A Long List of Ex-Lovers (Part II)
This is the second part of my investigation into the history and motivation of Taylor Swift’s auto-fiction marketing strategy, specifically around celebrity ex-boyfriends. If you haven’t yet, this essay will make more sense if you go and read part one first.
I
Two Sundays ago, Taylor Swift encountered something that must have been incredibly unfamiliar to her: an annoyed, unimpressed audience. In her acceptance speech for her thirteenth Grammy Award, this one for Best Pop Vocal Album, Taylor told the audience of music industry elites at the Crypto.com Arena that she had completed a secret surprise new album, The Tortured Poets Department, which would come out in just two months. Perhaps expecting gasps and rapturous cheers, she instead mostly got crickets.
Many audience members were perhaps already in an ungenerous spirit to Taylor, either because of the widely forecasted impending victory of her Midnights for Album of the Year over more critically acclaimed industry darlings like boygenius’s the Record and SZA’s SOS, because of her decision to opt-out of performing live at the event (unlike most of her fellow nominees, although in fairness, none of them had four consecutive stadium shows in Tokyo scheduled 72 hours later), or simply because of the current gravity of her star power, which by its nature seems to eclipse everything and make every event she attends revolve around her, whether it’s an award show, an NFL game, or a weekday evening at any one of the West Village’s finest bucatini establishments.
In any case, the audience’s tepid reaction to her album announcement was striking. “My brand new album…” Taylor said, pausing for effect and highlighting the room’s complete silence at this ostensibly shocking news. The broadcast briefly cut to a wide reverse shot of the audience that revealed exactly two people standing and cheering, amidst a sea of nonplussed sitters. “This was a rare misstep, announcing the album during her speech. You could feel it in the room.” Puck News co-founder and reporter Matt Belloni told his guests on his podcast The Town. “Nobody was really into it. It just felt like, this is the last person who needs that stage for promotion — at least in the room. She’s the biggest music star on the planet right now. Like, give it a rest.”
It’s always fascinating when the millennium’s savviest curator and marketer of her brand makes a public relations mistake like this. And it raises the question of whether it truly was a mistake at all, or whether Taylor simply was targeting her speech at a different audience: the superfans.
“Thank you to the members of the recording academy,” Taylor said once she got her bearings onstage, after an uncharacteristic moment of awkward and uncertain silence. “But I know that the way that the recording academy voted was a direct reflection of the passion of the fans, so I want to say thank you to the fans.” She seems to have hit her mark. Here are a few clips of people who were decidedly untepid in their reactions.
How Taylor chooses to announce and market her new album has low stakes, at least in a vacuum (as I wrote last week, I think the listeners will be rewarded most if they tune out the marketing completely and focus on the songs as free-standing pillars of high art). But to the extent that this is an indicator of Taylor’s priorities, it’s concerning to me that she is focusing on service to the hyperventilating superfans at the expense of the rest of us.
To be clear, I’m not saying that she should focus on the unconverted general public instead. To the extent that such people still exist, they are probably too deeply entrenched in their opposition or indifference to her, and anyway no artist, not even Taylor Swift, can be all things to all people. But she should continue to serve me, and people like me. If you’re reading this, I hope I’ve proven to you that I’m a pretty massive Taylor Swift fan. I saw Eras twice, have read a staggering amount of coverage of her career, and am currently, right now, writing this very blog, which brings my word count of writing about her to well over ten thousand. I am not the most devoted fan I know (you know who you are), but there’s a good chance that I’m the most devoted fan YOU know, and you probably know a lot of Taylor Swift fans. But there are multiple levels above me, and at the very top, there are the superfans, the “Level 10 Swifties,” that you see in those TikToks above, convulsing and hyperventilating in a way that a reasonable person might consider medically concerning.
I can understand why it would be tempting for Taylor to focus on these people. In many ways they’ve earned it, her attention will mean more to them than to the rest of us, and most of all, they must just be so soothing to her ego. But it’s a trap. I’ve seen what happens when a beloved, singularly dominant brand reaches an outrageous, unprecedented peak, and then focuses too much of its energy rewarding the sickos who got them there. After all, I was once a huge huge fan of Marvel movies.
II
To refresh your memory, in the summer of 2018, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had reached an unprecedented cultural apex, thanks to a run of consistently excellent and wildly successful “Phase Three” films over the previous two years, which included Captain America: Civil War ($1,153,296,293 box office, 90% “Tomatometer” on Rotten Tomatoes), Thor: Ragnorak ($853,983,911, 93%, one of my mom’s favorite movies of all time), Spiderman: Homecoming ($880,166,924, 92%), and Black Panther ($1,349,597,973, 96%, nominated for a freaking Academy Award for Best Picture). With this run, Marvel had defied gravity, by increasing output without any sacrifice in quality and success. If anything, these movies surpassed their predecessors, reaching unprecedentedly broad swaths of audiences across the country and the world, while also maintaining a high standard of quality and receiving critical acclaim from the snobby media elite. They also created and fostered a class of crazy superfans, who spent hours on reddit threads debating frame-by-frame analysis of the latest trailer or post-credits sequence.
By 2018, as they rolled out the climactic crossover event The Avengers: Infinity War ($2,048,359,754, the sixth highest gross of all time, inexplicably only 85% on Rotten Tomatoes despite being perfect), and as Marvel grew more ubiquitous, the crazy population correspondingly grew too. The week before Infinity War’s release, the AMC 25 in Times Square devoted two screens to Marvel marathons, truly depraved 31-hour screenings of the eleven previously released Marvel movies plus Infinity War, shown back-to-back with no breaks. After all, Marvel’s primary innovation was the concept of an interconnected universe, where events in one superhero franchise subtly affected events in another one. Infinity War was slated to feature all of the superheroes at once, so the devotees felt they needed to study all eleven movies in order to fully prepare. AMC 25 sold 500 tickets to this marathon, at $75 each, and fans flew in from across the country. And this wasn’t even the only theater offering this! The linked article alleges that all told, at least a thousand fans were crazy enough to partake in this endeavor.
A Marvel executive could have looked at this level of devotion, of religious fervor usually reserved for recently converted drug addicts, and reasonably decided that he could sell these people anything. “As long as we dangle the promise of future crossover events like The Avengers, these people will feel they have to see every single thing we release, even if it’s not our best work. After all, a thousand of them just pulled all-nighters in windowless rooms so that they could watch Doctor Strange and Iron Man 2 again1. They have an insatiable hunger for this stuff, nothing will ever be enough, and we need to feed them as much as possible as quickly as we can.”
And feed them they did. After 2019’s Avengers: Endgame (the highest-grossing movie of all time, full-stop), Marvel pivoted hard to TV, fattening up their parent company’s shiny new streaming service Disney+ with as much content as possible.2 In 2019, they released three films, Captain Marvel, Endgame, and Spiderman: Far from Home, and no television shows, for a total of 7 hours and 14 minutes of content runtime. In 2021, Marvel also released three films3, Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, and Spiderman: No Way Home, totalling in 7 hours and 16 minutes, and debut seasons of five new Disney+ shows, Wanda/Vision, the Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, What If…?, and Hawk-Eye. Each season had six to eight episodes, each episode was between thirty to fifty minutes, and if you add it all up you get 1,493 minutes of television content. It might be helpful to know that there are exactly 1440 minutes in a 24-hour day.
In 2018, it took superfans 31 hours to watch the previous ten years of Marvel’s film output. Now, with seven hours of films and 24 hours of television, superfans were expected to absorb another 31 hours of completely new content, all in one year. This would be like the NFL reacting to last week’s record breaking Super Bowl ratings by scheduling ten more Super Bowls this year, one per month, and expecting that fans wouldn’t lose interest.
Marvel could not maintain quality at this pace. Every aspect of these shows suffered, but it was most pronounced in the visual effects department, where the few VFX studios able to create the kind of cutting edge visuals that these shows required soon became so overworked that they missed deadlines, cut corners, vocally complained, and eventually put out unconvincing, obviously substandard CGI shots. In one interview, Taika Watiti, the director of Thor: Love and Thunder, publicly mocked the CGI in his own movie!
Furthermore, by opening the spigot so wide, they made it impossible to sustain the feeling that every component was connected, building towards a climactic crossover, and therefore essential viewing to appreciate the larger plot. There were simply too many moving parts, and they couldn’t figure out how to tie in ten other superhero arcs into each show while keeping each strand internally coherent (in retrospect, it’s kind of a miracle that they were able to do this with five superhero arcs). To compensate, they introduced the concept of the “multiverse,” where everything could take place in parallel universes that might (but might not) interact with each other, which was a clever escape hatch, but reduced the stakes of each individual universe to a crippling extent. Comparing pre-covid and post-covid box office figures are apples and oranges, but by every metric, Marvel is no longer the monocultural hegemon it was five years ago, and it is unclear whether it can ever rebuild its stature. Personally, I have not seen a Marvel movie in theaters in two years, and for the first time since I was nine, I am not eagerly anticipating any of their upcoming releases.
III
Like Marvel in 2018, Taylor has defied gravity for the past eighteen months, scaling up the output without any sign of diminishing returns in either quality or success. She’s released Midnights, plus the re-recorded versions of Speak Now and 1989, which feature seven and five new songs respectively.4 At the same time, she embarked on the highest-grossing music tour of all time, which meant that three nights a week this summer, the internet was flooded with shaky iPhone footage of her singing a new acoustic cover of a deep cut from a previous album, gamely dancing through a wardrobe malfunction, or bravely defending a fan from her security detail by insisting that “she wasn’t doing anything,” between bars of “Bad Blood.” She’s also ramped up her celebrity output, breaking up with her boring, long-term “hidden from the public eye,” boyfriend in favor of a British pop star and then an NFL Super Bowl champion, which placed her on national television nearly every Sunday for the past three months.
Like Marvel, Taylor has superfans that seem to have an insatiable diet for this content. The superfans absolutely love the relationship drama, and their zeal has led to a massive spike in female viewership for the NFL playoffs, and jersey sales for Kansas City Chiefs #87. Like Marvel, Taylor has managed to reach an enormous audience while keeping her standards high winning the critical acclaim of the media and industry elite (it’s the Recording Academy, after all, that awarded her those Grammy’s, even if it is a “reflection of the passion of the fans.”) And like Marvel, as she has reached her peak, she has started to focus her attention on the superfans, ignoring the masses in the audience of the Grammys and in general who begin to grow weary of the unending content onslaught.
Taylor is a generational talent at this stuff, she knows much better than I do about how to make the most of the public eye, when to flood the zone with content and when to retreat into silence to build up intrigue and suspense. But the folks at Marvel seemed like geniuses at this stuff too, until they were blinded by the white-hot passion of their superfans, and I worry that Taylor could be on the verge of falling prey to the same phenomenon.
Using a Grammy speech to announce the surprise new album thrilled the superfans but pissed off the industry elites in the room, who all love Taylor and her music, but found the endless engine of self-promotion tacky in that moment. Tying the album so closely to her real-life, British, tortured poet ex-boyfriend thrills the superfans who get to hunt for easter eggs, consume hundreds of Deux Moi unsourced rumors, and then write elaborate tumblr fan-fic5, but it alienates those of us who have spent the last four years passionately arguing that Taylor Swift is a Mozart-level generational genius who is redefining the medium of songwriting.6 And frankly, the decision to announce a brand new 80-minute album with seventeen new songs this soon after the Speak Now and 1989 re-records (not to mention Midnights), scheduled to be released as soon as possible, serves the “Level 10 Swifties” who will take anything, but overwhelms the only somewhat deranged fans like me. If the backlash builds, if this album does not sell quite as well as its predecessors (a virtual certainty based on basic laws of physics), and if the world decides to run back 2016 and deem her a duplicitous, calculated supervillain once again, it will be because she, like Marvel, focused too much on the craziest fans, and didn’t realize how comparatively few of them there actually were.
On the other hand, it’s also possible that Taylor Swift is, at this juncture, literally incapable of making mistakes, even if my puny mind can’t always fathom what is occurring in real time. It’s possible that The Tortured Poets Department will be the best album of all time, will be the first album ever to sell a trillion units, and will single-handedly heal a broken nation on the verge of societal collapse. Then, I will look pretty stupid.
These movies suck. That was clear from context clues right?
The pandemic obviously had something to do with this. But most of the “Phase Four” Marvel TV shows were in pre-production and production before March of 2020.
Four if you count Black Widow, which I don’t because it was supposed to come out in 2020, and because the rollout was botched so spectacularly that it belongs in its own category
Midnights exists in many forms: the standard edition, the “3 am edition”, the “Lavender edition,” the “till Dawn edition,” and the “Late Night edition.” The full edition taxonomy will make your brain explode but suffice it to say there are at least twenty new songs associated with this album alone.
I just spent the last week listening to “Is It Over Now” (a 1989 vault track) play on repeat on pop music radio, and I’ve become so obsessed with it that I may write an entire blog about its second verse. But that kind of obsession takes time and energy! I can’t be expected to do that seventeen more times in just two months!