I just don't get Taylor Swift

It's one thing to say you like Taylor Swift and her music, but don't blame CNN's AJ Willingham's when she says she just 'oesn't get' the global phenomenom.

I just don’t get Taylor Swift. There, I said it. (DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT DISLIKE HER. I WISH HER ALL OF THE HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS IN THE WORLD. PLEASE, I HAVE A FAMILY.)

It’s freeing to just … not care about something, isn’t it? When friends start to wax poetic about the Eras Tour or their favourite Taylor Swift song, I listen politely as if they were talking about professional darts or French cinema, and a feeling of peace washes over me.

I do not need to love things, I think to myself. I do not need to hate them, either. I can simply watch them pass by like a leaf borne along a river’s current and say, “Well, that certainly is a thing!”

Granted, it is a lot harder when that thing is, by all indications, specifically made for you to enjoy.

While Taylor Swift can appeal to anyone, there is real data showing what a single peek at an Eras Tour crowd or a simple walk outside can tell you: Swifties are most likely to be White suburban millennial women like me. Minds much more qualified than mine have written about the tension between Swift’s position as a “voice of a generation” and how much that voice is or isn’t speaking for listeners of colour. That’s a different conversation worth having, but it’s not the one I’m getting at here.

What makes me itchy is the constant framing of Taylor Swift’s music among my peers (or at least my census-designated demographic) as an unassailable communion of girl-and-womanhood: A favourable review of “The Tortured Poets Department” in The Spectator calls Swift “the tortured voice of millennials.” On a recent episode of BBC NewsNight, author Kat McKenna said the “uniqueness of Taylor Swift is that she speaks for an audience that is not always spoken for.”