So two months ago, I was the guy who dared to say the unspeakable: Taylor Swift’s overwhelming popularity was in some grand sense a sign of societal decline. While the blunt headline on my column got people’s attention — getting denounced by British tabloids wasn’t exactly on my bucket list — as per usual, people missed the substantive forest for the clickbait trees.
In the last year or so, Swift’s popularity reached such a crescendo that a great many of America’s self-styled intellectuals, who are nothing if not thirsty for cultural relevance, were falling all over themselves to praise a woman whose artistry is finely tuned to appeal to not particularly precocious teenagers. Indeed, there was a rash of think pieces that had this off-putting and very meta overtone of cultural critics working overtime to convince themselves of the truth of what they were writing.
And so, the basic point of my piece was pretty simple: Do not ascribe this much cultural power to a figure that hasn’t earned it or deserves it! It was stupid to read the NYT treat a thoroughly middling songwriter like the second coming of Bob Dylan. And this obnoxious treatment was on top of the fact that Swift is otherwise sucking up every available pocket of pop culture oxygen. It seemed inevitable that a backlash would arrive — even if it’s fair to say Swift didn’t necessarily ask for all this undue attention.
Considering anyone who’s dipped a toe in social media in the
