Do Swifties really care about the music?

I didn’t understand Taylor Swift fans until I married a football supporter. The pop star’s intense fandom had confused me for quite a while. Her songs seemed bland and formulaic, her image wholesome, and her interiority – at least what we are allowed to see of it – too shallow for such vigorous and repeated delving.

Swift’s arc, from cute Nashville country star to billionaire pop priestess, is one of total cultural domination. Her blockbuster tour Eras has altered the local economies of numerous cities, her romance with American football star Travis Kelce is covered non-stop in the media, and the release schedule of the entire music industry shifts around her album drops. All of that is propped up by a fan base who are known both for their fierce devotion to their queen (which sometimes includes the online harassment and bullying of her critics) and for their financial investment in her many limited-edition releases, expensive concert tickets and VIP meet and greets.

Yet when her fans prove their loyalty with social media reaction videos, I’ve noticed that few of them seem to be having a good time. It’s common to see video clips of young women sobbing to Swift’s songs on TikTok and Instagram – here they are at brunch overwhelmed by a favourite song, here they are at her concerts making sure their tear-streaked faces are still shot from flattering angles, here they are yelling at anyone who dares to criticise her music. I have loved a lot of musicians in my lifetime, some ardently, but I didn’t recognise the behaviour.

I had simply misunderstood the category. What her followers resembled was not so much the listeners of other bands but the fans of sports franchises. A boozed-up Taylor superfan with smudged mascara threatening the life of someone who dares to prefer the music of a different pop star is of the same class as the guys in my Philadelphia neighbourhood trying to flip over a car because it has a sticker for a rival team. The sports fan is defined by their suffering, and that team gives their suffering meaning. That’s why all the Taylor Swift fans were filming themselves screaming and crying. The more they weep, the more they must love.

Swift’s fan base is fairly diverse when it comes to age, income group and gender – although, according to a 2023 survey, almost 75 per cent of her American fans identified themselves as white. Her most visible and vociferous fans online are definitely young women. In a similar way, football attracts followers from the whole spectrum of a city, but the most prominent (and often problematic) group tend to be young men. In that case they are hooligans. In this, they are Swifties. It is the young and unattached that are most likely to have the disposable income and leisure time needed to dedicate themselves fully to their object of adoration.

Creating chaos, sharing trauma

When we first moved in together, I was confused by my husband’s loyalty to Santa Fe, a Colombian football club from his hometown of Bogotá. There were certainly moments of happiness with the advancement in a tournament here or triumph over their rivals there, but these were fleeting in comparison to the agony and distress the club seemed to cause him.

Why would someone love something that caused them so much pain? Over time, I figured it out. It wasn’t so much that the team caused his pain as it was that the team provided him the arena for externalising his pain and understanding it. The pain was always going to be there: the homesickness of migration, the frustration of competition in an unstable job market, the difficulty in living a life of integrity in a system built to reward the wealthy and the powerful above everyone else.

But what his investment in Santa Fe gave him – and it wasn’t just watching the games but also keeping up on staffing decisions and coaching strategies and the goings-on of other members of the league via blogs and podcasts and forums and social media –was a catharsis and a community with similar sufferers. He could commiserate with other disappointed fans, he could rail against the dirty oil money flooding the sport, he could find relief from his own difficulties by projecting these bad feelings onto this team. Conversely, his faith in them could be faith in himself. Even when things looked bleak in the next match or the next tournament or next season the team could turn it around.

There is a similar dynamic happening with Taylor Swift fans, as they bond parasocially with their pop princess. The complaints of the average song might seem, well, adolescent – her feelings get hurt by a friend’s betrayal, the usual heartbreak over some man, feeling like a weirdo and an outcast – but that’s what passes for suffering among her most visible wealthy white audience base, or at least it’s the type that appeals to the lowest common denominator.
And like sports fans, her base rallies around their shared pains and traumas, comparing stories of rejection and their fears of being misunderstood as they lip sync or just cry on videos they post to Instagram and TikTok. And they pore over every managerial decision made by the Taylor Swift team, from her dating choices to her costume changes to her private jet usage, bickering over her male suitors like they were potential transfers from other teams.

In Philadelphia, where my boyfriend and I live, high-profile games in tournaments require the city and its emergency departments to prepare for rioting, whether the team wins or loses. With Swifties there may not be destruction of property, but the fan base is now notorious for creating emotional distress, including sending death threats to music critics who are brave enough to pan her work. Recently, fans sent pictures of Kurt Cobain’s dead body to his former bandmate Dave Grohl after he called her out for using recorded music during her live shows. Creating chaos becomes a community activity, a way of bonding and reinforcing group cohesion.

Who benefits?

It’s unfortunate that all this investment of money, time, imagination and intellectual capacity just leads to a massive transfer of wealth. The businesses behind sports teams and pop stars prey on their fans’ devotion for their private enrichment – whether it’s through the subsidies teams get from cities’ taxpayers for the new stadiums or more directly through the merch, limited editions, inflated ticket prices or meet and greets. Swift has given to charities in every city on her Eras tour, but let’s look at the overall picture. The billionaire class has expanded within entertainment, sucking up wealth from fans that might otherwise have gone to other forms of art and culture.

There has been a lot of talk about the development of “standom” in popular culture – if a fan is someone who enjoys and appreciates the output of a particular team or artist, a “stan” is someone who bases a significant part of their identity on the media they consume. The term is based on the Eminem song “Stan” about a fan who stalks the rapper and ultimately kills himself. It’s not just Swift – Beyoncé, Star Wars, Harry Potter and Disney all have sizeable audiences that organise their lives around their devotional object. Many people benefit from these parasocial relationships, but not necessarily the stan (even if they may believe so). As a young woman profiled in The Cut said about ending a friendship over differing opinions of Swift’s music, “Taylor Swift has remained a constant source of comfort and understanding, while my friend has become a distant memory.”

This article is from New Humanist’s autumn 2024 issue. Subscribe now.