This week, bowing to the overwhelming blanket coverage in all forms of media, I took a look at the most important global news story of our times: Taylor Swift’s concert tour of Australia. It’s reassuring to know that with bloody conflicts raging in Ukraine and Gaza, the media still manages to overcome such distractions and report – again and again and again – on the really big issues.
First of all, I must make a terrible old fogey-like confession: until this week I hadn’t listened to a single song by Taylor Swift. Feeling that I must be missing something stupendous, I had a binge on YouTube, but the moment of revelation never arrived. All the songs sounded to me rather ordinary and formulaic. Taylor Swift ain’t the new Beatles, she isn’t even the new Joni Mitchell! Of course, all you fans will say: “It’s your problem, because you’re living in the past. You’ve got your head stuck in the sand.”
Fair enough, but I can’t shake off my invincible first impression that Taylor Swift is nothin’ special. Every single song played on the soundtrack of the new Wim Wenders film, Perfect Days, from Eric Burdon and the Animals to Nina Simone, shreds anything I heard in my – admittedly limited – listening session to the new superheroine of pop culture.
So why has the world gone crazy for this 30-something blonde from Pennsylvania? I think her ordinariness is the key. Swift may wear the showgirl costume on stage, but sex and sleaze are not vital components of her image, as they were, and are, for singers such as Madonna or Miley Cyrus, the latter having made vulgarity her trademark. Swift is attractive, but no bombshell. Her voice is good, but not amazing. She doesn’t come from a broken home – both her parents were executives in the finance industry. She professes to be a Christian and encourages her fans to swap friendship bracelets. Her boyfriend is a beefy, high-profile footballer, not a wacko or a drug fiend. Her songs stick to time-honored themes such as lost love, and never hang around long enough to wear out their welcome. She is overwhelmingly white and straight, in a world that spends all its time paying lip service to ethnic minorities and gender benders.
The unspeakable truth about Taylor Swift is that she is the antidote for all the ghastly, hypocritical “woke” rubbish we are obliged to indulge on a daily basis. She is an acceptable bourgeois option for fans and parents, who are uneasy with the rappers, gangstas, metalheads, etc. who try and make popular music into something dark and dangerous. She is white bread and soda pop. She is good-news-for-a-change. She is the revenge of the mainstream.
Swift generally steers clear of politics, although her suggestion that her fans register to vote was enough to demonise her in eyes of Republicans who would prefer as few people as possible exercise their democatic rights. Donald Trump frets that she might be more popular than him!
In brief, Taylor Swift is the goddess for a generation of pop music fans who are more conservative in their beliefs and lifestyles than their predecessors who continue to grow old disgracefully. Her popularity has been supercharged by social media, which allows fans from all over the planet to get together and reinforce each other’s fixations. None of the pop wonders of the past had such technological advantages. It has created a fan club that seems to grow exponentially, like the blob, devouring everything in its path. It’s not just a club, it’s a cult, a movement, a virtual religion. No wonder the Republicans are afraid of Swift’s power. When your political platform consists of banning abortion, burning books, gerrymandering elections, destroying health and welfare, and giving huge tax cuts to billionaires, it’s hard to imagine a younger generation of voters getting excited. One word from Taylor and it’s curtains.
So far the Democrats have sat back and waited for Taylor Swift’s endorsement, but they really need to get on the front foot and convince her to run for President. Grandpa Joe Biden can’t compete and will never seduce those youthful voters. Facing Taylor, Trump would have to put on his own orange showgirl outfit and gyrate in front of his fans, just to keep up. That should spell the end of his campaign once and for all.
Taylor Swift has distracted me from my usual hobby horses this week, but for form’s sake, the reports are in that the “consultations” over the future of the Powerhouse Museum have proven to be nothing more than a sham, as universally predicted. No useful information has been proferred, secrecy rules, direct questions remain unanswered, and now – lo & behold – the PHM admin has decided it will give away vast amounts of museum property – plinths, frames, vitrines, shelves, cupboards, etc, etc. – to anyone who wants these things. It’s another way of ensuring that it will be impossible to display much of the collection ever again. Many of the items in the bonanza giveaway were used in Leo Schofield’s 1,001 Remarkable Objects exhibition. Try and do the show again, and it would require a whole new presentation.
Needless to say, this is not only colossally wasteful in terms of money and resources, it advances the vandalistic project of destroying the institution’s identity as a museum of applied arts and sciences. As usual, I’m staggered by the effrontery involved. This is a crime against our culture and heritage, and the Minns government is complicit in the process. It’s easy to say history will judge them, but the damage being inflicted on a daily basis may not be repairable. It will be very cold comfort ten years from now, when we look upon the wreckage, and wonder who could have been stupid and irresponsible enough to let it happen? Those reflections will be given a keener edge by the knowledge that the NSW taxpayer is being slugged for tens of millions of dollars to keep the doors open on three ill-conceived venues that have not the slightest chance of paying their way.
The PHM is a bad fairy tale. For more varied and interesting examples, this week’s art column looks at Fairy Tales in Art and Film, at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. I’ve been waiting for this article to appear on the SMH website, but it still hasn’t done so, and appears to have been left out of the newspaper this week. Because nobody bothered to inform me, I’m going to run it anyway, as holding these columns, especially in light of the Herald’s draconian new paywall, causes all sorts of mayhem with my website. The editors may have had a good excuse, though, as they all seem to have been at the Taylor Swift concert, where they sent breathless song-by-song descriptions back to eager readers. Another case of concentrating on the really big priorities.
Fairy Tales is not a flawless show, but those flaws are forgivable when one recognises the quality of many of the exhibits. The theme itself is fascinating, offering a good excuse for a trip to sweaty northern climes.
The film under review is The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s controversial, creepy portrait of happy family life in the shadow of Auschwitz. We follow Commandant, Rudolf Höss, his wife and five kids, as they go through their domestic routines undisturbed by the proximity of the death camp, and the huge chimney of the crematorium that looms over their garden. It’s a new kind of family-themed horror movie.
Finally, I’m posting another profile, this time of Jacobus Capone, an unclassifiable artist from Perth, who prefers to spend his time on glaciers inside the Arctic Circle, or buried in a Japanese forest. Is Perth really so bad? Jacobus is no Taylor Swift, but from a generation of emerging Australian artists, he is one of most likely to get a taste of international stardom.