is how long a boom that seems to have no end will last and if he will know how to continue reading the signs of the times so as not to get off the bandwagon of success.

As often happens with million dollar questions, no one has an answer to that.

Nor, for example, what Taylor Swift will sound like in middle age: one of the peculiarities of her music is that, even having become more complex over the years, she is still capable of renewing her audience from below, among boys and girls barely four or five years.

But that, logically, cannot last forever either.

In the documentary of her redemption, the singer-songwriter reflects on her future in a rather somber way.

“We're all shiny new toys the first two years,” she says, sitting on a windowsill at one point in the film.

“Then, female artists have to reinvent themselves 20 times more than men.

Either that or they lose their job.

They tell you: 'Be new and be young, but don't cross the line.

Don't go bothering them'.

I plan to continue working hard to take advantage while this society still tolerates my success.

At the moment, that tolerance seems far from exhausted.

Pop music doesn't seem ready to turn the page on the Taylor Swift era just yet.

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