How Nearly 200 Years of Fandom History Culminated in Taylor Swift’s Total Dominance

Taylor has been studying fandom history and implementing it, whether or not she realizes it.

If there’s a gene for fandom-generating ability, Taylor Swift has it.

Her story has become so well-worn, like pop cultural wallpaper, that it’s easy to forget how extraordinary it is. She became a country-pop phenomenon in her teens, seamlessly switched to pure pop only to get bigger, switched again to indie folk and gained an even wider swath of fans for it, and has now become an omnipresent force, pop culture itself. Oddsmakers would have reasonably forecast any number of fates for her along the way: a fade-out, a mental breakdown, a backlash, a ruinous scandal, an embarrassing flop. 

And yet, especially since the pandemic, Taylor Swift has, unlike the rest of us, only leveled up and up and up again. Once she got every possible demographic hooked on her at a time when few others wanted to put out anything, much less two albums that spanned generations, all systems were go for a global takeover.

Last year, when her “Eras” tour essentially broke Ticketmaster, and the tour itself powered the U.S. economy, and the film version revived flagging movie-going, and her new romance with a football player dominated the Super Bowl while The New York Times ran a pure fandom-powered piece speculating irresponsibly about Swift’s sexuality, many of us found ourselves suddenly wondering: When did she get so big? Why did it feel as if she was suddenly everywhere, infusing every aspect of our lives, even if we weren’t fans? 

The answer lies in the history of fandom itself, and the ways she has intuitively harnessed nearly every aspect of fandom to turn all eyes, ears, and dollars toward her. Here, a look at the ways she has smartly wielded tactics for cultivating Swifties that touch on every part of fandom’s 200-year history, from the Victorian Era through Beatlemania, Trekkies, and more.

Galvanizing the Most Loyal Fanbase of All, Like the Brontë Sisters

With her debut in 2006, Swift became the latest young, female songwriting sensation in recent history with her self-titled debut record. She joins the likes of Carole King, Debbie Gibson, and Alanis Morissette (with Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo to follow), all young women who amassed legions of equally young, largely female fans by telling the truth about their own lives in their lyrics. This kind of fandom-via-kinship goes back as far as the Victorian-era Brontë sisters, at the very beginning of fandom history, whose dramatic and romantic accounts of female characters’ lives in their novels sparked such a frenzy that their small hometown in rural England, Haworth, was overrun with pilgrims seeking a connection with their favorite writers. Even after they died—Emily, author of Wuthering Heights, in 1848, and Charlotte, author of Jane Eyre, in 1855—fan visits only increased, with hopefuls craving a glimpse of their preacher father. (This recalls the way that even Taylor’s parents, Scott and Andrea Swift, are widely known.) Later, the Brontë Society museum would display any and all remnants of the sisters possible, from scraps of paper to locks of hair, to satisfy the hordes. 

Serving Beef, Like Old-School Sci-Fi Fans and Rappers

Swift’s 2008 album, Fearless, broke her into the mainstream, particularly her catchy and evocative ode to unrequited high school love, “You Belong with Me.” (“She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts/She’s cheer captain, and I’m in the bleachers.”) Not only did this ditty have everyone singing along, it also led to a pivotal moment in her career: As she tried to accept the MTV VMA for Best Female Video for the song, rapper Kanye West famously stormed the stage to interrupt her and voice his opinion that Beyoncé should be winning the award for “Single Ladies” instead. Though Swift came off as genuinely gobsmacked in the moment, she would learn to wield this first (and worst) of her several feuds masterfully in the public eye—forgiving and reigniting, writing coded lyrics and acceptance speeches—for years to come. In fact, more than a decade later, she’s still (presumably) swiping at West’s now-ex-wife Kim Kardashian on her most recent record.  

Beef would become one of Swift’s specialties, a surefire tactic for engaging fans and staying in the news. Fandom has long created what are essentially “teams”  that allow for a tribal feeling, which is reinforced by aggression toward other teams—think Star Trek vs. Star Wars, the Stones vs. the Beatles. Even the very first science fiction convention in history in 1939, Worldcon, was characterized by a vicious fan war, between traditional sci-fi fans and a group called the Futurians, who were agitating for the genre to move in a more activist and political direction. Futurians were barred from attending, while they circulated a pamphlet calling the organizers “heretofore ruthless scoundrels.” You can almost imagine that phrase showing up in a rap dis track, the most classic form of public pop culture beef. Where do Drake and Kendrick stand on sci-fi’s obligation to addressing social issues, anyway?

Mixing Art and Reality, Like Sherlock Holmes, the Monkees, and Carly Simon 

Another surefire way to hype fans up is crafting subtle mysteries that may (or may not) mirror the gossip pages. With 2010’s Speak Now, Swift began to go full-force with tracks that probably tracked with her (kind-of) public love life. “Dear John” charts an age-gap relationship and mirrors even the style of the older singer-songwriter John Mayer. (She would, tellingly, use a similar technique in “Bad Blood,” a beef song directed, allegedly, at Katy Perry, and expertly mimicking that pop star’s aesthetic.) Though Swift never confirmed that the song was about him, he publicly said he thought this song was about him, calling it “cheap songwriting” in an interview with Rolling Stone. While this evokes shades of Carly Simon’s classic “You’re So Vain,” and the decades of guessing-games that ensued—“I bet you think this song is about you, don’t you, don’t you?”—it also calls to mind a certain Full House star who pontificated, within earshot of media, that Alanis Morissette may have written “You Oughta Know” about him since they once dated, the greatest musical steroid shot to a ho-hum celebrity image ever. (Like Swift and Simon, Morissette has not confirmed the song’s muse.) Just for balance, Swift also gave us “Back to December,” a beautiful ode to a very nice guy she wishes she would have appreciated more (who is widely believed to be Twilight star Taylor Lautner, as determined by cross-referencing their dating timeline with the month in the title). And! This album also included “Innocent,” her make-up ballad for Kanye West before things went much more sour with him later. 

This blurring of public art and a “private,” ongoing “storyline” in reality makes a particularly irresistible blend for fans. Readers, viewers, and listeners have long conflated reality and fiction, as when Sherlock Holmes fans wrote letters addressed to the fictional detective and publicly mourned his death in 1893 after author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle decided to kill him. In the 1960s, the TV-constructed pop band The Monkees delighted their followers by becoming a real-life musical act separate from the corporate forces that created them, creating a fan frenzy and eventually gaining creative control of their music as well as critical acclaim.

Connecting Directly, Like Kevin Smith

Swift took the feeling that fans were her personal friends and made it literal, holding secret listening sessions for her 2014 album 1989 with select fans in her own home(s). Fans got to hear her new music early, a privilege usually reserved for industry insiders and critics, while petting her cats and eating her home-baked pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, a fantasy come true and a way to bond Swifties to the object of their fandom like nothing else. 

YouTube videos emerged showing fans milling around Swift’s house and dancing in Swift’s living room. This canny move could even make the masses who weren’t selected for this special treatment feel more connected to Swift. Once they heard about the sessions, they could imagine that something similar might happen to them someday, and the passing around of these intimate recordings had the feeling of genuine word-of-mouth, the way that rappers’ old-school mixtapes used to spread the word about their new tracks.

The mere existence of these small, personal meet-and-greets proved Swift’s extraordinary affection for her fans. And this wasn’t inaccurate—she’d continue the tradition for her next two albums, up until the pandemic. Meanwhile, she also became famous for swooping into fans’ real lives in other ways, sending fans Christmas gifts, paying off fans’ student loans, and surprising a fan at her bridal shower. Artists have long known the power of personal connection with their fans, from The Beatles (whose secretary, Freda Kelly, would make sure that fans who requested one of the band members’ locks of hair got the right hair) to filmmaker Kevin Smith, who’s been known to hold screenings and poker nights to connect directly with superfans. 

Building a Mythology, Like Sun Ra and Star Wars

Swift had been methodically building her own fan universe for the entirety of her career, leaving little clues in liner notes and videos, imbuing her favorite number (13) and lipstick color (red) with meaning. She also developed thematic throughlines that fans loved to spot, like repeated lyrical imagery involving rain. These callbacks, combined with the ongoing “real life” narrative of her beefs and loves, all of them woven into her music, drove fans into a frenzy of obsession. With 2017’s Reputation, and particularly the video for its first single, “Look What You Made Me Do,” she took this entire project to another level: The first three-plus minutes offer scenarios rife with references to her public battles (snakes for the name Kardashian called her, a “girl squad” like the model friends she showed off during her 1989 tour, but this time wearing cat masks, like, you know, her cats). These recurring motifs became a hallmark of Swift videos and social media posts, sending fans on an obsessive treasure hunt with every new release. This recalls the work of musicians such as Sun Ra in the 1950s, who created an elaborate mythology for himself involving Saturn and ancient Egypt, among many influences, and much of sci-fi fandom, from Star Wars to Lost, which is largely dependent on fans spotting clues and trading interpretations of even the smallest of details. 

Offering Multiple Identities and Costumes, Like Boy Bands and ‘Rocky Horror’

The final scene of the “Look What You Made Me Do” video unveils a piece de resistance of fan service, a lineup of “old Taylors,” Swift dressed recognizably as previous iterations of herself, like the dorky girl from the “You Belong With Me” video, the one in the dress Swift wore while being memorably interrupted at the VMAs by West, and a cowboy-booted girl from the earliest days of her career. What’s particularly brilliant about this is the way it sets up the concept that would come to full fruition in Swift’s current “Eras” tour while also providing fans with a classic fan activity: picking a favorite. Pity The Beatles’ fans, who only had four to choose from, and the boy bands who offered only five or six. Swift fans had a dozen and counting. And with these identities now clearly delineated, fans could engage in another form of worship, dressing up as their favorite Taylor, mimicking other forms of fandom like Rocky Horror Picture Show’s interactive screenings full of costumed audience members, as well as cosplay and convention pageantry. Of course, she copped this move from the original mother of reinvention (and master of fandom), Madonna.

Courting Artistic Respectability, like the Beatles

Swift grew her fandom far beyond the Swifties who’d been following her intently for most of her career when the pandemic hit. When her tour for her most recent album, Lover, was cancelled, she poured herself into a collaboration with producer Jack Antonoff and, more tellingly, The National’s Aaron Dessner, swerving from her undeniably pop sensibilities to more contemplative and quiet storytelling that was more clearly fictionalized. She dropped Folklore in July 2020 at a time when we were all desperate for new entertainment, and she took a page from Beyoncé’s self-titled 2013 album to do so. She announced it just 24 hours in advance, lending the release date extra excitement. And she emerged as a more adult, universal artist than ever before. Entire families, across generations, spent the summer savoring Folklore, and it became universally cool to like Taylor Swift. Less than five months later, she dropped a second, similar album, Evermore, cementing her Imperial Phase as she enjoyed the trifecta of commercial success, critical acclaim, and industry respect, a successful genre shift on par with The Beatles’ turn from pop rock to art rock and psychedelia with 1965’s Rubber Soul and, even moreso, 1966’s Revolver.

Improving on the Director’s Cut, Like Ridley Scott

After decades of film auteurs putting out their own versions of their most-loved films, Swift innovated on the form. Her master recordings were purchased out from under her by someone else—no need to get into these specifics again—and she had a brilliant response, apparently inspired by Kelly Clarkson’s advice: Why not simply re-record her back catalog? Like most undertakings, Swift didn’t approach this lightly. She would re-record every track she’d ever done, and release them methodically with bonus cuts that she hadn’t included on the original albums, thus inspiring her fans to: 1. Re-purchase every single song she’d ever sold to them previously, this time with the feeling of supporting a cause; 2. Get stoked about additional songs (which have consistently been very good) that would never have seen the light of day otherwise. Thus she took a DVD-era movie trope—the director’s cut, made most famous by the multiple editions of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner—and repackaged it, possibly even more profitably, for the streaming music era.

‘The Tortured Poets Department’: The End of the Eras?

Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poet’s Department, feels as if it marks a culmination of every last bit of her fandom orchestration, as well as an intriguing turning point. The songwriting is exceptional, as always, but felt like too much too soon, even to some fans (like me), after all of the Taylor’s Version and “Eras” tour content. Reviews were weary, while Paste felt it necessary to run its (unnecessarily harsh and petulant) criticism without a byline, fearing fan reprisals against the author. 

What’s fascinating about The Tortured Poet’s Department is that the music is beside the point. It doesn’t appear to be designed to be listened to for mere musical pleasure, like the rest of her work. It’s meant to be enjoyed for its self-references on self-references, for its coded gestures toward the other figures in the Taylor Swift Musical Universe. The people who are vibing on it most are the ones poring over, for just one example, the similarities between “imgonnagetyouback” and The 1975’s “Fallingforyou” and the fact that both song titles have no spaces and the question of whether that’s also a call all the way back to “Blank Space” … and omg what does this all say about her relationship with 1975 frontman Matty Healy? Let us pause to consider the fact that I just linked to a New Yorker piece that patiently decodes “imgonnagetyouback” and other songs on the album. The New Yorker is now doing what once was relegated to fan blogs—very smartly, sanely, and meaningfully, but still.

And yet, adding to the layered complexity of Tortured Poets, Swift spends a lot of it telegraphing hints (and more-than-hints) at her own exhaustion with her image and even her beloved fans. One fan on TikTok, @ttpd101, somewhat convincingly argues that “Fortnight,” which is on the surface about an affair that has ended, is actually about Swift breaking up with her fans. But more obviously, she lashes out in “But Daddy I Love Him” at “Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best/Clutching their pearls, sighing, ‘What a mess,’” a likely reference to fans who complained about her relationship with, yes, Healy. (Healy is the surprise MVP of Tortured Poets, and almost feels like some kind of decoder ring that has unlocked mysteries of past albums as well, eclipsing, say, her longtime boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn.)

Her manifesto of grievance, however, comes in the form of “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart,” an entire song about how difficult it was to go out on tour when she was in relationship turmoil: “Lights, camera, bitch smile, even when you wanna die … All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘More!’” What’s striking in this case is that no one forced her to go on tour, though, of course, demand was astronomical. Her fans would never have knowingly tortured her this way. That’s the thing about fan/star relationships; they can never be an equal playing field, and it’s hard to say which side is in charge. And yet it does seem possible that Swift’s most significant relationship, in the end, has been with her fans. The question is how to reconcile that with a real life.