It certainly looks like Taylor Swift, the biggest pop star on planet Earth, is going to marry Travis Kelce, her three-time Super Bowl champion beau, at Madison Square Garden on Friday.
While neither Ms. Swift nor Mr. Kelce has directly confirmed that their nuptials will take place there, over the past week, my imagination has been reeling with the potential for matrimonial stagecraft that only Ms. Swift could pull off. How many dresses will she wear, and what will they look like? Will Jack Antonoff be a bridesman? Will she perform? Who else will get up onstage? Paul McCartney? James Taylor? MGMT?
And yet, as I consider the expected event, I feel … well … “depressed” is the word.
In part it’s because Madison Square Garden — the modern coliseum where the New York Knicks play — seems like the least romantic possible place to marry. Certainly the least intimate. Why not Paris, Portofino, the Lake District?
It’s also the Trumpish miasma hanging over this Independence Day. Many writers have invoked the Roman writer Juvenal’s phrase “bread and circuses” when discussing the White House’s recent U.F.C. fight on the South Lawn, depicting it as a gladiatorial spectacle meant to distract the masses from the increasingly bleak circumstances of their lives. An American royal wedding unfortunately has the same vibe, a big-budget display of status that will, in the best-case scenario, serve as escapist entertainment for us proles. (One thinks of Ms. Swift’s invocation of the movie “Gladiator” in her Time Person of the Year interview: “Are you not entertained?”)
In the worst case, class resentment will balloon into anger at Ms. Swift herself, and her wedding will become a social media feeding frenzy, as happened to Jeff Bezos last year. Maybe that’s unfair — renting out M.S.G. is, arguably, more reasonable than swarming the city of Venice — but Ms. Swift and Mr. Kelce, as the image of the good-looking, wholesome, all-American couple, are harder than ever to relate to. No one roots for the overdog.
True, Ms. Swift has been a winner for over a decade — her first Album of the Year Grammy came at age 20 — but she used to do a good job of pretending she didn’t see herself that way, often channeling her inner awkward geek. “She’s cheer captain,” she famously sang of her crush’s girlfriend in “You Belong With Me,” “and I’m on the bleachers.”
I admit I’m one of those Swifties who have always been partial to Taylor the tempestuous artiste, ever since I heard those excellent sad-sack anthems from her self-titled first album, some of which she wrote as an overwrought tween.
I cheered when Ms. Swift declared herself a feminist, and my favorite Swift eras took place in the early 2020s, when she wrote delicate electro-folk albums with the leading lights of 2000s indie rock and her British boyfriend. In 2022, she sang, “The only kind of girl they see / Is a one-night or a wife.” And then continued: “No deal / the 1950s [expletive] they want from me.” Now it seems this defiance is nowhere to be seen. What’s more normie than becoming a football WAG in Kansas City?
Maybe Ms. Swift was just doing the thing where you say you’re against marriage because you don’t want to marry the person you’re with. (Now that’s relatable!) It’s not like I’m going to stage a “Speak Now” stunt, lying in wait in a corner of the arena for the officiant to ask if anyone objects. But I can’t help but see her matrimonial about-face in the context of the sexual politics of this decade, as tradwives and men’s rights activists have attempted to undo second-wave feminism altogether, encouraging young men to see themselves as domineering domestic leaders and young women to aspire only to marriage and motherhood.
Perhaps my depression is simply because she caved to gendered expectations after bucking them for so long.
In a documentary she released in 2020, Ms. Swift described the pressure she had always felt to be perceived as a “good girl” and a role model. Refusing this good girl image has been the project of at least the past 10 years of her career, from her gleefully melodramatic album “Reputation” to her horny, messy and miserable persona on “The Tortured Poets Department.” Part of this subversive effort was a lyrical resistance to a domestic life of marriage and children, often juxtaposed with the scope of her career ambitions, her unfeminine longing for fame, money and creative achievement. As she sang to her 15-year-old self on her second album, “Fearless,” “In your life, you’ll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team.”
But I think there’s something deeper that’s been bugging me about a Swift-Kelce wedding. It’s not just that she is finally settling down with the boy on the football team, but that such a highflying spectacle of “having it all” appears to be the culmination of the singer’s three-year career victory lap, ever since she pulled off the record-breaking Eras Tour, which helped make her a billionaire.
Ms. Swift’s music is best enjoyed on headphones in bedrooms, with intimate, evocative lyrics about childhood, breakups, complicated love and secret yearning. Now it seems she feels most at home in stadiums, judging from the broad pop schlock of her most recent album, “The Life of a Showgirl.” Even for this momentous milestone in her private life, Ms. Swift apparently can’t imagine a place to stage her next triumph other than a basketball arena.
One of the few highlights on “The Life of a Showgirl” is the Lana Del Rey-esque “Elizabeth Taylor.” While Ms. Swift has long been fascinated with Ms. Taylor, she is a strange role model for a bride-to-be, being perhaps best known — two Academy Awards notwithstanding — for getting married eight times. Ms. Taylor, like Ms. Swift, was known to be a serial monogamist whose public relationships with other celebrities and highly modern all-publicity-is-good-publicity attitude toward scandal helped build her legend.
On “Elizabeth Taylor,” Ms. Swift repeatedly sings, “Do you think it’s forever?” reflecting an oddly pragmatic outlook on marriage. This self-conscious distance has long been a feature of her music, as she dramatizes the story of her life in real time for her fans to devour, letting it play out on the biggest possible stage. In this light, an epic New York wedding would be just another juicy scene in her real-life soap opera.
Are you not entertained? I am, Taylor, I am.
Alice Bolin is the author of essay collections, including, most recently, “Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse.”
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