“Nowhere does this kamikaze mysticism hide more flagrantly and influentially in plain sight than in the wildly popular music of Taylor Swift, and the worldwide cult of “Swifties” she has inspired. The only artist in pop history to occupy all of the Top Ten single slots at the same time, Swift more recently racked up four simultaneous Top Ten albums. She has spawned “Swiftogeddon” all-Taylor club nights; the internet swirls with footage of “Swifties” singing in unison; there is even a Taylor Swift-themed university course. Even someone as square as I am can quote lyrics from more than one of her songs. Taylor Swift is a phenomenon.”

READ HERE: https://unherd.com/2023/08/taylor-swifts-tragic-appeal/

Comment posted under this article:

“Taylor Swift provides (for profit, of course) the soundtrack to contemporary psychopathy. What else can it be? Her music is all skin, no meat—all dolled-up to the nines, wearing its best evening gown, with nothing on underneath. An archetype of “high culture” in which all obsessed therewith can find some chameleonic shard of their idealized “truth.” It is a never-ending, putrid panoply of shallow impressions, of sideways glances at the urinal, of sparkling green astroturf. It’s a nexus—a utopia—where all strands of all things composing falsity eventually meet, and from there resume their normal weave, underpinning the rotting corpse of the American Dream. Her music is perfect. It’s contemporary. It expresses, never treading a step past the purely-oblique, the entirety of the 21st century experience, where the most powerful force is the economic transaction…
… or something.”

“Either way, I think Taylor Swift is gross, and I think this article is great.”

— Kyle Pelletier