I receive an email informing me that they are looking for the “biggest Taylor Swift fan to offer him the pack further insane and exclusive to the world.” With that heading it occurs to me that it could be a parody of The World Today. But no: a very central Madrid hotel offers two days of all-inclusive accommodation in its Presidential Suite for a couple, with two “VIP box tickets to the Taylor Swift concert (on) May 30” and little details like “colored lipstick Taylor.” Cost: 30,000 euros. Does it seem very expensive to you? Why, they can stay in one of the establishment’s smaller suites: the same treatment there only costs 22,000 euros.
Mmmm, The message seems directed at a male client: he believed that Taylor’s audience was mostly female. I go to my favorite observer, the neighborhood newsstand. He has the pulse of the market: right now he sells — “they are saturating the market” — a dozen monographs of the singer, in English and Spanish. He explains to me that they especially attract girls, although there are some ardent boys. I tell him about the hotel offer and he grimaces: “They’re not exactly flush with money. They usually come with their mother, who helps select and ends up paying.”
They are known as swifties. They identify with her youthfulness: Taylor is now 34 years old but she looks more tender than she did when she was starting out, hidden under a cascade of curly blonde hair, pure Nashville aesthetic. That has been Swift’s master plan: to evolve from country to rock, folk, indie and electronic music, leading to that great cauldron that is universal pop. A drift not at all improvised: during the past decade, he even hired the (expensive) services of the Swedish King Midas, Max Martin, as producer and co-writer.
For the swifties, functions as an older sister and, wow, as an object of desire. In more countercultural times, she would have been viewed with suspicion: she cannot say that she suffered for her art. After the inevitable beginner stumbles, everything worked out for her: daughter of a prosperous family, who moved to the country capital to facilitate her vocation (her father even invested in Big Machine Records, the record label that eventually signed Taylor). But the story emphasizes what happened when she broke up with Big Machine; After losing her first six albums, she decided to re-record them like the Taylor’s version, as the exclusivity rights of the aforementioned record company expired. It is difficult for me to think of a case of such zeal in the defense of his work by a triumphant artist.
However, Taylor Swift’s central argument is the connection between her repertoire and a love life, occasionally amplified by the media. Her intimate diary materializes in songs that are supposed to reflect her expectations and anxieties. The miracle consists in the idea that Taylor maintains a one-on-one contact with the millions of swiftieswho are expected to decode each stanza.
A hyper-professional team is in charge of maintaining the flame with a merchandising overwhelming plus the spread of every numerical record and every romantic pairing (also controlling, I suspect, Taylor’s numerous Wikipedia entries). I wouldn’t be surprised if they monitored the satisfaction of the couple who will pay 30,000 euros for the version deluxe from the Swift Experience.
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