The pop star’s relationship with an NFL player gives fans a peculiar form of gratification.
This Thanksgiving, America is divided: One half knows why the word squirle is funny, and one half does not. Are you in the latter group? Then you should know that earlier this month, a series of tweets surfaced by Taylor Swift’s new boyfriend, the Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce. In one of them, from 2011, he offered this observation: “I just gave a squirle a peice of bread and it straight smashed all of it!!!! I had no idea they ate bread like that!! Haha #crazy.”
Many more Kelce tweets like this soon emerged, rife with spelling near misses, extravagant punctuation, and a charmingly retro belief in the power of hashtags. They were indeed #crazy, but also sweet, funny, and sincere. This might be the first recorded instance of “offense archeology”—the writer Freddie deBoer’s term for digging through someone’s old posts—that enhanced the subject’s reputation. Yes, Kelce had written tweets about “fat people falling over”—the kind of thing that any 20-something dude might have said online in the early 2010s, unaware that he would one day be the subject of presidential-level vetting—but the majority of Kelce’s posts were adorable in their straightforward joie de vivre. In my own personal favorite, now deleted, he celebrated Easter by giving a “shoutout” to Jesus for “takin one for the team.... haha” (not just the son of God, but the tight end of the apostles). Kelce’s tweets were so wholesome that even the inevitable “brandter” from companies he mentioned, including Olive Garden, Chipotle, and Taco Bell—“karma is a crunchwrap coming straight home to me,” shoot me now—could not ruin my enjoyment of Kelce’s existence. “i understand taylor swift now,” one X user wrote in a viral post. “it’s every girl’s biggest dream to be able to text their dog. and that’s sort of the vibe travis kelce is bringing to the table.”
Devin Gordon: Taylor Swift is too famous for this
Since the squirle revelations, I’ve realized that my long-standing casual interest in Taylor Swift’s love life has developed into a full-blown obsession. Many of my friends have confessed to the same problem, and judging by social media, millions of Americans also worship Travlor. (Swiftce? Swelce? Tayvis? Let’s keep workshopping this.) At first, I wondered if this was evidence of a deep seam of anti-feminism—we just want to marry off Swift, as if that’s the only way for her to be happy—but now I understand the whole phenomenon as a performance-art project. Swift is the hottest pop star in America right now because she understands fame better than anyone else. She has made peace with the constant speculation over the autobiographical nature of her songs. “I realized very early on that no matter what, that was going to happen to me regardless,” she told Rolling Stone in 2019. “So when you realize the rules of the game you’re playing and how it will affect you, you got to look at the board and make your strategy.”
In her new book, Toxic, the British journalist Sarah Ditum writes about nine women bulldozed by fame in the 2000s. Britney Spears is a classic example: The culture liked her as a sexy teenage virgin and wanted to freeze her there. Spears also had the misfortune to become well known just as gossip bloggers such as Perez Hilton and high-velocity outlets such as the recently defunct Jezebel were emerging. Although the amount of commentary was enormous, Spears was supposed to be a passive figure at the center of it. Eventually, Spears lost control of her image—remember her attacking that car with an umbrella?—her children, her money, and, under her father’s conservatorship, her entire life. The next generation of female stars learned from that experience. In Swift’s Rolling Stone interview, she emphasizes that being a pop star is a different job from being a musician. She is proud to be both a creative artist and one of America’s great businesses, even if that threatens people: “People don’t want to think of a woman in music who isn’t just a happy, talented accident.”
Swift and Beyoncé, the only other Millennial performer as polished as her, are the most successful artists of their generation because they have cracked the code of modern fame. Their relationship with their fans is simultaneously intimate and strongly circumscribed. Both release work that alludes to rumored incidents in their personal lives (such as Jay-Z’s affair, in the case of Beyoncé’s album Lemonade) and then don’t submit to many traditional interviews, the kind in which they would be pressed for the gory details. They are flirting: giving fans a glimpse into something secret, but not the whole picture. That gap is where desire lives. Their fans always want more. That’s why scrutinizing their lyrics has become a cottage industry. Trying to work out whom Beyoncé is describing as “Becky with the good hair,” or whom Swift is targeting in “Vigilante Shit” (Kanye West, the record executive Scooter Braun, someone else entirely?) is a massively multiplayer online game. It is the Millennial version of QAnon.
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Both women also understand, as the late Queen Elizabeth II did, that they need to be seen to be believed. Hence the tours—which also offset the poor returns on streaming compared with old-fashioned album sales—and, in Swift’s case, an extremely tactical attitude toward having dinner. For a recent article in Vulture, the writer Rachel Handler trudged around New York looking for traces of Swift in buzzy hangouts where the singer had recently eaten. “What motivates this militaristically busy, perennially stalked international superstar to put on a good outfit and leave the luxe confines of her Tribeca condo,” Handler asked, “to dine alongside the unwashed masses and staked-out paparazzi, many of whom instantaneously sell her out to ‘Page Six’ and DeuxMoi?” Really, Handler had answered her own question. Taylor Swift gives us something—pictures of her dining with the British actor Sophie Turner—and we supply the rest. (Turner is currently divorcing Joe Jonas, an ex-boyfriend of Swift’s and the rumored subject of songs including “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” so the paparazzi pictures can be read as a sisterly show of support, their mutual revenge, or a warning shot across the bow of whoever had previously leaked stories about Turner being a bad mother.) When you are as famous as Taylor Swift, you can communicate with the smallest gestures.
The stage management of her relationship with Kelce has, unsurprisingly, been sublime. Swift has attended four of his games, always decked out in red Chiefs merch, and he flew out to see her in Argentina on the South American leg of her tour. (That leg has otherwise been a somber one, marked by postponements due to extreme weather, questions over the stadiums’ ability to deal with that weather, and the deaths of two fans.) The first footage of the pair kissing—she runs offstage, he’s standing there with his hands behind his back, she goes straight in without hesitation—was analyzed like the Zapruder footage. Kelce’s posture was hesitant, fans theorized, so that she could decide whether to go public with their relationship. He had passed the vetting process.
That wasn’t guaranteed. Swifties like to assign a persona to each of the men in her life, and Kelce has been deemed to be the perfect gentleman, in contrast with Joe Alwyn (reclusive plus-one); Tom Hiddleston (alarming fanboy); and John Mayer, Calvin Harris, and Jake Gyllenhaal (the enemy). Kelce had an advantage, which is that he had already begun to develop his wagging-tail-Labrador persona before dating Swift. “Killatrav” talks about his family a lot. A recent profile by Prince Harry’s ghostwriter in The Wall Street Journal notes how easily he cries. In March, he appeared in a Saturday Night Live skit as a “straight male friend”—the simple beer- and sports-loving creature any gay guy needs when he’s exhausted by women’s gossip and emotions. Kelce’s public persona is a sensitive alpha—the modern update on the famous poster of a ripped and shirtless man cradling a baby.
Modern culture uses celebrities to work out conflicts and tensions; they become shorthands for arguments we want to have. Swift has been the vector for several of these conversations already: She sings her early country songs in a noticeable twang—what does authenticity mean in music? Her 2020 Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, shows her torn between her Nashville connections and her desire to publicly oppose Donald Trump—how political should a pop star be? Why do so many people, including other women, still see female ambition as inherently suspicious? After Kim Kardashian called her a snake—amid a public feud between Swift and Kanye West, Kardashian’s then-partner—Swift reclaimed the image in a video and in her tour props, turning the insult into a sign of defiance.
At 33, Swift is deep in an international tour that has grossed hundreds of millions of dollars. Former enemies such as West and Braun have been utterly vanquished. She is triumphant. But a new narrative has emerged, because that same victory is threatening to the reactionary online right, the type of commentators who are always talking about birth rates. Some people have become invested in the idea that the price of feminist success is loneliness, that the modern, liberated woman can’t find a man, or at least can’t find one to play second fiddle to her. Or even if she does find a man who will put her career first, an alpha woman wouldn’t want to be with that kind of a beta male anyway. Feminism, huh? Not so great now, is it?
Part of the fandom’s investment in Travis Kelce is that he neatly solves this problem. He is an undoubted star in the NFL, rather than a less successful competitor to Swift in the entertainment industry. He’s a multimillion-dollar brand in his own right: He wouldn’t be swallowed up as “Mr. Swift.” At 34, he is also nearing the end of his playing career, so in our strange little fantasy world, he will soon have plenty of time to make her breakfast and dance in loud shirts at her live shows.
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Never mind, of course, that many of Swift’s best songs are about not settling down, not doing the expected thing, not taking the picket fence and the small-town life and everything else people tell you that you would be lucky to have. My favorite Swift song is “Champagne Problems,” a track about a breakup, unusually told from the perspective of the dumper rather than the dumpee. (The song was co-written by Alwyn, under a pseudonym, while he and Swift were still dating.) Like many Swift tracks, it laces together the idea of moving on from a relationship and wanting to escape a community where the narrator doesn’t fit in. “Your hometown skeptics called it,” she sings, before acknowledging that the decision has also broken up her group of friends. Swift’s most recent album, Midnights, meanwhile, starts with “Lavender Haze,” in which the singer complains about “the 1950s shit they want from me.” You have to admit, these do not sound like the sentiments of a woman who is desperate to get wifed up and knocked up.
All of this is why, despite my enthusiasm, I won’t feel cheated if the Travlor relationship fizzles out like the one with Tom Hiddleston did after he wore that I ❤️TS tank top. (Perhaps it fizzled because he wore that I ❤️TS tank top.) It also explains why every time a new Swift romance is announced, fans begin to salivate over how good a breakup album she will get out of its eventual demise. We understand that she is creating a puzzle for us, to keep her true self protected. Modern pop consumers are more sophisticated than they get credit for, operating on a plane of irony and self-reference that often gets missed because many of them are young women. Whatever is really happening between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce has nothing to do with the rest of us. One of them has given us some of the century’s best pop songs; the other has two Super Bowl rings and has given us the word squirle. We are not entitled to anything else. Enjoy the show.
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