CIA Director: Okay, so it’s agreed, we force Taylor & Travis to date, fix a series of NFL games, & then have them come out for Biden at the Super Bowl.
CIA Agent: If we have this much power, why not just throw Trump in jail?
CIA Director: BECAUSE WE LIKE TO HAVE FUN, OK KYLE?!
— Jay Black (@jayblackisfunny) February 2, 2024
Ignitable cakes, sweatshirts and more. Travis Kelce, Taylor Swift gear flies off store shelves https://t.co/yG3ZdDXQBx
— The Associated Press (@AP) February 7, 2024
Taylor Swift, still propping up the national economy!
… “I think it’s amazing,” said Katie Mabry van Dieren, owner of Shop Local KC, which sells merchandise made by local artists, including the Karma sweatshirts. “I have never shipped so many items from our stores to different states.”
She said she thought the busiest weekend would be when Kansas City hosted the NFL draft in April. But she said Swift’s The Eras Tour concert stop at Arrowhead Stadium over the summer blew that away…
About 73% of adults say they plan to watch the game this year, about 10% higher than in recent previous years. And the romance that has been dominating headlines throughout the NFL season might be helping drive interest…
none of this is true about Taylor Swift; this is just a vaguely left version of sneering at people for liking popular things that are good https://t.co/T8O7jSO19G
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) January 30, 2024
I’ve decided that Taylor Swift is my personal next-gen Mary Chapin Carpenter, and I really love Mary Chapin Carpenter. There’s a lot more tech work supporting Swift’s music, which is fine — music tech is so much better and cheaper than it was forty years ago, when I was going to MCC concerts in Michigan church basements!
Interesting Vulture article on last week’s Grammys — “How Taylor Swift Beat Sinatra”:
… With her win for Midnights, Swift broke a four-way tie with Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder, and Paul Simon to become the artist with the most AOTY wins. This means 40 percent of her albums have been recognized by her peers as the year’s best: Fearless at the 2010 Grammys, 1989 in 2016, folklore in 2021, and now Midnights.
While it’s hard to call Swift’s first-place finish an outright shock — Midnights was a wildly successful album buoyed by a just-as-successful tour while Swift dominated over a year of conversation — it’s surprising to see her break a Grammys record so handily and to do it over competition like the night’s top nominee, SZA, who was up for her second album, SOS. Here’s how Swift pulled it off.
She wasn’t just successful — she gave the music industry hope.
Prior to October 2022, most industry observers thought a million-album week on “The Billboard 200” (a number combining album sales, song sales, and an equivalent amount of streams) was no longer attainable in today’s streaming economy. Adele couldn’t do it, Drake couldn’t do it, and successful newcomers like Morgan Wallen and Bad Bunny couldn’t do it. Then Midnights posted a stunning 1.5 million units, the first seven-figure American debut since Swift’s own reputation in 2017 (and since Billboard tightened up its bundling rules). As the music industry became even more resigned to streaming’s dominance, there was Swift, doing the impossible. For good measure, she did it again with 1989 (Taylor’s Version) last fall…She held on to her new folklore fans.
In such a plural Academy, your own genre alone can’t carry you to AOTY. That’s how Jon Batiste surprised for We Are back in 2022, with nominations across R&B, American roots, and contemporary-classical categories (plus jazz for Soul). Swift last won AOTY for 2020’s folklore, an ostensibly pop album that drew on folk and country and was largely produced by the National’s Aaron Dessner, a rock musician. From the way her peers heaped praise on that album, it seemed as if she’d stacked votes from all those corners of the Academy to come out on top…She had key technical voters’ support.
Swift may now have the most AOTY wins among artists, but someone else still beats her outright: Serban Ghenea, an audio engineer who has worked with Swift since Red. He may be one of the most respected collaborators in pop right now, and this was his own fifth AOTY win (he has also won for Adele’s 25 and Bruno Mars’s 24K Magic). The Academy is full of people like Ghenea — the engineers, writers, and producers often standing behind an artist when they win — and if you want to win big, you’ve got to earn their votes. Swift has. It’s not just the engineers, either, since Antonoff, her right hand, once again cleaned up in Producer of the Year…She’s Taylor Swift.
Whenever Swift attends an awards show these days, her peers turn into fans. Everyone’s clamoring for a photo with her, and people shout her out when accepting trophies that have nothing to do with her. She’s like the music world’s Meryl Streep — even when Streep is also in the room….
Taylor could write Tangled Up In Blue but Bob could never do the Eras choreography https://t.co/9YORYjen5X
— vituperativeerb (@vituperativeerb) January 31, 2024
And also, she’s driving the right people out of their tiny minds!
Knowing that this all is based on Trump not handling someone being more famous than him (and the usual dose of re misogyny) makes this even more insane https://t.co/uXNfzpXUeB
— vocational politics appreciation account (@Convolutedname) January 30, 2024
Saturday Evening Open Thread: Taylor-ing the ExperiencePost + Comments (103)