Good Boy X Bad Girl

[Isabella Kells]

TaylorSwift is arguably the most famous person in the world. She is in the middle of a record-smashing multi-year world stadium tour. The filmic version of that concert experience has grossed over $260 million worldwide. She has released three albums in three years (soon to be four in four years) and has re-recorded four more. She has successfully negotiated a very public and heavily scrutinized relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, who will play in the Super Bowl this coming Sunday.

I am writing this piece in good faith (that you, as a reader, like to think more about the culture that surrounds you, whether it\u2019s culture you love or hate or are ambivalent about) and that you are in turn reading in good faith (that I do not hate Taylor Swift, that this is not a takedown, that we\u2019re talking about Swift\u2019s image but we\u2019re also talking about people\u2019s reaction to that image).

Do I write this sort of preamble before every post about a cultural object? No! But we\u2019re not always great at separating celebrity analysis from like/dislike, and that gets even more difficult when we\u2019re dealing with an image with as much history and emotion accumulated around it as Swift\u2019s. So I\u2019m putting it here today.

For two years, Swift has managed what Lainey Gossip aptly calls an \u201Cunprecedented PR streak\u201D \u2014 we\u2019re talking case-study-style mastery of the narrative. If football fans were mad that the camera was panning to Swift in the box at Chiefs games, they were telling on themselves. But Swift was treading a fine line, and she and her team knew it.

When a celebrity is that prominent, they are always in danger of becoming the figurehead of cultural and societal frustrations. Which is one of the many reasons celebrities periodically recede from the public eye: no matter how many people love you, there comes a point when the structure of a star image cannot shoulder the weight of the star\u2019s meaning and import. The history of celebrity is filled with examples of people who did not or could not protect themselves from this scenario \u2014 because of their youth, because of addiction, because of others\u2019 greed, including our own as consumers and fans \u2014 and careers and lives that imploded because of it.

Swift\u2019s image didn\u2019t collapse at the Grammy\u2019s this past Sunday, not even close. But it did show signs of strain. It\u2019s not about any one thing she did or did not do, or if those actions would be judged as \u201Coff\u201D if another celebrity did the same thing. It\u2019s about the significance of what she did in context: after the last two years, at this moment in her career, at an awards show, at this particular awards show, in context with others\u2019 wins and acceptance speeches\u2026..at this moment in her meaning, but also about how all of those things intersected with other societal frustrations and conversations percolating in this moment. So let\u2019s unpack it.

Swift was nominated for six Grammy awards. She won Album of the Year for Midnights, making her the first artist to win the award four times \u2014 a historic achievement, and I understand why people are upset that it\u2019s been overshadowed by other discourse. We\u2019ll get to that in a moment, but first we should situate her win within the rest of this particular Grammys broadcast.

The first Grammy of the night went to Miley Cyrus for \u201CFlowers\u201D for Best Pop Solo Performance of the Year. It was also Cyrus\u2019s first Grammy win ever, and she accepted the award from Mariah Carey and gave a brief and very Miley speech.

Cyrus also performed \u201CFlowers\u201D in vintage Bob Mackie, ad-libbing lines to further solidify references to ex-husband Liam Hemsworth and celebrate her win. This performance was no more or less calculated or orchestrated than any of Swift\u2019s, but the overwhelming affect of it (and again, this is about context) was playful and vampy and celebratory, the pinnacle of her redemption arc post-rebellion from her highly regimented days as a childhood star.

Celine Dion made her first public appearance since announcing her diagnosis with Stiff-Person Syndrome \u2014 and was the one to present Swift with the Grammy for Album of the Year. Swift didn\u2019t acknowledge Dion onstage or in her speech \u2014 which could be chalked up to surprise, but was nevertheless in marked contrast to Cyrus\u2019s acceptance from Carey. (Swift later embraced Dion backstage, and FWIW I don\u2019t believe it was a purposeful slight)

Swift used the second half of her acceptance speech to announce her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, to be released on April 19th. There is no rule against announcing new music at the Grammys, but the general sentiment was that Swift was making an announcement for her fans \u2014 when her audience (at the Grammys) was her peers. The Grammys understands itself as a celebration of other artists, not a promotional tool. Obviously this is a fiction. but when people say Swift \u201Cdidn\u2019t read the room,\u201D that\u2019s what they\u2019re talking about.

There were other small things, too. Swift loves to support other artists at Awards Shows, often by standing up and dancing (even if that means doing it by herself). The camera then cuts to her standing up and dancing, which, as was the case in Tracy Chapman\u2019s transcendent performance of Fast Car (alongside Luke Combs), can feel like she\u2019s trying to make the performance about her. But Swift can\u2019t ban the camera from cutting to her. Should she sit stone-faced instead? Imagine that scandal! The same sentiment applies to Swift\u2019s insistence that Lana Del Ray join her onstage (after Del Ray lost Album of the Year to, well, Swift). It was awkward, it felt kinda weird \u2014 but if you read the situation with good faith, it also seems like Swift authentically feels bad that her winning means her friend losing.

Again, none of these behaviors were \u201Cbad\u201D or \u201Cwrong.\u201D But sometimes, when you keep on winning \u2014 awards, sure, but also in your career \u2014 it doesn\u2019t matter who you are or how hard you worked for those achievements. People are going to find it harder to root for you. It\u2019s when domination turns into over-saturation: when honest missteps become weaponized, when the interpersonal comes to feel emblematic, when every move becomes overdetermined.

This logic has governed the celebrity world for centuries, but this moment? It\u2019s the most supercharged version of the celebrity/media/social media shitstorm in history. Swift is downstream of every conceivable cultural conversation. She\u2019s an avatar \u2014 a puzzle piece that anyone can insert into their particular argument or way they see the world. Taylor Swift, the celebrity, will be consumed, processed, and evaluated in the context of everything that\u2019s happening around her, which is mostly stuff she\u2019s not involved with. It\u2019s a signal of her importance, both as an attentional item and as an artist and human. It\u2019s also excruciating. Winning is losing\u2026again and again and again.

If that feels unfair, that\u2019s because it it is. Women and women of color in particular reach this point of \u201Cover-saturation\u201D much faster than men, which has everything to do with how society understands who should hold our attention and for how long.

And that\u2019s the point Swift reached on Sunday night. In hindsight, it had been building for some time: you could see it vividly in the conspiracy theories coming from the far right. But it was also visible in renewed conversations about Swift\u2019s embodiment of girlhood \u2014 and how that vision of girlhood, and the connotations of innocence it contains, is limited to a sliver of girls. See, for example, last week\u2019s excellent episode of NPR\u2019s Code Switch, featuring the work of cultural historian Addie Mahmassani on Swift and girlhood. (You can find a pretty decent transcript here).

Like all cultural and celebrity analysis, this conversation is ostensibly about Swift, but it\u2019s also using the prominence of her image to talk about discourses of girlhood in general: who\u2019s allowed to have it, who\u2019s given the assumption of \\\"innocence,\u201D and how all of that connects to whiteness, thinness, and class. Of course, these conversations are not new: they undergirded the full decade of blowback after Kanye West interrupted Swift\u2019s acceptance of Best Female Video at the 2009 VMAs. But I think they\u2019re re-emerging now for a reason.

It\u2019s about the uproar over the Academy\u2019s snub of Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie \u2014 but not Greta Lee and Celine Song for Past Lives, or Fantasia Barrino and Taraji P. Henson for The Color Purple. It\u2019s about Barbie\u2019s feminism just generally. It\u2019s about exhaustion and fatigue and apathy and annoyance. It\u2019s about the limitations of privileged white women\u2019s progressive politics.

As a privileged white woman with progressive politics, I understand the frustration: we are generally good at seeing injustice, and we are generally bad at giving up our own sliver of societal power in order to rectify that injustice. What most reliably moves us to act is personal stakes, and the absence of them makes it easy for us to \u201Cmove on\u201D from causes that other people have no choice but to engage every day of their lives. It can feel like white women are only in the fight when the fight is popular, easy, and without significant social or financial risk \u2014 and when they do join the fight, they want to be celebrated for it.

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