On my college campus in 2013, there was a moment where it seemed like everyone had a New Yorker tote. This was probably because the New Yorker was then running, as they still are, a limited-time offer to get a free tote bag with a subscription, and because a sturdy canvas tote bag is hard to come by and very handy to have in college, but they also were, and are, a status symbol.
I did not have a New Yorker tote bag, because I had never read the New Yorker, and didn’t really know how to start doing so even if I wanted to. I know there are cartoons? I know there is cultural commentary? My issue with these cultural mainstays like the New Yorker and New York Magazine and other New-York-themed publications is that I don’t know how to frame what they’re presenting me within a cultural context, because I am not in New York, I am in the Midwest. People who live in New York and DC always seem to have an effortless grasp of not only what people are saying around there, but also why they are saying it, and who said it first, and what it is derivative from.
This has never been my strong suit in any discipline. The same people who could explain to me how John Scotus Eriugena led to Schlegel led to Hegel led to Rilke live in DC now and could probably explain to me who Vivek Ramaswamy is. These people probably still have New Yorker totes in the back of their closets.
It’s easy to be snide and glib about people who know more than you about anything, and I will admit that there was a little bit of self-importance to my never owning a New Yorker tote. In college I prided myself on knowing exactly what made someone “cool”—listening to Lana Del Rey, getting bangs, wearing red pants, drinking PBR ironically and smoking American Spirits—and intentionally opting out of it. Of course, that’s just another way of doing the same thing. There’s no really escaping cool, just like no matter how much you don’t know about politics, you still have to live in it. And I did actually get a pair of red pants.
The current inescapable zeitgeist is Taylor Swift. No matter where you go, she is there, supercharging SEO for tired-out takes about how there is way too much Taylor Swift nowadays, drinking and laughing with her NFL boyfriend, influencing an election she has not said one word about, churning out seemingly endless albums, winning seemingly endless awards, on a seemingly endless tour.
I don’t have any new takes about Taylor Swift and oversaturation, or the implications of her popularity for tomorrow’s youth, or even her master plan for superstardom and world domination. Taylor Swift is famous; since about 2008 she’s been either famous, or more famous. Currently she’s more famous. That has opened up the possibility for would-be hipsters like me to define themselves in opposition to the mainstream, as we love to do. In middle school and high school, I couldn’t stand Taylor Swift in the same way I couldn’t stand catty girls with Silly Bandz who wrote in bubble letters. As I concluded college and Taylor edged herself into the hipster space with folklore and evermore, I fell in love with her songwriting, and (perhaps even more) fell in love with her obsessive, relentless self-presentation.
Taylor Swift is a girl who writes about girl things—mostly heartbreak and falling in love, but sometimes also ethereal, girlish emotions that no one else quite puts their finger on in the same way. The runaway success of “You Belong With Me” is the perfect example of this: describing the feeling of being the girl next door who knows that the boy you’re in love with should be in love with you, that you’re not the cool girl but you’ve got what’s better—you’re genuine and loving and secretly soooo pretty. She’s described the feeling when you like someone but everyone likes them so you don’t want to like them (“gold rush”); she’s described the feeling of becoming homecoming queen and somehow it’s a cosmic triumph (“Long Live”); she’s described the feeling of buying a house as an adult female who everyone thinks is too loud (“the last great american dynasty”).
At the same time as being genuinely very good at doing this, Taylor has effortlessly woven her way into precisely whatever is the coolest at any given time. She started in country, which was safe and mainstream; she moved into pop because pop was cooler and afforded her more space to grow, becoming a pop superstar with 1989; when everyone became hipster she became hipster too, with folklore and evermore; and now she’s firmly in the synth-pop space with Midnights and the upcoming The Tortured Poets Department. On her albums, Taylor swears however much nice girls swear at the time (in 2017, not at all, even on the supposedly-rebellious Reputation; in 2023, all the time, thus explicit Midnights). Everything she does is calculated to create and sustain perfectly-controlled megastardom.
And it works. And I think we don’t really know anything about Taylor Swift. Her entire brand is being relatable, but you can’t be relatable when you’re Taylor Swift, rushing around on private jets and performing superhuman tours. She’s good at the business of being famous—at the self-presentation it takes to get there. And that’s okay. We don’t need to know anything about Taylor Swift, not really. And we don’t, no matter how many armies of fans feel like they know her personally. They feel that way because that’s exactly where she wants them.
Nowadays, being annoyed with Taylor Swift has also become the mainstream. The world is divided in two and there is no third—people who are obsessed with Taylor Swift, and people who are annoyed with Taylor Swift. Some of these are the same people. But you can’t opt out of Taylor Swift. You’re stuck living in a world where girl-next-door pop is the new Beatlemania. This probably doesn’t even happen once in a generation—maybe once every hundred years, but a cultural moment has become so all-encompassing that there is no way to be a hipster. Liking Taylor is mainstream; not liking Taylor is mainstream.
But maybe that’s good for us. In a time when cultural hegemony is all but gone, maybe it’s helpful to have a New Yorker tote of national culture, something you can identify yourself against or with but not separate from. Maybe this is what it was like to grow up in a small medieval town where everyone knew their neighbors—where no matter how idiosyncratic you tried to be, your community would put you back into a context where they knew exactly where you belonged. Maybe it’s good for us, sometimes, to have some element of our common life that we can’t escape from.
When I went to New York, I carried my Architectural Digest tote.
Come back in two weeks: to find out why a wedding registry is like American Idol.
Cookbook recommendation: I am currently obsessing over Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat.
A good piece on pants: from Twitter’s Audrey Horne.