It’s hard to see history when you’re in the middle of it, harder still to distinguish Swift’s impact on the culture from her celebrity, which emits so much light it can be blinding. But something unusual is happening with Swift, without a contemporary precedent. She deploys the most efficient medium of the day—the pop song—to tell her story. Yet ov... See more

She’s modeling radical self-acceptance on the world’s largest stage, giving the audience a space to revisit their own joy or pain, once dismissed or forgotten.

She is a maestro of self-determination, of writing her own story

It is only very recently that this postmodern hatred towards every kind of ideal has gone fully mainstream — mainstream enough to take over TikTok. Just ten years ago, teenagers still revered ideals. They looked up to the red-lipped sexiness of pin-up girl pop stars like Katy Perry, a standard of beauty that was artificial — injected with plastic a... See more

I’m not a Swiftie (nothing against them! some of my best friends are Swifties!) but this summer I was sad not to be, because the collective ecstasy of the Eras tour looked so delicious and so important, and collective ecstasy is perhaps the thing I miss most about being A Person Who Loves Music. After all, I once wrote a whole book about the power ... See more

We are now entering the Hannah Montana Generation of pop stars: young artists who are not just evoking the frilly and bold aesthetic and unapologetically sugary sweet music of the show but also the type of larger-than-life persona Montana had in comparison to “real-life” Stewart. Carpenter is the prime example of leaning into the Hannah Montana-ifi... See more