Do We Really Need to Make Fun of Swifties?
Think of your favorite musician — you own every album and know every lyric by heart. Maybe you’ve been a fan for years; maybe you’re new but fell in love hard and fast. Imagine that after a few years, years which included a pandemic which shut down the concert industry, this musician finally announces a tour, and despite a process which is a pain in the ass, you score tickets, maybe in your hometown, maybe somewhere you’re willing to travel. You look forward to it for months, and when the day arrives, you dress up, maybe as a nod to one of this musician’s albums, music videos, or iconic looks. The show is perfect. You sing along all night, and although the set list doesn’t include everything you wanted to hear, you still were treated to some of your favorites, plus a few surprises. You go home thrilled, your ears ringing, the whole thing still replaying in your mind.
Imagine, a day or so later, you find yourself plastered all over the Internet, mocked as you boarded public transportation to go home, marring an otherwise amazing experience.
For some of us, music is sacred, live music even more so. To mock a musician’s fanbase is awful enough; to do it on the heels of something as thrilling as a concert is even worse, even more cruel. It’s heartbreaking to think some of these girls left home feeling great, then had an amazing time seeing an artist they love, and in the days since, may have seen themselves plastered on TikTok, Twitter, and even website headlines, where they’re being laughed at and compared to a scene from a horror movie.
I’m not innocent here — I’ve cracked plenty of jokes in my time about musicians I don’t like. But at the end of the day, I wouldn’t dare attack someone for liking them, in part because it’s a level of shittiness I can’t abide, not as a mom approaching my mid-30s and certainly not as a music lover. And I know all too well how the criticism of what you love, especially if it’s mean-spirited and zeroes in on specifics, as some have here, can sometimes feel like a criticism of you. After all, I’m an emo kid (it’s not a phase!). I know how shitty it feels for your taste in music — and the aesthetic that goes along with it — to be the butt of the joke, except I never had to contend with going viral, and I’ve expressed this so many times I’m concerned I’m plagiarizing myself here. It’s one thing to be made fun of by a few kids in your high school. It’s another to be made fun of by whole swaths of the Internet, mostly adults.
The Internet is full of contradictions, but nowhere is this more apparent — and cruel — than in this instance. Taking pictures and video of strangers and public is rude, except to make fun of the fans of a musician you don’t like. Let people like things, unless they like Taylor Swift. Female interests tend to be minimized and infantilized, but it’s okay if it’s Taylor Swift and her fans. We should all take public transportation, but it’s annoying when Swifties do it, nevermind the fact that these fans are by no means the first, nor will they be the last, to crowd it after a concert. Would a group of men in sports jerseys leaving a game be filmed and posted to TikTok, then blasted all over the Internet, like this? Almost certainly not.
The fact that Swift’s fanbase skews female surely isn’t coincidental, in addition to the fact that it’s also assumed to skew young, despite the fact that at this point, a not insignificant number of Swift’s fans are close in age to her and have been following her since she and they were both teenagers. In reality, her demographic seems to be all over the place — my social-media feeds have included everything from women in their early 20s through their late 30s, even a video from a parenting website showing a new mom discretely sticking to her breast-pumping schedule mid-concert. We don’t single out fans this way with any other artist, at least not on this level. The interests of teen girls tend to be overlooked at best and infantilized at worst, sometimes becoming appreciated much later, which society has become increasingly aware of in recent years. The most notable examples, The Beatles and Elvis Presley, were catapulted to fame thanks to enthusiastic young female fanbases, to put it mildly, and are now regarded as cornerstones of rock music. And despite our awareness of this, it’s still happening. Not only is Swift dismissed as an artist, but her fans are dismissed, too, mocked for enjoying her music and, most notably, for their enthusiasm. Swift is far from the first artist, female or not, whose fans dress up for her concerts. Elton John’s farewell tour has featured plenty of fans replicating his iconic blue and white Dodgers costume, as well as feather boas and over-the-top glasses. Lady Gaga’s fans recreate some of her most famous looks, and her most famous predecessor, Madonna, also has a fanbase who have followed her fashion cues. I’ve seen Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks live multiple times, and I don’t think I have to tell you how much black lace I’ve seen — and worn — at those concerts. Even Jimmy Buffett fans dress up for his annual summer tour, sporting bright Hawaiian shirts. And yet Swift’s fans, taking inspiration from Swift herself and choosing costumes according to her “eras,” are now being mocked for it. Hell, Swifties aren’t even close to the first fanbase to have a collective noun — we have Beyoncé’s Beyhive, Buffett’s Parrotheads, The Grateful Dead’s Deadheads, and Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters, to name just a few.
If your instinct is to say, “Well, that’s different. X musician is a classic artist who’s been around for decades,” or, “But Y is a better singer and Z is a better songwriter,” first, is it different? And second, it doesn’t matter. We love the music we love. We should all be free to do that. And to take public transportation after a concert without being filmed and posted online.
Part of the problem could admittedly be the “not like the other girls” attitude Swift put on early in her career in particular — but it’s that same attitude that’s rearing its head now. Swift’s critics often seem to be trying to distinguish themselves from her fans and make it clear that their taste sets them apart. A lot is implied by these attitudes, too — that her fanbase has bad taste, is unintelligent, et cetera, again, things that are not implied about fanbases of most other female artists and certainly not of fanbases of male artists. You can even gauge websites based on whether or not they covered the video and what their word choice was. If “horror” or “nightmare” appear, they consider themselves cool and alternative, and if you search the site for Swift’s name, the only coverage you get is almost definitely negative.
To be fair, most of us probably feel our personal taste is superior to others. That’s kind of how it works. The problem is when it turns to this open mocking or implicit hierarchy. Some people have a bizarre need to use our personal taste as leverage, a way to position ourselves above others. It’s a form of acceptable elitism. It’s always existed and always will, but it also always was and always will be bullshit.
