JAMIE SARKONAK: THE MOB'S IMPOSSIBLY HIGH EXPECTATIONS FOR TAYLOR SWIFT

Taylor Swift has done a good job at playing the role of the old-school celebrity. She’s generous and charitable, yet mostly has tried to remain apolitical and uncontroversial in her career. I’m not a hardcore fan, but it’s easy to appreciate a talented lyricist who stays in their zone.

Despite the widespread goodwill she’s built up over the years, Swift is now a target of the mob — and unfairly so. The 33-year-old has made the mistake, in the view of her fans, of dating a “problematic” man.

For the (blissfully) uninformed, Swift has been rumoured to be dating 34-year-old indie rockstar Matty Healy of The 1975. Depending on your generation, Healy can be described as an edgelord, a troll, a clout chaser or a rabble rouser. His humour and irony go too far in the eyes of some in the general public, which is exactly what someone with that kind of personal brand is going to do.

Some Swift fans are struggling to cope with the news. On one hand, the music is great. On the other hand, because the personal is the political, it could stain one’s reputation to associate with a musician who associates with another musician who has behaved outside the bounds of political correctness. Obsession is the norm for the Swift fandom, which is so vast that it’s been described as a “metaverse.” Fans regularly conduct microscopic analyses of Swift’s life and music, trying to draw greater meaning from her clothes, her words and her affiliates. The community even has factions that war over the pop artist’s sexual orientation.

Swift’s new boyfriend has had more than one controversy. The worst and most notable arose from an on-stage Nazi salute, though this appeared to be satire and not an act of serious support. The salute was made while singing, “Thank you, Kanye, very cool.” Kanye West, of course, has made himself a wide target for satire, having spoken highly of Hitler in the past year and having made a number of antisemitic statements in that time. Healy’s other sins have included making racially-charged jokes on a comedy podcast (edgy, but it’s hard to consider them as serious).

Healy isn’t evil. He’s just neo-punk. In an interview with Pitchfork, he said he was “politically homeless”; from the outside, he appears to be an old-school anti-authority leftist. He’s spoken against Alabama’s abortion ban, he’s open about past and present drug use, and he’s sung about police violence against Black people (and was later targeted by the mob for using the Black Lives Matter movement to promote himself). He even had Greta Thunberg feature in one of his band’s songs.

“I’m certainly not on the extreme left, but I also think that the word ‘centrist’ has become so ubiquitous that it’s annoying,” Healy told Pitchfork. “I suppose I’m a traditional progressive who is suspicious of woke-ism as a viable world view or device to make things better. But I don’t want to be associated with any side because then I can’t make jokes about them. I just wanna make jokes.”

He would be considered a social justice figure if this were 2010, but in 2023, he’s over the line and venturing into white supremacy. His relationship with Swift is unacceptable to some of her fans, even though they probably agree with a lot of Healy’s views.

Swift is a bit more quiet about her personal politics, but she did break that silence during the Trump presidency. She endorsed Democrat candidates and denounced Trump for “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism (his) entire presidency.”

Until then, neutrality had been good for business; regardless of her personal views, Swift could comfortably sell records that appealed to both urban progressives and rural conservatives.

She took a risk by picking a “side” in politics, but even that’s not enough to give her the freedom to date a fellow progressive. There is no appeasing a fervent crowd that expects ideological purity from its idols.

It might be odd to see a clean-cut, straight-laced woman such as Swift end up with someone who’s more of a modern punk type. But who cares? They’re adults. If anything, the problem is that Swift is choosing someone who behaves like a teen despite being in his mid-30s. He’s not a bad person, but he’s a risky choice. Either way, it’s her life and she has agency over it.

The relationship doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things; most celebrity romances are brief and many are fake. This particular relationship has already received more attention than it’s worth — but that makes it a great example of just how utterly unreasonable the mob can be, and how unrealistically high its expectations can climb.

National Post

2023-05-28T10:02:09Z dg43tfdfdgfd