Heartbreak Is the National Anthem

I am at best a casual Taylor Swift fan, so I was hoping that Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield could help me understand her unprecedented, global superstardom. I get that she's a smart, talented songwriter and a brilliant businesswoman, but how does she inspire such fan frenzy that her Eras tour has earned almost $2 billion? Sheffield doesn't fully explain the Swift phenomena, but his brief, poppy chapters offer a more or less chronological history of her music, with asides for most notable songs and quirks. The focus is firmly on Swift's artistry, not her boyfriends or other gossip. I'm fascinated by middle-aged, white, cishet Sheffield's unabashed confession that the lyrics of “Archer” from 2019's Lover (“They see right through me/I see right through me!”) helped him process the grief of his mother's death.

Maybe we have a “vision-impaired person describing an elephant” phenomenon. Sheffield's connection to Swift is unique to him, and only by piecing together the impressions she has made on each one of her countless fans will we ever get to the core of her popularity. Perhaps she's just the right person at the right time, although the fact that “the right time” has now spanned more than 15 years is mindboggling. I suspect that Heartbreak Is the National Anthem will be too detailed for people who are only vaguely familiar with her work, and too basic for die-hard Swifties, but it was compelling enough to make me wonder what I'm missing by not having a Taylor Swift Spotify playlist.