The Parasocialism Era

Considering the peak of fan culture

The other day, I was messaging with the writer Mo_Diggs on the topic of pop music and the culture, and how so few of the current superstars can speak to the pro-Palestinian movement, which is larger than ever and has fully enraptured politically-engaged youth. Pop stars did not have this sort of trouble with Black Lives Matter, MeToo, or resisting Donald Trump. Even Taylor Swift, perpetually apolitical, backed a Democrat against a Trump Republican in a 2018 Senate race and endorsed Joe Biden in 2020. She might be pulled off the sidelines to endorse Biden again. What she won’t do, like most celebrities, is go anywhere near Israel and Gaza. Calls for ceasefire grow—Drake and Dua Lipa have done it—but the core demands of the anti-Zionists will not be echoed by a vast majority of major label artists and Hollywood. Swift, herself, has not called for a ceasefire. This hasn’t dented her popularity; if there were grumblings, before 2020, that she wasn’t doing enough to oppose Trump, few have chided her for staying silent on the enormous death toll in Gaza. In the latter half of the 1960s, many musicians felt pressure to speak out against the war in Vietnam and to lend their voices to the cause of civil rights. It was the moral thing to do, and it could be lucrative: those countercultural baby boomers bought plenty of records. Subversion, or the appearance of it, could pay. Still, not all artists were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, or any of the other artists hovering at the Monterey Pop vanguard. In fact, it was trumpeter and easy-listening maestro Herb Alpert who, in 1966, outsold every other rock band in the world. We just think much more today about Revolver and Pet Sounds than Whipped Cream & Other Delights.

Diggs floated the question: is Swift the Alpert of our times? She is, of course, far more famous than Alpert ever was, and she dominates the discourse on a level only seen by the likes of Michael Jackson, Madonna, and those aforementioned Beatles. Her music, for now, exists on the level of religion, even myth. She’s locked in her A1 New York Times obituary. But she remains, for all the reverence she inspires, rather anodyne. Madonna was regarded, at one time, as a subversive artist. Ditto Jackson, for reasons beyond music, but he was also, in his approach to dance and performance art, revolutionary. Other pop stars, like Whitney Houston, awed audiences with talent rarely, if ever, witnessed on the stage. What of Swift? Her run of cultural hegemony is already longer than that of most pop stars’, every album surging to number 1, every new release an event unto itself. The Eras Tour, as an economic force, is unrivaled. But the cultural question nags. Since we live in a period of macrocultural stagnation, even contraction, what has Swift changed? Has she altered fashion in any noticeable way? (Do the friendship bracelets count?) Has she transformed how we think about music or the world? Has she innovated music itself or changed the very nature, in the 2020s, of pop? (The algorithm, if anything, seems much more influential.) No one can argue against Swift’s dominance. Influence, however, can still be debated.

What Swift has heralded—or even forced into being herself, through the sheer power of her music and persona—is the era of the parasocial relationship between fan and celebrity, fan and product. It’s intriguing that Swift’s ascent to global fame came in tandem with the explosion of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that period of the 2010s when fan culture consumed everything in its wake and made the love affair with IP a deeply personal matter. Swift, herself, is not IP, but she is treated by her fan base like a superhero, a more infallible Spider-Man or Wolverine. It is not enough to love her music, to buy her albums, to spend thousands of dollars on her concerts, and to track every morsel of news published about her relationship with Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end. You must resent or even revile those who have not accepted the gospel of Taylor. You must regard, with bitter suspicion, anyone who might not believe Swift is the greatest pop star who has ever lived or who might simply prefer other kinds of music. Friendships are now ruined over an insufficient devotion to Swift, according to recent story published in The Cut. A 29-year-old had the temerity to ask on Instagram why Swift was so hyped. Not longer after, her college best friend stopped speaking to her.

In new friendships, the mention of Swift alone can be enough to grind a blossoming talking stage to an immediate halt. It happened to one 34-year-old New Yorker, let’s call her Maria, after she started hanging out with her best friend’s brother’s fiancée in February 2020. The friendship progressed rapidly — they were hanging out weekly, grabbing dinner and drinks — then that July the topic of Taylor Swift came up over appetizers at a restaurant in Soho.

A young Swift fan, meanwhile, says she has backed away from friendships where her love of the artist is not properly understood.

Manhattan Turn, a 25-year-old Swiftie in Alberta, Canada, says she’s walked away from friendships with the feeling that no one “gets it.” Turn started listening to Swift in 2020 while going through a difficult situationship. After her college best friend went through her own breakup in 2021, Turn suggested that she, too, listen to Swift. “But every time I played Taylor’s songs, she’d roll her eyes or change the subject,” she says. Tension built in the friendship after Turn’s now-ex-friend called her “stupid” for flying to Europe for Swift’s tour. When she didn’t come to Turn’s 25th-birthday party in April 2023, their ten-year friendship was over.

Devotion, worship, and mania are not new. Bobby soxers screamed for Frank Sinatra. Elvis Presley met crazed, uncontrollable crowds. The Beatles courted hysteria and violence. What differs now is that Swift fans, in particular, seem to view Swift as an extension of themselves, a celebrity they can not only identify with but, in some form, become. They know her like no one else does, even if such a relationship between a billionaire pop star and an anonymous ticket buyer can never, in any lifetime, be reciprocated. Her fans have aged with her while not fundamentally altering their outlook on fandom itself. A fervent Swiftie, in certain ways, is not unlike an MSNBC-addled Democrat or a Trump-worshipping Republican. In this age of negative polarization, with hatred of the other political party determining so much of daily existence—dating and marriage between opposite parties is on a steep decline—it’s not so shocking that a Swift fan would decide to cut ties with someone who can’t comprehend what it means to organize a life around Swift and only Swift. A critique of Swift becomes a personal assault for the individual who cannot see themselves as anything other than a Swift devotee. Adulthood is supposed to temper this behavior, but it isn’t.

I’ll hazard a prediction: parasocialism isn’t forever. All trends ebb and flow and invite, in a variety of forms, backlash. Today’s toddlers might, two decades from now, read that old story about Swift fandom in The Cut and find it all, in that dated 2020s parlance, cringe. Just as some of the 2010s-style politicking around social justice and identity issues is now suppressed or forgotten entirely, the manic intensity of fan culture may eventually seem absurd to the new youth. The MCU movies are no longer enormously popular. Superhero fatigue is real, just as audiences, in the twentieth century, eventually tired of Westerns. Swift, certainly, can still churn out number 1 albums and singles into middle-age and beyond—a dull, AI-enhanced Beatles single briefly topped the charts last year—but there are limits to any mortal’s hegemony. It’s plausible, a decade from now, fans will find new pop stars to parasocially bond to, to recreate what they’ve had with Swift in others. Or, in time, they’ll simply break away. A budding backlash has come for tech itself. Will it come for parasocialism? It may when the 18-year-old member of Gen Alpha is snickering at her aging millenial parents who can’t stop talking about a pop icon who’s been releasing music for 40 years. And if mainstream culture, in the coming years, no longer stagnates—if any upheaval like the old counterculture is upon us—Swift might suddenly find herself beyond the vortex, a representation of all that was and no longer is. And then, the parasocialites will have to figure out how it is they’re supposed to be.