Taylor Swift and the champagne problems of fandom
On Vienna, presidential endorsements, and the respective power of a superstar and her fans.
Last month, I came out as a Swiftie at my new job. Well, and to the world: There I am on national radio, preserved on the internet, complaining about my thwarted pilgrimage to see Taylor Swift in Vienna.
I’m ambivalent about embracing the Swiftie identity, for various reasons, but the facts are these: More than a year in advance, I paid money and dedicated the next summer’s vacation time towards an international trip, to a charming city I’d already visited twice, for the sole purpose of attending a relatively affordable entry in Swift’s blockbuster concert tour.
That trip was planned before Travis Kelce; before the Super Bowl and all the NFL culture wars Swift’s very presence there fueled; before her record-setting, billionaire-minting Eras tour fully ate the world. And—even though I hesitated to ask my new boss for time off immediately, especially by advertising a fandom I do not wholeheartedly embrace—my negotiations over my NPR start date definitely included the words: “I have tickets for Taylor Swift this summer.” (To which she immediately replied: “Well, of course.”)
I’m not not a fan of Swift. I enjoy her music, I admire many of her accomplishments, I find her role in our society and how she navigates her power fascinating, and—the kernel of my reasons for planning this trip—I love people who love her. I first listened to Swift’s extended discography in 2018, during a long Labor Day weekend spent driving Iceland’s Ring Road, while my friends Steph and Katie DJ’d. After a few hours of all-Swift playlists, as Katie still reminds me sometimes, I sheepishly asked if we could listen to something else.
I’ve grown to love a lot more of Swift’s music since then, especially for its bittersweet importance to Steph. I can’t plan another vacation with her, but I’ve found some joy by doing things that, in a happier universe, I would be sharing with her. So five years after that Iceland trip, when Katie suggested going back to Europe to see Swift, I was enthusiastically in.
Yet I hesitate to declare myself a Swiftie. Part of that is my personal, blanket ban on fangirling real people: No matter how much I may love someone’s art, all of us are fallible and worthy of scrutiny commensurate with our power. And part of it is also the lingering reaction from some people, predominantly but not exclusively men, to Swift’s name or the word “Swiftie.” The eye rolls, the laughter, even the more benign lack of comprehension. (When I mentioned my Vienna plans to one male friend, who’s a little older than I am, he was genuinely befuddled that I would go to a Taylor Swift concert without a tween girl dragging me there.)
Which plays into why Swift and her fans alike often still act like she’s an underdog. She has objectively won—life, fame, fortune, all the awards, all the breakups, all the ancient beefs she keeps on relitigating in her music. But despite this world domination, she’s still not taken seriously by everyone. She’s just the tween girl singer.
And if Swift’s massive success still isn’t taken seriously, what does that say about how the world views her fans? What does it say, especially, about its systemic unwillingness to acknowledge or respect the accomplishments of women and girls who aren’t famous billionaires?
It’s depressing to see a woman get to a point in her career where she’s making $14 million for three hours of work—and is so powerful that one Instagram post can send 400,000 people to a voter-registration website—and there will still be people who dismiss her. It’s even more infuriating, as always, for superstars who are women of color, and their fans: Witness Beyoncé’s recent shutout by the Country Music Awards for her widely-acclaimed and commercially-successful Cowboy Carter album, which celebrated Black women’s contributions to country music and wrestled with the racism and disrespect that these artists, including Beyoncé, have had to overcome just to keep making their art.
Yet getting too personally outraged about the injustices and disrespect facing wealthy superstars gets into tricky territory—because they’re also so much more insulated from the consequences than any of us.
Swift is officially a billionaire, with the private jets to prove it. She enjoys the privileges of both whiteness and superstardom, and the power that they confer. She never again has to give an interview, or answer a question she doesn’t want to.
Swift and her longtime publicist, Tree Paine, are also very skilled at redirecting any snowballing criticism with a few well-chosen words. Last week, Swift was facing some blowback for being photographed hugging Brittany Mahomes, the wife of her boyfriend’s work friend and an apparent supporter of Donald Trump. Then Swift endorsed Kamala Harris, with an Instagram post that happily sank its teeth into J.D. Vance’s “childless cat ladies” nonsense.
Swift’s presidential endorsement made many, many headlines. Few of them led with Mahomes, or how the timing of Swift’s (expected) Harris endorsement neatly made that friendship old news.
Or there were the belated few sentences Swift finally wrote on Instagram about Vienna, two weeks after terrorism threats canceled those concerts. I was a little surprised at the bare-bones crisis management, especially for a superstar who’s cultivated such a close relationship with her fans—and who’s reaped the financial benefits. As a business reporter, I was expecting Swift to put more visible effort into managing the Vienna mini-crisis in her fan relationships.
But then again, she probably didn’t have to. More than 150,000 people were planning to attend Swift’s three Vienna concerts. And while some fans were pretty upset at how little she did in the immediate aftermath to acknowledge our disappointment, most of the people I spoke with in Vienna just wanted another chance to see her in concert.
It’s within Swift’s power to make that happen. And maybe at some point she’ll go back to Vienna, or offer everyone who had tickets to those canceled concerts another chance to see her somewhere during a future tour.
But this is also where the power of the superstar runs out. Fans are also individual people, each with our own stories and motivations. We all have our own reasons for our fandom, even those of us who are reluctant to embrace the identity.
There’s no refund, or Instagram post, or future concert that can address the 150,000 individual joys or hopes or griefs or memories that brought people to Vienna in August. And there are some things that no one person—no matter how wealthy, powerful, beloved, or well-intentioned—can fix for all of us.