‘Taylor Swift is as culturally essential as Shakespeare’

How very far the world has travelled within the 125 years since Queen Victoria laid the muse stone for London’s V&A Museum to at the moment, when that venerable institution is promoting for a ‘Taylor Swift Super Fan Adviser’.

The place – for a loyal Swiftie (as followers of the 34-year-old singer are known as) – requires somebody to present their professional insights into fan tradition and the memorabilia that fellow Swifties accumulate and create, reminiscent of live performance indicators and friendship bracelets. The museum hopes to have its new appointee in place earlier than the 14-times Grammy winner begins the European leg of her Eras tour in May.

Inevitably, the information has horrified cultural purists. They cry that this deification of a pop starlet, recognized for her string of high-profile boyfriends and vogue sense, will taint the hallowed halls of one in all Britain’s most august establishments. She isn’t cultural sufficient, not literary sufficient, not deserving sufficient. How will tributes to her spangly outfits sit alongside Rodin sculptures and all these Virgin and Child work?

Frankly, they couldn’t be extra incorrect. Taylor Swift is as vital to world tradition as any of those nice items.

I write as somebody who accomplished my Oxford University English diploma two years in the past with a dissertation entitled ‘Is it romantic how all my elegies eulogise me’ – Taylor Swift as a contemporary romantic poet’.

It positioned Taylor Swift alongside Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Lord Byron. I based mostly my dissertation on ‘the lakes’ (no, this isn’t an error – Swift is erratic along with her capitalisation), a tune from her album ‘folklore’.

Lines reminiscent of ‘Take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die’, after all reference the Lake District, residence of Romanticism. Indeed, with ‘Tell me what are my words worth’, she name-drops Wordsworth the daddy of Romanticism. Of course, I did my Swift dissertation as a fan but additionally as an appraisal of a younger girl whose work I believed the world ought to recognize for its literary weight.

Taylor Swift performs at Melbourne Cricket Ground in Australia this month

Wordsworth mentioned poetry was the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. By this measure, Swift’s lyrics are indisputably poetry. They conjure floods of tears from those that have by no means had their coronary heart damaged, vengeance from those that have by no means been betrayed and pleasure in those that really feel bereft on the state of their lives.

Like all the nice writers, she speaks to common experiences. Her cult traditional All Too Well – so common that she launched an prolonged ten-minute model – attests to this.

Everyone can relate to a relationship by which they’ve felt belittled, neglected and dismissed. Heart-breaking lyrics reminiscent of ‘You call me up again just to break me like a promise, / So casually cruel in the name of being honest’ have shaped a lump in lots of an unemotional throat. For need of a greater cliche, Taylor Swift makes individuals really feel seen and heard.

This girl is an inescapable world phenomenon. Her present tour has already grossed greater than £790 million and added £3.6 billion to the US economic system. Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump know that 18 per cent of US voters are more likely to be influenced to vote in November’s presidential election for whoever she endorses. No surprise the V&A, one in all Britain’s key cultural arbitrators, needs to recognise her standing. Its Swiftie job is one in all a number of popular culture consultancies the museum has lately launched. People obsessed with emojis and Crocs footwear are additionally wished. Advisers on Pokémon playing cards and Lego have already been secured.

According to the job description, the V&A’s new Swiftie adviser should have a ‘hyper niche interest’, along with her as their ‘specialist subject’.

The museum’s director, former Labour MP Tristram Hunt, mentioned: ‘These new advisory roles will help us celebrate and discover more about the enormous, and often surprising, creative diversity on offer at the V&A, as well as helping us to learn more about the design stories that are relevant to our audiences today.’

In current months, extra pillars of academia have taken Swift’s work severely. Harvard University supplied a Taylor Swift And Her World course; New York University additionally runs Swift lessons; and Queen Mary University of London has a particular ‘Taylor Swift and Literature’ module.

Shakespeare scholar, Professor Sir Jonathan Bates, has in contrast her to a ‘literary genius’, the Shakespeare of our time. A self-confessed Swiftie, Bates wrote an impassioned article by which he in contrast the pair, saying she is a ‘real poet’.

William Shakespeare, painted by Louis Coblitz. Taylor Swift has been in comparison with the British playwright resulting from her cultural significance

Swift revises tales and rewrites them to suit her personal time and work – most notably revisiting the Bard’s Romeo And Juliet in her tune Love Story and giving the younger couple a contented ending. Shakespeare did related, by writing his model of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Why ought to Swift be diminished and held in decrease esteem for borrowing a narrative Shakespeare already borrowed?

She pulls strains from all over the place. Prof Bates factors out that Swift’s tune ‘invisible string’ has the road ‘Isn’t it simply so fairly to suppose’, which comes from Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, and the tune’s premise – that two individuals join to one another all through their lives – attracts from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

With so many references, allusions and borrowings in her work, there’s a conflation of reality and fiction that solely true Swifties can confirm. Hence the V&A’s want for an professional.

Her lyrics should not the one issues embedded in our cultural consciousness. Even earlier than the #MeToo motion and earlier than allegations broke towards Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, Swift impressed different ladies to talk out about harassment and testified herself in courtroom about having been assaulted.

She’s been a trailblazer in her advocacy for artists’ rights and inventive management over their work – one thing that has influenced the entire business. With her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, due for launch in April, and with no signal of slowing down, Swift will solely additional cement her place as a contemporary icon. Swift belongs within the V&A as a result of, whether or not we prefer it or not she is defining our tradition.

A concertgoer carrying armfuls of friendship bracelets attends the second of 4 Taylor Swift Eras Tour dates at ACCOR Stadium in Sydney

The banner of the museum’s web site reads: ‘If you’re into it, it’s within the V&A.’ There is little doubt that individuals are ‘into’ Taylor Swift. Fans of their hordes make friendship bracelets to trade at her exhibits due to one line in You’re On Your Own, Kid that urges them to ‘make the friendship bracelets’. While at college, I made one for a ‘guilty pleasures party’ – though, wanting again, I don’t suppose it was that responsible.

The reality is Swift conjures up a devotion and a following that’s virtually Christ-like. How apt that final 12 months, a picture of a Taylor Swift-inspired T-shirt was projected on the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, with the permission of the Christ the Redeemer Archdiocesan Sanctuary, which takes care of the monument.

Here, in Britain, the V&A was initially generally known as the Museum of Manufactures and when it opened was provided with gasoline lighting so it may stay open for the comfort of the working man. It was all the time a museum of the individuals to characterize the individuals.

Today, with practically three-and-a- half billion views on YouTube for her tune Shake It Off and 281 million Instagram followers, Swift does characterize the individuals.

Plus, on condition that supermodel Naomi Campbell is about to have her personal V&A exhibition, its present about designer Coco Chanel is coming to an finish, and with Elton John, Cher and Diana Ross all featured in one in all its present exhibitions, Diva, why shouldn’t Swift be up there? None of those exhibitions merited the applying name to arms for a Super Fan Adviser, which clearly exhibits how severely the curators are taking her.

I’ve already despatched off my utility for the job, regardless of the V&A’s vacancies web site crashing on Friday, presumably as a result of so many individuals had tried to entry it. Only a idiot would imagine Swift’s lyrics gained’t be spoken of by future generations in the identical breath as Wordsworth’s daffodils or Shakespeare’s sonnets.