How You Get the World: Reflections on Taylor Swift, Pt. 2
Part 2: An immediate digression into "Weird Al" Yankovic and the media maelstrom
Forever going with the flow but you’re friction
All installments: Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4 // Part 5 // Part 6 // Postscript 1
I keep looking for a celebrity in music with anything resembling Taylor Swift’s trajectory: pop domination for 15 years, during most of which she’s had essentially no competition. Maybe my imagination is too limited, or maybe I’m just putting off writing a post about this separately, but I keep going back to “Weird Al” Yankovic.
I wrote a lot in 2014 about “Weird Al”—possibly the only music celebrity with whom I’ve had a proper parasocial fan relationship (ages 11 to 14)—when he was ending an unthinkable 30-year, 14-album contract. “Weird Al,” like Taylor Swift, had a briefly rocky debut period before clicking into his whole thing circa album 3 in 1985 (in this comparison, “Eat It” is Al’s “Love Story,” which seems right-ish) and maintaining it unabated for decades. Lots of artists crank out work for decades, but few maintain the exact position in the industry hierarchy and also maintain a huge proportion of their fair weather fanbase in tougher times.
“Weird Al” just happened to be a C-list celebrity rather than an A-list one, in a niche where C-list by most people’s standards is the top of the heap. This is, in fact, the absurdist premise of his biopic, Weird, in which he imagines what it would have been like if “Weird Al” was an A-lister. Michael Jackson steals his song. He has a grand, doomed romance with Madonna. But “Weird Al” simply wasn’t that interesting; he certainly wasn’t interesting enough to be so famous.
Taylor Swift is what would happen if “Weird Al” was also Madonna.
I’m struck by how undramatic Taylor Swift’s celebrity profile seems for someone who ostensibly writes a lot of songs about famous people she has interacted with and/or dated. Her biggest scandals to date are an outsized carbon footprint and briefly dating an asshole who turned out to be more socially unfashionable than her other asshole boyfriends trended. She seems so bereft of genuine intrigue that her fanbase has long since descended into Q-Anon level lunacy, having been raised on liner note acrostics that make sipping a latte (which you could eventually purchase at Starbucks) feel like a plot point in an espionage film.
Every Taylor Swift album has done about as well as the last one. Fearless and Red and 1989 stand out a bit, but that’s because they’re the last CDs anyone bought (I bought Fearless at FYE, Red from Starbucks, and 1989 at Target). For a decade, every Taylor Swift album after her debut sold a million copies in its first week, even as the album format was all but dead from a sales perspective. In the streaming era proper, her sales are as flat as presidential approval ratings. Her tours spark ticket gouging legislation. Movies of said tours make more in the first few days of pre-sales than most movies make their opening weekend. There appears to be nothing that can stop her: not politics, not terrible movies, and by all appearances she’s neither abusive nor ickily mean. If “Weird Al” is the template, we’re currently halfway through Taylor Swift’s career arc.
Both artists put me in mind of Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the media maelstrom. The basic idea is that our ways of interacting in the world change as the media landscape changes; media changes us in ways that we can only dimly perceive. He likens it to the maelstrom from an Edgar Allan Poe story, a force that becomes most dangerous when you either give in entirely or fight against it. By observing and going with the flow of the maelstrom, and specifically by recognizing its patterns — where the flotsam disappears and reappears — you can survive it. It requires a savvy detachment:
The sailor in his story The Maelstrom is at first paralyzed with horror. But in his very paralysis there is another fascination which emerges, a power of detached observation which becomes a “scientific” interest in the action of the strom. And this provides the means of escape.
“Weird Al” was a masterful maelstrom-surfer: this applied most obviously to his chameleonic parodies, which is the “killer app” he figured out by 1985: it was his faithfulness and reverence to the submersions and resurfacing of pop culture flotsam that would allow him to survive, not continuing to try to outwit it with accordions and armpit farts. (That he’d save for the polka medleys.) But “Weird Al” also held still in a kind of paralysis, stayed resolutely true to a core identity and approach that never wavered. The most disruptive thing he ever did to his image was ditch his glasses and shave his mustache, at the exact halfway point in his own imperial maelstrom in 1998. But he kept the Hawaiian shirts.
“Weird Al” was savvy beyond his music and image. He sussed out the key features of every major media shift for 30 years, from syndicated radio programming’s power to bring together niche communities across the country (and later the world) in the early 80s, to the fundamental inclusiveness of weirdos in the cable TV transition in the late 80s, to the harnessing of geek group identity in the early days of the internet, to atomization and fandom-building (always stopping short of weaponization), finally “retiring” with an album in 2014—his first Billboard #1 (mostly because, Taylor Swift aside, the sales ceiling had dropped)—optimized for memetic transmission during the dreaded pivot to video.
Taylor Swift is in many ways as chameleonic as “Weird Al”—she absorbs the key sonic signifiers of her trendiest peers (Lorde, Lana Del Rey) and never takes off her proverbial Hawaiian shirt. Like “Weird Al,” she sounds so much like she has endless stylistic breadth that you might not notice that she’s basically rewriting the same song over and over again. She’s as savvy about the business end of things, too: at the end of the album era, always getting an album out for Christmas releases, many years before the now-trendy New Year’s Eve surprise album drop. After the album era, she has optimized releases for streaming, including not only clockwork iterations of albums that keep a steady drip of new songs appearing on streaming services, but a rerecord of her entire catalog that, noble fight against behind-the-scenes chicanery aside, is a crackerjack release strategy in the streaming era.
I wanted to make this “Weird Al” diversion to emphasize a key point from the first part: we are in year 15 of Taylor Swift’s 2008, just like how 2014 was year 30 of Weird Al’s 1984. I have plenty of thoughts about how she’s maintained her presence since then: she’s very good at doing whatever it is she does! But I want to be clear that unlike “Weird Al,” Taylor Swift isn’t just cannily reactive to popular culture. She also leads it. That’s the impossible reality of Taylor Swift after 2008: it’s not just that she’s able to withstand the maelstrom, but that she is a part of the maelstrom, too, one of the forces perpetuating its churn.