Then, on 4 July, at Madison Square Garden, the iconic arena in midtown Manhattan, the billionaire pop superstar wed Kansas City Chiefs American football star Travis Kelce, in a celebration attended by 1,000 of the couple’s closest friends. There were barriers, and guards. No phones were allowed at the ceremony.

It was both the most public and the most private event of the year. It took place on the day of America’s 250th anniversary, and bore all the hallmarks of Swift’s longstanding talent for narrative reflexivity. And, above all, it offered proof positive that the 21st century is, once again, a time of lords and princes. Ironically, nowhere is this more evident than in the nation founded by those who left England to escape the medieval past, and its hierarchies.

Despite the secrecy, a few details have emerged. Notably, we’ve seen photos of the wedding favors received by every guest: a lace napkin embroidered with a special logo and — startlingly — a line from one of Swift’s most darkly self-destructive songs, “Blank Space”. It’s an odd choice of quotation for a wedding favor: the song is anthemic for every girl who has ever chased wild passion, knowing it’ll end in disaster. “So it’s gonna be forever,” reads the napkin. No one more deftly refracts her own self-image through her fanbase like Taylor Swift; the line was surely chosen knowing fans would immediately fill in the blank space, where the song’s next line would be: “Or it’s gonna go down in flames.”

Swiftological omens aside, what was so remarkable about the event was how much of a blank space it remained. Despite New York City surely having one of the highest densities of camera-phones per square mile anywhere on earth, the only footage to have leaked so far is a short clip filmed from the edge of the stadium’s interior. Guests can be seen processing toward a stage-set structure, decorated by greenery. There are verbal reports of the décor and food, but that’s it.

Outside in the streets, throngs of adoring Swifties gathered to participate in this radically exclusionary, wildly opulent, maximum-security event simply through proximity. And later, after the feasting was over, the catering company distributed left-over wedding desserts to fans, who screamed, scrabbled, and fought to consume a holy, sweet fragment from Travis and Taylor’s nuptial feast.

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No one could miss the eucharistic parody here — nor the echoes of feudal bounty, bestowed by the great within to the peasants at the gate: a form of lordly munificence that has largely vanished from the modern world. It survives today mostly as quirky traditions: for example at my alma mater, where the Masters celebrate Ascension Day by throwing pennies into the quad from the towers, and local children scrabble to gather them up.

Such gestures of charity to commoners were once part of the ordinary fabric of social life. Historian Eamon Duffy describes the liturgical calendar of pre-Reformation Christian England as including some 40-50 celebration days, on which “servile labor” was partly or wholly forbidden. On these days, those with means were often expected to show their wealth, and piety, by contributing towards communal feasting in charity to the poor.

This medieval holiday regime was scuppered in the 1530s, when Henry VIII broke with Rome. Shortly thereafter, the Crown abolished most of the local and national feasts, especially during the summer months, because all this liturgical partying was getting in the way of agricultural productivity. Nor was this dour onslaught on Merrie England’s pre-modern cakes-and-ale schedule the last: not long after, Henry also dissolved the monasteries, selling their lands to his friends and in the process ending a whole form of subsistence peasant life.

The more profit-focused new owners of former monastic lands didn’t always exhibit the same sense of obligation to the poor as their predecessors. Unscrupulous rent-extraction and callous landlordism became a persistent social problem, and songs and folklore from the period express an angry sense that the rich had reneged on what was expected of them. It got worse, in some respects: a century later, even kings were abolished, and the brilliant, ruthless Roundhead general Oliver Cromwell set out to transform England into a Puritan paradise — to the still greater detriment of that old regime of feasts and holy days. No more partying, even at Christmas.

A Royalist broadside ballad from the 1640s blames the loss of charity and free feast-day goodies on the Puritan leveling instinct:

To conclude, I’le tell you news that’s right, Christmas was kil’d at Naseby fight:
Charity was slain at that same time, Jack Tell troth too, a friend of mine,
Likewise then did die, rost beef and shred pie,
Pig, Goose and Capon no quarter found.
Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down.

But in other respects it got better. The same reforms also drove the creation of a new middle class, shook up laws governing heredity, and kicked off a revolution in agriculture. The resulting transformation would remake modern England, driving the Industrial Revolution, turbocharging growth, and impelling the uprooted English outward into the empire — including her then-colonial lands in America.

The irony behind Taylor Swift’s opulent extravaganza is that the origin story of the United States lay in those Puritans who left England in the 17th century, in pursuit of still greater leveling than could be managed in the Old World. Some were disappointed by the failure of radical Puritan measures during Cromwell’s Protectorate; more were underwhelmed by the religious compromises and royal Restoration that followed Cromwell’s death. These radicals sailed away, to create their shining city on a hill somewhere unburdened (as Kamala Harris put it more recently) by what has been.

Now, 250 years in, the nation that spun off from those pioneers counts more billionaires than anywhere else on earth. And, ironically, their rise is downstream of a great hollowing-out of America’s own middle class, characterized by urban geographer Joel Kotkin as a coming age of neo-feudalism. This, he suggests, is sweeping away the middle-class characteristic of the modern age, in favor of a huge subsistence peasantry, a comparatively small “clerisy”, and an unthinkably rich aristocracy.

Kotkin’s book The Coming of Neo-Feudalism was intended as a warning, and a call to arms by the beleaguered middle class. Conversely, among the new aristocracy, many seem keen to lean into the corollary of this neo-feudalism: that just like in the olden days, the new lords and princes will be obligated to dispense alms to some portion of the peasantry. Tech plutocrats, especially those producing AI of the supposedly job-destroying kind, periodically float (and sometimes pilot) “Universal Basic Income” proposals that are post-modern variants on pre-modern subsistence peasant life. The subtext, whether explicitly stated or not, is that if things continue in the current direction the wealth gap will soon be so immense that some kind of redistribution will be prudent, simply as a hedge against revolution.

All of this makes for a much sweeter pill when refracted through the prism of lordly magnificence. At least one fan interpreted Taylor Swift’s pastry distribution thus, gushing in suitably feudal style that “She loves us”. But does she? Set against the eye-watering expense of her celebration, distributing a few left-over slices of cake to fans outside isn’t much in the way of hospitality. Was it even Swift who authorized the pastry distribution? Or just a departing caterer’s van that knew the cakes would otherwise go in the bin?

The question bites much more sharply for those who have grown rich not through entertainment, but more controversial (or even job-destroying) lines of business. The last household-name billionaire wedding to hit the headlines was Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, a man who acquired his unthinkable wealth rendering high-street hardware shops obsolete, and algorithmically optimizing delivery-drivers and warehouse staff to the point where they need to pee in bottles to keep up the pace of work. This time last year Bezos and his bride Lauren Sanchez took over great swathes of Venice for a three-day wedding that cost somewhere in the region of $50 million, and attracted at least as much criticism and protest as excited rubbernecking.

Bezos also seems to be fumbling toward lordly charity — at least, by proxy. He asked his guests not to bring gifts, but instead to make donations to local Venetian charities. Despite this, his wedding still attracted protestors. Perhaps this reflects a misunderstanding of how aristocratic bounty is supposed to work: Bezos didn’t spend any of his own money throwing a party for the Venetians; he just asked that his guests dispense alms at their own expense, in lieu of wedding gifts. Those pre-modern peasants who expected goose pie now and then might have thought this a contemptibly cheapskate approach, especially given the degree of magnificence expected of a figure such as Bezos.

But a simpler interpretation is that the protests are a natural reaction to what figures such as Bezos represent: both in terms of financial inequality, but more profoundly still in power. Taylor Swift has the kind of reality-altering wealth that can close entire streets in midtown Manhattan on the nation’s 250th Independence Day holiday weekend, and build a fairy-tale film-set castle inside an iconic concert arena, in near-total secrecy. Normal people, quite naturally, find this unnerving. What else might she do with that power?

Swift evinces little interest in more hard-edged uses of her clout. But her wealth — in old-fashioned terms, we’d say “rank” — abuts the kind of individual power that can change regimes, massage markets, or redraw continental maps. All the hue and cry over other household-name billionaires, such as Bezos, the Soros family, Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel, ultimately turns on this recognition of power on a par with nation-states. Are the individuals wielding it friends, or enemies? Does it even matter what any of us thinks? If we rubberneck at billionaire weddings, and project fantasies or protests onto their lives and desires, it’s because we correctly intuit that they could do things we might never even dream of. They are, in a very concrete sense, not like us.

Is this new hierarchy gonna be forever? Some think AI will make it vastly more extreme. Should we simply accept this state of affairs, and say thanks for the left-over pastries? Resisters say we can tax these new plutocrats back into line: can the faltering middle classes still resist? Is this all, as Taylor Swift’s wedding favors didn’t say, gonna go down in flames?

It’s probably too early to tell. But if I were to guess, I’d say that in the end the excited queue for pastries will outnumber the angry mob. Provided, that is, our new, glittering overclass manage to re-learn the lordly art not just of magnificence, but also of feast-day hospitality.

Her latest release, Life of a Showgirl, is all rescues from loneliness, hopeful love after long dark nights of the soul, joy at being really loved for the first time, and dreams of ditching the celebrity life for suburban motherhood.  And then there’s the dick song. Wood is surely the most polarizing number on Life of a Showgirl. One listener declared it the best on the album; another said: “I miss who I was before Wood”. I think Jilly, author of immortal lines such as “Penis Grigio”, and “his leaning tower of pleasure”, would have laughed merrily at “The curse on me was broken by your magic wand”.

But Wood is not a dick song like Cardi B’s WAP is an “Ask for a car as you ride that dick” song. It’s not about transaction, but astonished, delighted pleasure. Swift has swapped the mood of romantic yearning, which led me once to characterize her as a distant descendant of the Gnostics, for a kind of winking, sexually-replete smut that wouldn’t be out of place in the Rutshire Chronicles.

But far more than fan accusations of “tradwife propaganda”, what’s truly revolutionary on this song is the pivot from yearning to “ah-matisation”: a radio-friendly version of “dickmatisation”, a colloquial term for the trance state supposedly induced in women by very good sex. An “ah-matised” Taylor Swift marks the end of the era Jilly Coper began: one in which lust was always privileged over loyalty. This age, which Jilly had a hand in crafting, saw the eternal tension between sexual desire and lifelong loyalty normatively resolved in favor of desire. Now, though, after two decades of making transitory and sometimes broken-hearted lust and yearning into music, with Life of a Showgirl Swift has created a hymn of praise to a delightedly lustful “happy ever after” — an album that expresses both a promise of and hope for lifelong loyalty. But will Swift be able to preserve this newfound “forever” from her own content-hungry fans?

I don’t care what the culture mavens say: Jilly Cooper and Taylor Swift are, in their respective genres, storytelling greats. Cooper’s oeuvre has already outlasted most of the dreary literary fiction published over her lifetime, while searing as indelible a mark on the psyche of every middle-class Englishwoman of a certain age as Swift has on those millennials and younger. Likewise, Swift’s songwriting captivates so widely because she is, like Cooper, a storyteller above all else. Each of her songs captures a mood, a character, and just enough narrative to sketch a scene, into which the listener can pour their own experience.

The central concern of both storytellers is love and sex. But they approach this from opposite ends of the same age of sexual liberation, and diametrically opposed personal situations. Until now Swift has been famously, chronically single; but Cooper was already married when she began writing. And the real accolade for “tradwife propaganda” should go not to Swift but Cooper, for the non-fiction book that was her first publication. How To Stay Married, published 1969, is full of tips that wouldn’t be out of place in today’s cartoonish “tradwife” discourse. “If you amuse a man in bed, he’s not likely to bother about the mountain of dust underneath it” is perhaps true, as far as it goes, but today it’s not fashionable to say so unless you’re an influencer with an online course in “Embracing Traditional Gender” or suchlike to sell.

But Cooper’s interest in marriage from her very first writing days underlines the core preoccupation of her life’s work, and (from the opposite direction) Swift’s: the tension between desire and lifelong commitment. Cooper’s characters tend to be charismatic, rich, ambitious and highly sexed. Everyone is always cheating on their spouses, and either having screaming sex or screaming rows, or sometimes both at the same time. And yet even the most obnoxiously arrogant, horny heroes and heroines generally get their “happy ever after”: even the uber-rogue Rupert Campbell-Black, whose heart is captured by the innocent and angelic Taggie O’Hara.

And yet if Cooper’s books glamorized the riotousness of lust, her life celebrated loyalty. She married a man she first met when she was seven and he ten, and remained married to him from 1968 until Leo Cooper’s death in 2013. They hung on through an early affair of hers, and also after his mistress revealed their eight-year affair, a disclosure she said was prompted by Cooper boasting about her perfect marriage. Who knows, maybe this experience shaped her portrayal of the one occasion when Campbell-Black does cheat on Taggie, in Mount! (2016); a far more ambivalent depiction of infidelity than is the rambunctious norm for her fiction. Taggie’s grief and sense of betrayal is vividly evoked. But eventually Rupert is forgiven, as was Leo.

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In Cooper’s fiction, then, sex is a chthonic, joyful life-force, as well as one that can cause havoc. Her fiction celebrated this riot, even as her own life was characterized by unswerving loyalty to the marital bond, including in the face of the devastation that followed from Leo ah-matising someone else for a few years. But by the time Swift was born in 1989, the sexual revolution was well-advanced, with Cooper’s literary assistance: she had already published Riders and Rivals, two of the three most famous Rutshire books. Taylor Swift grew up amid the sexual mores writers such as Cooper helped to normalize: a new, more libertine set of norms, where an ever more anything-goes attitude to commitment left lust and passion as increasingly the only reliable markers of meaningful connection.

With the possible exception of 2008’s Love Story, most of Swift’s storytelling takes place against this backdrop. Most of her songs are infinite variations on the theme of lust unstructured by loyalty. Her gift for capturing those “relatable” flushes of lust, fleeting experiences of romantic uncertainty, excitement, hope, or bitter disappointment, have made her a billionaire and global pop sensation. But in becoming the only reliable marker of meaningful love, Swiftian desire seems to have lost its simplicity. Instead, it’s chronically overlaid with second-guessing, anxiety, and the scars of previous relationships. Is it going to be forever, or is it gonna go down in flames? Can I tell him how I feel? Or is it too Delicate? The upbeat songs are mostly just the ones about an exciting first meeting; implicitly, getting to know someone always ends in heartbreak.

Except apparently not always. You are, Swift tells us now, “starving till you’re not”. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that what’s allowed her to stop overthinking her love life, and just feel, is the prospect of stability with her “forever night stand”. That is: with a partner who promises to be there not just for “magic, madness, heaven, sin”, but for the long haul. Swift’s two decades of chronically-single musical unhappiness made her relatable to countless fans; now, complaints about “tradwife propaganda” cash out as anger at her implying that “pledging allegiance to me, myself, and I” was only ever a way of coping with not having found her prince yet.

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And this is, indeed, at least from a liberal feminist point of view, a deeply reactionary sentiment. But if it’s Taylor Swift’s truth, and now musical inspiration, they’ll just have to cope and seethe. Or perhaps, in the case of her married fans, relate to a different side of her. Perhaps a more interesting question is: what will “forever” do to the future musical output of someone whose extant corpus is so strongly associated with heartbreak?

Here, Jilly Cooper’s example might reassure: her writing career only began after her marriage. Swift herself has already expressed pleasant surprise at discovering she wasn’t in fact less creative for being less miserable. Maybe for Swift, emotional security will result in more, not less, creativity as well as more satisfying ah-matization. But the overall arc of Cooper’s personal life also hints at what is needed to sustain this: both steadfastness, and — sometimes — a willingness to not say things. Half a century on from How To Stay Married, she told the Mail she’d got almost everything in the book wrong — except that, in the case of affairs, she still believed it best to forgive your own spouse, and not to “blab” about the misbehavior of friends. But even aside from the ethical debate, is this kind of studied discretion even possible now?

Cooper was born in 1937, not long into the TV era. Swift has spent two decades as an object of online parasocial fascination for millions. Is it even possible under these circumstances to preserve space for private intimacy, or to ask people not to gossip? To complicate matters further, her storytelling has to date drawn deeply from her personal life. But she can hardly expose her husband as she might an ex-boyfriend. Celebrities who turn their marriage into content often end up, in due course, no longer married.

I wish Swift a marriage as steadfastly lifelong as Jilly Cooper’s. But in those slightly less hyper-mediated times, readers mostly contented themselves with obsessing over that of Rupert and Taggie Campbell-Black, and left Cooper’s comparatively alone. Will Swift’s fans grant her the same courtesy? Or will they demand more details about what, er, comes after Wood?

If so, let us hope Swift doesn’t oblige. I do not want to find myself reviewing her new album Penis Grigio for UnHerd next year. Conversely, if she finds the strength to refuse, she could yet be reborn as the first global storyteller not of some new sexual Puritanism, but of a far subtler (and more horny) sexual Restoration. And having found her “forever”, she might even be able to keep it.

Eight years later, the Republicans are suffering from the same mistake, although this time the fatal phrase emerged years before the campaign. In 2021, J.D. Vance (then a Republican candidate for the Senate) gave an interview to Tucker Carlson (then a Fox News host), in which he attacked what he had described as the “childless Left”. The USA, Vance told Carlson, was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too”.

Childless cat ladies. Regrettably for Vance and the Republicans in general, it is a great phrase: pointed, memorable — and ripe for the reclaiming. Which is why, when Taylor Swift declared her backing for the Democrats on Tuesday, she did it by posting a picture to Instagram of herself holding one of her three cats (the cat in question is Benjamin Button, a ragdoll). And she signed off: “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.” Elon Musk responded on X with a gallant offer to impregnate her, which will do little to diminish accusations that Trump supporters are weird.

Her announcement was hardly surprising. Swift backed Biden/Harris in 2020 and has previously lent her support to liberal causes including gun control and abortion rights. But it was an anxiously awaited one. Other pop stars had declared their affiliation long ago: Charli XCX tweeted “kamala IS brat” almost as soon as the vice-president declared her run for the White House. And hours before Swift’s post, The Guardian published “Is Taylor Swift a secret Trump supporter?” The evidence for this was a photograph of her hugging a friend who had liked a Trump post on Instagram. (McCarthyism, apparently, can change its shape but never die.)

And it is a significant move. Swift’s cultural heft makes her a fearsome political force. When she shared a link to a voter registration site in 2023, there were 35,252 new registrations that day; notably, this included a 115% increase in 18-year-olds, who are more likely to vote Democrat. Swift’s audience also skews female, which is significant for an election held in the shadow of the Dodds Supreme Court decision which undid Roe vs Wade. Bluntly, the more women vote, the harder it becomes for Trump to win.

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But even though Swift has embraced her electoral power now, she’s historically been cautious. As a young singer-songwriter on the Nashville scene, she cultivated an apolitical stance. One of the country acts she had first been inspired by as a child were the Dixie Chicks (now simply called the Chicks): in 2003, their career was all but destroyed after a member of the band criticised George W. Bush during a concert. “They were made such an example that basically every country artist that came after that, every label tells you, ‘Just do not get involved, no matter what,’” said Swift in 2019.

Five years on, Swift is much more comfortable pinning her colours to the mast. But she still carries some of the burden of being — as the title of her 2020 film tagged her — Miss Americana. Nashville may be behind her now, but the similarly conservative-leaning National Football League is firmly in her present. That’s thanks to her boyfriend, the footballer Travis Kelce, who has become more established in her public life than any of her previous partners. They are a formidable team: between them, they cover the worlds of sports and pop music, male and female, Right-coded and Left-coded. A homecoming king and queen for the nation.

But Swift is more than an individual. She’s a business. Michael Jordan’s truism that Republicans still buy sneakers holds in the music industry too: Republicans stream songs and buy concert tickets and merch as well. For Swift, the art is to cultivate her own positions without alienating half her potential US market. It’s a problem that other, more explicitly political artists have been learning to navigate since Swift’s own political coming-out. Chappell Roan, for example, is all-in for LGBTQ causes. But in interviews, she has stressed her Midwest roots and compassion for people with opposing views: “I know where they’re coming from. It’s just not that black-and-white.”

For Swift, a crack along the lines of “basket of deplorables” would probably be even more calamitous than it was for Clinton — and absolutely devastating for her other half. Hence what looks like the careful orchestration of the announcement. That hug with her problematically pro-Trump friend, fellow NFL WAG Brittany Mahomes? The rune readers were wrong to see it as an endorsement of Mahomes’s politics, but probably right to see it as a deliberate announcement of something. The message of the hug is that friendship comes before partisanship. In Swiftworld, you can have your beliefs without needing to cancel people from life for having different ones.

I hesitate to read too much into a paparazzi shot, but maybe this is a good sign for American democracy. Back in Swift’s days of silence, there wasn’t much pressure for her to speak out on politics, because there wasn’t a strong expectation in the Noughties and early Tens that a teen pop star would have any politics to speak of. Their job was to look pretty and be air-headedly inoffensive: nobody expected to know how Britney Spears was going to vote.

That changed with the great politicising of everything that happened in the mid-tens. First, “feminist” went from suggesting an alarmingly confrontational woman to sounding new, exciting, even sexy: Beyoncé danced in front of the word in 2013. Slogans like “silence is violence” came into popular use, insisting that anything less than outright campaigning amounted to complicity with evil. More importantly, social media meant that silence had become perilously easy to detect. Lending your support to the Black Lives Matter cause, for example, was as simple as posting a black square to your grid — so how much of a closet racist would you have to be if you couldn’t even do that much?

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Personal relationships began to be treated as a battleground. Patronising Left-wing guides on how to handle Thanksgiving began to proliferate after Trump was elected: “It’s our responsibility to go home and have the hard conversations with our family members, because, in many cases, only we have the power to reach them and begin the long work of rooting out bigotry in our communities,” said one cringingly solemn article on the website Mic. But these had their match from the Right: the Daily Signal, an offshoot of the conservative Heritage Foundation, offered tips on “how to be persuasive about politics with your liberal relatives”.

As strongly as Swift’s history had compelled her to hold her tongue, the new order dictated that she should speak out. She described herself as a feminist for the first time in 2014. Just two years earlier, she’d answered a question about whether she was a feminist by saying “I don’t really think about things as guys versus girls”; perhaps significantly, between those two points, she was sexually assaulted by a DJ, against whom she later won a civil suit. From there, her political evolution evolved steadily, bringing us to the present day, when a Swift endorsement was coveted enough for Trump to share fake images implying he had her backing.

Vance’s jibe at “childless cat ladies” is the nonsensical endpoint of the era in which everything was politicised by default — even pet ownership, even whether or not you have procreated. Anti-feminist claplines might play well to a tame audience such as Tucker Carlson, but in the wild, a lot of women are going to hear this as the Republicans rejecting them: if being a “childless cat lady” makes them liberal, then so be it — they will cast their vote accordingly.

Swift’s response is mindful and demure and resolute. It shows a grasp of political messaging that Vance and co. have failed to get anywhere close to: pop stars have learned the power of the big tent, while right-wing politicians flail around for the pleasure of their fandoms. This is, of course, the opposite way round to how it ought to be, but there’s hope for the US in Swiftian politics. Maybe, it’s time to stop putting people into baskets.

Then there are those who, far from being curious, want to stare into the face of a suspected perpetrator and see their worst enemy projected back at them. Since the Southport knife attack on Monday, it is this tribe that has been most vocal.

Until today, the name of the suspect behind the stabbing rampage was not released; he is 17 and the law prohibits the naming of child suspects in criminal proceedings, except in very rare circumstances. And yet, within hours of the Southport rampage, a number of accounts on X claimed to have seen his name. “He is alleged to be on MI5’s watch list, had ‘mental issues’ and was a Channel migrant,” wrote one conservative “journalist” with more than 200,000 followers. Laurence Fox, meanwhile, blamed the attack on the “national emergency” of uncontrolled immigration. In response, he croaked, “you’re about to see the roar of the British lion”. In the event, that lion turned out to be a tanked-up geezer in a tracksuit, while his roar amounted to hurling wheelie bins and bricks at police.

Within hours, it had become clear that these claims were false. According to Merseyside Police, the suspect was in fact born in Cardiff. We also know that he moved to the Southport area with his Rwandan parents when he was aged six. In other words, he was a second-generation immigrant, not an undocumented migrant who had recently arrived in an illegal boat.

But put this knowledge to one side — should the personal identity of the perpetrator of mass-casualty violence matter? From a human perspective, it shouldn’t; had the suspect of the Southport atrocity been a white teen whose parents were from Reading instead of Rwanda, the horror wouldn’t be any less horrific. Yet even so, it does matter, to the degree that it might shed a light on the motives (if any) of the perpetrator. Atheists called John Smith, for example, are unlikely to carry out acts of jihadist violence, while women don’t commit incel-inspired outrages.

And of course, in today’s atomised world, identity has never commanded such political and existential power. Had the suspect of Monday’s stabbing spree indeed been white, and targeted a Beyoncé-themed event where the victims were predominantly black children, it seems likely that many on social media would condemn Britain’s racist superstructure. Which is to say that politicising massacres isn’t just a vice of the online Right, but is fully alive among online progressives too.

Merseyside Police, for its part, has said that the motivation behind the Southport attack is “unclear”, that it is not being treated as terror-related, and that the suspect acted alone. Two possibilities follow from this. The first is that the suspect had personal reasons for launching his attack, however outrageously shallow, incomprehensible or incoherent they may seem to us. For all we know, he may have wanted Taylor Swift to notice him, much like John Hinckley Jr, who tried to assassinate President Reagan in 1981, wanted Jodie Foster to notice him. As Kat Rosenfield recently observed in a smart piece on Donald Trump’s would-be assassin, “the desperate desire to believe that life-shattering violence must have some kind of deeper meaning”, though understandable, belies the fact that a lot of violence is “not just senseless, but depthless, a lizard-brained impulse in search of an outlet”.

The second possibility is that the suspect may be mentally ill and that his illness is such that he had no clear or stable motives for doing his attack; that is, he acted not according to his free will, but in response to some imagined voice, command or imperative that he felt he had no choice but to follow. According to a recent report in The Guardian, police investigators are “increasingly focusing on the state of their suspect’s mental health or potential neurodivergence in the years before the attack”.

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For those seeking to make political hay out of the Southport massacre, this second possibility is vehemently rejected as a form of rank gaslighting designed to distract us from what they see as truth — which seems to be that the sort of people who commit monstrous atrocities against children are not from here but over there, where monstrousness is widespread. As one prolific commentator on the online Right put it: “If they come out and they say this geezer’s got mental health problems… I’m on it… We’re not in a Middle Eastern country… This is England.”

Elsewhere, another prominent poster sought to expose, in his view, the blatant double standards around the reporting of political atrocities in the UK: “If Southport killer is white = far-Right. If Southport killer isn’t white = mental illness/thoughts and prayers.” If this formulation has a familiar ring to it, it is because it is an exact inversion of a particular brand of Muslim victimology which holds that, if the perpetrator of lethal violence is Muslim, he is automatically branded as a terrorist by the media, whereas if he is white, he is portrayed as a lone wolf with mental health problems.

Others have insisted that the Southport attack, for all its unique and unspeakable horror, is part of a wider pattern of mass-casualty violence in the UK, where the perpetrators are disproportionately first or second-generation immigrants. Is it racist to point this out? It certainly can be, and much of the commentary in recent days has been infused with prejudice. But, crucially, it doesn’t have to be. For example, the claim that black or Muslim people are intrinsically violent or terror-prone is, undoubtedly, grossly racist. What isn’t racist, however, is to sensitively explore the economic, social and cultural circumstances in which individuals and groups act, and investigate how those circumstances may allow malevolent impulses to flourish.

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How might this look in practice? Most obviously, it requires us to look at the nature of an individual’s encounters with wider British society and how or whether it has failed them in some way. But it also requires us to explore the pathologies of tribal grievance and cultures of honour, shame and retribution that migrants themselves bring to their host society, and how this in turn shapes their encounters with it. We also need to probe the relationship between migrant populations and mental illness: if culturally displaced people, particularly those who have fled war zones, are more prone to mental health problems, how can we better treat them to manage their risk to others and to themselves?

These are difficult and urgent questions that neither the Right nor the Left seem willing to address; with the former seemingly content to stoke white victimology for clicks and likes, and the latter inclined to pretend that the real problem is the reaction to such violence by the far-Right. And in the middle, many are left idly wondering how such an outwardly normal and introverted kid could be suspected of doing something so unfathomably evil.

Mired in toxicity, there are surely few more depressing ways to honour the victims of Southport. There is nothing “British” about it, and nor is it “progressive”. And, almost certainly, it won’t help to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

In the Times, correspondent Ben Hoyle wrote that going to the concert with his wife and children had acted as a bonding experience for the family, during which he realised “he couldn’t be happier”. An accompanying picture showed him resplendent in a hot pink feather boa, which he said had been urged upon him by his teenage daughters. Meanwhile, in the Mail on Sunday Bryony Gordon recounted the story of what was, for both her and her 11-year-old, “the best night of our lives — and made all the more magical for getting to enjoy it together”.  According to Gordon, the concert had “united the generations in sparklingly spectacular glory”.

Less cynical minds than mine probably read this stuff with approval. Assuming that parents and children are increasingly mutually alienated, lost in different online worlds, isn’t it refreshing to read about a relatively innocent communal activity taking place in the open air? But I’m afraid I’m going to be the voice of doom. If you want that sort of thing, do a Parkrun together. In my ideal world, adults would get their vampiric mitts off young people’s music and leave them to it.

Reality is not ideal, however; and I’m as guilty as the next Gen X-er of having a Spotify playlist that ill behoves my advancing years. In fact, with my own kids, it is as if the poles have reversed — when my 18-year-old tells me he has an “absolute banger” he wants me to listen to, more often than not it’s by Fats Waller. It’s all a far cry from the late 20th century, where an informal social contract still existed between teenagers and their parents, dictating that the right and proper attitude towards the other party’s music should be suspicion bordering upon downright contempt.

Youngsters could feel rebellious in virtue of whatever fresh aural hell was emitting from turntables and tape recorders, while adults in the vicinity would mutter gratifyingly about the culturally impenetrable noise. Concerts and raves were places for older kids to engage in Dionysian excess — dancing, moshing, screaming, crying, snogging, crowdsurfing, ingesting stimulants, and acquiring eardrum injuries — as their parents worried about them impotently, far removed from the action.

But then the mobile phone came along, spoiling live music in a number of ways — and not just because now, at emotionally charged moments, you had to wave your phone torch aloft instead of a lighter. Soon, certain brains would automatically translate nascent feelings of excitement into an imperative to film something; to adopt a shrewd directorial eye towards incoming sensory experience, treating it as a product to be sold on later to others. This also meant it was no longer possible to dance like no one was watching. Another result was that now young people were never very far away from their parents, psychologically speaking — only a call away, in fact, which seems at some point in the 2010s to have morphed into “only a few feet away” instead.

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Nowadays, there is much talk about helicopter parenting, but in the case of music, the metaphor should probably be that of a grasping hook — though one which steals nice things from teenage girls not boys, since the latter still seem able to go to rap and rock gigs without chaperoning. The main site of familial musical appreciation is commercial pop music like Swift’s: consumed by vastly more females than males, and scarcely much of a prospect for adolescent defiance anyway, either in terms of decibel level or parental advisory warnings. Instead, what pop music does best is give visceral melodic form to desperate feelings of love and heartbreak, topics very close to young hearts. Doubtless such themes are perennial. Still, when you are belting out a ballad along with your idol, pouring forth all that rejection and self-doubt like an exorcism, do you really want to hear your mother singing it too?

That music has become so horribly inclusive is not entirely the fault of us oldies, though. As others have noted, largely thanks to internet streaming we seem to have arrived at the doldrums phase of musical history: stuck in an eternal present with no forward momentum. All musical periods are available all the time, and artists — even great ones like Swift — don’t so much create new styles as put old ones in quotation marks. It’s also impossible for youth subcultures to get going in quite the same way, since an infinity of choice atomises listeners.

Globally, there might be lots of fans of a particular act, but locally there are unlikely to be enough to feel part of something meaningful. And even when you stumble across something you love, there’s a relative lack of physical objects in which to ground the intense feeling: fewer records and CDs, music venues and record shops; no weekly music papers to pore over; virtual fandoms rather than organised fan clubs. Sounds float weightlessly, easily accessed and more easily lost. Megastars like Swift, capable of filling stadiums and shifting merch at scale, hoover up the surplus adoration.

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Though it sounds fogeyish to say it, musical quality has also definitely deteriorated, as record companies aim for whatever is most likely to achieve virality on TikTok. Songs are getting shorter and also simpler, lyrically and melodically; the album format is dying; the “loudness war” continues, reducing aural dynamics; human composition and performance are now indistinguishable from AI. New bands make practically no money from streaming and can’t afford to tour. Perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that this year’s festivals include headliners whose heydays were decades ago: Coldplay at Glastonbury; Pet Shop Boys at the Isle of Wight; Liam Gallagher and Blink 182 at Leeds and Reading.

Some may protest that great tunes speak to everyone; and anyway, the absence of aesthetic boundaries between family members is not all bad. Given the state of the housing market, you will probably all be living together forever anyway — so why not lean into the psychic enmeshment? At least that way you won’t be fighting over what comes out of the speakers.

Still, I suspect the lack of generational differentiation — musical or otherwise — has a cost. In a reboot of The Picture of Dorian Gray, as adults refuse to grow up, Gen Z-ers seem to get ever more straight-faced and anhedonic in compensation. Booze and sex are out, apparently; antidepressants and staycations in the Cotswolds are in. It’s as if they are desperate to make a psychic break with older generations, and have concluded that moderation, responsibility, and excessive worry about the future are their only options. Every time a political leader arses about on a waterslide, a 20-something on Love Island gets enough facial fillers to make her look like a Milf.

A perhaps healthier means of mentally detaching from your elders — and perhaps of getting a bit of revenge too — is by featuring them in your social media content, in order to make them look endearingly foolish and pet-like. That seems to be what 24-year-old Francesca Scorsese, daughter of film director Martin, has been doing for a while now: getting her famous and apparently compliant 81-year-old father to pronounce upon the function of various “feminine items” of hers, or otherwise clown around, then putting the outputs to ironic music. A recent TikTok trend which also mines the narcissistic tendencies of parents involves getting them to dance to Bronski Beat like they “would have danced in the 80s” and then filming the results.

Parents might think they look cutely uninhibited, but the kids are presumably watching a whole different show. After all, “cool” is an attributive adjective, changing its standards of application relative to context. Just as a “large” mouse still looks small next to an elephant, a “cool” parent — at least in the eyes of other parents — can still be a source of high mirth or mortification to subsequent generations.

It’s almost enough to give the unselfconscious concert-going mum and dad a dose of paranoia. While you were uploading those happy family selfies for Instagram, who knows what your darling offspring were posting about you on Snapchat? Maybe next time, instead of playing the glitter-strewn ghost at the feast, try to restore the natural order of things: drop them off at the venue if you must, but with the parting shot that whatever they are about to hear is a load of rubbish. And then go and take selfies at a National Trust property instead.

The Paris La Defense Arena is where, last night, Swift began the European leg of her Eras Tour, which sprouts records and superlatives like Midas makes gold. The 2023 dates made it the first concert tour to ever gross a billion dollars. It’s forecast to double that this year. After sweeping through Asia — where a minor diplomatic incident went down when Singapore offered government subsidies to get regional exclusivity — Swift has now reached the old world. Four shows in Paris and 51 across the continent in total, ending with a five-night run at Wembley Stadium in August. She’s not the only American in town. Both the Eurostar from London and Paris itself ring out with well-projected US accents. Forget the doomy warblings about Washington’s geopolitical ebb: the spring sun is out, the dollar is strong and Europe is America’s playground.

Concertgoers — mostly young, mostly female — are in sparkly dresses, cowboy boots and glitter. The few guys here are dressed down to the point of invisibility; tonight, humanity joins those few species of birds and insects where bright colours are for babes only.

Swift is scheduled to start at eight. Two minutes beforehand, a clock on the giant screen which stretches across the back of the stage counts down — and right on time, we begin. As the arena lights dim, the tens of thousands of swaying smartphone cameras illuminate, like a phosphorescent ocean. Dancers shimmy out trailed by billowing fabric, which they manipulate to form a kind of liquid clam shell. And out of that, like Botticelli’s all-American Venus, emerges Taylor Alison Swift, 34, of West Reading, Pennsylvania, USA.

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Taylor Swift inspires love, dedication and obsessive fandom. In me, she has kindled about a decade and a half of mild but increasing curiosity. There are seven Swift songs I recognise from their titles, and none come after 2014. My musical knowledge of her petered out when she was merely a very big star, and in an era where culture was coherent enough for everyone to absorb a certain level of commercial pop. Then I started seeing her in Bloomberg and the Financial Times, attached to stories about inflation and foreign policy.

Taylor Swift’s current era — dating, it seems, from the pandemic onwards — is out-and-out imperial. She was last year’s best-selling artist worldwide, and the year before that too. Her current relationship, with the puppyish American footballer Travis Kelce, is theorised by the more batshit US conservatives to be an elaborate psyop to boost Joe Biden in this year’s presidential election. The European dates of the Eras Tour are the first after the release of her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, in April. It was not a critical success. “Sylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this!” read a review in Paste magazine — anonymous, because writers who criticise Swift can reliably expect online death threats from fans. Nevertheless, upon release it smashed multiple streaming records.

After the opening number, Swift pauses, for half a minute at least, to take in the sound of the crowd. Blown up to a giantess on screen, Swift looks overwhelmed, as if she hasn’t experienced this reaction before. She has, hundreds of times. But each and every member of the audience must be broken free of the billions of dollars of revenue they represent and made to feel seen. After the pause, Swift extends her wrist, as if offering it up to be kissed, and says: “Enchanté.”

The Eras Tour, as its name suggests, cycles through each of Swift’s “eras”, or albums. The various stage setups reference cityscapes, forests and, at one point, a surreal landscape of steel cages sunk into the ground either side of an open highway. Periodically, Swift sinks down a trapdoor in the middle of the stage, into what must be her era-shifting chamber, then remerges, moments later, from an ingenious new position and in a different outfit. I get the sparkly costumes now, because this is very much what Swift goes in for herself. Sparkly hot pants, sparkly ball gown, sparkly miniskirt with sparkly thigh-high boots — even what looks like a sparkly dressing gown. The battalion of dancers go through endless outfit changes too, but no-one’s allowed to sparkle quite like Swift.

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Singing and dancing her way through a typical Eras setlist lasts between three and four hours. Swift began her career writing and performing country songs in Nashville, Tennessee, where music is whittled down to a perfect product. These days, she embraces an opposite but equally American approach: superabundance. Song piles upon song. And every great American genre seems to get a hearing: pop, rock, country, folk, rap, R&B (slow and sultry), R&B (fast and spiky). I almost expect a banger inspired by Washington DC-style hardcore punk.

Not everything works. An hour in, we’ve entered the era of Folklore and Evermore, her pandemic albums. It’s ballad central: wafty and witchy and, to be honest, a bit snoozy. But then we go back in time to 1989 (or 2014, which is when that confusingly named album came out). She launches into “Shake It Off” — one of my precious seven songs — and my subconscious flashes up memories of chugging brilliant blue alcopops in sticky student nightclubs. It’s glorious.

Swift is big in the way that no other modern superstar is. Orders of magnitude bigger. The logarithmic scale could have been invented for her. This bigness manifests in the thousands upon thousands who attend her concerts, and the probable millions that try and fail to get tickets. But out of the many, one — e pluribus, unum, as a teacher might have put it to Swift in an American history class around the turn of the millennium. At one point in the show, Swift compliments the crowd. “I’m making extreme eye contact with everyone; I’m dancing with everyone; you’re so present,” she says. “And it means the world to us as performers.”

Yes, it’s what the pro that she is would and should say. But in the moment, it sounds sincere, or at least well-meaning enough to discourage any attempt to prod at its veracity. For three hours and seven minutes — this ends up being a comparatively brisk performance — Swift assembles her fans, usually only joined up by the spindly limbs of social media, into a physical community. These fans don’t just adore her; they end up adoring each other. Inspired by one of her stray lyrics from 2022, they now make friendship bracelets to trade with strangers at shows.

Truly mass culture in its most tribal form barely exists anymore. The all-consuming influence of the internet has degraded it in two substantial ways. Algorithmically generated feeds on everything from Instagram to Netflix have given us all tastes which are similar but slightly different — amid this torrent of content, it’s harder for youth tribes such as punks or New Romantics to cohere around sets of cultural tenets. And the isolated and antisocial manner in which we consume what these feeds serve up — on our phones, alone — acts as a barrier to shared experience.

But Swift is one of mass culture’s last bastions. And she presents a very good case as to why we should cling on to what’s left of it. She, like few others, can out-muscle the brute force of the algorithm and bring people together to commune around her music — some of which is good, and some of which isn’t, but that’s hardly the point. The point is the ecstatic crowd in front of her.

Her last song is, again, one I don’t know. It’s an up-tempo electropop number with sugar-rush synthesiser lines, and as it plays, we’re dazzled with sparkles, primary colours, fireworks and confetti — all that is good in the world. Swift bows with her band and her dancers, then bows alone. Then she descends, for the final time, into that hole in the stage, to get ready to cast the same spell tomorrow.

Welcome to the new America. In this strange new country, Taylor Swift fans are interested in football, while American football fans have been obliged to take cognisance of the existence of Taylor Swift, and even grudgingly admit that at least some of her music is actually quite good.

The Swift-Kelce singularity has already proved so powerful that there are dark mutterings from corners of the American Right that the celebrity couple is part of a plot to get Joe Biden re-elected, engineered by the US Department of Defense. Donald Trump is said to be personally miffed by Swift’s popularity, and to privately insist to unnamed advisors that his fan base is larger than hers.

Trump is right to take Swift seriously. I encountered America’s reigning pop princess on the last leg of her Eras tour — the music event of the summer, soon coming to Europe, with tickets selling for $1,500 and up — through a music-lover friend who, proclaiming himself tired of my unthinking prejudice against his teeny-bopper idol, offered me a ticket to see her show in Seattle. I alighted from my Uber outside the Lumens stadium in the company of a mother, in her 40s, and her daughter, in her mid-teens, wearing matching white glittery dresses. The middle daughter, in her early twenties, wore black, with a row of maybe a dozen friendship bracelets on her right arm.

By compelling the allegiance of all three generations, Swift has become the closest thing that America has these days to a national hero who connects the entire country, the country-club set included, together, and to a common mythos. F. Scott Fitzgerald would have loved Taylor Swift. A little bit cracked, a little bit reckless, bound for disappointment, but protected by invisible cushions of race and class, her tragedy is at once pre-ordained and, at the same time, affirms the country’s battered-but-still-existent social order. If “Cruel Summer”, Swift’s summer radio anthem, isn’t exactly Cole Porter, it’s easy to imagine F. Scott humming the tune.

But Taylor Swift is also something more than a pop star. Neither a brilliant singer nor a gifted dancer, she is the author of memorable lines and couplets that seemingly emerge from a stream-of-consciousness story-telling voice whose seeming artlessness is a calculated effect of her craft, of which she is a master. Her persona is a disenchanted version of the girl-next-door, who is overly labile, loses control of her emotions, gets dumped, and then pours out her simmering anger and hurt to her diary, as well as to her millions of fans, for whom she serves as a kind of substitute for family. What makes her persona stand out from the usual run of injured females is her awareness of her own failings, which is in turn the whetstone upon which she sharpens her daggers, which she thrusts into the eyes of those who have injured or betrayed her. Her actual family is an upscale affair, consisting of her young brother Austin; her mother Andrea, a former marketing manager at an advertising agency; and father Scott, a stockbroker-turned-vice-president for Merrill Lynch, who manages his daughter’s money.

Awaiting her arrival, the crowd was an explosion of cut-off-jean shorts over fishnets, prom dresses, glitter tops, shimmery metallic leggings, glittery tiaras, henna tattoos, rainbow glitter tops, glittery cowboy hats, and more glitter. It was like Planet of the Apes for Women Wearing Glitter. Perhaps half the crowd were seriously overweight, which is more or less the same ratio I’d expect to find among the men at a football game. Where male football fans wear team jerseys, the Swifties are dressed for a summer prom, proving once again that the audience for female finery is other females. Maybe one out of every 10 here is a man. Relations between the sexes are cordial.

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Swift’s opening act was the Haim sisters, who rock a more physically and mentally healthy Sarah Silverman-type vibe. What they lack, however, is the comedienne’s awareness of her own brokenness, which was the source of her charisma and wicked sense of humour. Silverman knows that the world can be a mean, cruel place. Where young American men are generally forced to internalise the lessons of their own insignificance in unpleasant ways by the time they hit puberty, young women are encouraged by schools, older women, and every form of entertainment on the planet to believe they can have it all. To believe otherwise is to let down the side, which consists of all other women on the planet. The result being, at least here in America, the near-certainty that young women will fail to achieve even basic levels of happiness, as the gap between their expectations and reality proves impossible to bridge. Which is where Taylor Swift comes in.

Part Khaleesi warrior goddess, part stripper, part show pony, part Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, part sorority sister, part Country Western singer, part Daisy Buchanan, part woman scorned, and part broken toy, her presence is effortlessly authoritative. She just stands there, commanding the stage. Through the power of her persona, one she has assembled with her own magpie creativity, she takes colourful bits of string from the nests of her producers and song-writing partners and fuses them together in a way that is always uniquely her own.

Swift’s craft as a songwriter comes from her rootedness in the themes and rhythms of country music, which is the genre in which she began, and which she has seamlessly adapted to pop. The marriage of these two forms allows Swift to escape the emotional confines of pop, and channel the stresses and resentments of a generation of women who are hopelessly torn between the demands of the workplace and ingrained ideas of romance and femininity, and above all by the knowledge that the scripts don’t match, and never will match. Swift’s job in the culture is to take the toxic life-trap these women feel caught in and reflect it back to her audience while still making them feel special. Her songs mirror the brutal inner monologues of a generation of caged female animals who grew up with the language of girl power and are now unwilling to either fully endorse their condition or abandon the possibilities of romance with men.

Swift has a charming way of presenting her life as a movie while at the same time fully inhabiting the characters in her songs. She’s a better actress than Madonna, in part because her persona rests on being the girl next door rather than Superwoman. This persona is convincing because she suffers. She suffers because she wants too much, often from men whose inadequacies force her to settle for less, or much less, until she explodes, and leaves them long drunken answering machine messages, or stalks them at bars, or becomes obsessed with their new girlfriends. Costuming aside, she’s pure Nashville.

Swift is America’s Female Id, taking the feminine emotional range and insight of country music and injecting it into pop without compromising the virtues of either. “Oh wow, you know,” she said at the Lumens, returning to her safe place, which is her 70,000-strong audience. “Musically speaking, we’ve got a lot to catch up on. It’s been five years. But let’s not talk about me anymore. Let’s talk about you. There are performances I see in this crowd tonight that are Tony Award-level.”

What separates the performer from her audience is not that her inner life is any more elevated. It is that she’s a hugely talented songwriter who works incredibly hard at her craft, and there is something endearing about Swift’s need to keep making that point plain. “I’ve been writing songs since I was 12,” she said, matter-of-factly. “My way of coping with stuff is that I go through something, and then I write songs about it.” The fact that the stories in her songs are real is part of what makes them good though, just like any rap star, a fact she underlined by launching into “champagne problems”, a song inspired by her ill-fated liaison with Conor Kennedy, RFK Jr’s son. She’s a nightmare dressed like a daydream, or so the song says. “She would’ve made such a lovely bride,” she sings. “What a shame she’s fucked in the head.”

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Maybe she is, and maybe she isn’t. Maybe it’s all her fault. Or maybe it’s the guy’s fault. Either way, it’s impossible not to be struck by the perfect construction of the line, and by the delicate emotional line that the song walks — between seeing herself through the eyes of her detractors and admitting that she is nuts and being a survivor who in the end will always win out, by turning the pain of being unwanted into pop chart success. Swift is a talented emotional acrobat who is continually walking lines that are finer than they look, feeling from the inside while describing herself from the outside. The combination of those talents makes her a star.

If it was exhausting, for a man in the audience, that nearly three hours of non-stop female emotional shadowboxing and politicking, there is also no denying how completely Taylor Swift has mastered the art of being a pop star, at a moment when Americans in general, and single American women in particular, seem paralysed by a pervasive uncertainty. Meanwhile, Swift is free to return to her roots. Which brings us to folklore, the alt-country pop record she released in 2020, at the height of Covid lockdowns.

“I hit my peak at seven feet / in a swing / over the creek / I was too scared to jump in,” she sings to a childhood friend, before wondering if there is still sweet tea to drink and other beautiful things left in this world.

This is Taylor Swift taking her stand. She’s still the most famous woman in the world, even if her job — as a songwriter and a pop star — is to be miserable. She can be famous and live in a mansion by the sea in Rhode Island, a safe distance from the Kennedys, but she can’t have it all. The rules won’t allow it.

Swift never stops trying, though. Her Nashville work-ethic, like her lunges at her exes, root her in a place that Americans look to for salvation from their present ills. Not to billionaire fantasies about colonising Mars, or the insistence on abolishing borders and gender, but to the Fifties America of Leslie Gore, where women could still call out the men who betray and control them, and assert the fierceness of their own inner lives, with the assurance that there is some greater form of structure, which, regardless of the constraints it imposes, might offer an alternative to being alone. After spending the past 50 years tearing down the structures of families, churches, local government, ethnicity, gender, nations and borders, a very large number of Americans now find themselves struggling to find rhythm and meaning to their lives.

The idea that Taylor Swift, of all people, can find happiness cheering for her boyfriend, a burly, bearded football star seems well-deserved. It is also an embodiment of the kind of healing synthesis that is hard to find in Trump’s angry bluster, or Biden’s senile ramblings, or activist campaigns to shut down bridges and highways, or mandate the exclusive use of electric cars, or otherwise force one’s views and practices on others. What Taylor Swift finally has for herself is what a large majority of Americans want for themselves. Or maybe it’s all a clever promotional stunt, cooked up by Swift’s handlers and the country’s most popular sports league to sell their respective products. Which would also be entirely and even comfortingly American.

“Hi, I’m the problem,” she announced in Seattle bluntly, before softening the blow with an eruption of glitter. “When I walk in the room / I can still make the whole thing shimmer.”

Released in 2008, Swift’s “Love Story” recounts the frustrations of a young “Juliet” kept away from her “Romeo” but longing for him to carry her away. In the final stanza, the song’s “Romeo” unexpectedly kneels and — cue Truck Driver’s Gear Change — proposes marriage. It’s hugely satisfying, emotionally powerful — and, in a way Swift has always instinctively grasped, it’s a story drawn straight from the collective female unconscious.

The central trope in “Love Story” is that of most romance novels: true love whose course doesn’t run smooth, but which ends Happily Ever After. It is, perhaps, the most conservative of all plot lines. So why, amid rumours that Swift’s own much-publicised romance with American football star Travis Kelce may be on the brink of its own emotional gear change, do conservatives seem to be furious with the real-life “Love Story” heroine, Taylor Swift?

The hate is not exactly new. Last year, MAGA activist Laura Loomer posted a long and impressively swivel-eyed X screed about how the Soros family has induced Taylor Swift to help the Democrats manipulate the media, in exchange for re-acquiring the rights to her own music catalogue. But the incipient lunacy of the 2024 US election cycle, plus Biden calling on Swift for an endorsement, seem to have inflamed the hatred to fresh levels. Presidential also-ran Vivek Ramaswamy, for example, has popped up with a nudge-nudge about the Superbowl being rigged for Kelce’s team.

So, is Swift a Democrat media-manipulation asset? I doubt it. But if we view conspiracies poetically rather than literally, we might say a deeper intuition is at work: a sense that the cultural force embodied by Swift is both a political loose cannon, and one that has very little to do with traditional democratic politics. And, worse (from the perspective of Loomer and her like), it’s a force the Right neither understands well, nor has much prospect of turning to their advantage.

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The force in question is internet-enabled swarms. There are a great many instances of this phenomenon, but Taylor Swift’s collective fandom — or “Swifties”, as they are known — represent perhaps the largest and most well-known. They can also, occasionally, have startling effects in the real world. In 2022, for example, after Ticketmaster crashed during a surge of unprecedented demand for tickets to the singer’s Eras tour, Swifties enraged by the ticketing firm’s dodgy practices mobilised to break up the company: a campaign that is now bearing fruit. And just last week, after obscene AI deepfakes of Swift were released, the Swifties swarmed again, drowning out the fake images and prompting calls in Congress for greater regulation on such tools.

And perhaps here we can grasp the contours of what the conspiracy-theorists are gesturing at, however clumsily, when they claim that “Taylor Swift is a psyop”. When public discourse comprises a host of overlapping swarms, of which Swifties are only one of the better-known and more prominent ones, politics simply doesn’t work the way it used to. Just recently, the think-pieces and polls have woken up to this — speculating on whether, or how, Taylor Swift might shift the upcoming US election.

And if there’s a weirdly misogynistic edge to the boos and “empty egg carton” jokes (referring to 34-year-old Swift’s supposedly diminished fertility) prompted by media images of Swift doing girlfriend stuff, this is less for who she is than what she represents. For this isn’t just “popular music women really like” but something far more insidious and wide-ranging: her role as metonym for the female-coded phenomenon of swarmism.

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Infectious emotions are not uniquely female, but studies suggest women are more prone to them. Anyone who has ever observed a group of teenage girls will recognise the way, whether in real life or via internet channels, emotions felt by one member of the group refract and are amplified by others. This process is, in turn, linked to the well-documented prevalence of conversion symptoms and social contagion among adolescent girls, such as the pandemic-era outbreak of “TikTok tics” among a predominantly teenage female cohort — or, more darkly still, the teenage girls’ Instagram suicide group uncovered by police in 2021.

In other words: swarmism can harm, or even kill. It’s also radically intensified by the internet. Part of the joy of fandoms and online subcultures is the sheer pleasure of getting caught up in its contagions. The kind of high-intensity stampede common on social media is also, now, a potent political force. It was at least partly the power of online swarm consensus that powered the duration and intensity of Covid measures, while punishing dissent using (again, very feminine) sanctions such as social ostracism and character assassination.

Now, as we roll into a crunch election year across numerous very online democratic nations including Britain, Germany and the United States, it seems more than likely that swarmism will play a crucial role. And this perhaps explains the Right-wing panic over Swift. For many conservatives — especially older conservatives — simply do not understand how swarm politics works, or how to exploit it for political advantage.

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Conservatives are also, by and large, fairly inept at mobilising female-dominated swarms. And the genius of Swift lies in her capacity to render, musically, the emotional landscapes of young women; it’s no surprise that her internet-enabled fandom should be among the largest, most emotionally labile, and most female in existence. Given the now widely-noted global phenomenon of sex-divided political fandoms, in which the Left leans female and the Right male, it’s therefore reasonable to assume that Swifties are likely to be structurally Left-wing.

To the misogynistic subtext of Swift hate, we can perhaps add a side order of resentment that the Left possess such a potent and well-organised potential swarm ally — even if that swarm’s figurehead seems currently mostly occupied with falling in love and doing silly dances at NFL games. Swarms can be dangerous; but they can also tip the scales for your side. For conservatives — and especially those conservatives who still believe in pre-internet stuff like facts and logic — the mechanisms whereby a swarm can be persuaded to do so are largely mysterious. And under it all lurks the suspicion that there’s just something girly and therefore low-status about the whole business.

But despite this ineptitude, they are going to have to learn. For while swarmism may be female-coded, not all swarms are female-dominated, and nor is the phenomenon likely to disappear any time soon. Arguably the American Right-winger who grasps this most instinctively is Donald Trump, who has sailed serenely through his party’s primaries without participating in a single debate — and who is nonetheless already being hailed as the likely next POTUS even by the Davos elite.

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Trump instinctively grasps internet demagoguery. But I can see how, for less adept conservative internet denizens, the femaleness of Swifties and Swift herself, plus women’s broader tilt away from Right-coded fandoms might make the emerging power of swarm politics look, in aggregate, like a sinister girly plot against the Right. So, when the stakes are this high, it’s probably too much to hope that anyone might see a successful young woman enjoying the third-stanza emotional gear-change in her own personal Love Story, wish her well, and leave it at that. For the swarm significance of Taylor Swift is simply too vast for her to be left in peace. No matter how resentfully the pre-internet Right may barrack her for it, the truth is that with or without her, the internet’s meme polities are not going back into their box.

This bodes ill for representative democracy on the pre-internet model. The emotional contagions of the networked world are transnational, near-instantaneous, and as emotionally changeable as adolescent girls, but with vastly greater power to affect policy or even take lives. But it also stands as a warning to the Right: future shots at power will stand or fall on conservatives’ willingness to make peace with the swarm.

Rumours that this or that star was actually, secretly same-sex attracted were par for the course in classic Hollywood, even as studios provided cover to their not-so-straight stars by casting them in scripted fauxmances with celebs of the opposite sex. Actor Tab Hunter, then closeted, reportedly managed to keep his career afloat in the Fifties by “dating” Natalie Wood, while gossip columnists asked sly, barbed questions about whether he was really the right type of guy for her, wink, wink. Rock Hudson battled rumours about his orientation for decades, even marrying his agent’s secretary to preserve the appearance of being a good old-fashioned lover of ladies. In a culture that viewed homosexuality with a mix of horror and fascination, creating a straight narrative for gay actors was part conspiracy, part con: to stay in the public’s good graces, they needed to at least pretend to conform to its mores.

But times changed, and with them, so did the nature of the is-he-or-isn’t-he discourse. Malicious rumour-mongering about gay actors gave way to something more like idle curiosity, while straight artists earned accolades for playing explicitly gay characters on-screen. The overt homophobia of the 20th century was replaced in the 21st by a fascination with minority sexual orientations, and shortly thereafter, the commodification thereof: Tumblr fanfic writers avidly projected queer desire onto canonically straight characters (not to mention the actually straight actors who played them), culture critics wrote think pieces about the problematic appropriation of allowing straight people to play gay roles, and the term “queerbaiting” was coined to describe the behaviour of celebrities who weren’t gay — or were they?

Crucially, this is bait that people of all persuasions have been all too happy to take. Today, the penchant for slyly referring to certain celebs as “confirmed bachelors” has been replaced by a smorgasbord of stars who are confirmed queer, or queer-adjacent, or queer-suspected, along with the occasional celebrity of a certain age who was grandfathered into the closet back when the mores were different and now remains there either by choice or inertia. Being ambiguously gay, or at least willing to be seen as maybe possibly such, confers status and intrigue much in the same way as those studio-orchestrated fauxmances did back in the Fifties.

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But the symbiosis between the maybe-gay star and the slavering public is a precarious one, and it is possible to push it too far — as illustrated by the New York Times opinion piece titled “Look What We Made Taylor Do”. The essay, written by Anna Marks, is presented by its author as a catalogue of all the evidence that Taylor Swift is actually, secretly gay, but is probably better described as 5,000 words of pure wish-projection, a Tumblr-grade conspiracy theory that somehow wormed its way into the paper of record. Per Marks, Taylor Swift’s entire dating history (men), lyrical subject matter (men), and publicly stated preferences (men) are all just an elaborate psy-op: what’s really important, what really matters, is that her Lover album cover contains some of the same colours, sort of, as the bisexual pride flag.

As a cursory internet search for the term “Gaylor” will reveal, this is not the first time Swift’s sexual orientation has been the subject of speculation. And yet, there was an immediate sense in the wake of its publication that Marks’s essay had crossed a line. An anonymous source from within Swift’s camp slammed The New York Times in an interview with CNN, saying that a similar article about a male artist would never have passed muster at the paper: “There seems to be no boundary some journalists won’t cross when writing about Taylor, regardless of how invasive, untrue, and inappropriate it is — all under the protective veil of an ‘opinion piece’.”

Here, it is probably worth noting that, however inappropriate an article like this is, it is neither singular nor sexist: though Marks rarely writes for the paper at which she is an editor, she does have one other essay under her belt, a similar (albeit less lengthy) case for the secret gayness of Harry Styles. “Mr. Styles’s performance (and exorbitant ticket prices) makes his identity our business,” she wrote in August 2022. And if it is inappropriate, it’s arguably not more so than all the other speculation about Swift’s sex life that the press has engaged in over the years, including camping out at the apartment of current beau Travis Kelce in order to breathlessly report that Swift — who, lest we forget, is a 34-year-old woman — spent the night with her boyfriend. The difference, perhaps, is that the latter narrative is one in which Swift has always been a willing participant; what The New York Times did is more akin to casting her in a public and vaguely masturbatory lesbian fantasy without her consent.

The sympathetic take on this is that it’s about representation and identity, and specifically about the desire of marginalised groups from whom dignity, respect, and due credit have often been withheld to claim certain celebrities as One Of Us. Certainly this was the desire that fuelled last year’s controversial New York Times op-ed about Louisa May Alcott, to whom the writer assigned a trans identity and he/him pronouns — and which not coincidentally struck some of the same sour notes as the Swift one, fuelled in this case by the fact that Alcott was not alive to object.

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The more cynical interpretation, though, is that Marks’s essay is a sort of queerbaiting unto itself — as in, baiting Taylor Swift into an argument about her own sexual orientation that she would really prefer not to have, forcibly conscripting her into a culture war she has thus far done her best to avoid. It’s hard not to notice that many positive cultural developments, such as the welcome rise in visibility and acceptance of the LGBT community, have been accompanied by the rise of an ideology powerful enough to supersede both national and religious identity, draping its rainbow-coloured flag over statehouses, churches, and corporate culture alike. And with this has come the unspoken but palpable sense that there can be no fame without the proper politics — a monocultural hegemony in which the press, including The New York Times, act as chief enforcers. There is an expectation that pop stars who’ve ascended to a certain level of visibility will announce their support for Democratic candidates. They will use their platforms for progressive activism. And they will produce an artist’s tithe in the form of an anthem signalling their support for the LGBT community — or be subject to increasingly pointed questions about why they haven’t yet.

In this context, Marks’s essay starts to seem like more than just a piece of poorly argued gossip, something akin to the political rumour-mongering about which Hollywood figures were Communist sympathisers at the height of the Red Scare. Calling Swift queer in the pages of The New York Times feels like a flex, and a test: what’s she going to do about it? Complain? After nearly two decades of playing peek-a-boo with her fans and the press alike over which guy she wrote that revenge song about, it’s the essay about her secret LGB status that’s somehow beyond the pale?

At this point, Swift can’t protest this invasion of privacy without being accused of protesting too much. Any objection will be read as an admission of guilt: if not that she’s the closeted queer her fans so desperately yearn for, then that she’s the secret Right-wing bigot the press has so often accused her of being, which is of course the only type of person who would object to being called gay in The New York Times. The only way for Taylor Swift to signal now that she’s on the right side of history is therefore to stay silent… at least until she releases her next album.

There are other ways to read this scene, of course, including as a metaphor for the adolescent search for one’s most authentic self: these Taylors must be destroyed so that the one true Taylor can rise in their place. It’s also a clear aesthetic precursor to her current, worldwide “Eras” tour, in which Swift cosplays her way through her twenties, performing hits from throughout her career.

But the squabbling Swifts are also an apt representation of the life cycle of any American pop star, whose survival in an ever-shifting culture relies on continuous self-reinvention. It’s not enough to keep writing, singing, performing; she also has to metamorphose, emerging every few years as something enticingly but not entirely different. Remaining nimble, fresh and hungry is paramount. There are, after all, a thousand slavering ingenues ready to take her place.

This cycle is inescapable, whether the pop star is a young woman at the height of her power, like Swift, or a grande dame looking back at a career that has spanned five decades, eight presidential administrations, and the dawn of a new millennium. Madonna, who stepped back onstage last weekend for a six-month “Celebration” tour across Europe and the US, is joined during the performance by lookalikes sporting her most iconic outfits from albums and tours past: the Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra from “Blonde Ambition”, the diamond drip of “Material Girl”, the Marie Antoinette getup from “Vogue”. Unlike Swift, Madonna doesn’t fight with the ghosts of her former selves. She flirts with them, fondles them, welcomes them like old friends.

This is an extraordinary moment in musical history: two of the most powerful and successful female musicians ever to exist, each back onstage in a blockbuster, career-spanning spectacle centred on her own timeless status. The obvious difference is that only one of these women has been around long enough to merit such a sweeping retrospective; the unspoken absurdity of Swift’s tour is that she’s not just revisiting her past artistic personas, but also acting like a far older, more seasoned performer than she is.

At 33, Swift doesn’t have eras to look back on; she has phases. And while her adolescence may not have been typical — professionally, at least, she’s accomplished more in the last 10 years than many people will in a lifetime — precociousness is not a substitute for the perspective that comes with age and experience. It certainly doesn’t put her in the same league as the 65-year-old Madonna, a mother of adult children who performs with a face shot full of dermal fillers and a brace on her arthritic knee.

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As a product of the Xennial microgeneration born between 1978 and 1984, I’m almost exactly the same age as Madonna’s career, which also makes me young enough to remember when Taylor Swift was a teenage country singer whose song-writing skills were superior to her singing voice by an order of magnitude. What strikes me most now, comparing them, is that neither would have thrived in the other’s time. Madonna, with the physicality of a modern dancer and the sensuality of a teenager in the throes of sexual awakening, was made in and for the Eighties. Swift, a famously bad dancer but extraordinary lyricist, understood intuitively how to exploit the power of both online fandoms and the new tabloid press, titillating both with songs that may or may not have been cryptic diss tracks aimed at the famous men she’d dated.

With their sexual politics, both women know how to manipulate their particular cultural moment: in her mid-20s, Madonna was triggering the prudes with “Like a Virgin”, not to mention the Pope with “Like a Prayer”; at the same age, Swift shrouded her sexuality in a high school-style coyness that coincided perfectly with the neo-chaste mores of the #MeToo movement. Even now, in the midst of a high-profile romance with NFL player Travis Kelce that saw reporters staking out Kelce’s home in order to breathlessly report that Swift had spent the night, her public persona is still, to borrow a phrase, like a virgin.

This dichotomy also extends to their wardrobes for their respective tours: Madonna has fully leaned into the dominatrix aesthetic with which she’s been flirting since her 1992 Erotica album. She showed up at the Grammys this year carrying an actual riding crop. Swift, meanwhile, takes the stage wearing spangled leotards that look like adult-sized reproductions of the outfits the contestants wear on Toddlers and Tiaras.

And then, there’s their actual politics — or conspicuous lack thereof. Madonna was an icon for gay men at a time when doing so was politically unpopular if not artistically risky: her new show features a video memorial to all the friends she lost to the Aids epidemic. For Swift, meanwhile, it was remaining apolitical that attracted criticism; her refusal even to signal her leanings eventually became something of a media obsession. The Christian conservative Moral Majority that commanded Madonna to shut up in the Eighties was replaced in the 2010s by an equally powerful cabal of influencers on the now-culturally-dominant Left for whom Taylor Swift’s political silence was taken as an affront. Madonna was banned by MTV and excommunicated by the Catholic Church; Swift, who had the bad luck to be wildly successful at the precise moment that the culture declared war on basic white women, was accused of courting white supremacists and neo-Nazis as fans — and perhaps being a closet fascist herself. Finally, she “came out” as a Democrat.

But you could tell she didn’t want to — nor has her heart really been in her subsequent, tepid engagements with the culture wars. Even the rainbow-spangled video for “You Need to Calm Down”, which stars various Queer Eye cast members and is the closest Swift has ever come to an anthem for the LGBT community, feels more like a Walmart Pride Month commercial than a bold political statement.

After all, Swift is far more interested in her own career than its cultural backdrop. And in that respect, she has a lot to brag about: 12 Grammy awards, nine number one hit singles, a $740 million fortune. But the one thing she doesn’t have, at least not yet, is a cultural legacy that merits a three-hour celebration of her eras. Even the music she performs on this tour has no broader relevance, no anchor point outside the artist’s own life. The only way to identify a given Taylor Swift era is to look at Swift herself: who she was dating, what she was wearing, which ex or fellow artist was she beefing with.

Madonna’s music, meanwhile, is inextricable from its historical context; her concert is a journey through time from the excesses of the Eighties, through Y2K, and into the glittering now that is also the twilight of her career. Although she doesn’t say so outright, and although she’s certainly in great shape for a nearly-septuagenarian, it seems likely that this is Madonna’s last tour. Even her eerie waxwork appearance, the object of almost as much scrutiny as the music itself, ironically highlights just how long she’s been with us; in 2023, a preternaturally smooth face is as much a marker of age as a wrinkled one. Looking at her, we understand: this is the face of a woman who has seen some shit.

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What has Taylor Swift seen? Not much, but maybe enough to know that she doesn’t want to be a Madonna, that surviving for decades in this industry isn’t always a blessing. Consider the personas of her “Eras” tour, and what they truly represent — not the musical evolution of a veteran artist, but a young woman’s multi-year battle for control over her public image. All these different Taylors — the princess, the rebel, the baby feminist, the hipster — are less a creative product than a reactionary one, an attempt to wrestle her identity back from a hostile media apparatus that wants to conscript her unwillingly into the culture wars and define her in the most unflattering possible terms. “No, this is who I am.” And yet, Swift must also be aware that if she sticks around long enough, that battle will eventually end.

The new challenge, as the years go by and the culture evolves, will be convincing people to care about her at all. You could forgive Swift for deciding she would prefer not to do this — that she would rather take her eras in the form of a 15-year retrospective than one three times that long — especially when Madonna is onstage as the living, breathing, knee-braced embodiment of what it takes to stay in the game. Swift has been around long enough to reinvent herself a few times, but she hasn’t experienced the brutal highs and lows that come from a lifetime in the spotlight, the devastation when, say, the album you poured your soul into becomes a critical disappointment. Or when Patti Lupone tells the world you can’t act. Or when your ageing body becomes an object of mockery — but then so does whatever you do to address it. When nothing will ever be good enough for the people who want to see you fail, and the only person who believes in you is you. Madonna is an icon, a queen, a goddess — but she’s also a 65-year-old woman in a leather bustier, saying, I deserve this. Saying: Look at me.

And if you’re a young star, perhaps you do look. You look at her life. Look at her face. Look at the risks she’s had to take, the hardships she’s had to endure; look at what it looks like, what it really looks like, to try, and fail, and flop, and finally claw your way back to relevance. It’s audacious. It’s awesome. It can even be sexy. But it’s not pretty.

It’s common knowledge that women like love stories. And those which gain iconic status tend toward tragedy. Why? Is it just that tragedy speaks to the emotional intensity of being young? I’m staid and middle-aged now, but I remember the exquisite agony of teenage unrequited love, not to mention the perverse draw of sexual liaisons too edgy, kinky, or otherwise intense to last.

What’s less well-recognised is that this kind of emotional intensity, and the motif of doomed passion that serves as its carrier, has roots in a thousand-year-old religious schism. And while its origin story has been largely forgotten, the spiritual hunger it encodes lives on in a perplexing trait often seen in the young, and perhaps especially young women: a craving for romantic transcendence that’s difficult to distinguish from self-destruction.

Nowhere does this kamikaze mysticism hide more flagrantly and influentially in plain sight than in the wildly popular music of Taylor Swift, and the worldwide cult of “Swifties” she has inspired. The only artist in pop history to occupy all of the Top Ten single slots at the same time, Swift more recently racked up four simultaneous Top Ten albums. She has spawned “Swiftogeddon” all-Taylor club nights; the internet swirls with footage of “Swifties” singing in unison; there is even a Taylor Swift-themed university course. Even someone as square as I am can quote lyrics from more than one of her songs. Taylor Swift is a phenomenon.

So what is it about her work that so captivates the young women who form the backbone of her fanbase? Crucially, I think, her love songs don’t tend to be about relationships that end well. A few — “Mine” and “Love Story” for instance — describe happy endings. But by and large even her requited ones are upbeat only when describing the first flush of infatuation, as in “Enchanted“, “Fearless“, and “Ready For It?“.

Instead of inclining towards the happy ever after, Swiftian passion comes with its own doom baked in: an assumption that, for any number of reasons, the high won’t last. “Delicate” is a stuttering, anxious hymn to the fear that declaring your feelings will destroy a budding romance. “Endgame­” captures both the longing to be someone’s “happy ever after” and, implicitly, the expectation that this the dream will turn sour.

And perhaps it’s no wonder. For in Swift-world, the next step from the buzz of first love seems to be thrill-seeking: passion made more intense by the fact that it will be over any moment.

Other songs make still more explicit this pursuit of intensity at the expense of permanence.”Wildest Dreams” describes a liaison made more magical by anticipating how it’ll feel to remember, after it’s over. And “Blank Space” describes a woman who throws herself with wild vigour into every new liaison, while warning her new paramour that she is “insane” and will make him miserable.

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Beyond the first flush of love, then, lies mostly darkness, longing, and perhaps bittersweet recollection. My takeaway from Swift’s oeuvre is that a happy ending matters less than the sheer romanticness of love elevated by whatever dooms it to destruction, whether that’s the lover, some external circumstance, or the protagonist’s inner demons.

We could just shrug and say well, Swift has been unlucky in love — her fans are as well-versed in her doomed love affairs as they are her lyrics cataloguing them — and she has a knack for singing about this in a way that resonates with a wide audience. But why is this theme of thwarted, exquisitely painful romance so powerful?

Our love-affair with doomed love begins in early 13th-century France with the two-decade Albigensian Crusade which saw the Cathar sect persecuted, tortured, slaughtered and scattered by the orthodox Christian Knights Templar, leading to the deaths of an estimated 200,000. Their books were burned. But inasmuch as their beliefs are known, they were seen as heretical for their rejection of the Christian belief that God was made man. Rather, in their view the world was evil, and incarnation imprisoned souls who longed to be freed to return to the divine. And, also heretically, in their view this return would be to unity with God, not — as orthodox Christians believed — “communion”.

This bloody episode in European Church history has made its way into pop culture via the phrase, attributed to Papal legate Arnaud Amalric, at the massacre of Béziers: “Kill them all. God will know his own.”. But that violent religious struggle also had another, subtler and further-reaching legacy stemming from what happened to the Cathar faith.

For it didn’t disappear: it went underground. And the origins of the recurring theme of doomed passion in Western culture, according to the Swiss medievalist Denis de Rougemont, lie in the survival of Cathar heresy, hidden in plain sight in “courtly love” literature.

This work was created by the “troubadours”, poets and composers attached to Provençal courts — who were, de Rougemont argues, at least Cathar-influenced if not all secret heretics. For there are eerie parallels between their poetic mythologisation of knights and “courtly love”, and the heretical faith they were slaughtered for. If, as it was for the Cathars, every soul was trapped in a state of longing for reunion with the Divine, when the troubadours sang of unrequited love of a knight for his “Lady” that wasn’t a literal love story. On the contrary: it stood for that spiritual pain and longing.

And because such a longing could only be attained by escape from the prison of flesh — which is to say, by death — the love of a knight for his “Lady” could not be consummated, except by the death of one or both. In other words: to convey its esoteric meaning, the narrative “romance” couldn’t have a “happy ever after”. In these terms, the only real happy ending is death.

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This myth proved so powerful it outlived the sect that inspired it. Long after the esoteric double meaning of the romance myth was largely forgotten, the motif of doomed love continued to flourish in Western culture, from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or indeed Jack and Rose in Titanic. But the tragedy is that even as this myth has influenced what we believe love is, and what it means, we’ve slowly lost not just the faith that first spawned the ideal of tragic passion, but also the mainstream religious framework that served to keep it in check by nudging young people toward the real-world “happy ever after” of marriage.

Now, though, most no longer believe strongly enough in any kind of God to argue the toss over “union” versus “communion”. Against this backdrop of a culture largely shorn of coherent shared spiritual beliefs and moral framework, even the “happy ever after” option of communion with a long-term partner in this life is losing adherents, to say nothing of a commitment as permanent as marriage. And this, in turn, has left the myth of tragic passion all but unconstrained — revealing a true face that is less enchanted than terrifying.

What began as an esoteric way of describing the yearning to leave flesh behind and reunite with the divine becomes, in a world with no divine, something more like a longing for passionate self-annihilation. Taylor Swift, of course, has the toned-down, romantic version of self dissolved in the lover, in “willow“, singing: “I’m begging for you to take my hand / Wreck my plans / That’s my man.” But the longing for oblivion manifests in still darker, more intense, and destructive ways, too.

One of these is “breath play”: that is, choking during sex. There’s no doubt some of the impetus for this trend emanates from a male desire to hurt women. But studies suggest it’s not just women putting up with it: some actively like it. I suspect the practice is a by-product of the same buried hankering after passion-as-annihilation, modulated by the now-ubiquitous moral and visual vocabulary of porn. After all: if the only transcendent desire is one that ends in death, the closer sex comes to that threshold, the nobler and more intense it is.

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And nor does this intensity end with sex and relationships. It cross-pollinates into body hatred too. Thinking back to my passionate younger self, I remember not just the exquisite agony of unrequited love, but also the agonised and very Cathar-ish sense of wanting to escape the prison of my own flesh. I pursued these linked longings for escape from flesh not just via unrequited or self-destructive liaisons, but also gender confusion, eating disorders, and simply fleeing into the bodiless realm of the internet.

Since I was an adolescent in the Nineties, the internet has eaten most of culture and normalised mass disembodiment. Perhaps it’s no wonder so many more of us — and especially young women — now experience these interconnected longings: first to escape embodiment, and relatedly, to be dissolved in passionate intensity. Taylor Swift’s genius is her capacity to give catchy tunes to that sweet, painful, multifaceted longing for something other or higher than what’s in front of us.

On the surface, her work recounts relatable romantic highs and lows. But its 800-year-old undertow implicitly glorifies those who renounce any possibility of happiness in this world, in exchange for the exaltation that comes from seeking something higher — even if the price of reunion with the divine must be death.

For the young women who thrill to this promise, and don’t even realise that what they crave is not sexual, or romantic, but spiritual, it’s the cruellest imaginable way of both promising and denying relief. But that’s the fault of the age — not of the 21st century’s foremost troubadour, Taylor Swift.

The woman thrashing me pauses to throw a ladleful of eucalyptus-infused water onto a sauna stove. There is a hiss, and steam clouds the room. “Beware the puddles, for they are fiery intra-planetary cauldrons, used by the Sussex dragons to travel to Australia,” chants the English siren. Outside, a hip Canadian woman chops wood to sensuous French-Malian rock-kora fusion playing from a portable speaker. Others are busy at work, sweeping and carefully preparing the enchanted sauna ceremony.

My birch-twig attacker is Jamie, the ethereal saunameister of this spa-start-up-cum-pagan-temple. In a previous life, Jamie was a MacBook-using, flat white-sipping hipster photographer from east London, growing slowly disillusioned with the pressure and precarity of the city’s gentrification. Then, one day, while hungover at a music festival, she stumbled upon a sauna. “I came out of the sauna into nature and plunged into a cold lake and was reborn,” she says.

Months later, Jamie left London, moved to Sussex and set up her first sauna venture. After just five years, she’s flourishing: “I’ve created a really beautiful life for myself. I live on the beach, I work in a forest, I run my own business. I’m doing work that feels purposeful and impactful.”

In this, Jamie’s rebirth is far from unique. Quite the opposite: she is part of a vanguard rejecting the refined hedonism of the globalised Brooklyn-Shoreditch urban creative class. Suffocated by the downward mobility induced by our neo-feudal economy and its spiritually malnourished consensus, Jamie is part of an emergent socio-economic class — the Bohemian Peasantry, or Bopeas for short.

The Bopeas are a new paradigm in culture and consumption. They are the descendants of other post-war consumer groups: the Hippies, the Yuppies, and the Bobos of Soho House. However, unlike their predecessors, who grew from the boom of generational upward mobility and urbanisation in the 80 years after the Second World War, the Bopeas are responding to something else: a crisis of what Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction” — and a diminishing need for everyone to be an urban creative.

For the past year, I have been investigating and decoding the experience of the downward mobility of the elite-aspirant creative class across the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and China. As part of a collective of social scientists, I have been exploring optimistic alternative responses to widespread disenchantment. Contrary to the depressing “opting-out” tales of global NEETs, hikikomori and the Great Resignation, I studied people and communities finding new ways to live a fulfilling life within society.

Like the rest of their generation, the Bopeas were bred to chase a particular vision of the good life, but they now know they cannot replicate their parent’s lifestyles — waiting until their deaths to inherit. Thomas Piketty calls this the return to the “inheritance society” that has been the norm for most of history. Steve Bannon puts it more bluntly: they are “nothing but 19th-century Russian serfs. They’re better fed; they’re better clothed; they’re in better shape; they have more information than anybody in the world at any point in time, but they don’t own anything.”

Yet rather than succumbing to the doom and gloom or burning themselves out by hustling, Bopeas are developing new ways to build a life. They cultivate meaning and status in ways that expand the ideals of success beyond conventional material accumulation and instantly decaying “cool”. Moreover, while this modern serfdom may not be able to accrue capital, Bopeas are spoiled for choice in a consumer universe built by brands. They can’t buy houses in the city, but they do have disposable income and a clear idea of “how to spend it”.

But what are Bopeas? The Bopeas are diverse in demographics and geography, but united by a shared mindset. Like the creative class that now dominate our culture, they draw inspiration from the bohemian ethos of artistry, non-conformity and self-expression. At the same time, however, they are wary of the narcissistic excesses of bohemianism, and enjoy a neo-medieval peasant worldview rooted in community values, rituals and natural rhythms.

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The Bopeas don’t wear a uniform. There is no universal white sneaker choice and craft-beer calling card. Instead, it’s all about the niche, the hyper-local and the mythic. While they might be wearing an expensive French worker’s jacket bought from a nose-to-tail restaurant, they are more easily spotted by their deeds and search for harmony. Unlike their success-obsessed Yuppie and Bobo ancestors, Bopeas want to flourish holistically. They want to feel deeply in tune with their bodies and the world. They are the wild swimmers,  the sauna obsessives, and the knitting, foraging and fermenting revivalists. They’re the ones rewilding our forests and guts. They are already shaping elite culture — they’re the reason the Financial Times wants you to buy £1,225 Givenchy cargo gardening trousers.

In essence, Bopeas opt for enchantment over refinement. In an algorithmic meat market of homogenous aesthetics and lifestyles, Bopeas differentiate themselves through their intentional cultivation of harmony. While Bopeaism incarnates in individuals — Paul Kingsnorth is perhaps the Bopea made flesh — it is also an aspirational mindset. During the Covid lockdowns, for instance, many of us transfigured into sourdough Bopeas.

The Bopeas I studied are essentially united by a desire to nurture genuine connection and finding meaning in life. They care about wider societal issues such as climate change and inequality, but they are rarely overtly political. Instead, they are driven by a small-scale politics of harmony channelling their values into making a positive, sustainable impact in their immediate world through their work, social and family lives. They don’t care for empty virtue-signalling.

Bopeas want to immerse themselves in nature and quirky culture. All of them are tired of trends, off-the-shelf lifestyles, and endless inane scrolling and swiping that leaves them feeling hollow. Instead, they seek wisdom that provides lasting guidance to shape life, even if it comes from ancient practices and traditions — or even (gasp) institutional religion. There is no central inspiration hub for Bopeas. They curate their own constellation of ideas and wisdom from a dynamic fusion of writers, podcasters and micro-influencers who align with their particular Bopea passions.

Most importantly, Bopeas don’t want to do it alone. Frustrated by the loneliness of modern branded “community”, Bopeas seek the comfort of tight-knit fellowships pursuing shared projects and a soulful life comforted by real community obligation and nature. In many ways, then, the Bopeas are a kind of post-internet Arts and Crafts movement. And yet, the dark satanic mills they rebuff are not the soulless Victorian workhouses, but the design agencies and tech start-ups that inhabit the WeWorks that have colonised the very same factories. Indeed, if the Victorian backlash was ideologically led by John Ruskin and manifested by William Morris, then their Bopea spiritual successors are King Charles III and Taylor Swift.

Like Ruskin, Charles III serves as the Apex Bopea philosopher king. With his tireless environmentalism, Perennialist theology, and mystic outlook, Charles has set the agenda for a bohemian neo-medieval revolution that places harmony and ancient wisdom at the centre. As Aris Roussinos writes, as “a Christian mystic, a layer of hedgerows and protector of the soil, there is a mythic quality of identification between our King and his land which we have not experienced for some time”.

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Meanwhile, like Morris, Taylor Swift has served as an avatar of the King’s Bopea ideology. In the midst of the lockdowns, Swift used her albums Folklore and Evermore to position herself as the ultimate Bopea vessel. With her knitted cardigans, enchanted forests and magic, Swift catapulted the niche Pinterest-TikTok cottagecore aesthetic community to a global platform. By celebrating the wonders of a simple, traditional lifestyle surrounded by a bucolic paradise and manual crafts, she made the enchanted Bopea worldview sexy.

Elsewhere, Bopeaism continues to be evangelised to the masses through notable Bopea Elders. Jeremy Clarkson’s Clarkson’s Farm is now the most-viewed original series on Amazon Prime in the UK. Nick Cave has transitioned from post-punk enfant terrible to earnest coronation-attending Christian. Tilda Swinton set up a tiny Steiner school in rural Scotland where phones are banned and children must learn to care for bees. Even Carrie Johnson, with her strawberry picking and knitted blankets, has become the nation’s Bopea tradwife. These are clear signals of a subtle re-enchantment of the world — a paradoxically countercultural conservatism.

Beyond the global stage, the internet is awash with Bopea missionaries. One does not have to search too far before getting lost in the world of doomstrolling, Irish water worshipers, entrepreneurs restoring small holdings, fungi activism, and Gladstone’s foraging and wild-swimming chef many-great-granddaughter. Bopeaism is simultaneously everywhere and totally invisible to those that are not looking. Some go full Bopea and are living off the grid. Others are more likely to gentrify semi-urban spaces like Hastings or Polperro — or perhaps Bruton if there’s family money. Financially, most Bopeas often maintain more conventional urban creative industry jobs — in marketing, design or tech — but work remotely from their more affordable homes. However, the most committed enter the Bopea culture production industries, selling Bopea artefacts and services to wealthier Bopea aspirants — like Jamie and her sauna business.

What next? Will Bopeas go the same way as the hippies? Bopeaism certainly seems more robust than its ancestors. It is, after all, more than just a set of aesthetics and practices that you can trade in and out of, but rather a mindset inspired by a hunger for timelessness. It serves as the North Star of a more harmonious post-internet worldview that rises above the digitally mediated pleasure that David Courtright terms “limbic capitalism”. But if it is to survive, it must be nurtured carefully and protected from the trend-market feedback loop, lest it be bled dry and discarded.

When Richard Florida published the The Rise of the Creative Class in 2002 and anointed the Yuppie-slaying “No Collar” hipsters and Bobos, policymakers and corporate brands descended like vampires. Within two decades, the creative class has been drained of all vitality. Investment bankers now wear white sneakers. Wetherspoons sells smashed avocado muffins. Everywhere looks like an Airbnb. In such a world, Bopeaism is surely something that must be nourished and sustained — not for a generation, but for eternity.

The series arrives as Kanye is in the thick of one of the more excruciatingly public divorces of recent times, his Instagram feed a bilious froth of resentment towards Kim Kardashian and her new boyfriend Pete Davidson. He also recently took against Billie Eilish for showing concern for crowd safety, which he somehow interpreted as a dig at his friend Travis Scott.

There’s more where that came from. West’s public life has become an endlessly dispiriting spectacle at the same time as his records have become increasingly hard to love. While he continues to throw giant listening parties for them, and will be headlining this year’s Coachella festival under his new legal name, Ye, his music now “sounds like an afterthought, some extra sounds to have as a treat”, as Pitchfork put it. All in all, it’s not the ideal time for four-and-half-hours of television dedicated to his genius, but that is precisely what makes jeen-yuhs so compelling.

The origins of the documentary are suitably complicated. In 2002, Clarence “Coodie” Simmons jacked in his career as a stand-up comedian and television host in Chicago to move to New York and chronicle the rise of a fascinating new 24-year-old rapper-producer that he had first met four years earlier. Coodie was there for two years, sometimes with co-director Chike Ozah, up to the release of West’s sensational debut album The College Dropout in February 2004.

Had it come out in 2005, the documentary would have charted the birth of a superstar, but West blocked it. “Kanye said he wasn’t ready for world to see the real him,” Coodie explains in his genial voiceover. “He told me he was acting now — playing a role.” Gradually, Coodie was frozen out. The two men didn’t see each other at all between 2007 and 2014 and filming resumed in earnest only in 2019, making the third episode of jeen-yuhs a bizarre and messy coda. To cap it off, Kanye demanded (but did not receive) final approval, so the series has been released without his blessing.

It would be difficult to make a conventional biopic about Kanye because the narrative arc doesn’t land. The classic pop star story goes something like this: ambition, achievement, crisis, recovery, redemption. That redemption might have happened for West with 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 VMAs was such an aggressive breach of celebrity etiquette that even President Obama called him a “jackass”. (It’s remarkable to think that Joe Biden is the first 21^st-century US president not to have expressed a strong opinion about Kanye West.)

The rapper weathered the almighty backlash by hunkering down in Hawaii with three studios full of collaborators working 24/7 on an operatic magnum opus. “It’s never explicitly discussed, but everyone here knows that good music is the key to Kanye’s redemption,” wrote one journalist who covered the sessions. “With the right songs and the right album, he can overcome any and all controversy, and we are here to contribute, challenge and inspire.” There is, however, a big difference between vindication and redemption. West learned that if his music was good enough he could get away with anything — so what happens now that it’s not?

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West is both the most significant and the most polarising artist of his era. Significant because he made hip hop so huge and omnivorous that the beats-and-rhymes model depicted in the 2002 footage now appears parochial. In 2012, the Atlantic described him as “the first true genius of the iPhone era, the Mozart of contemporary American music”. Polarising because he touted his wares with a manic grandiloquence that raised the bar for rap braggadocio. “For some kids right now, I am what Michael Jackson was for me,” he once said, as if Jackson weren’t the crowning example of a sweet, supernaturally talented kid who became destroyed and dehumanised by fame.

I’ve met West on two occasions. The first time was in Los Angeles in 2005, when he was launching his second album, Late Registration. Playfully bombastic, he framed his legendary arrogance as a form of entertainment in its own right: “It’s like I’m walking on this tightrope. It’s like the reason why you go to a circus — it’s more entertaining. It’s like, damn, what if he falls? And if I do make it, it’s like, damn, he made it! But either way you’re saying damn. Everybody else is just walking on the ground.”

The second time was in London, a decade later, between the cyborg roar of Yeezus and the colourful melee of The Life of Pablo. I remember thinking that I’d never met a less relaxed person in my life. He told me he was “extremely fucking happy”, but the only time he smiled was when his mother-in-law Kris Jenner walked into the room with his daughter North. Otherwise, it was like talking to a balled fist.

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You didn’t need to see him up close to witness this hardening and shuttering. Many of the College Dropout songs we see him recording in jeen-yuhs (‘We Don’t Care’, ‘All Falls Down’) are interested in other people, situating West in the broader community of we. He became much less, well, collegiate over the next few years. Even when his albums were as vast and populous as imperial palaces, they had an air of claustrophobia and loneliness, with more mirrors than windows. Paranoia is a species of narcissism after all. On stage, too, he conveyed a terrible solitude. No Glastonbury headliner has ever shown less interest in bonding with the crowd than he did in 2015. We were there to witness a moment, not to share it.

A year later, West experienced a breakdown which led to hospitalisation and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. This partially (but only partially) explains the most chaotic episode in the history of pop stars venturing into politics. It began when he celebrated Donald Trump’s victory during a concert, triggering a chorus of shocked boos. Later, he took to wearing a MAGA hat, posing for photo opportunities with Trump and saying that slavery was a choice: they just didn’t have enough gumption to be free. In 2020, he ran for president himself on a platform that sounded rather like theocracy. He won 60,000 votes.

Even before all this, West mocked his disappointed fans in the 2016 track ‘I Love Kanye’: “I miss the sweet Kanye, chop-up-the-beats Kanye.” Well, the good news is that there are three hours of that guy in jeen-yuhs: performing a daffy Stevie Wonder impression on the porch of his childhood home; gawping like a tourist at the lights of Times Square; giddy with delight when Jay-Z lets him rap a guest verse on ‘The Bounce’.

You can’t help rooting for him because everything was a struggle. He was a hot producer who wanted to be known as a great rapper and his neediness is heartbreakingly apparent. In one mortifying scene, he tries to impress a small boy by reeling off the names of hits he has produced. “Cool,” the kid says politely. A receptionist announces him as “Cayenne West”. Beside the suave virtuosity of Jay-Z or Mos Def, his rapping is tense and effortful, like he’s pushing a boulder up a hill.

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During this difficult period, he had no greater cheerleader than his mother, Dr Donda C. West. He’s talked about Donda often (and named two albums after her) but it’s something else to see her in the documentary, the quintessence of maternal pride, and to observe how boyishly humble he is in her company. “This is so exciting isn’t it? I love it!” she says with a brilliant grin. “Anybody that does something that much and that long and is that good, it’s gotta pay off”. Her death during cosmetic surgery in November 2007 is the decisive rupture in West’s life: the start of the chaos years. In 2015, I asked him what he had sacrificed for success and he didn’t hesitate: “My mom. If I had never moved to LA, she’d be alive”. He refused to elaborate, lest he start crying.

In the documentary, Donda offers caution along with her encouragement: “It’s important to remember that the giant looks in the mirror and sees nothing”. Coodie runs with this metaphor, implying that West took it to heart, but he’s hardly an objective observer. His attempt to wrap up the story with gooey platitudes about God’s plan and friends reunited doesn’t square with what his camera captures, whether it’s a distressing bipolar episode or West delightedly viewing a clip of Tucker Carlson praising his anti-abortion position. The bridge that Coodie tries to jerry-rig back to 2002 collapses because he wasn’t there to document the transition from that Kanye to this one and unpick the rat king of grief, fame and mental illness that brought it about. The narrative doesn’t conclude; it just stops.

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Perhaps the problem is that West really does see nothing when he looks in the mirror, and what reads as preposterous self-confidence is really fathomless insecurity. In 2002, West had every reason to feel thwarted and undervalued, and to turn that frustration into rocket fuel, but that feeling never went away. Having conquered popular music, he had to find new areas in which to be misunderstood (fashion, politics) and new role models to emulate (Walt Disney, Picasso), the result being that he can never, ever be satisfied.

For a long time, that insatiability propelled his music to greater heights; now it distracts from it. Seeing the look on his face as he receives some kind words from Pharrell Williams or plays some tracks for Donda, you have to wonder if this period was as good as it got, before he realised that recognition wouldn’t bring happiness after all. Thus jeen-yuhs becomes a cautionary tale of ambition without end. The unique tragedy of Kanye West is not that he failed but that he could never allow himself to acknowledge that he’d won.

You know what she means. The pop records made between 1980, the birth of synth-pop, and 1987, when hip hop and house began to reconfigure the sound of the Top 40, have a lasting glow. At wedding discos, they unite revellers who grew up on them with kids born decades later. Advertisers also use them as generational glue: McDonald’s recently went for Tiffany’s I Think We’re Alone Now while John Lewis staked their Christmas campaign on a breathy cover of Together in Electric Dreams by Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder.

It’s not just that old hits are doing gangbuster numbers on Spotify. When artists such as Taylor Swift, Angel Olsen, Laura Mvula and Mitski want to pivot to pure pop, they turn to Eighties signifiers. You can hear it, too, in the glittery ebullience of Dua Lipa and Jessie Ware. There are even meticulous Eighties fetishists who create multiverse remixes of recent hits: Initial Talk made Lipa’s New Rules sound like Tiffany and Dead or Alive, while Louis La Roche turned Adele’s Easy on Me into the Madonna ballad that never was.

Top of the pile right now is The Weeknd, whose latest album Dawn FM is framed as an oldies radio station playing in purgatory. It’s the dream hybrid of new wave, electro and Thriller-funk that the Canadian has been working towards for a few years now: his neon-bright 2019 single Blinding Lights is the biggest Billboard single of all time. Among Dawn FM’s blatant homages to the mega-pop era are a monologue by Quincy Jones, a song named after Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Less Than Zero, and a very peculiar English accent. The Weeknd has long aspired to be the kind of pop colossus who bestrode the Eighties, so why not explicitly sound like one?

What’s significant here is not that the Eighties are back, but that they have been back for so long that these influences have seeped into the bedrock of popular music. The self-conscious Eighties revivalism of the electroclash scene is now 20 years’ old, as distant from us as it was from the heyday of The Human League. In 2016, Vulture had enough material to produce a solid list of “the 50 best modern songs that sound like the Eighties”, including Bon Iver, Chvrches, Mark Ronson and Haim. An ongoing Spotify playlist called “Modern indie songs that sound like 80s music” is currently 44 hours long. Guilty pleasures are now simply pleasures. Music that was once regarded as shallow and impermanent has proven itself eternal.

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Pop is the trickiest genre to pin down. In theory, it simply describes music that is popular but in reality it is defined by the absence of obvious genre identifiers: if it’s not squarely rock, country, hip hop, R&B, then it’s pop. What happened in the Eighties was a paradoxical combination of diversity and consensus, with disparate artists coming together under the friendly, giant umbrella of pop. “The Eighties were a great decade for pop in America,” writes Kelefa Sanneh in Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, “because musicians from different genres — R&B, various strains of rock’n’roll, the dance music underground — were all experimenting with electronic production, and converging upon similar styles.” When I asked my 15-year-old daughter what she liked about Eighties pop, she said that it sounded “united”.

The Eighties pop hegemony followed a deeply fractious period when the rockers hated the disco fans and the punks disdained both. The great unifier was the fast-evolving synthesizer. While the stigma suddenly attached to disco forced Prince, Michael Jackson and Nile Rodgers to invent new forms of dance music, members of the punk generation who preferred Kraftwerk to the Sex Pistols hatched synth-pop and the New Romantic movement, driven by a refreshingly impertinent hunger for mainstream success. In 1981, the pop polemicist Paul Morley celebrated a move “away from rock, grey independence, submission, austerity” towards “pop, disco, colour, lights, action”.

The New Pop Jacobins derided rock’n’roll as stuffy and earnest but songs such as Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark and Van Halen’s Jump used brash synth fanfares to revitalising effect. Sonically curious art stars of the Seventies, including David Bowie, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, became mainstream phenomena by way of Fairlight synthesizers and gated drums. To be big, bright and, most of all, new was a common cause. “The world’s Top 40 is like an audio shot in the arm for everybody,” said Van Halen’s Dave Lee Roth. “We’re all different and we’re all being consumed by the radio for no other reason than we’re all 128 beats a minute and damn good looking.”

As Michaelangelo Matos describes in Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Become Pop’s Blockbuster Year, this was the triumph of consensus pop; the zenith of music as a monoculture. Technology helped. The Sony Walkman made pop music portable while MTV made it visible. In I Want My MTV, Rob Tannenbaum calls the new network “the sun around which pop culture rotated” — an ultra-modern star-making machine which rewarded those artists who fully embraced pop’s potential for sensory overload and outrageous spectacle. Music videos often conspired with movies, as Hollywood producers sought synergistic hits. Can you think of The Breakfast Club without hearing Simple Minds’ air-punching Don’t You (Forget About Me) or Top Gun minus the slo-mo throb of Berlin’s Take My Breath Away? (The title of the Weeknd’s Take My Breath can’t be a coincidence.)

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Consensus didn’t mean homogeneity. In terms of race, gender, age and sexuality (not that most gay artists were out yet), pop was remarkably diverse. The top of the Billboard Hot 100 had room for a mysterious polymorphous genius, a balding prog-rock drummer, a cross-dressing reggae fan from Kent, New York punk pioneers and a dancer from Detroit. Pop was even more transatlantic than it had been during Beatlemania: one week in 1983, almost half of the Billboard Top 40 was British.

The critic Lester Bangs once wrote that “we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis”, but then he didn’t live to see 1984, when just five albums, the fewest ever, topped the Billboard 200: Thriller, Prince’s Purple Rain, Springsteen’s Born in the USA, the Footloose soundtrack and Sports by Huey Lewis and the News. Three of the UK’s 10 bestselling singles of all time — Last Christmas, Do They Know It’s Christmas and Relax — came out that year. Nor did these represent competing constituencies: it was not unusual for a single record-buyer to own all of the above.

Critics such as Bob Stanley and Simon Reynolds like to draw a line at Live Aid in the summer of 1985, separating the playfully subversive drive of New Pop from studio-drunk MOR decadence, the career of The Eurythmics being the perfect case study. I don’t think it’s quite that neat (Exhibit A: the Pet Shop Boys) but very quickly the ambition and hi-tech sheen of Eighties pop came to be regarded as overblown, avaricious and rootless. Genre distinctions reasserted themselves. The consensus shattered. Authenticity made a comeback. Even Madonna sounded serious.

During the Noughties, the quintessential products of the Nineties inspired hungover nausea. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), the Eighties is when everything goes garishly awry: too much money, too much cocaine. When artists such as Beck and producer Stuart Price foregrounded Eighties’ influences in 1999, many critics assumed it was some kind of ironic prank. Soon, though, the virtues of Eighties pop were being seriously reassessed. Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant praised electroclash because “it’s not trying to be normal. In the Eighties, pop was aspirational. Then it got taken over by being one of the lads: rave, football, Britpop. It stopped being aspirational and it celebrated ordinariness.” Steadily, the Eighties was reborn as the apogee of pop as larger-than-life escapism. Its hugeness — sonically, melodically, emotionally, commercially — was no longer embarrassing but admirable.

Over time, younger artists emerged for whom the Eighties were an idea rather than a memory. In 2002, LCD Soundsystem mocked “borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered Eighties” but for someone like The Weeknd, born seven weeks after the decade ended, this absence of first-hand experience is what allows for a potent simulation of the era, as distilled and romanticised as it is in Stranger Things.

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In this dream of the Eighties, half-real, half-fantasy, there is Prince but no Huey Lewis; Depeche Mode but no Howard Jones; the vibe of a John Hughes movie rather than the songs that actually appeared in John Hughes movies; and an unreasonable amount of neon. A record like Blinding Lights, M83’s Midnight City or The 1975’s A Change of Heart is not a sonic reenactment of the Eighties but a fresh riff on our collective (mis)understanding of the Eighties.

Why does Eighties pop have such inexhaustible talismanic power? Partly because it is thrillingly colourful, glamorous and dynamic next to the jaded minimalism of much post-hip hop pop music. Partly because it recalls a time when futurism still outweighed nostalgia and fame still looked like fun. It also represents a period when hits could have universal appeal without being bland and a song could be both gauche and glorious.

But there is another, more underrated factor. When Tamara Lindeman was asked why she loved Eighties pop, she didn’t cite production values or style. “It’s the music that’s about longing and desire and despair and unrequited love,” she said. The mood of an archetypal hit — Together in Electric Dreams, A-Ha’s Take on Me, Madonna’s Borderline — is urgent exuberance with a streak of melancholy and yearning. A common narrative, in both the lyrics and the videos, is transformation and escape from the mundane. As Prince’s 1999 or Alphaville’s Forever Young make explicit, the fear of imminent nuclear annihilation played a part in this compulsion to live fast and large.

Knowing that so much of Eighties pop’s energy came from a passion for the right-now and the what-next, I want to avoid the irony of simple nostalgia and a fusty dismissal of what is happening in pop today. But when someone as commercially dominant as The Weeknd is using the Eighties imaginary as a winning template, then and now can’t be so far apart. He is plugging into the closest that pop music has ever come to attaining its utopian ideal of being everything to everybody.

***

Listen to Dorian’s ‘Misremembered Eighties’ playlist here.

Bri Luna is a magical influencer, whose posts appeal to the increasing number of people — especially young women — who self-identify as witches, and who account for the 6.8 million Instagram posts with the hashtag #witchesofinstagram. It’s clear that many of those posting use it simply to attract attention to their hot Goth selfies; to interior design ideas with not-much-of-a-twist — “Last Minute Beltane Ideas … place a bouquet of fresh flowers in your home. Light a red (passion) and a white candle (purity) [sic]. Decorate your home with ribbons and flowers…”; or to promises of a miracle — “Any Finger That will like this will never lack of money” (though they may lack of grammar).

On TikTok, witches are even more popular: witchtokboy, who offers spells and curses, has had 8.2 million likes and offers bookings. But it’s not just a digital phenomenon — Taylor Swift’s latest album, Evermore, has seen witches welcome her to their tribe. In the last few years, witchcraft manuals, such as Ariel Gore’s 2019 Hexing the Patriarchy: 26 Potions, Spells and Magical Elixirs to Embolden the Resistance, have been published in number and sold well. Gore writes that “magic has always been a weapon of the disenfranchised” and promises to teach her readers how to make “salt scrubs to wash away patriarchal bullshit” and “mix potions to run abusive liars out of town.”

Elsewhere, self-identifying witches have become political, like the protestors in Boston in August 2017 who dressed as witches and carried signs saying, “Witches against White Supremacy”, “Hex White Supremacy”, “Good Night Alt-Right”, and — note the acronym — “We Interrupt Those Choosing Hate”. Some of this has been taken very seriously: when, in February 2017, Michael Hughes posted online “A Spell to Bind Trump and All Those Who Abet Him” and urged other witches to join him in casting it, Christian Trump supporters put out urgent calls for prayer and fasting to counter the spell.

Having studied the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, I find this resurgence both fascinating and a little disturbing. Historically, people turned to magic when things felt uncertain or inexplicable. They were more likely to accuse their neighbours of witchcraft in times when money was tight or disease was rife. And while men could be and were accused of witchcraft, in most places in Europe women made up the vast majority of those who were prosecuted and executed as witches, because women were perceived to be innately weaker and more sinful than men, and so more easily tempted by the Devil.

In a culture fixated on fecundity, older women were especially vulnerable to accusation, because the witch was seen as infertile, an anti-mother. Above all, it was the idea of magical, diabolical power being used by the socially powerless that made witches especially scary. In today’s world, when money is tight, disease is rife and many people feel politically impotent, the resurgence of witchcraft among young women is both a mark of powerlessness and an attempt to reclaim power.

Professor Ronald Hutton suggests that the word “witch” was once used as a kind of smear campaign for all types of folk magicians. Many names that were originally insults — Protestant, suffragette, sans-culotte, queer — have been reclaimed, and that seems to be happening again as, for many modern sorceresses, “witch” has become a synonym of “feminist”. Much of the identification comes from seeing the history of the witch-hunts as a story of female oppression. Modern-day witch Gabriela Herstik told Sabat Magazine that “Witchcraft is feminism, it’s inherently political. It’s always been about the outside, about the woman who doesn’t do what the church or patriarchy wants.”

She is echoed by April Graham, whose sweep is even broader: “A Witch is somebody who stands against patriarchy and everything that is currently wrong with our society and any society throughout the ages.” By that definition, we could all be witches — which may, indeed, be the point; Luna says, “Every woman is a Witch.”

Witchcraft, then, has been repackaged as a kind of female empowerment. Erica Feldman, the proprietor of HausWitch shop in Salem, Massachusetts, says that for her the initials WITCH stand for “Woman In Total Control of Herself”. Deborah Blake, author of Modern Witchcraft: Goddess Empowerment for the Kick-Ass Woman (2020) gives away her stance in the title, but adds that “Many women are feeling frustrated, frightened, triggered, and down-right furious with the current social and political environment, but also feel powerless to create positive change … Witchcraft can give them both a sense of personal empowerment and a number of goddesses through whom they can channel those feelings in healthy and productive ways.”

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Though not always. There is a burgeoning genre of books on how to hex your ex, including Deborah Gray and Athena Starwoman’s How to Turn Your Ex-Boyfriend into a Toad and Other Spells. You can feel the fun they had composing these: ingredients needed for “The Forget Me Not Spell” are “a square of white cloth, a sprig of mint, a photograph of you and your lover together, a pair of your lover’s underpants, a pair of your sexy underpants, a piece of scarlet ribbon”. The Toad Spell needs to be done at midnight on a Full Moon and involves making a cloth bag, filling it with dirt and a picture of your ex, and drawing a toad on it. If you can’t draw, you can probably find someone on Tiktok to cast a spell for you. This is the commodification of witchcraft.

Some of the modern elision between witchcraft and feminism, however, has a less capitalist edge. The notion of using the figure of the witch to fight patriarchy has roots in the 1960s American women’s liberation group W.I.T.C.H. — Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell — who protested societal inequalities by dressing up as witches, “hexing” Wall Street, and gluing shut the doors to the New York Stock Exchange — but they were using the term with their tongues conspicuously in their cheeks: they didn’t consider themselves to be “real” witches.

Instead they adopted the name because they believed accused witches of the past were “the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression — particularly the oppression of women down the ages” (WITCH manifesto, 1969). The group was revived in 2015-16 and its modern iteration takes its witchiness much more seriously. Its founding members, who all identify as witches, staged a ritual performance to focus attention on the lack of affordable housing in Chicago. One of them, Jessica Caponigro, objects to being called a “witch” in inverted commas, and resents threats from Wiccans who don’t think her witchy enough. She considers witchcraft to have always been “an act of social protest.”

In this reading, witches were always activists, rebels and non-conformers, who were punished for the resistance they mounted to the patriarchy. In the women’s marches of January 2017, protesters wore T-shirts, pin badges and placards bearing the line (from Tish Thawer’s 2015 novel The Witches of BlackBrook): “We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn” (even though, in England and New England, witches were hanged). Witchcraft has become a signifier of both systematic violence against women and of women’s attempts to resist that violence. This creates a binary of “we” — the assumed descendants of the oppressed — and “you” — the assumed oppressor.

This involves holding two dissonant ideas in tension: witches are women who exploit their power, and magic is something used by those who have no power. It is worth noting that neither aligns with the historic reality of the European witch-hunts in which large numbers of powerless, innocent people were prosecuted, tortured and executed — by which I mean that most of the witches accused in the 16th and 17th centuries protested that they were not guilty because they had not used magic. To believe witchcraft is making a comeback, you have to believe it was around in the first place. But today’s witches do, and they believe in both using and celebrating their supernatural powers. But here’s the rub: do they claim to actually practise magic?

Much hinges on our definition of the word. Witches in the past were thought to practice maleficium or evil magic that caused harm to people, animals or property, but Professor Hutton suggests we need a broader definition of magic that includes “any formalised practices by human beings designed to achieve particular ends by the control, manipulation, and direction of supernatural power or of spiritual power concealed within the natural world.” Witchcraft today seems to be about accessing supernatural power without faith in a deity. It promises to tap into unseen sources of power as a way to tackle life’s problems. Luna claims that witchcraft offers “resources for collective healing in our fraught political and social climate.”

But what does this magic look like? There is normally mention of the sort of things you might expect: Juliet Diaz, whose 2018 book Witchery: Embrace the Witch Within was an Amazon bestseller, describes a “Magick” that includes herbs, working with lunar cycles and the solar year, and setting up a sacred space. Others mention shrines, crystals, tarot cards, astrology, reiki, and auras. But there’s much that emulates Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret – that the universe will yield up its bounty in response to repeated affirmations. I’ve seen a spell defined as “a prayer to the universe”.

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Diaz offers a “manifesting spell”, for example, for which you need a bay leaf, some matches, a pen (she recommends menstrual blood as ink), a burn-safe bowl or cauldron, and some plant seeds (perhaps sage, eucalyptus or mint). Then: in a place of stillness, repeat aloud your desire as an affirmation (“I am blessed, money flows into my life easily and effortlessly”), and write the affirmation on the bay leaf before burning it in the bowl and planting the ashes with the seeds. Elsewhere magic is presented in the language of self-care – aromatherapy and meditation feature frequently. Magic is aligned with accessing what Luna calls “the deepest parts of ourselves”, Diaz’ “witch within”.

“Natural magic” — what Hutton referred to as the direction of “spiritual power concealed in the natural world” — also seems to play a major part. Here witchcraft manuals overlap with another genre of books that have boomed in sales as the young feel more politically powerless: books about getting back in touch with the world around you and reconnecting with nature.

Dr Alice Tarbuck’s A Spell in the Wild: A Year (and Six Centuries) of Magic (2020) — a beautifully-written meditation for the urban witch — seems to speak of magic where other words might do. Her “healing ritual for winter pains” is an affirmation of the healing power of food. Her euphemism for masturbation — “solitary sex magic is a way of observing the energy of witches’ Sabbats” — made me laugh out loud. But there is much that is metaphorically enchanting about the way she comprehends magic to be about connecting with the earth and attuning oneself to nature.

“Witchcraft is,” she writes, “I believe, the practice of entering into relation with the world, of exerting your will in it and among it, and learning how to work with it in ways that are fruitful for yourself and the world.” The warm, lyrical, and tender tone of her writing wins her many five-star reviews, but you don’t need to be a witch to wonder with her at “the curious magic of the world, the way it shimmers and changes if you walk through it … with your eyes open”. So why do she and others think that you do?

I think the rise in people identifying as witches might come from a combination of factors: not only does witchcraft promise you the mystical power to change your life, but in the same breath calling oneself a witch claims a victim status — as part of a historically downtrodden minority — and offers a reassuring place in the world: membership of a community with a shared language, set of rituals, and an identity. It provides the comforting framework of religion for the non-religious and a fellowship of believers for the unbeliever, and it does so in a very capacious way, as befits an age of identity politics. “Witch” and “witchcraft” have become such all-inclusive, amorphous categories that they can mean anything and everything — and sometimes even nothing.

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This mantra is repeated again and again: Diaz states that “A Witch can’t be defined, because a Witch is an embodiment of his or her own unique Magick.” Caponigro argues that “There is no right way to be a witch. If you say you are a witch, and feel you are a witch, you are a witch. End of story.” That there is no definition, no criteria, appears to be a major part of the appeal. Being a witch is conceived, as Luna puts is, as “the freedom to be your most authentic self. To embrace ALL aspects of whoever that may be, and fiercely.” Diaz is even more startingly postmodern: a witch is “an embodiment of her truth in all its power”. Being a witch is whatever you want it to be, as long as it is self-actualising. Focusing on the self is legitimated by the language of healing nature and scaring the patriarchy.

In the European witch-hunts, witchcraft was invoked in times of poverty or pandemic, when people felt disenfranchised, and when things seemed inexplicable, and it chiefly concerned women. For similar reasons it is being invoked today (humans, universally, it seems do not cope well with the brutal unfairness of the concept of chance). But those characteristics in early modern Europe caused people to accuse their neighbours of witchcraft, not to name themselves as witches.

In the witch-hunts, nearly everyone who confessed themself to be a witch did so only out of fear and pain, like Gertrauta Conrad who, in Germany in 1595, changed her robust denial into a confession of witchcraft only after being left to hang for five hours with her arms tied behind her back and lifted above her head, her shoulders dislocating as they bore the weight of her body and of the weights attached to her feet. Today — at least in the West — people freely self-identify as witches. And in contrast to the witches of old, today’s witches practise magic. Or, at least, they say they do.

Her most revealing video, “Not My Responsibility”, is so dimly lit that she’s barely visible at all; it feels more like a confrontation than a seduction. In the shadow, you can just make out that she’s wearing a bikini top, while her whispered voiceover challenges the viewer for all the ways they might judge her body. But of course, keeping her body relatively concealed didn’t actually stop people from judging it: a paparazzo shot of her wearing a perfectly decent strappy vest and shorts kicked off a tiresome round of body-shaming followed by clapbacks to the body-shamers.

“Not My Responsibility” was released when Eilish was 18, by which time she’d passed from “promising” to “successful” to “terrifyingly, staggeringly famous” in a remarkably short time. The documentary The World’s a Little Blurry (new to Apple TV) tracks this extraordinary path, bringing home how bizarre her life has been: fly-on-the-wall style footage shows her with her family, working on music with her brother in his shabby-looking bedroom, then heading out out to play the global superstar. Her designer stage outfits go through the family washing machine.

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Other stars say they’re like their fans, but with Eilish — at least at the start — it’s really true. In concert footage (recorded pre-Covid), she performs her songs of melancholic ecstasy to an audience of girls who look just like her — one mass of self-ironising, tragic girlhood with their eyes closed in the bliss of pain and their phones held high. In Salt Lake City, she descends from the stage to embrace them. “They’re not my fans,” she tells the camera later, “they’re like a part of me.” She’s still a child at this point: 17 years old and about to record her gigantically successful debut album When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We All Go?

That’s near the start of the documentary. Towards the end, we see another encounter between her and the public, from about a year later, by which time When We Fall Asleep has become number one in 37 countries and made Eilish the youngest female artist to top the UK album chart. She’s doing a post-gig meet-and-greet in New York, but it doesn’t have the spontaneous affection of the earlier scene. Instead, it goes off-script and Eilish walks away.

Of course, someone comments on social media that she was rude. Eilish then berates her team (which includes her mother) for leaving her exposed:

“I don’t want anyone who knows who I am, who is any sort of fan or knows a fan, to see me in any sort of awkward situation. It’s embarrassing and I have to keep smiling and if I don’t they hate me and they think I’m horrible.”

She sounds like any teenager dealing with a fraught social situation; she sounds like no other teenager in the world, negotiating global scrutiny of her every scowl.

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The film, directed by R. J. Cutler, is a document of the costs and calculations of fame — and the way those costs and calculations are heightened when the subject starts young. Eilish has now been living in public for about a quarter of her life, and the film shows her to be both adept (like most teenage girls, social media is her natural element, and every time she makes a decision she asks herself what the internet will say about it), and overwhelmed.

Because how can you foresee what an existence like this will do to you? And how much protection can the people around you give? There’s a scene where a representative from Eilish’s record label discusses the song “Xanny” with Eilish and her mother. The song is critical of substance abuse; but, counsels the label rep, “maybe you grow up and feel differently and then get dragged for it.” Eilish’s mother is outraged, partly at the suggestion of Eilish compromising her voice (although elsewhere, she also questions her daughter’s use of suicide themes), but mostly at the implication that Eilish might “fuck up” in her future.

The spectre of the fuck-up. The label rep feels it and Eilish’s mother feels it and Eilish feels it too, because everyone knows that this is what happens to those who become famous when they’re young. The one-time child actor Mara Wilson, best known for starring in the film of Matilda, recently wrote about this in a column for the New York Times which looked back on her own experiences in light of the recent reassessment of Britney Spears’ career.

Wilson calls it “The Narrative” — the arc from prodigy to tragedy that defines Spears, and Judy Garland, and Drew Barrymore, and Corey Haim, and River Phoenix, and Aaliyah, and Lindsay Lohan, and any number of others you can think of. These children were all exposed to the corrosions of an industry in which punishingly hard work is demanded and sexualisation is standard. (From the age of six, interviewers would ask Wilson whether she had a boyfriend.) And their falls, says Wilson, were all helped along by prurient journalism and the public that consumed it, something now amplified by the panopticon of social media.

They were adored for their youth, then tried as adults in the court of reputation. But a child star, however autonomous they might seem, is still foremost a child, and to say otherwise is to write a licence for those who would abuse and exploit young people. Or as the writer Tavi Gevinson (a famous style blogger at 12, editing her own magazine at 15) put it in an article for New York Magazine, also inspired by Spears: “even if someone is precocious, it is their youth that makes them precocious. If you can still be considered ‘mature for your age,’ you are not an older person’s equal.”

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There’s another potential price to child stardom, though — a price that’s less horrific than mental illness or sexual violence or addiction, but that is still colossally bleak. What if early fame leaves you fixed forever in the shadow of the child you were? Gevinson is an intimidatingly good writer, but there is still a part of me that, having followed her career since she was a tween, reflexively and superfluously adds the words for her age (she is now 24). And Wilson, though she has evaded “The Narrative”, is still essentially famous for being the woman who used to be the girl who was Matilda.

When you’re beloved for being young, ageing can only make you a disappointment. John Logan’s play Peter and Alice imagines the real-life templates for John Barrie’s Peter Pan and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland meeting as adults. “Here’s a burden: the only reason anyone remembers me now as Alice in Wonderland is that I decided to sell my hand-written manuscript of the book,” Alice tells Peter in the play:

“But do you know why I sold the manuscript? Because I needed the money. To heat my house… Now, is that the Alice people want to know? Or is it just possible they would rather remember that little blond girl in the dress, eternally inquisitive, impossibly bold, never changing and never growing old?”

For Eilish, never changing and never growing old has a particularly grim implication. In the documentary, we see her looking at her journals twice. Once near the start of the film, when she excitedly shares her doodles and lyric ideas; and once when she’s 18, looking back on how, aged 14 or 15, she would lock herself in the bathroom and self-harm. Some of the girls who adore her for articulating that pain could make a snare of their love, demanding that Eilish go on hurting for them, rejecting her if she threatens to leave them behind.

Becoming an adult means letting things go as well as embracing the new experiences of maturity, and there’s a grief in that — even if what you’re letting go of is grief itself, as you resolve the anguish of your teens. Those who truly survive child stardom are the ones who get the opportunity to grow up, reinventing themselves in public as their adult selves. Think of Taylor Swift, Thomas Brodie-Sangster or Justin Timberlake, who no longer really count as child stars now: they’re just stars, their career beginnings a mere anecdote eclipsed by ongoing success.

The test of whether Eilish lives through her fame or ends up destroyed by it isn’t only in whether she “fucks up”. It’s also in whether she’s trapped forever as this Billie, or gets to become the next version of herself. In the future where she makes it, we’ll never talk about her age at all, and the incredible, inhuman fact that she had to navigate all this when most people are still messing up their homework will be forgotten.

Here we are 175 years later, and those questions are more contested in the courts than ever. This month alone the US Supreme Court finally dismissed a long-running claim that Led Zeppelin plagiarised the introduction of “Stairway to Heaven” (1971) from Spirit’s instrumental “Taurus” (1968) but high-stakes copyright lawsuits against Katy Perry, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift continue to move through the legal system. Even in the midst of a pandemic, the vital business of deciding whether some songs sound too much like other songs goes on.

There is something inherently ludicrous at the best of times about judges and juries assessing copyright infringement claims based on the testimony of rival musicologists (“proverbially discordant among themselves,” as Carusi’s attorney put it) and their own inexpert understanding of the creative process, and these are not the best of times. The business of sueing over plagiarism — and it is a business — has been in overdrive since 2015, when a jury found that Robin Thicke’s and Pharrell Williams’ hit “Blurred Lines” (2013) had stolen from Marvin Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got to Give It Up”.

Even though the two basslines used different notes, rhythms, phrasing and scales, the jury decided, to the tune of $7.4m, that having a similar vibe was enough. It was a shocking, chilling verdict, and when Thicke and Williams lost an appeal in 2018, the author of the dissenting opinion stated that the verdict “allows the Gayes to accomplish what no one has before: copyright a musical style”. The judge added that the decision “establishes a dangerous precedent that strikes a devastating blow to future musicians and composers everywhere”.

Musicians and legal experts agree that this lousy decision has created a climate of fear, with artists awarding credits left, right and centre in order to fend off the faintest possibility of a lawsuit. Almost as soon as some listeners noticed that the chorus of Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” (2017) was amusingly similar to that of Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” (1991), Swift credited the British band, even though nobody seriously thought that she plundered 90s novelty hits for melodies. If you’ve ever wondered why modern hits seem to have so many songwriters, then this neurotic credit inflation is one reason. Credits are becoming more a legal fiction than an accurate account of a song’s creation because it is easier to settle even a frivolous claim than to risk years of costly litigation.

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The “Blurred Lines” verdict was unusually hostile but it exposed the underlying weaknesses of copyright law as it relates to music. Other artforms have a much more mature relationship with the nature of influence. While a screenwriter or director can’t just plagiarise someone else’s work wholesale, the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Ryan Murphy are free to stuff their work with homages and allusions. Nobody would claim that a Mexican stand-off, or a socially awkward detective, or a pram rolling down steps, or a serial killer who makes costumes from human skin are legally-protected concepts. And every Shakespeare-lover knows that he took raw material from extant sources without being a mere copyist. Art should be a lively conversation between past and present, with the minimum of obstacles.

Not so for music, where litigation has little to do with the reality of creativity. For a start, most instances of “plagiarism” are unintentional. Songwriters are human jukeboxes whose instinct for realising when a new melody resembles an old one can never be infallible. After Sam Smith gave a cut of “Stay with Me” (2014) to Tom Petty for its inadvertent resemblance to “I Won’t Back Down” (1989), Petty was sympathetic: “All my years of songwriting have shown me these things can happen. Most times you catch it before it gets out the studio door but in this case it got by… A musical accident, no more no less.”

Unfortunately, the judge who ruled in 1976 that George Harrison had plagiarised the Chiffons on “My Sweet Lord” (1971) set a precedent that did not allow for accidents: “Did Harrison deliberately use the music of ‘He’s So Fine’? I do not believe he did so deliberately. Nevertheless… this is, under the law, infringement of copyright, and is no less so even though subconsciously accomplished.”

Some elements of copyright law are hopelessly outdated. The old defence that the defendant did not have “access” to the plaintiff’s song is meaningless in an era of streaming. The song is on Spotify or YouTube? Then you have access, whether or not you know it exists. Nor has the law kept pace with songwriting norms. Most hits are now constructed by several specialists: the beatmaker, the topline melody writer, and so on. Yet when a jury ruled (dubiously) that Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” (2014) had copied the beat from Flame’s “Joyful Noise” (2008), even the lyricists were ordered to pay damages. The ongoing suit against Taylor Swift is of a different order of stupidity: her song “Shake It Off” (2014) bears no resemblance to 3LW’s “Playas Gon’ Play” (2000) except the common phrases “Players gonna play” and “haters gonna hate.” The writers of Playas Gon’ Play are claiming ownership of figures of speech.

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The history of popular music skews towards the free flow of ideas, from the melodic recycling of the folk tradition to the cheerful repurposing of old songs in sample collages and mash-ups. Yet the law keeps getting in the way. The notorious 1991 case Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc. destroyed the tradition that gave us freewheeling, sample-happy records like the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising. Even now, uncleared samples bar De La Soul’s classic work from streaming services. Samples are at least demonstrably someone else’s work but how can you own a generic beat or common chord progression? As Katy Perry’s lawyer Christine Lepera complained in court, the writers of Joyful Noise were “trying to own basic building blocks of music — the alphabet of music that should be available to everyone”.

Who benefits from strangling creativity in this way? Certainly not music fans. The most compelling case for copyright law is protection for the little guy. It feels ethically right that struggling blues musicians won songwriting credits from Led Zeppelin in the 1970s and tragic that the drummer Gregory Coleman died homeless in 2006 even as his performance on the Winstons’ “Amen, Brother” (1969) became the most sampled breakbeat of all time. The idea that songwriters shouldn’t starve while others grow fat off their work has an instinctive moral appeal.

Most plagiarism suits, however, have less uplifting consequences. Bridgeport Music, the second plaintiff in the Blurred Lines case, has made millions of dollars from hundreds of suits over unlicensed samples without any benefit to the original songwriters. The 2005 case Bridgeport Music, Inc. v Dimension Films (2005) overturned the de minimis defence of sampling, making even an unrecognisably altered two-second sample a matter for litigation, yet the composer of the sampled song, George Clinton, didn’t get a cent because, he claimed, Bridgeport “stole” his publishing rights (although the courts ruled it legal).

Copyright acquisition can lead to Kafkaesque scenarios. John Fogerty was sued by his former record label over a resemblance between his song “The Old Man Down the Road” (1985) and one of his hits for Creedence Clearwater Revival 15 years earlier. Because the label owned Creedence’s publishing rights, Fogerty became the only person ever to be sued for plagiarising himself. “It was very cruel,” he reflected.

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This year’s economic turbulence has seen a boom in investors scooping up song catalogues. While this is primarily to profit from streaming revenues (“Music and booze are only two industries that flourish when people are both happy and sad,” one wealth manager told Billboard), the potential for a bonanza lawsuit will not be lost on them. One of the plaintiffs sueing Ed Sheeran is a company called Structured Asset Sale. So much for the little guy.

There needs to be some legal deterrence against bad actors flooding Spotify with note-for-note replicas of classic songs, or big stars stealing demos submitted by hopeful young songwriters, but the bar should be extremely high. Currently, the typical case is a cynical waste of time and money which gives the public the false impression that artists are amoral thieves without two original ideas to rub together. A successful song is both an artwork and a commercial asset but the plagiarism-suit racket perverts the art. Old songs become roadblocks to new ones. The natural process of being influenced, consciously or subconsciously, is recast as larceny.

This was never the intention. “The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an ‘author’’s creative labour,” said Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1975. “But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good.” The post-“Blurred Lines” epidemic of litigation and nervous celf-censorship makes a travesty of that aim by suppressing creativity. Enough. Throw all of these cases out, reform copyright legislation, and let art do what it does. And you know what? Carusi’s version of “The Old Arm Chair” was better.

Except, if you knew about the #FreeBritney campaign, this felt like something else. Not a tech-flavoured parable about the commoditising effects of the pop industry, but a straight-up retelling of a story about Britney Spears, who for the past 12 years has had no legal control over her life while her family has made every decision for her. In 2008, Britney — who by then had been shockingly famous for a decade, since the release of “… Baby One More Time” — had a very public breakdown. She shaved her head. She attacked the paparazzi. She lost custody of her children for a time. She was taken into hospital strapped to a gurney, and all this was harrowingly documented by the eager press.

Around this time, I woke up in the middle of the night, turned on the World Service, caught the latest update on the Britney situation, and semi-consciously decided that the first thing I would do the next morning would be to write Britney a letter inviting her to stay with me. She just needed someone to look out for her for a bit, and boy am I good at looking out for Britney, who I’ve loved since the first time I saw the “Baby” video. I put a poster of Britney in her teenage bedroom in my own teenage bedroom and had to, excruciatingly, un-out myself when this led everyone to assume I was mostly into girls.

No pop star has ever arrived with such a perfect statement of what they are, and what they mean. Here’s the former Disney Mousketeer, now 16, surrounded by a pounding Max Martin production, big-eyed in school uniform and moaning out every word, absolutely desperate with desire — with love, because Britney’s S&M-skirting invitation to hit her (figuratively!) one more time is all directed at one baby. And of course, we all knew she was a virgin. That was part of the sell. She had to be in on it, didn’t she?

Maybe my 17-year-old self was making some generous assumptions about how far Britney was directing this, but don’t teenage girls always make generous assumptions about their command over the world? Anyway, the Britney template was established: half unstoppable purpose (hit me!), half hopeless supplication (when I’m not with you I lose my mind!). On top of this, by her second album, the irresistible phoniness of this confection was being acknowledged in songs like “Lucky”, a ballad about a “Hollywood girl” who’s “lost in an image, in a dream.” She had to be in on it. Didn’t she?

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The best of Britney’s fame songs is probably “Piece of Me”, which was released in November 2007. In it, Britney — by then well into her “hot mess” era, with two broken marriages and one abortive rehab stint — goes in on her tabloid image. “I’m Miss American Dream since I was 17… Mrs She’s Too Big, Now She’s Too Thin,” she chants. The refrain is classic Britney, part come-on and part threat: “You wanna piece of me?” It sounded like someone throwing her own coverage back in the media’s face and taking charge.

A few months later, she was strapped to that gurney and in charge of nothing. From that point, amid rumours of mental illness and substance abuse, she was put under a court-ordered conservatorship, which gave her father control over essentially her entire life — her finances, as well as her physical and mental health. In the public account of the Britney story, this is where the show got back on the road. Head shaving: out. In: mammothly profitable Las Vegas residencies. I saw the touring version in Scarborough, in 2018, and God she was good when she was performing.

When she wasn’t in motion, though, she seemed a little vacant, and I’m not fully sure she knew she was in Scarborough (the best we got was a “Hello UK!”). This is where a second version of the Britney story cuts in, the one that’s been assembled by supposition and guesswork. This is the version the #FreeBritney campaign is working to. For them, Britney, like fictional Ashley O in Black Mirror, has been wholly co-opted by the people around her — her family — who they believe are exploiting her for maximum financial gain. The ACLU has even offered to support her in challenging the conservatorship arrangement. Her latest attempt to remove her father from her affairs was just deferred by a court till 2021.

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What’s actually going on with Britney is difficult to say, because the hearings on her conservatorship are all closed, and her family deny any charge of acting against Britney’s best interests. Fans have been left picking over her social media for clues, which is, it’s fair to say, opaque. But even the most generous guess at what’s happening leaves a bad taste. If this is a woman who really is incompetent to run her own life, and has to be overseen in every particular by her guardians, why was I squealing away in the stands watching her do hot Thatcherite self-determination anthem “Work Bitch”?

Being a hypocrite, I guess. Being a fan. Getting my piece of her. Other artists play off their persona and their private lives in their music: Gaga, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift — in fact, all the most exciting pop stars since Britney have followed her in making their music primarily a record of their relationship to fame. But with Britney, it seems as though the image long ago outran the woman underneath it, and even the supporters who want to free her still want her to be their Britney.

The most heartbreakingly implausible bit of that Black Mirror is that the pop star character gets her liberation, because it’s hard to see Britney’s way out. If she succeeds in cutting her father from the conservatorship — even if she’s eventually deemed too competent to be released from it entirely — what does freedom look like for someone whose entire adult life has been spent being famous for being Britney Spears? The most constricting part of celebrity isn’t the people who hate you: it’s the people who think they love you, and who think that love means they own you.