Over effusive, but as usual Noonan writes well.
We Should All Give Thanks for Taylor Swift
She brings joy, jobs and happy feet everywhere she goes. She’s the best thing happening in America.
Peggy Noonan
Nov. 22, 2023 6:54 pm ET
Right about now Time magazine would be choosing its Person of the Year, a designation I’ve followed from childhood because their choices tend to vary from sound to interesting. Also I almost always know who they’ll choose and enjoy finding out if I’m right. Here I tell you who it will be and must be or I will be displeased.
Miss Taylor Swift is the Person of the Year. She is the best thing that has happened in America in all of 2023. This fact makes her a suitably international choice because when something good happens in America, boy is it worldwide news.
I have been following her famous Eras tour since it began in March. Everyone says she’s huge, she’s fabulous, but really it’s bigger than that. What she did this year is some kind of epic American story.
Here are the reasons she should be Person of the Year:
Her tour has broken attendance and income records across the country. She has transformed the economy of every city she visits. The U.S. Travel Association reported this fall that what her concertgoers spend in and around each venue “is on par with the Super Bowl, but this time it happened on 53 different nights in 20 different locations over the course of five months.” Downtowns across the country—uniquely battered by the pandemic and the riots and demonstrations of 2020—are, while she is there, brought to life, with an influx of visitors and a local small business boom. Wherever she went it was like the past three years didn’t happen.
When Ms. Swift played Los Angeles for six sold-out nights in August she brought a reported $320 million local windfall with her, including 3,300 jobs and a $160 million increase in local earnings. From Straits Research this month: Ms. Swift’s tour is “an economic phenomenon that is totally altering the rules of entertainment economics.”
When the tour became a bona fide record-breaker Ms. Swift gave everyone in her crew—everyone, the dressers, the guys who move the sets, the sound techs and backup dancers—a combined $55 million in bonuses. The truck drivers received a reported $100,000 each.
Bloomberg Economics reports U.S. gross domestic product went up an estimated $4.3 billion as a result of her first 53 concerts.
The tour made her a billionaire, according to Forbes the first musician ever to make that rank solely based on her songs and performances.
When Ms. Swift made a film of the ongoing tour she reinvented how such things are financed and marketed, upending previous models, and when the film opened, on Oct. 13, it became the most successful concert film in history.
Foreign leaders have begged her to come. One said, “Thailand is back on track to be fully democratic after you had to cancel last time due to the coup.”
All of this is phenomenal, groundbreaking, but it’s just economics. Ms. Swift brings joy. Over the summer I was fascinated by what became familiar, people posting on social media what was going on in the backs of the stadium as Ms. Swift sang. It was thousands of fathers and daughters dancing. When she played in downtown Seattle in July, the stomping was so heavy and the stadium shook so hard it registered on a seismometer as equal to a magnitude 2.3 earthquake.
People meaning to compliment her ask if she’s Elvis or the Beatles, but it is the wrong question. Taylor Swift is her own category.
Here I wish to attest personally to the quality of her art but honey, I’m not the demo, I’m Porgy and Bess, the American Songbook and Joni Mitchell. She writes pleasing tunes with pointed lyrics. They’re sometimes jaunty, sometimes blue, and famously have a particular resonance for teenage girls and young women. She has said she sees herself primarily as a storyteller. They’re her stories and those of her audience—breakups, small triumphs, betrayals, mistakes. Her special bond with her audience is that for 17 years, more than a generation, they’ve been going through life together, experiencing it and talking it through. It’s a relationship.
Nine years ago, in an interview with CBS’s Gayle King, Ms. Swift cooly self-assessed. “My life doesn’t gravitate towards being edgy, sexy, or cool. I just naturally am not any of those things.” Pressed for what she is, she said: “I’m imaginative, I’m smart and I’m hardworking.” She was only 24 but all that seems perfectly correct. She’s focused, ambitious, loves to perform, loves to be cheered, loves to strut. Great careers are all effort. She works herself like a rented mule.
In the Atlantic magazine, the writer Spencer Kornhaber captured her opening show. Over more than three hours she played an amazing 44 songs in Glendale, Ariz. “Somehow seeing her up close made her seem more superhuman.” She has “the stamina of a ram.” She was fearless and inventive. “At one point she induced gasps by seeming to dive into the stage and then swim to the other side, as if it were a pond.”
Friends, this is some kind of epic American thing that is happening, something on the order of great tales and myths. Over the past few months as I’ve thought about and read of Ms. Swift my mind kept going back to phrases that are . . . absurd as comparisons. And yet. “When John Henry was a little baby . . . ” And a beautiful lyric I saw years ago that stayed with me. “Black-eyed peas asks cornbread/ ‘What makes you so strong?’/ Cornbread says, ‘I come from/ Where Joe Louis was born.’ ”
There is just something so mightily American in Taylor Swift’s great year.
Am I getting carried away? Oh yes, I am. And yet I think, isn’t it great that somebody’s shown such excellence you get carried away?
We end with her recent purported famous romance with football star Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs. Is it real, everyone asks. Who knows? Maybe they don’t know. I don’t understand the argument that they’ve come together for publicity. That’s the one thing she doesn’t need more of and could hardly get more of. As for Mr. Kelce, as J.R. Moehringer noted this week in the Journal, his mug is all over too. Whatever it is they owe no stranger an answer.
But here are reasons people would like it to be real. Because it makes life feel more magical—the prince meets the princess. Because it’s sweet. Because if it’s real then not everything is media management, which is the thing that deep down we always fear. Because it’s fun. Marilyn and Joltin’ Joe made America more fun, more a romantic place where anything can happen and glamour is real. Also if it’s real it adds to the sum total of love in the world, literally increases its quantity, and the love enters the air and the world breathes it in and, for a moment, becomes: better.
Onward to further greatness, Taylor Swift. Onward Travis Kelce. Win the Super Bowl this year, make an impossible catch, jump a man’s height to snatch the ball from the air with 10 seconds to go, score the winning touchdown, hold the ball up to your girl in the stands as the stadium roars and the confetti rains down.
Leave a 100 billion memories. Remind everyone: It’s good to be alive.
Because it is.
