Needlessly Swift analysis
The coverage of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's engagement shows how much the traditional media is playing catchup.
Previously: Despite what the papers say, 'Operation Raise the Colours' is far from organic
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's announcement of their engagement is more than just personal news. It’s the merger of two brands and a massive media event. But what do traditional news organisations have left to say when the celebrities they’re covering have already said it all in a carefully choreographed Instagram post?
The conclusion of the Swift/Kelce merger talks was revealed yesterday with just such an Instagram post, which hit 1 million likes in less than ten minutes. It was followed by push alerts from news organisations— ranging from the BBC to sports network ESPN — covering the event as though it were a political scandal or an invasion. The engagement photos set off a rash of Kremlinology, dissecting everything from the couple’s outfits to the flowers to, inevitably, the engagement ring.
Without much desire to add the information to my overflowing mental store of trivia, I now know that the ring features an Old Mine cut diamond (estimated to cost around $550,000) in a setting designed by the enjoyably-named Kindred Lubeck of Artifex Fine Jewelry. A billionaire and a multi-millionaire are getting hitched, and the media will now act as though everyone has to have an opinion on the news.
For The New York Times opinion section, novelist Jennifer Weiner gets in early with a crushingly controversial take — she’s happy for them:
The news feels like a tiny piece of joy in a sea of troubles, a little bit of brightness in the dark. Yes, it was probably all micromanaged. It still made me happy — and hopeful. Maybe there are still good men. Maybe love still wins. And maybe we were seeing a new paradigm for the old pairing of beautiful female star and successful male athlete.
She does then raise an unhappy historical parallel, the stormy nine-month marriage of America’s sweetheart Marilyn Monroe to sporting superstar Joe DiMaggio (“…too often, these dream-team marriages end badly…”), which feels a lot like hedging her bets. Weiner then quickly swerves back to calling the engagement “some serious role model behaviour”.
There’s a slighter more (deliberately) unhinged opinion piece in USA Today, where Rex Huppke urges his fellow Americans to keep calm about the upcoming nuptials/brand synergy, while hammering away at the Caps Lock key:
Whoa. Easy. Gotta chill out a little. There are a lot of really bad and serious things happening in the world and we would be remiss to be distracted by something as unimportant and superficial as I WONDER WHAT HER DRESS IS GOING TO LOOK LIKE?!? WILL TRAVIS KELCE’S BROTHER JASON KELCE BE THE BEST MAN?? I’M LITERALLY GOING TO DIE IF I DON’T GET ALL THE DETAILS IMMEDIATELY.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post did not follow Huppke’s advice with an ironic but not really ironic article entitled An obsessively detailed look at Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement, which contains this peach of a paragraph:
The [Instagram] post itself is a rich text: five photos depicting the couple in various poses of elation, the diamond ring with which Kelce proposed and an as-yet-unidentified outdoor setting absolutely exploding with pink flowers.
Truly, it is the Zapruder film of two extremely famous people doubling down on their brand collaboration.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Sarah Ditum uses a column in The Times to wonder if the prospect of a married Taylor Swift means an end to lyrical intrigue:
As happy as Swifties are, there is a worry that romantic contentment will be a drag on her songwriting. We’ll find out whether that’s the case on October 3, when her next album The Life of a Showgirl (first announced during her appearance on Kelce’s podcast) arrives. If all this strikes you as a little too well-managed to be romantic, I urge you to stow your cynicism. As Swift sang in her 2008 song Love Story: “It’s a love story, baby just say yes.”
While Ditum confines her concerns to a paragraph at the conclusion of her piece, over at The Daily Telegraph, its Chief Music Critic, Neil McCormick, goes for a more doomy vibe with a piece headlined Taylor Swift beware, marriage kills creativity in pop:
… I hate to be the Cassandra-like voice of gloomy foreboding [but] Swifties should be careful what they wish for. Because after a career that has seen her make 11 original studio albums brilliantly detailing the ups and downs of her complicated dating life, with heartbreak after heartbreak making her the most relatable woman in pop, marriage could well signal the end of Swift’s era of global domination. Will fans feel the same fervour towards her now that every part of her life seems to have reached Cinderella-style perfection? Or will her ultra-polished brand, which now includes the ultimate fairy-tale romance, with a meticulously stage-managed engagement photo, seem coldly unattainable?
So pessimistic is old Neil that he quickly moves on to writing about classic divorce albums — perhaps in an effort to hit his word count — and speculating about what as-yet-unconceived Kelce-Swift offspring might do to their mother’s creative output:
… after she dominated the global pop business with her relentless touring and release schedule for so long, I wonder how Swift’s fans might feel about waiting five years for their idol’s return to the front line?
All in all, quite a weird bit of speculation for a man in his sixties to be writing about a woman he doesn’t know and kids who don’t even exist yet and may never.
But while McCormick’s space-filling fantasising about a future family is pretty odd, the BBC’s approach to the story is arguably even more unsettling. With a breathless tone, the BBC News website has seemingly turned into an old-school US supermarket tabloid, headlining one of several reports on the story with the line Taylor's engaged - what we learned and the new details revealed by Travis's dad. That’s the UK’s national broadcaster sounding like someone gossiping in a family group chat.
While the media will always be outflanked by stars’ own social media channels, the Swift/Kelce engagement will now become one of those stories with endless angles to analyse, speculate upon and, in many cases, totally fabricate. We’re in for months of reports on possible wedding venues, best man candidates, maids of honour, family feuds (real or imagined), trend stories about ‘normal’ people inspired by the celebrity couple, contrarian takes about why the marriage is a bad thing, and so much more.
And by joining in, I’m just as bad. Well, almost…
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