Taylor Swift’s ‘moment’ keeps growing. A reporter (and fan) shows why.

Episode transcript

Clayton Collins: You know Taylor Swift as a shimmering, stadium-packing performer. The billionaire vocalist earned more than $780 million just on the U.S. leg of her 2023 show, The Eras Tour, Forbes estimated. 

As fan bases go, hers is especially ardent. After a Ticketmaster fiasco around Eras [Tour] sales a year ago, fans channeled their collective outrage into resounding legal action. 

Swift pays back her fans, many of them young women, one night clutching her mic and powering through her set list in driving rain, another night making sure a dehydrated concert goer gets water. (She halted her tour for heat in Brazil after another fan was overcome and died.)

A columnist for Inc. Magazine credited some of her power to generosity. 

“She is giving her fans everything they could want from her in a concert,” he wrote. “She’s playing every song. She’s being generous with her talent and her time.”

That quote caught the attention of one senior Monitor writer, who included it in a column. Another staff writer became a “Swiftie” herself when she went to a show with her daughter. Even our skeptical senior culture writer explained last year how he’d been converted.

So what’s going on? “Taylor Swift is having a moment,” read a recent Monitor headline, “and so is girlhood.” The writer of that story, Isa Meyers, joins us today. Welcome, Isa!

Isa Meyers: Hi, thank you for having me. 

Collins: So it seems to be a lasting moment that this artist is having. Everyone’s hip to Taylor Swift now, even NFL fans, thanks to her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. USA Today has a writer dedicated to Taylor Swift. So how big a fan are you and what’s at the root of your own fandom?

Meyers: So I definitely am a fan. I have been since probably middle school. I remember I had “Speak Now,” as a CD that we would play in our minivan on our drive to school every day. 

I definitely went through a phase where I loved her, but I fell out of love with her a little bit when I thought she wasn’t as cool – I think that was probably in high school. I really kind of came back into it in 2020 during the pandemic. I think her release of “Folklore” really was something that was universally surprising to a lot of her fans because she dropped it without any advertising or marketing.

She’d always been mainstream, but at that moment is when a lot of people started realizing that her discography wasn’t just pop and it wasn’t super frivolous and just about boyfriends and breakups like I think was previously misconceptualized about her.

I went to the Eras Tour this summer. I also attended the Red tour in 2013 with my older sister. My first-ever concert was Taylor Swift’s, and my sister and I got ready before, and she was in college at the time, so I got to sit with her and attend it. And at the Eras Tour this summer, my sister and I went, and she performed a surprise song from Red, and we both looked at each other, and we just had this moment … where 10 years previously, we had been watching Red together, listening to that same music, and hearing it performed at the Eras tour acoustically, as a surprise, was really special for us. And we both just looked at each other and started crying. So that was really special.

Collins: I want to ask about the fan base because there are other fan followings that go all in, right? There are Deadheads, there’s Mariah Carey and her “Lambily,” there’s Beyoncé and the BeyHive. What’s different about Taylor Swift’s fanbase?

Meyers: I think that she intentionally positions herself as a celebrity who really cares about her fans, but I don’t think that that’s superficial either. Ever since she first started her career, she’s always been into her relationship with her fans. One of my sources, Brian Donovan, had talked about, too, her goofy relatability and this kind of girl-next-door persona that she puts on that is completely devoid of how I think men and how the male gaze has created and altered how other female stars, um, interact with their fan bases. Not that that’s anything negative either, um, for other stars, but I think that Taylor Swift is just really unapologetically herself.

So I think that her star quality has just, it’s always been there. She’s always been performing and she’s always had these really successful albums. She is the only woman who has ever won three [Album of the Year Grammys], for “Fearless,” “1989,” and “Folklore.” Her range of vocals and genres speaks for itself, and a lot of people have felt like they’ve grown up along side of her, so she started her career, um, with that fake country twang in Nashville. And people watched her go from being a country star and moving into something a bit more popular, just as those same people were growing up and going through high school themselves.

Collins: I love that “goofy relatability” moniker. For this story, you decided to broaden into a look at girlhood and, you know, the term girl can be reductive in some contexts or just, you know, overused in a campy way, like “hot girl summer.” But here it suggests something much more, right? Something empowering and connecting. And she had her first Top 40 way back in 2006. Like, what is it about now?

Meyers: I think that, like you said, “hot girl summer,” there’s also other ones trending on TikTok, like other phrases like “girl dinner,” um, “hot girl walk,” all these different invoking of the use of the word girl. One of my sources, Hannah Wing, had described this moment, like, girlhood has always been in pop culture. It’s ubiquitous. It’s always been there, and it’s always been a way to make money, but now it’s different, just in the fact that, like, she is able to create this fandom that’s based around friendship, not around just romantic love.

I think that girlhood has always been present, but the representation it has in culture now is something that’s less to be ashamed of, so girls are taking this moment and they are not afraid to shout and scream at Taylor Swift concerts, they’re not afraid to get dressed up in pink, they’re not afraid to be themselves, which is sometimes really girly and sometimes it’s really not.

There’s this word that’s been used in pop culture to describe different interests and personality traits and stuff like that, and it’s the word “basic.” When I think of the word, it comes to mind, like, the phenomenon of the Starbucks pumpkin spice latte, and that’s often deemed as “basic.” I think that that’s a word that is unfairly put on women’s interests and interests that are seen as feminine, and I think that that’s why there’s been so much shame around being a girl and enjoying interests that are linked to girlhood and femininity because it’s often seen as frivolous and unimportant. 

I think you can even see it right now with Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift’s relationship.

You have the NFL, which is dominated by masculinity, and Taylor Swift has infiltrated it. A lot of Taylor Swift fans have taken up football as a cause and are watching Sunday night games and are buying Travis Kelce’s jersey and wearing his number. But you don’t see NFL fans doing the same for Taylor swift, and you would think that the crossover of those two stars could produce a community that’s, like, talking about both Taylor Swift’s Eras erasTour, which is really successful, and you can talk about that in relation to how the Chiefs are doing, but I don’t think that those conversations are coming up because the environment is so hostile.

What I really tried to capture, um, in this moment of girlhood that’s different, too, is that girlhood for Taylor Swift and her fans is not any targeted age or gender; it can really be anyone. I had a 40 year old mom and her son who enjoyed listening to Taylor Swift together. I had a group of 11 year old girls who all loved Taylor and that’s how they united and bonded as friends.

I think that girlhood is something that people are realizing that they don’t have to transition out of. It’s not something you have to grow out of and mature and move on to other forms of media, other celebrities, other music. Girlhood is able to just be this uniting factor across anyone who wants to be in it and listen to Taylor. 

Collins: OK, I want to ask you a process question. There’s the “generosity” factor associated with Taylor Swift. I mentioned up top that Inc. Magazine quote. Your story had a “community” label on it. How did the Monitor’s emphasis on finding every story’s underlying universal values affect the way you decided to approach and pitch this story?

Meyers: I think it would have been really easy to write a story about her financial impact, and just how she has impacted pop culture abstractly because it’s pretty apparent just with the numbers how big of a pop star she is. But I think what really drove my process in reporting the story into a value-based Monitor story was emphasizing that community. And it’s not just community at the stadium or at the theater. It’s community on a day-to-day level. 

One source is a 15-year-old-boy who says that when he’s having a bad day, he just listens to Taylor and it makes him happy. And I think that that community doesn’t also have to just be with other fans. It’s kind of with yourself. You get to sit and listen to Taylor, and she gives a glimmer of joy and hope in her community and I think that that’s really what drove my story was figuring out how to show her impact, not just through the numbers, so I think that something I just wanted to approach was how girlhood can be a community and how it can be an inclusive community.

Collins: You point out that there’s a price of admission to this club, especially in terms of attending live shows, though, of course, there were also the Eras screenings (the concert film, you know), from your reporting, would you say that this is a phenomenon that’s inclusive as, as you’ve just said it is, but does it seem likely to have any lasting pro-social effects?

Meyers: Tickets are expensive and not everyone could go and, like you said, with Ticketmaster, even if you could afford it.... And even the movie has a cost, but she did actually announce just a few days ago that it will be reaching streaming services on her birthday on December 13, so that can be a viewing opportunity for people who didn’t want to pay even 20 [dollars] to go see it in theaters. You can turn on Spotify, you could listen to her music at any point. And it doesn’t have to be, like I said, in that theater for you to feel like you’re relating to her because a lot of what makes her relatable too is just her lyrics.

A lot of people condemn her for being a “white feminist.” Something that both of my experts talked about is how a lot of the criticism about her is on her lack of intersectionality when she speaks on, um, different social issues or when she uses her platform to address problems going on and I think that that’s important and I think it’s important to recognize how her community is shaped by different identifiers, but I don’t really think there is such thing for her to be like this perfect feminist that I think people are expecting her to be.

My source Hannah Wing talked about how she doesn’t really overstep and doesn’t take a voice for causes that aren’t hers to champion because she has her own different lived experiences and I think that that’s a really important thing to consider when those criticisms of her feminism arise, because I agree with that in that there’s always a time and place to speak up about issues but I don’t think she has to be this monolith for social issues.

Ultimately, I think, despite the cost of attendance and the stereotypes that are put on her fans for being and looking a certain way, she has created this lasting community that revolves around friendship and girlhood. 

Collins: Thank you, Isa, for coming on to talk about the cultural phenomenon that is Taylor Swift, and for talking about how you both thought and wrote about it differently. 

Meyers: Thank you so much for having me. I will always take any opportunity to talk about Taylor Swift!

Collins: Thanks for listening. To find a transcript and our show notes, with links to this story and others, visit CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Mackenzie Farkus. Jingnan Peng is also a producer on this podcast. Our sound engineers were Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by the Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2023.