Taylor swift

Monday

Alexander Larman

The vulgarity of the Swift-Kelce wedding

When Taylor Swift, the billionaire pop star, announced her engagement to Travis Kelce, the rather less wealthy (although still multi-millionaire) NFL player, she chose to mark the occasion by declaring, “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” It was rather a nice way for Swift to refer to herself and her forthcoming nuptials. Those who, like me, have always been fans of both her and her music had hopes that her wedding to Kelce would not become the usual hideous exercise in celebrity tackiness. Boy, was I wrong.

Taylor Swift

Wednesday

Julie Burchill

Are any fans weirder than Michael Jackson fans?

From our UK edition

What does a star need? A great lawyer, a good publicist, a silent plastic surgeon on speed dial – and fans, lots of them. Since the rise of OnlyFans, the word ‘fans’ has gained unpleasant associations but it was originally a 19th-century baseball term to describe the most ardent spectators – though its provenance was far earlier, from the Latin ‘fanaticus’, meaning insanely but divinely inspired. I thought of this on reading that the new Michael Jackson film has had the highest-grossing opening weekend for a biopic of all time. It’s fair to say that the fans will have made this happen: it’s not really the kind of flick someone casually picks after perusing the options.

Tuesday

David Honigmann

The misery of working with Chuck Berry

In Ian Leslie’s John & Paul, the creative relationship between the titular Beatles is treated as a platonic love story. Matt Thorne widens the paradigm with seven more pairings, variously rivalrous, amorous, respectful, disrespectful and occasionally frankly tenuous. The 11 American and three British musicians here have careers that collectively cover seven decades of popular music. There are three dynamics at play. First, there are the Thucydides tensions, where a waning power tangles with a rising one. Frank Sinatra invites Elvis Presley to join him on a television show; Keith Richards throws a filmed concert with Chuck Berry. (Richards, for once, is the younger partner.) The older player is not always generous.

Thursday

Josie Cox

February in New York: where dreams come to die

I probably sound naive, but February always struck me as a month that should be full of hope – brimming with the type of optimism that comes from new beginnings. At least here in New York, though, it was grim. Everything feels more expensive. Everyone’s temper seems as short as the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them daylight hours. And then there’s the weather. The streets are flanked like an Arctic military checkpoint by car-sized mounds of calcified brown snow. The kind of snow that has visible layers, like a geological cross-section of urban neglect. The kind that has already gobbled up who knows how many small dogs. The wind is so ferocious, it makes that chemical skin peel you’ve been targeted for on Instagram look pleasant. New York does sleep. And thank goodness it does.

Tuesday

Sam Leith

Spotify wouldn’t exist without the musicians it exploits

It used to be said that you could walk from the west of Ireland to Nantucket on the backs of the cod, so thick was the Atlantic with the fish. But as readers of a certain age will remember, by the last decade of the last century, it was looking doubtful that the cod population would see this century out to the end. By 1992, the cod population was one 100th of its historic level.   We knew that the way we were fishing was, in that unappealing but apt vogue-word, unsustainable. The fishermen themselves knew that it was unsustainable – that they were destroying the very resource on which their livelihoods and futures depended; that they were, in effect, sawing off the branch they were sitting on. And yet, for years, the overfishing... just sort of happened.

Wednesday

Isaac Sligh

When Dylan went folk

For all the billions Taylor Swift has made from guiding her career into carefully delineated “eras,” it was Bob Dylan who pioneered this career path. With practically every new album, Dylan traded one persona for another. There’s the folkie hobo of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the pill-popping beat poet of Blonde on Blonde, the cleaned-up country crooner of Nashville Skyline, the Christian revivalist of Slow Train Coming and many, many others. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Dylan’s The Basement Tapes, a tranche of previously unreleased hoedowns, goof-offs, shaggy-dog stories and barroom ballads that was never meant to be a proper album, but might be the closest we can get to seeing the man behind the mask.

bob dylan

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

Florence and the Machine is back

It may be coincidence or clever record company marketing, but the two current reigning queens of the British pop music scene, Lily Allen and Florence Welch, have released their two latest records within a week of one another. Allen, who has admittedly been more involved in acting and selling pictures of her feet on OnlyFans of late, brought out the excoriating and autobiographical West End Girl, which is said to explore the compromises and difficulties of her short-lived marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour. And, not to be outdone, Welch and her band Florence and the Machine have come back with her first album since 2022’s excellent Dance Fever; it promises another smorgasbord of operatic vocals, soaring choruses and BIG tunes. Does it work?

Tuesday

Veronica Clarke

Taylor Swift’s new album balances glitter with grit

With The Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift set out to do the opposite of her previous record, The Tortured Poets Department. Critics had called that sprawling 31-track project “unrestrained” and “imprecise,” and Swift herself admitted it was a “data dump.” This time, she wanted precision: a lean, 12-track pop record where every beat and lyric fit “like a perfect puzzle.” When Swift announced that music industry legends Max Martin and Shellback were producers on her 12th studio album, fans wondered whether this might herald a repeat of her 2014 smash-hit album 1989.

Showgirl

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Why men are the disposable sex

From our UK edition

I am a proud father. Both my daughters got good degrees. But better still, they smoke, go to pubs and drink Guinness. I suspect they may sometimes drink rosé or prosecco behind my back, but I soldier on. You see, if you are the lone man in an otherwise all-female family, it’s important to make sure overall testosterone levels don’t decline too far. Kanye West found much the same thing when he lived with the Kardashians. It is a man’s ‘job’ to be stupid – to take rapid, risky decisions with high variance outcomes in the hope that they pay off And at least neither of my daughters likes Taylor Swift. So that’s another small win for the Y chromosome.

Thursday

Graeme Thomson

Has Taylor Swift been reading The Spectator?

From our UK edition

The Last Dinner Party received quite the critical backlash when they arrived amid much fanfare in 2023. Posh, precocious and theatrical, armed with lofty ideas that matched their station as four young women who had benefited from very expensive educations, the band encountered widespread suspicion that they were industry ‘plants’, or had somehow bought their way to instant recognition. Happily, their debut album, Prelude To Ecstasy, proved sufficiently accomplished to repel these waves of hostility (strange how the success of privileged young women tends to attract far greater opprobrium than that of privileged young men). In any case, the excellence of the follow-up should settle the matter.

Monday

Rebecca Reid

Has Taylor Swift broken music’s last taboo?

From our UK edition

As a woman in my early thirties, it is my God-given right – arguably my duty – to have an opinion when Taylor Swift releases an album. And it’s a role that I’ve always performed without compunction. But on this occasion – the release of album 12, The Life of a Showgirl, my ability to get into the weeds (does ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ represent close text analysis of Shakespeare?) was hampered by my shock at one particularly audacious lyric.  Previous albums have had the the odd raunchy moment. So when, on this new album, she sang ‘His love was the key that opened my thighs’ in a song titled ‘Wood’, I was unmoved.

Friday

Luke Lyman

Taylor Swift is saving America

From our UK edition

Elon Musk and Taylor Swift fans rejoice! America’s birthrate is saved! News of the engagement between America’s reigning sweetheart, Taylor Swift, and jock, Travis Kelce, can mean only one thing: a millennial marriage boom is upon us. And with it, natalists will hope, an impending baby boom. I’m no Swiftie. Nor am I one of those men who’s organised his entire political identity around hating the singer. Still, I can’t deny that I feel uplifted by the jubilation erupting across the US and beyond this week. Why? Because Taylor and Travis are taking a stand against pessimism. America’s permanently heartbroken oldest daughter has escaped her fate (for now). These are people taking the leap! Committing to something! How exciting is that?

Thursday

Travis Aaroe

Taylor Swift: queen of the normies?

Politicos used to know how to take the temperature of the nation. They could talk to their cab driver. They could sidle up to the man fixing their toilet. There was the Iowa farmer, the diner waitress. There was Walter Cronkite.  Now there is only Taylor Swift. In a society that increasingly consists of mutually unintelligible niches – like multivolume works of Sonic the Hedgehog erotica or reenactments of the War of the Austrian Succession in Roblox – Swift can still fill huge arenas at short notice. Her fans cut across every social and economic class. To a political nation that's often baffled by this new society, Swift has become the great barometer.

Taylor Swift

Tuesday

Cockburn

Taylor Swift engaged – thanks, quite frankly, to ‘TRUMP’

It’s a love story, baby just say ‘yes’ Despite her shilling for Kamala Harris last November, Taylor Swift has evidently not had a Cruel Summer. Everything Has Changed for the singer, despite President Trump’s declaration that she is “no longer hot.” If things go as planned, the Gorgeous Swift will live evermore with Travis Kelce, her boyfriend of two years to whom she is now engaged. Cockburn is waiting with bated breath for the President to claim credit: she was never going to get married under Biden or Obama, clearly. This afternoon, Trump said, “I wish them a lot of luck… I think he’s a great player, a great guy. I think she’s a terrific person. So, I wish them a lot of luck.

taylor swift engagement

Monday

Cockburn

Trump eulogizes Woke on Truth Social

​​President Trump announced a major vibe shift on Truth Social today, declaring that he, like any other sane red-white-and-blue blooded American, finds Sydney Sweeney sexy, especially because she toes the party line. “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the “HOTTEST” ad out there,” he posted. “It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are “flying off the shelves.” Go get ‘em, Sydney!” Why Trump put “flying off the shelves” is a question only for advanced semioticians, but the White House’s stance is clear on this cultural hot point: Sydney Sweeney good, left-wing “Nazi” denunciations of Sydney Sweeney bad.  But Trump wasn’t done. He turned his Sydney Sweeney boosterism into a full-blown cultural critique.

Trump Sweeney

Monday

Matt Purple

I watched everything except the Super Bowl

Who did you cheer for in the Super Bowl last night? The asteroid? Evan McMullin? (OK, let’s not go too crazy.) Rarely has a third-party option looked so good. This was one of the least appealing Super Bowl match-ups in NFL history—and it’s the second time these two teams have met in a championship game in just three years. In one corner, football’s new dynasty, the Kansas City Chiefs, like the New England Patriots of yesteryear except everyone has a make-up artist on retainer. The Chiefs might play on the wind-swept plains but they’ve imported Hollywood into the NFL like never before.

super bowl
super bowl
Teresa Mull

Why the Super Bowl was worth watching

Minus a few big plays, the Super Bowl match-up between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs itself was a bit of a snoozer. But everyone knows the main event is not really the main event at the Super Bowl. Prior to kickoff, there’s the panning of the cameras to show the famous folk in attendance. Taylor Swift was mercilessly booed, and she didn’t seem to know how to react to the derision. In her defense — who would? Say what you will about Swift, but having your face appearing on a jumbotron elicit jeers loud enough to be heard from inside your swanky private box must be soul-shattering, no matter how many billions you have in the bank. President Donald Trump’s appearance had the opposite effect: the crowd goes wild!

Monday

Ross Anderson

The 2025 Grammys made up for past mistakes

We’re well into awards season, ladies and gentlemen, and though the Oscars always garner the most attention, and the Emmys cover the streaming entertainment Americans actually watch, the Grammys have always been among the most controversial awards shows.   The National Recording Academy hasn’t always been up to speed on what musicians are the most influential and deserving. With the Grammys, it seems the mood isn’t excitement about who will win, but anticipatory annoyance at who will be snubbed.   This year’s show was a little different though. Rising stars got the stage, for performances and trophies, and the biggest awards were apologies for the previously snubbed.  And so we get the Best Album of the Year, handed to Beyoncé for her country record, Cowboy Carter.

grammys

Thursday

Dave Seminara

The Kansas City Chiefs are the luckiest team in pro sports history

On Black Friday, I attended a Friendsgiving party where I watched the Chiefs-Raiders game with a friend who is a die-hard Chiefs fan. I’m a Bills fan, and I detest the Chiefs and their legions of bandwagon fans with every fiber of my being. Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes endorses seemingly every product in America, and I do my best to boycott them all. Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and his insufferable girlfriend, Taylor Swift, are just as unavoidable, and being forced to watch her gleeful celebrations of Chiefs touchdowns is arguably even more unpleasant than listening to her favorite politician, Kamala Harris, wax poetic about the passage of time.

chiefs

Wednesday

Ben Domenech

The winners and losers of the 2024 election

Every election has winners and losers that extend beyond the politicians themselves, but in this particularly unique situation, the sheer number of outside individuals, movements and institutions who can be categorized as winning or losing based on last night’s sweeping result for Donald Trump and Republicans is astounding.  Winner: the bro army and its defenders. The decision to lean so hard into appealing to the American manosphere, with its testosterone-fueled UFC events and a litany of podcasts hosted by comedians with mass appeal to young men, ran the risk of turning off female voters or seeming to only prioritize the frat vote. But it proved absolutely correct — and not just the Joe Rogan interview, though that was a key step in the journey.

winners and losers election