So How Do You Really Feel about Taylor Swift?

On the last day of school this June, my kid was in a crowd of his classmates as they streamed out the doors of their elementary school, backpacks loaded with their stuff from the year, Freezies sticky in their hands. As we waved goodbye to the teachers, the PA system that broadcasts the morning announcements blared a familiar percussion line into the air. The kids looked up. “Taylor Swift!”

It was “Shake It Off.” Their song. Sure, it’s been 10 years since the American singer-songwriter released the memorable bop from her 2014 album 1989, but that didn’t matter to the six-year-olds dancing on the blacktop. It was the song some of them performed at the talent show that spring, the song to which they knew all the words.

In an era where a stratified media ecosystem means that we’re rarely (if ever) tuned to the same channel, Swift has emerged an unlikely champion of mass culture.

She started out as a teenage country performer before pivoting to pop music, and her catalogue runs across formative years of her life from age 16 to present day (she is 34). Part of the wide-ranging appeal of her music is that Swift’s songwriting positions her repeatedly and relatably as an under-appreciated yet self-assured underdog whose best qualities may not be apparent to outsiders and potential haters, but there’s fun and freedom in paying them no mind.

Swift’s capacity to speak directly, perhaps uncannily, to the interior lives of her listeners has produced a devoted fanbase who feel seen by the empathy and secret meaning of songs like 2024’s “Down Bad” and 2019’s “Cruel Summer.”

She sings in a register that many listeners can reach themselves. She’s glamorously costumed in her performances, but above all, her public persona, right down to her signature red lipstick, is exceptionally accessible — maddeningly so to her critics.

People of all stripes can see themselves in Swift. And with a finely-tuned business acumen (she’s a “one-woman stimulus package,” writes Olivia Horn in Pitchfork), she reflects their vulnerabilities and desires back to them.

All of this has helped Swift punch through a cratering mediascape, producing a shared experience of pop music on an economic, social and cultural scale that is virtually peerless.

Now a billionaire global phenomenon, Swift’s two-year international Eras Tour closes with a three-night performance at BC Place stadium in Vancouver next weekend, a few days before her 35th birthday.

Swift grew up alongside the meteoric expansion of her influence as a pop star. And her listeners grew up with her too: many of her young fans consider her music crucial to transitional chapters in their lives.

A teenage fan I interviewed this week first heard her music in Grade 1, when “Blank Space” from 1989 played over the morning announcements at her Vancouver elementary school.

“I remember singing them over and over to myself the entire day. That night I begged my dad to buy me the record with 'Blank Space' on it, and the next day he brought me home a crisp vinyl copy of 1989. I would listen to it every day without fail, dancing in my living room to ‘Shake It Off’ and performing dramatic plays to ‘Wildest Dreams,’" she told me.

“Most of my concrete childhood memories have Taylor Swift playing in the background. I obviously listened to her when I was very young, but what’s so special about her music is that I never stopped listening. I grew up waiting for the next album, hunting for Easter eggs and watching interviews and live performances until my ears would hurt. Her music has always been there for me, and through that I feel like she has as well.”

She’ll be in the crowd with three friends at Swift’s Dec. 7 concert at BC Place. The scene in the crowd, according to her and other fans I’ve spoken with, is welcoming, affirming and inclusive in ways that are relatively rare for most public spaces inhabited by women.

The wide-ranging audience for Swift’s three final Eras Tour performances will include families, children, seniors and young adults, many of whom are travelling to Vancouver to attend the concert. The demand for accommodations have priced some people out of being able to attend.

In addition to predictions of seismic activity caused by the concerts, the Vancouver police are planning a heavy presence at the Eras Tour. In an Oct. 31 Vancouver Police Board meeting, deputy chief constable Howard Chow shared the Vancouver Police Department’s plans. He anticipates deploying at least 700 officers that weekend.

“We haven't lost sight of what took place in Vienna, where they actually had to call off the concert,” Chow noted at the board meeting. “So, a number of planning, risk management issues are being considered there.”

It's a big deal. What else is behind Swift’s appeal? Read on for sharp reflections on her influence and allure.

— Jackie Wong

‘There’s something about her epic niceness’

I read somewhere the other day that the only thing that endures long after a particular culture is gone is the art that it created.

The day-to-day stuff of the ancient Egyptians, Romans, Sumerians — elections, business dealings, conflicts, concerns — is long gone from popular understanding. The only thing that remains is what they created: sculptures, mosaics, buildings or paintings.

Even more recent time periods like the Renaissance, the Enlightenment period, or the Great Depression come to life in the form of art, literature and music.

So when future humans (if we make it that far) look back on this period, I wonder what they’ll say about Taylor Swift.

To be blunt, I’m pretty agnostic about Swift. She seems a perfectly pleasant human person, with lots of sparkly clothes and a wide smile. What is more interesting is how she makes other people feel.

Like any cultural phenomenon, it’s easy to stand on the outside, scratch your head or shake your fist at the sky, depending on your level of curmudgeon. It’s harder to take an unjaundiced look at why a particular artist makes an entire generation go cuckoo-for-coco puffs.

The Swiftie era reminds me of a story that my mother likes to drag out about the first time she heard Bob Dylan on the radio, when the announcer played all eight minutes of “Like a Rolling Stone.” According to her, she knew, in that moment, that something had changed forever.

I remember a similar experience, lying in bed, hearing the TV downstairs playing Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and thinking, “This is for us, the ‘80s kids!”

Swift has done the unusual thing of uniting generations of people, and you have to wonder how she’s done it. Her songs are okay, although they all kinda sound the same to me. But there’s something about her epic niceness that makes people feel safe.

I think it’s this aspect of Swift that draws so many people. Which begs the question, why are we so desperate to feel taken care of?

It’s kind of an obvious answer, I guess. The world just feels so dark, grim and predatory. Especially for young women and girls.

When historians look back, maybe they’ll assume that we needed Swift in this moment, in the same fashion that people needed Busby Berkeley extravaganzas in the dirty ‘30s or Colosseum battles in Ancient Rome.

We need to be taken out of ourselves and sent someplace else. Where Swift sends people is a place of community, comfort, sparkly shorts. But ultimately, safety.

— Dorothy Woodend

‘The most-successful beneficiary of the oldest trick in the book’

The other week, the CBC posted an Instagram Reel where the poet Antonio Michael Downing was quizzed on whether he could tell Taylor Swift’s lyrics from the words of CanLit poets. He could. Easily. He got every question right. You guys! Come on.

I have a hard time with Swift. Her legacy is undeniable. But her place in pop culture has very little to do with the music. We rarely discuss how her outsized success has allowed for the continued marginalization of racialized artists, including some of the biggest names in Black music.

For two decades now, I’ve watched artist after artist reach the top, only to discover that the top has been relocated to wherever Swift is standing at the moment.

Swift is far and away the most-successful beneficiary of the oldest trick in the book.

She’s this generation’s the Beatles.

People used to tell me that the Beatles were the best to ever do it. I believed it. I repeated it while trying to sound smart. Eventually, I learned that the Beatles were active at the same time as some of the best Black musicians in history, that their fresh ideas came from these musicians, for the most part, and their music, quite often, was played by these musicians.

This culture will go to incredible lengths to protect and prioritize whiteness.

America hates to give credit to Black artists. But it has to go somewhere. This generation funnels pretty much all of it to Taylor Swift.

All that said, her longevity is truly impressive. Two decades on top is no small feat. One thing that helps her, I think, is her refusal to grow up, musically or lyrically. Most artists in their 30s are taking strange artistic risks because they’re getting bored.

Not Swift. She’s 34 years old. You wouldn’t know from her music, which may not be timeless, but is certainly ageless. For a generation that seems terrified of aging, it must be nice to idolize someone who simply refuses to do it. Anyway. Skip the concert and listen to SZA. The new Laura Marling is excellent too, but I warn you: it's mostly about growing older.

— Harrison Mooney

‘Don’t let the bullies and gloomsters get you down’

I like Taylor Swift’s music. And I like way more what she does for young girls.

I spent time this year hanging out with two young grandkids as their family moved from central Florida to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Part of the evening ritual was checking out the astonishing number of YouTube videos aimed at young Swifties, like seven-year-old Cerys. There are trivia, challenges, interviews, videos of Taylor as a kid singer.

The messages were consistent. Do your own thing, work hard, don’t let the bullies and gloomsters get you down. Have the backs of other people who are being pushed around.

There’s Swift explaining she took up the 12-string guitar as a kid after a jerk guitar teacher told her she couldn’t because her hands were too small. (And practised until her fingers bled to prove him wrong.)

And then there’s Swift recording “Mean” after a critic said her bad 2010 Grammy appearance as a 20-year-old had “consigned herself to the dustbin of teen phenoms.”

Cerys and her younger brother Dylan and I were in a McDonalds after a summer-camp pickup when “Mean” came on the speakers.

We drove to their new, mostly unfurnished house, watched the video and checked out the lyrics.

Good writing, and a video that championed everyone who had been bullied or shunned.

Swift’s ascendancy isn’t unprecedented. New Kids on the Block, Justin Bieber, even the Beatles had their time as teen idols.

But Swift has made her time last and, in the social media era, found a way to build a global brand.

Lots of people don’t like that. They don’t like her music, don’t like the marketing, don’t like what they see as the sexual energy in performances, don’t like the success.

Which is fine.

But millions of young girls around the world do. Swift means something to them.

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani education activist, went to an Eras Tour concert this summer and wrote on Instagram about how Swift’s music “made me and my friends feel confident and free” in a time when the Taliban had choked the joy out of girls’ lives. (Read it and argue her music doesn’t matter.)

Swift gives them a sense of belonging to something. And to me it seems something decent, and with a useful dose of complexity.

— Paul Willcocks