The End of Taylor and Travis
A new era arrives
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will be extraordinarily rich until they’re dead. They may keep dating, they may marry, and they may have children. Or, they could break up. Their personal lives, played out so much on the public stage, shouldn’t concern us too much. They deserve happiness, like anyone else.
What’s become clear, with the passage of a year, is just how thoroughly they once dominated the culture and how such a phenomenon is unlikely to repeat itself. Neither individual, barring an unforeseen twist, will approach the heights of 2023, when Swift embarked on her Eras Tour and entered into a relationship with the Super Bowl-winning Kansas City Chiefs tight end. They each enjoyed fame, for a wedge of time at the end of last year, that rivaled any twentieth century celebrity’s at the apogee of the old analog culture. It was, in retrospect, the last gasp of what can be called Empire. We are not going back to Elvis and Marilyn, the Beatles and Michael Jackson. Swift and Kelce, for a fleeting number of months, almost brought us there, with Swift donning red in her luxury suite during prime time to cheer on a future Hall of Famer playing America’s most popular sport. Kelce even won another Super Bowl as Mr. Taylor Swift. Imagine that thrill. For a man who once longed to be as famous as the Rock, this was the zenith. He must have been sure he was headed to celebrity’s very upper limits.
Kelce and his brother have a popular podcast called New Heights. They banter about football and interview athletes. When Kelce began dating Swift, the podcast attracted many more listeners. Earlier this year, the Kelce brothers signed a $100 million deal with Amazon’s podcast studio, Wondery. For a podcast that only launched a few years ago—and was hosted by brothers who, before the year 2023, weren’t especially famous—this was the greatest of coups. It was a confirmation of the ascension of the Kelces and a credit to Swift’s own halo of fame, which has made even an ex-Eagles center into a household name.
Money is money, though, and the zeitgeist is something else. Recently, I noticed that many videos of the New Heights podcast on YouTube were failing to rack up 1 million views. For a pair of podcasters who have enjoyed so much conventional fame, these numbers struck me as rather anemic. My suspicions were confirmed when I checked in on comedian Theo Von’s YouTube channel. Von, something of a mini-Joe Rogan, is not nearly as well-known as Kelce. Yet his full videos—interviews with various comedians, cultural figures, and politicians—routinely exceed 1 million views. His total subscriber count on YouTube beats New Heights by nearly 1 million. I cite YouTube because I truly think the platform, despite its obvious dominance, still manages to be underrated by the mainstream. YouTube is the future of television and audio alike. If its parent company, Google/Alphabet, cared more about winning the streaming wars, YouTube Premium could probably put Spotify out of business. For less than $20 a month, a premium account allows a user to skip all advertisements and listen to what amounts to virtually the entire music catalog on Earth—one, in terms of human-made quality songs, even larger than Spotify’s.
It is on YouTube where the Kelces not only trail Von but get lapped by computer scientist Lex Fridman. It’s probably not worth bringing up Rogan, who is nearing 19 million YouTube subscribers, nine times as many as the New Heights podcast. This is how relevancy is measured in 2024. And since the Kelces, on aesthetics and substance, aren’t exceeding any of these other men—if anything, the NFL brothers are far less interesting—it is the fairest, and perhaps only way, to judge them.
It can be argued Travis Kelce will never be the Rock because he lacks the Rock’s charisma and gravitas. He’s too straining, too preening, nakedly thirsty for the attention he’s mostly receiving because he was able to date his generation’s Madonna. But it’s the crumbling superstructure of fame that will truly hold Kelce back. It was Old Hollywood and Old Television that made the Rock who he was; it was the world before social media had metastasized and culture had fractured. Millions of boys watched the Rock wrestle on linear television in the 1990s and bought DVDs of his action movies in the 2000s. There was a monoculture for the Rock to seize. Kecle won’t be so lucky.
And the future, for Swift, might not offer nearly as much bounty as the past.