Taylor Swift: the last great American dynasty
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The year is 2044. It’s 20 years since Taylor Swift’s seminal Eras Tour took her around the world in a multi-billion dollar extraveganza. A podcast host — or the host of what counts as a podcast in 2044 — whispers into his microphone. “When I was still in short trousers,” he narrates, with well-practiced NPR vocal fry. “The world’s biggest popstar embarked on a globe-trotting, two-year, era-defining carnival of Americana. But why? From WBEZ Chicago and the Amityville Enquirer, this is Blonde Ambition: was Taylor Swift a CIA plant?”
Walking up Wembley Way last Tuesday evening, towards the final stop on the European leg of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, my partner turned to me. “You’re going to write about this on your Medium, aren’t you?”
Swift’s tour has long been a source of interest to me. Back in October last year I wrote a blog about how the tour was a carnival of commercialism, on a possibly unprecedented scale. “I’m calling it,” I wrote, at the time. “Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” is the most lucrative cultural product in human history.”
Historians can, and will, bicker about that sort of claim for some time. Certainly it’s now established that the tour is the most lucrative, of its kind, in history — undoubtedly overtaking Elton John’s endless farewell jamboree. Whether that, plus the success of the theatrical and streaming release of the concert movie (plus the intense marketing push it has provided for the re-issues of Swift’s entire back catalogue) constitute “the most lucrative cultural product in human history” is a tricky thing to prove, even for the most accomplished of accountants. But I stand by it. And I certainly stood by it as I walked up to Wembley Stadium, amidst a frenzied sea of cowboy hats and shimmering, glittery dresses.
The last time I’d been at Wembley was a few months earlier, to see my hometown football team, Crawley Town, crush Crewe Alexandra 2–0 in the League 2 play-off final (the only other time I’ve visited the stadium was during the 2012 Olympics, for South Korea vs Gabon, which ended 0–0). 33,341 people turned out for the play-off final; more than 92,000 people showed up to each of Swift’s eight Wembley shows. My ticket for the play-off final cost me £33; tickets for Swift’s show started at £58 but ran confidently into four-figures. But in the stadium — standing on the sacred turf where the great Liam Kelly recently fired Crawley up the football pyramid — no-one was worrying about the cost. Everyone was just waiting for Blondie.
The US is the world’s second biggest export economy, behind China. Compared with us here in the UK, they have a diverse portfolio of exports — from genuine manufacturing to commodities and financial services. But nowhere on any visualisation is there a box saying TAYLOR SWIFT. Maybe she’s part of ‘travel and tourism’ (which constitutes 2.76%) or maybe there’s a tiny ‘entertainment’ box somewhere, but generally analysis of export economies struggle to grapple with soft power. Especially here in the UK, where, other than the big ol’ ICT box, our biggest export is ‘gold’. Gold. We produce a negligible amount of gold here in the UK, so this is all to do with gold reserves and commodity trading and that sort of bullshit that is basically meta-exporting. There is no box saying “Dua Lipa” or “Ed Sheeran”, “Harry Styles” or “Adele” — all of which do as much for Britain’s reputation, internationally, as British Airways, Rolls-Royce or AstraZeneca.
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has taken her around the US in a Nascar-like series of donuts. She will return there, shortly, before the tour finishes in Vancouver, of all places, in December. It has been a long run. Beginning in Glendale back in March 2023, the Greatest Show on Earth headed south of the border in August, running through South America before hopping over to Oceania and Asia. Then onto Europe. (At present, she has not performed a date in Africa, which, alongside Antarctica, remains a continent yet to conquer). It is a global conquest, the sort that only America can do.
And this is because America, above all else, understands the power of cultural monopoly. They understand culture as an exportable commodity. They understand that culture must be consumable to be consumed. The greatest American books — things like The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird — are taught in middle-schools. The greatest American plays — things like A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman — are put on by am-dram companies around the country. It is all built to be accessible, to be consumed again and again through the generations.
And this is the landscape in which the Disney corporation emerges — a megalithic media leviathan, which now owns everything from Star Wars and Marvel to The Simpsons and National Geographic. It is culture built for consumption, boosted by a country that knows that Ralph Wiggum’s salience in pan-continental markets increases their global hegemony. This is a country that can make the summer’s №1 movie — co-starring a Canadian and Australian, with two Brits as villains — a symbol of Americana. While everyone else diminishes — while the UK seems ambivalent about developing any cultural product, other than Harry Potter (which is now an American product, really) — the second American century continues in earnest.
And Taylor Swift is a perfect ambassador for this sort of Americana.
She is the hegemon’s hegemon. And there, last week, amidst a mob of 92,000 Brits who knew every lyric before it was spoken, she had an unmistakeable aura. America, the great republic, has crowned her their Queen. As the Eras Tour draws to a close, analysts are already asking “what next?”. What do you do after the most commercially successful tour in history — one that spanned your entire, decades long, career — that could possible replicate that euphoria? Do you get back into an album-tour, album-tour, album-tour cycle? Or do you retreat, bide your time, wait for the energy of anticipation to re-emerge?
Taylor Swift is America’s top soft power cultural asset right now. The incentives for her to take a break after the exhausting schedule of the past two years are entirely in the minds of worried fans. America is not a burnout economy; it’s a burn-through economy. And in a world where there is increasing nervousness about technological, trade and — possibly — military conflict between the US and China, Swift and Spiderman and Fortnite are cultural ambassadors, ensuring that the 21st century continues with America on top.
Taylor Swift may or may not be a CIA stooge. She may or may not have been set-up by the Biden administration to proselytise late-stage capitalism for the masses. She may or not be in secret negotiations with the Harris camp about Mandarin translations of Speak Now (泰勒的版本). But one thing is for sure: the Eras Tour has shown that with the willing collusion of both the state and the private market, mass-media cultural products can be as effective in maintaining a global superpower as ill-advised deployments in the Middle East.
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