Eras today, gone tomorrow: Brat summer and Swift success

This is an extended version of an article written by me and published by Thred. You can find the Thred online version here: https://thred.com/culture/opinion-the-reinvention-of-taylor-swift-is-totally-unrelatable/

 If, like me, you also find yourself chronically online, then you might agree that summer 2024 felt like a divisive one. Gen Z seemed to be either snorting keys and smoking at raves like Charli XCX, or donning our cowboy boots and fighting our way through hoardes of 14 year olds and their parents in order to catch a glimpse of Taylor Swift. 

Whether you were entrenched in Brat summer, or revelling in the nostalgia of the Eras tour, the two pop stars dominated public attention.  

Grossing over $2 billion in tickets sales, Taylor Swift’s tour lasted almost two years. It consisted of 149 three hour long shows in 51 cities, across five continents. As the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, until recently, attention wasn’t the only thing the country-pop star was drawing in. 

While Charli’s moment in the limelight (literally) lacked the longevity of a tour spanning almost two decades of Swift’s career, her dance album Brat hit with a vengeance. 

2024 was the summer that everyone and their mum learnt the viral Apple dance. Young people returned to nightclubs and took up smoking again. Lime green became not just a viable outfit choice, but also the branding of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. For the first time since the Covid epidemic, it almost felt like youth culture was going back to normal. 

[https://x.com/charli_xcx/status/1815182384066707861]

But, this was all more than a year ago. 

No longer is internet discourse filled with people passionately making their case for Red over Reputation (obviously) or arguing over which celebrity looks sexier with a cig between their lips. Brat summer became CMAT summer which then morphed into Manchild mayhem.  On and on rolled the trends, as they do by their very nature.  

Despite the inevitability of Brat summer’s demise, foreshadowed by the reliable changing of the seasons, Charli couldn’t help but be slightly bitter about it. The Brat album cover rotted, yes like an apple ‘right to the core’, to coincide with the final show of Charli’s tour. While supposedly a marketing tactic, it didn’t make the album any better. 

[https://www.reddit.com/r/popheads/comments/1kfrl5c/charli_xcx_has_once_again_changed_the_brat/]

Charli has, however, much like a bad nicotine habit, managed to sustain her fans’ adoration. Through celebrity collaborations and a raunchy brand deal with fashion designer YSL, she still induces regular confessions of love and marriage proposals, mostly from the gays and the theys. 

[https://www.instagram.com/p/DQAFE4iDzhQ/?hl=en&img_index=1]

Unfortunately, Swift hasn’t been so lucky. 

Even during the first leg of her record-long tour, Swift upset fans with her dating choices when it was rumoured that she was dating 1975’s front man Matty Healy. Then, just before summer 2024 she released The Tortured Poets Department, which fans speculated was a rumination on the pair’s (possible) brief romance. 

At the time of its release, and as Swift incorporated it into her tour, TTPD was perhaps her most polemic work. Some people loved it, seeing it as an extension of the literary drama explored in her sister albums Folklore and Evermore. For earlier fans too, it was a return to the romantic melancholia of Swift’s original break up albums. It provided a wealth of tracks to belt out, now that many of us have actually experienced the heart break the country music star sang about when we were in our teens.

For others, however, it was lazy. Too overshadowed by the controversy of the Swift’s love life to be relatable. Too lacking, too, in the characteristic country twang that Swift had otherwise been able to revisit through the re-release of several of her earlier albums. 

Yet, if the criticism for TTPD seemed harsh, Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, released only a couple of weeks ago, makes the star’s previous album look practically irreproachable in comparison. 

Released immediately in full, albeit with the characteristic easter-eggs dotted around beforehand, reviewers have slammed TLS, some of whom were previously die-hard Swifties. 

[https://youtu.be/Hj9NMCLe-Mg?si=gLSLD571QtUCICaz]

In an effort to regard TLS as a piece of art rather than autobiography, I begrudge condemning Swift through her lyrics alone. Yet, it’s hard to ignore songs like CANCELLED!, in which she mocks accusations that she “girl-boss(ed) too close to the sun” or “made a joke only a man could”. Once again, Swift is subscribing to a sexism-specific victimhood in order to justify her extravagant wealth. 

Meanwhile, a 2023 study indicated that around half of her US fanbase have a household income below $50,000. Nor are these statistics indicative purely of just women since, according to CBS news, almost half of her US fans are men. 

For someone like Taylor Swift to claim that she’s been somehow disadvantaged, because she’s a woman, is preposterous. Rather, her ability to, like many other female celebrities, successfully monetise her femininity is due less to her talent, and more to her relatively well-placed starting point. 

Swift is the daughter of already wealthy parents, and her dad reportedly bought a stake in Big Machine Records when the Swift family moved to Nashville to support Taylor’s career. If she is girlbossing ‘too close to the sun’ then, it’s because her father’s wealth gave her the opportunity to be up there. 

While most Swifties will never have the Reputation Swift complains of having had slandered through celebrity criticism, many of us will know how it feels to want someone we desire to desire us back.  Likewise, it’s highly improbable that we’ll have to rerelease our work to claim compensation on our creative assets. But at least the various iterations of (Taylor’s Version) gave us an opportunity to revel in the nostalgia of our soundtracked youth, contained within the byproducts of those particular displays of capitalism. 

By contrast, TLS offers little more than clumsily constructed lyrics, a poorly executed performative reading of one of literature’s greatest and most renowned playwrights, and melodies which are less catchy than they are boring. Perhaps worst of all are the unintelligent and not-so-subtle references to Travis Kelce’s dick. 

Critics have torn into the 30 something pop-star’s latest release to call her out as a privileged celebrity. Swift herself has batted away the Bad Blood. Citing the number one rule of showbusiness, she said: “if it’s the first week of my album release, and you are saying either my name, or my album title, you’re helping”. 

And this isn’t just about the What About Me Effect either; Swift herself has commented that, as an entertainer, her job is to “hold up a mirror”. If her music is no longer providing her fans with a relatable listening experience, it’s because she’s priortised the money her career brings in over the fans who’ve made it possible. 

[https://youtu.be/UV5hO7zc_sQ?si=LtAHBJneISbLYMvD]

Swift may think she’s beating the critics at their own game. However, her blatant focus on financial remuneration over fan connection does little to dispel the subjective reality that this album is just another lazy effort to extract as much money as possible from the consumer market. Selling more than  4 million equivalent album units in the first week alone, the pop star will have no trouble maintaining her billionaire status. 

There are a multitude of factors, both personal and political and varying in gravitas, which have warranted such harsh criticism of TLS. Not least amongst them are Swift’s silence on the genocide in Palestine, and the threat her legal team made to sue 22 year old student Jack Sweeney who tracked her private jet in order to expose the environmental impacts of the vessel’s carbon emissions. 

However, perhaps the most ironic component of Swift’s fall from grace is the way in which she herself has instigated the demise of her own career. Although the Eras tour my have been the highest grossing tour of all time, arguably, this is where it all began. 

By chasing fame and fortune, Taylor Swift has turned herself into a trend, and lost the following that made her who she was. Undoubtedly, the idea to encourage her fans to dress as one of her eras for the tour was a clever marketing strategy. And it paid off. Each show was sold out and lots of people (me included, twice) paid her lots of money to perform hits from her impressively extensive discography. 

[https://www.instagram.com/p/Cv4e0unI1Y4/?hl=en]

But the success of such an initiative comes with a catch. The temporally and stylistically specific distinctions of each era lack the longevity earned by artists who’ve connected with passionate fans across generations.  

By dividing her career into different eras, Swift encouraged people to self-categorise. This has meant that now, more than ever in the span of Taylor Swift’s fame, people have a tendency to affiliate themselves with one specific era in her career, rather than loving her entire discography equally and appreciating each new release as a piece of art in its own right. 

Like with the self-categorisation perpetuated through fleeting and fickle internet trends, in wanting to gain fame and fortune, Taylor Swift has turned herself into a trend rather than an artist. 

And the thing with trends? They don’t last forever. Eventually, inevitably, people get bored of them and move on. 

Never has the name Swift been more appropriate. 

TLS has been criticised by many. Apart from the fact that it lacks the endearing country innocence of her first albums, the artful yet poppy lyricism of her mid-career work, and the surrounding celebrity/poetic wannabe characterisation of her more recent releases, it’s just bad. 

But the biggest mistake Swift has made in painting herself as an unrelatable showgirl: it just doesn’t fit with any of the versions of herself that Swift gave us to choose from. 

Now that, as she’s made clear she sees as a guiding principle, is showbusiness.