4 long things I thought about this week
Taylor and Travis: the perfect couple?; women chasing fame, The Ordinary's tragic story.
ARE TAYLOR AND TRAVIS END GAME?
Unlike my Fake Rothko partner, I like Taylor Swift but I don’t worship her. I think that she is talented and extremely hardworking, but most of all I think she is a marketing genius who knows how to squeeze lots of money from her fans. Taylor lives in a complete symbiosis with the media and her fans. I don’t think anyone else pays more attention to what is being said about her on the Internet. It would not surprise me at all if Taylor had a full-on CIA-style room in her house from where a team of data analysts measures the national moods as it relates to anything Taylor does.
Taylor’s level of attention and commitment to her public image is impressive. For example, when Taylor got even a whiff of negative press for dating Matt Healy of the 1975, he was booted out expeditiously. Consider that for instance Ariana Grande is unwilling to let Sponge Bob go back to his pineapple under the sea even though this is tanking her reputation.
I have also not seen anyone more willing to play into the news cycle than Taylor. Sometimes she does it for petty reasons like when she released all of her songs to streaming services on the same day Katy Perry dropped a new album. Other times I believe she is hanging out with people who are getting lots of press coverage to keep herself relevant. What fascinates me about her antics is that Taylor does not need to be any MORE relevant than she already is: by all accounts, she has reached the absolute peak of fame, her songs are played everywhere, and her tour is on track to make a billion dollars. And yet, she still enjoys being talked about in that gossipy, tabloid way.So how does this relate to Travis Kelce, her new paramour, and the Chief’s tight end (don’t ask me what’s a tight end)? Well, I think they might be it. Taylor might have found a guy she genuinely likes + this is the match made in branding HEAVEN. T&T will bring together two completely separate fandoms and, by the power vested in them by social media, create a billion-dollar marketing opportunity. Young Swifties playing fantasy football. NFL fans humming Taylor’s songs. Think of all the cute crossovers they can do that will cause a social media storm. The two times Taylor attended Travis’s game the cameras were cutting to her every 3 seconds. The ticket prices for the games went up meanwhile she got free air time while having fun. Win-win!
Travis just makes so much sense as part of Taylor’s Americana. She ascended to the top of American pop culture — a prom queen meets her prom king.BEING FAMOUS IS NOT THE SAME AS KNOWING HOW TO MAKE MONEY.
For all of us, fame has never been more within reach. Every single one of us is one funny video, one clever concept away from getting millions of views and likes on TikTok. But fame without money is not sustainable, so you have to be famous for a purpose and Julia Allison understood that well.
A little backstory from the hairy 2000s: As an undergrad, Julia wrote a dating column for a Georgetown paper which quickly gained her notoriety on campus. After graduating she moved to New York to pursue writing full-time. The big magazines weren’t answering her emails so she began writing for a free daily newspaper Am New York. What she has done in the meantime is try to get as much exposure as possible. She was peppering Gawker’s comment section with links to her own articles until she got banned. Finally, she showed up to Nick Denton’s Halloween party in a condom dress. The next day, Gawker started covering her.
In 2008 she landed a Wired cover and a story. Idk why a tech publication was covering her — perhaps the idea of being Internet famous was still new.
Reading the accompanying article now is crazy. The writer spends hundreds of words trying to encapsulate what today could be described in one: influencer.
This is the description the writer lands on:
”Allison is the latest, and perhaps purest, iteration of the Warholian ideal: someone who is famous for being famous. Like graffiti writers who turned their signatures into wild-style gallery pieces, she has made the process of self-promotion into its own freaky art form. Traditionally, it takes an army of publicists, a well-connected family, or a big-budget ad campaign to make this kind of splash. But Allison has done it on her own and on the cheap, armed only with an insatiable need for attention and a healthy helping of Web savvy.”“I don’t do fame for fame’s sake. I don’t think it’s worth it. I don’t think it makes any sense. I think that you need a reason to do it. […] The whole goal for becoming a marquee name or getting my name out there is job security.”
Of course, this is probably not entirely true. I’m sure Julia loved the fame for fame’s sake too and although some monetization did come her way, I had a bit of a hard time figuring out what she was doing post-2010. It appears that her flame did die out as flames do.
But… fires can be rekindled and so Julia made an unbelievably strange and enchanting comeback.
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