Finn McRedmond: Why does Taylor Swift generate so much sneering cynicism?

Bloomberg did not pull its punches when it ran with the headline “Taylor Swift is the music industry.” That was in 2014 and hardly a controversial statement at the time. But now, five new studio albums later, years of chart dominance, and what’s set to be the highest grossing tour of all time, Swift has reached such global superstardom that the headline is no longer sufficient. Taylor Swift is not just the music industry, she has swallowed the entire culture.

The economic heft of her ongoing Eras Tour is staggering. Data suggests the US leg of the tour could generate $4.6 billion in consumer spending. Ahead of its arrival in Dublin next summer, Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe has cautioned the service industry against exploiting the spikes in demand Swift’s arrival will cause. Ticketmaster – a ticket distribution company – bungled the original sale last November so badly it was subject to a senate hearing in the United States. Swift is not just writing earworms, she’s threatening monopolies and encouraging government intervention on price-gouging.

And she has infected our brains too. Dr Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell writes in the New York Times that Swift has “rocked” her psychiatry practice. Young women, she explains, are using the pop titan’s oeuvre to articulate and navigate the psychological challenges of adolescence.

Outside the doctor’s office, thousands flock to TikTok and Twitter to scrutinise Swift’s shows – her mannerisms, her outfit changes, her choice of set list. Swift’s onstage persona involves a purposeful – perhaps deceitful – cultivation of intimacy and friendship with her fans. Most fall hook, line and sinker for the act.

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Now everywhere you look it is Swift, Swift, Swift. But how does someone like this come to exist? It is rare – outside of organised religion – to inspire cultish devotion on such a mass scale. Her expansive 18-year-long career has outpaced the shorter-lived commercial prime of even the Rolling Stones and U2. Chris Molanphy in Slate magazine describes the debut of her album Midnights as “literally Beatleesque”.

It may be her preternatural songwriting talent. But many are quicker to attribute her cosmic success elsewhere. Perhaps her careful self-styling as America’s sweetheart has been the key to lasting fame – she calls herself, somewhat unsubtly, Miss Americana. Or perhaps the combination of a planetary-sized ego coupled with obvious and crushing insecurity is a more relatable trait than we might think. And she certainly owes a lot to a good publicist, a marketing team, personal business acumen and potent ambition.

Swift’s expansive 18-year-long career has outpaced the shorter-lived commercial prime of even the Rolling Stones and U2

These factors are certainly not irrelevant. But really none of those things create a behemoth like Swift alone. The songs still form the core of her unusual cultural endurance. Thanks to the depth and diversity of her enormous catalogue there really is something for everyone: strange attempts at trap music on her album Reputation, plucky guitars and wistful melancholy on Folklore, U2-inspired drums and guitars on State of Grace, yee-haw country on Fearless. It helps that her lyrics are perfectly crafted to feel as if they are about you and you alone. 165,000 people will not fill the Aviva Stadium next June to watch a good marketing budget in action, after all.

But after all this time and incontrovertible success Swift still generates sneering cynicism. There is no faster way to provoke ire in a certain type of man than to claim she is her generation’s answer to Bob Dylan, for example. And sure, she is mawkish and earnest and lacks edge. Her insatiable desire to be adored and her flimsy wannabe feminist-champion act can grate. But not many of the stars of yore come across as lovely people either. And deriding mass culture for the sake of it does not necessarily indicate more sophisticated taste than everyone else. Rather those still intent on dismissing Swift as a frivolous phenomenon are finding it harder and harder to avoid the charge of philistinism.

There is plenty of anxiety among critics about how culture is becoming more disparate. Social media has opened up the world, offering thousands of avenues for cultural exploration. We no longer flock to the same music, TV, film and theatre in ways we once used to. Thanks to streaming and artistic over-production the options for consumption available to us are overwhelming and endless. In such a climate cultural crazes like The Beatles are almost non-existent. And in the 21st century singular figures like Taylor Swift are the anomaly not the norm.

So Swift’s constant and looming presence is not to be taken lightly. As religion fades in significance, society wends its way towards hyper-individualism, and social media feeds narcissistic impulses, Swift has managed to buck all of these cultural tides. A unifying figure in a disconnected world, her Eras Tour has become a kind of megachurch of adolescent anxiety. There is no artist as omnipresent and widely adored by women as Taylor Swift.

When her star wanes – and it will – it is not clear if someone like this will come along again. So when therapists, their patients, millennial women, teenage girls, and men who have been forced to acknowledge Swift’s talent (lest they display their prejudice) gather in the Aviva next summer it will not just be for any ordinary concert. But instead for one last hurrah for monoculture.