In an event only slightly less inevitable than the rising of the sun, Taylor Swift has been named Time’s Person of the Year. It is difficult to remember, or even conceive of, the last time a cultural figure felt as inescapable or as invincible as Swift has in the past year, breaking record after record—many of them previously set by her—on her way to becoming a Forbes-certified billionaire. Economies rose, ratings spiked, the entire movie industry took notes. The very idea that the world could be united in its love for, or even hatred of, a single phenomenon seemed as much a relic as dial-up internet, but it turns out there’s one exception. Monoculture still exists, and its name is Taylor Swift.
Person of the Year—a title, one is obligated to point out, previously awarded to such notable influencers as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin—is not, presumably, an accolade one is allowed to refuse, but Swift chose to embrace it, giving the magazine her first in-depth interview in years.
(The Travis Kelce quotes alone will keep SwiftTok busy for weeks.) The coronation is almost superfluous, redounding more to Time’s significance, and sales figures, than to Swift’s, but it feels like a fitting capstone to a year when even those inclined to resist her ubiquity finally gave up trying.
So, congrats, Taylor. But also: Watch your step? The laws of cultural physics require that a boom is followed by a backlash, and the higher the pedestals to which Swift ascends, the greater the potential fall to earth. Even in 2023, she dodged plenty of bullets, from dating an accused racist to a fan dying at one of her shows, and yet nothing seemed to stick. When the rerecorded 1989 was rereleased in October, my social media lit up with angry fans who felt that it was an inferior betrayal, underthought and sloppily recorded. But it turned out to be the first Taylor’s Version to outsell the original, surpassing the record for first-week sales it set in 2014. Even when she makes a misstep, she still strides away the victor. She can do no wrong, even when she does.
In the 2020 documentary Miss Americana, a 29-year-old Swift mused on the way female pop stars start to lose their power once they turn 30. It’s hard to remember in this “Eras”-defined era, but she originally had only a handful of headlining shows planned for that year, including two on each U.S. coast. (RIP, “Lover Fest.”) Instead, at age 33, Swift has had a “Jesus year” that has found her ascending to almost godlike heights, showcasing her catalog at Springsteen-like lengths and still leaving fans with plenty of surprise-song FOMO. Whether live or in movie theaters, Swift’s crowds have been so enthusiastic they’ve threatened to drown her out, and yet they’re obsessively attentive to every minor alteration, whether in lyrics or costumes or choreography.
Still, the center cannot hold, right? Can we keep this up for another year of “Eras” tour dates? Can she? No one long-range plans better than the self-proclaimed “mastermind,” but even she is running low on tricks. The cheat code of using rerecords to goose the promotional cycle between new releases is two albums shy of running its course, and while Midnights racked up plenty of Grammy nominations, up to and including album of the year, a triumph there is far from ensured. Then again, maybe a defeat is just what she needs. After all, it’s widely expected that the next album Swift will revisit is Reputation, her 2017 poison-pen letter to the haters and the losers. Coming from an artist who’s so definitively on top of the world, its back-from-the-dead assertions might feel a bit off-key. (Not only can the old Taylor come to the phone right now, she’s got her own chunk of the set list.) But give Swift something to push back against, and she might find a whole new world to conquer.
