She's no antihero
No wonder we all fall for the Taylor Swift love story
© Kensington Palace
- Caroline Frost
Add Untold: The Rise and Rise of Taylor Swift, Miss Americana, The Long Pond Studio Sessions or The Eras Tour to your watchlist.
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I admit I’m a little late to the Taylor Swift party. “What’s the big deal?” I asked my pals as we watched the military band outside Buckingham Palace perform her song Shake It Off when she first brought her Eras tour to these shores in June. “Doesn’t she just write lovelorn songs about her famous ex-boyfriends?”
Well, as it turns out, the deal is big. One friend chaperoned his teenage daughter to a concert in Edinburgh, where the youngster spent two years’ worth of pocket money on a hoodie. Another splashed the cash for two VIP seats – in Portugal! Now, as Swift returns to round off her London season with five nights at Wembley Stadium, we hear more talk of her tour’s effect on Britain’s GDP, how her friendship bracelets if laced together would reach the Moon, and the rumour that the Bank of England is delaying an interest rate shift until she’s departed. So I wonder again, what’s this all about?
Fortunately, there’s a wealth of TV material to get us all up to speed. Netflix documentary Miss Americana offers insight and, crucially, intimate access into Swift’s life. It charts her journey from precocious country singer – corkscrew perm, guitar surgically attached – her crossover to pop and eventual world domination, via marketing genius, personal challenges and apparently tireless creativity. As she says, her storytelling is her unique thing, and it’s made her the first female billionaire through music alone. The figures are staggering (the Eras tour has reportedly earned her $1bn while there were more than 300 million streams in one day for her last album). But, increasingly with fractured media and the decline of music journalism, you need docs like these to tell the story. Watching studio Taylor – ponytail, trainers – inventing intimate lyrics on the fly, then cutting to stadium Taylor belting out the same song to thousands is a wonder to behold and testament to her talent to make the personal universal.
Her storytelling is her unique thing, and it’s made her the first female billionaire through music alone
Over on Disney+, you can watch the Eras concert from the budget comfort of your sofa, and for those wanting a deeper dive into her musical process, Disney also has The Long Pond Studio Sessions where Swift joins two collaborators in a barn to record her stripped-down album, Folklore.
Noam Galai/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management
Without the streamers’ deep pockets or access to anyone remotely near the travelling circus, Channel 4 delves into the currents caused by any Taylor toe in the water. I’m reminded of the millennium bug, or just the stroke of the new century: it didn’t really matter that nothing monumental occurred, the fact that so many people treated it with reverence, proposing, divorcing, buying plane tickets, changing lives, was significant alone. In Channel 4’s Untold: The Rise and Rise of Taylor Swift, we meet the superfans, including one who boasts, “She’s all I ever talk about, all I ever think about”. This person is 27 (!), but she’s not alone. Another is given an MRI that reveals how many emotional and visual neurones are being fired by listening to their favourite artist. The results are on a scale akin to a religious experience or, as one academic puts it, “They light up like a Christmas tree.”
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Just think if politicians, or worse, could bottle that. Fortunately, Swift tells us in the Netflix doc, “My entire moral code is a need to be thought of as good. To do the right thing.” We see that with her donations to UK food banks and with her gracious response to the unspeakable tragedy in Southport last month. All in all, there are far worse things, and people, my friend’s daughter could be spending her pocket money on.
Authors
Caroline Frost
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