3 hours ago
3
No speculation is too harebrained when it comes to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding. Are they getting married at the gigantic Madison Square Garden arena? What initially sounded mad is apparently quite true. Will she perform? Will Paul McCartney? All bets are off – and given the level of secrecy, maybe we’ll never actually know what does happen.
Only one recent report has made me go: yeah, as if. Gossip site DeuxMoi claims that Swift recently met 50 country radio execs to pitch an alleged upcoming country album, a return to her roots 20 years after she started in the genre. This strikes me as potentially true: even the world’s biggest pop star will glad-hand when needed, as it usually is in the always-traditional Nashville industry. But the report also claimed the rumoured album – Swift’s 13th, famously her lucky number – would be her last “for a while”, presumably because of her impending nuptials. So much of the discussion around the couple’s wedding is focused on what it will mean for Swift’s job. Will she take a break to “enjoy” marriage? Will it change her ambition? Will her songwriting suffer?
Since 2020, Swift has released five original albums, four re-recorded albums, two live albums, a song for Toy Story 5 and collaborations with Ed Sheeran, the National and Gracie Abrams. She undertook the first billion dollar-grossing pop tour, which spawned a concert film, a second concert film (to reflect a setlist update halfway through the run) and a documentary series. She was pictured coming out of a New York City recording studio just two weeks ago. It’s almost impossible to imagine this workaholic and achievement fiend pressing pause on her career as she becomes a married woman – she called the idea “shockingly offensive” last year – and yet the idea seems to be sticking.
I don’t read sports media, but I don’t think anyone’s asking these questions about her American football star fiance. The wedding has spawned a bizarre Stepford line of inquiry, autopiloting us back to the 1950s when a newlywed woman might have quit her nice teaching/librarian job to draw up plans for the nursery, then kicked back to admire the wedding silver. I’d love to hear whatever music Swift might make from her Betty Draper housewife era – complete with 11am vodka gimlets and a barbiturate addiction – but I don’t see it for her. (Also, a true head might say: she already made a record that sounds something like that, and it was called Midnights.)
The idea that happiness makes for boring work is rooted in tired tortured-artiste tropes, as if there aren’t millions of great pieces of art about domesticity’s many joys – and sorrows. For a starter triptych alone, how about Beyoncé’s self-titled album (randy), Lemonade (recriminatory) and Everything Is Love (reconciliatory) with her husband, Jay-Z? And if there aren’t that many songs by female pop stars about married life, that’s less because they’re unwritable than because few acts of Swift and Beyoncé’s calibre have maintained careers at their level into that life stage. In a more manufactured pop era, marriage was the point at which labels might condemn a female pop star to the dumper. How are fans meant to fantasise about you with a ring on your finger?
All that aside, any idea that marriage is a one-dimensionally happy experience leaves you wondering what some commentators think it means: the plastic couple on top of the cake made flesh, stuck in a permanent state of bliss? Maybe these lines of inquiry indicate some desperate clinging to a collective fantasy. The heteropessimist era – encapsulated in Swift peer Sabrina Carpenter’s weary songs about the eternal disappointments of loving men – has made straight relationships seem more like a state of inescapable damnation than consenting mutual bliss. Swift and Kelce’s queen bee/football star dynamic is some kind of antidote that millions evidently want to believe in. But I don’t know any millennial or gen Z women who are getting married imagining it to be some sort of happily-ever-after panacea, myself included.
I didn’t say yes because I thought it would make all my dreams come true. For years, I could list every reason I didn’t want to get married, certain of how constricting it would be and how un-wifelike I am. Then one day I realised: what if not knowing what it would be like is actually a good reason to take the leap? To make it up as you’re going along? To be frank, if someone could facilitate me having several months off work so I can “enjoy” newlywed life later this year, I’d polish some candlesticks for the privilege – though, sadly, I don’t see it for me either. Swift’s wedding may be planned with all the precision of a military exercise, but presumably the fun part is that no one – not the happy couple nor the gawkers – knows what marriage will actually mean for them.
after newsletter promotion
-
Laura Snapes is the Guardian’s deputy music editor
