The Strange Anti-Woke Case for Taylor Swift

Are the elite gatekeepers and tastemakers not celebrating Taylor Swift enough? That’s one contention of a provocative new column from David Samuels on our shriveling popular culture. Samuels, a decorated long-form journalist, argues convincingly that the worlds of cinema, music, and publishing have been captured by creativity-stifling monopolies. The broken streaming model has played a significant role in a writers and actors strike that may drag on for many more months. Today’s cultural institutions don’t manufacture and promote talent like they once did. Samuels points to Swift and Christopher Nolan, the director of Oppenheimer, as the outliers, genuinely original purveyors of mass culture. “Hollywood’s problems are only the latest in a series of culture industry cataclysms that have overtaken American journalism, book publishing and the music business, and which make both Nolan and Swift seem more like the freakish end-products of bygone eras (Nolan released his first feature film in 1998; Swift’s eponymous first album came out in 2006) than harbingers of future glory,” he writes.