No. 55 - Haters gonna hate, hate, hate edition
I promise I'll stop writing about Taylor Swift after this...
Happy Taylor Swift is in Toronto Day to all who celebrate.
For those who don’t - or anyone who just doesn’t “get” her - I wrote a little explainer about Taylor for the Toronto Star, part of the deluge of coverage for her upcoming six-night stand at the Rogers Centre (that’s 50,000 people per night).
The first few graphs are below, the rest can be found at thestar.com.
Since the beginning of her career, the singer and songwriter has been under an intense microscope, where everything from who she’s dating to the impact of her tours on local economies gets detailed and debated ad nauseam.
The intensity has been ratcheting up over the past 18 months; since launching her massive Eras tour last March, Swift has reached a heretofore unknowable level of fame in North America. One recent New York Times piece was entirely devoted to quantifying that fame and after likening it to the Beatles, Madonna, Michael Jackson “or your icon of choice,” couldn’t find an artist similar enough to make a proper comparison. National political polling was done after she endorsed Kamala Harris for president, the act that raised Trump’s ire. Turns out that when everybody knows who you are, everybody has an opinion about you.
But fame is funny. The more famous you become, the more likely your public persona will become divorced from the thing that made you famous in the first place. People love talking about Taylor Swift, even if they don’t actually know that much about Taylor Swift’s music.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
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