Singer and songwriter Taylor Swift was named Time Person of the Year on Wednesday in response to her record-breaking nationwide concert tour.
The accolade, typically reserved for political and business leaders, comes after Swift traveled to more than five dozen cities this year for her “Eras Tour,” featuring music from across her artistic career. The tour has garnered media attention for provoking massive surges in local tourism economies in addition to selling out entire stadiums. The thirty-three-year-old has also released a blockbuster concert film, inspired ten college classes, and caused ticket sales for the Kansas City Chiefs to soar after she started dating tight end Travis Kelce.
“It’s hard to see history when you’re in the middle of it, harder still to distinguish Swift’s impact on the culture from her celebrity, which emits so much light it can be blinding,” an article from Time said. “But something unusual is happening with Swift, without a contemporary precedent. She deploys the most efficient medium of the day, the pop song, to tell her story. Yet over time, she has harnessed the power of the media, both traditional and new, to create something wholly unique: a narrative world, in which her music is just one piece in an interactive, shape-shifting story. Swift is that story’s architect and hero, protagonist and narrator.”
The feature from Time also contended that she joins “rarified company” in the history of popular culture, likening her to Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna. “This was the year she perfected her craft: not just with her music, but in her position as the master storyteller of the modern era,” the article added. “The world, in turn, watched, clicked, cried, danced, sang along, swooned, caravanned to stadiums and movie theaters, let her work soundtrack their lives.”
Swift is nevertheless not without her critics among the ranks of American conservatives. Mark Hemingway, an editor at The Federalist, provoked controversy when he contended that the popularity of the singer marks a “sign of societal decline” as audiences and critics determine that her “narcissistic lyrics and cliched music are a cultural triumph.”
“She has almost wholly pioneered a new genre of what an acquaintance of mine calls the ‘bellyaching about a boyfriend’ song,” Hemingway commented. “Swift is very, very good at serving an audience that has been conditioned to accept less in terms of musical and lyrical sophistication. Look, you can choose to like Taylor Swift, and I concede she’s so good at the exact thing she does that she’s hard to resist in certain contexts. If the occasional three-minute bursts of Swift make you feel good, I won’t deny you that. However, the over-the-top celebration of Swift’s success says volumes about the stagnation of pop culture.”
