Millions of albums sold. Fourteen Grammy awards. Time magazine's Person of the Year in 2023. A world tour in 20 countries. Fans referred to by her name: the "Swifties." It's impossible to avoid Taylor Swift.
After the staggering economic benefits of her concerts, her political role is driving conversations now. She could get her supporters to follow her if she were to reveal her vote in November's presidential election. The music star has yet to make a statement about this election, but she has already publicly endorsed the Democratic Party in 2018 and Joe Biden in the 2020 election. This position still seems paradoxical for an artist whose career began in country music.
She has become a pop star, after beginning to break away from the country world with her album Red in 2012 and leaving it with 1989, two years later. But she remains linked to the music genre. Her youth spent in Nashville, the Mecca of country music, and her trajectory all the way to New York have become the narrative thread of her national and global rise. If Swift's political positions are controversial, even to the point of being accused of treachery by the right, it is because her political silence until 2018 and her roots in country music seemed to invite the right to link her to the traditional conservatism of this musical genre.
When it first flooded the United States music market in the 1920s, country music was immediately described as the music of the white, rural South. To this day, this has encouraged conservatives to use it to rally the white vote, as Alabama's segregationist governor George Wallace did in the 1960s and 1970s. This political exploitation of country music explains why artists and their audiences are often associated with conservatism and nationalism.
Who listens to Taylor Swift?
This is why it seems contradictory for Swift to support Biden and speak out in defense of the rights of racial and sexual minorities and the protection of abortion rights. Yet country music is affected by the same currents that run through American society. While it has its share of conservative artists, musicians of the same generation as Swift take similar positions on women's and minority rights.
Since the 1990s, when the country music industry began to target a more diverse, national audience, it has nonetheless been the habit of country musicians with large followings not to endorse either the Republican or Democratic parties. Superstars such as Dolly Parton, for example, take a stand against racism or homophobia, but don't take sides so as not to alienate a loyal part of their audience.
You have 58.16% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.