The day after the Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory, the print edition of Montreal Journal had on its front page a photograph of Taylor Swift, embracing her lover in the middle of the stadium. You could see people all around them, some holding phones and cameras, there was electricity in the air, maybe confetti, I don’t know.
It was like a scene from a romantic movie, an ideal moment from the imagination of a sentimental young girl. A union displayed in broad daylight, the whole world taking note of its strength and its reality, that applauds, surely, because such love can only be celebrated collectively, it is a victory, in fact, a victory against adversity, against cynicism, against those who didn’t believe in you.
I thought, when I saw the image: it looks like it’s arranged with the views guy.
Is this fixed for the views guy (or team)? This is what some right-wing commentators think. I won’t dwell on the details of the conspiracy they foresee, they have circulated a lot, like everything concerning Taylor Swift. A quick summary for those who managed to avoid this media tsunami: Swift, the biggest star on the planet, is dating one of the star players of the winning team of the Super Bowl, the biggest sporting event in the United States. They are both Democrats, as we know, in her case because she supported Biden in the last elections, in her case chum because he made an ad for the COVID vaccination.
It was enough for Fox News commentators, these ardent defenders of democracy, to see in this an operation orchestrated by the Pentagon in order to torpedo Donald Trump’s campaign – they are one coffee away from declaring that Swift was created in a laboratory by obscure communist scientists.
Because they have a rather uneasy relationship with nuance and the idea of a woman being able to do something on her own, they call Swift’s entire career into question, claiming that her popularity is insane and inexplicable, as if he wasn’t always something astonishing and inexplicable in the trajectories of the very, very big stars.
Why her and not others? We approach popularity as if it were a reward to be earned, when everyone knows that is not the case.
There, it is certain that we are faced with something frankly phenomenal, and I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that in my lifetime, I have never seen anything like it. Every day for weeks, I’ve been reading articles about Taylor Swift, even though I only know three songs. I’m not looking for these articles, they come to me, through the traditional media moreover, in this newspaper and in the two other Montreal dailies, in the New York TimesTHE International mail, everywhere.
They are often very uninteresting, where you wonder if there shouldn’t be an apostrophe in the title of your upcoming album, The Tortured Poets Department, if the municipality of Charlemagne would not have an interest in taking up arms following the affront to Céline, if the activity of the crowds present at her concerts can be detected by a seismograph (the answer: yes, a little ). Others, even more consistent, return to the conspiracy and wonder if the convergence of these two symbols of the “American Dream”, the beautiful singer and the triumphant athlete, can have a real influence, in the end. , on the November election.
In fact, maybe yes, a little.
And with all due respect to the guys at Fox who think they have unearthed a super mysterious plot, it would certainly not be the first time in history that artists have contributed to a political victory or that, conversely, politicians have exploited artists.
During the Cold War, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization affiliated with the CIA, claimed to fight communism by financing and supporting, among other activities, the influence of American art abroad. They would have subsidized exhibitions of expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, no less. Author Éric Reinhardt returns to this strange episode in French comedybut you can easily google the thing, it is very well documented, essays have been written on the subject.
Maybe one day we’ll read books about the pop star who kept Trump from returning to power. Maybe not either. But it would still be funny, in the end, if such a man ended up being undone by a love straight out of a girl’s dream.
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