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Music | Art
In Defense of Populist Art: Taylor Swift
The other day I found myself listening to Taylor Swift’s ‘You Need to Calm Down’ at 10 minutes past midnight.
It was soothing and enveloping. It felt like the blanket that was currently draped over my body. It was asking me to sink further into my bed. It asked me to close my eyes, to drift off into the real of the nightdreams. Nightdreams aren’t regular dreams but daydreams had at night.
It’s when — instead of looking out the window at the passing flock of birds or the drifting firewood smoke as it pours into the city, polluting it even more than it already is — you close your eyes and allow yourself to exist in a liminal space. Between existence and its perception and non-existence and its non-perception. Where sleep courts sentience, the two start dancing, each trying to overpower the other so as to win. But soon you realize that they are equals and are stuck in a perpetual dance, until the music stops.
And so as I was laying there in my non-existent non-perception I started nightdreaming about Taylor Swift, and something came to mind. Taylor Swift is the quintessential modern example of populist art. And as more and more of her songs played and I drifted further and further into the real of nothing, a new thought formulated on the dance floor. A new entity entered the dance between sentience and non-sentience. That thought was a spinning coin… And that spinning coin represented populist art.
We all know what I am talking about. The art which everyone knows and has engaged with; the MCUs, the Harry Potters, the Taylors Swifts, the [Insert here whatever popular art you believe fits].
As the train of thought was barreling down my brain it began loading itself with questions: Why do we simultaneously all engage with this populist art but also shun those who engage with populist art? What does that say about us as people? And perhaps more interestingly: what even is populist art? Do those who make populist art intentionally set out to make populist art or do they stumble into it? And if it is the former what does that mean for us as art lovers…
