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    FKA twigs Dances Martha Graham: ‘This Is Art in Its Truest Form’

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    Once a young bunhead, the acclaimed musical artist is taking the stage with the Martha Graham Dance Company. For her, this is holy grail territory.The rebellious spirit of Martha Graham has found a rebellious soul mate in another creative powerhouse. A classically trained dancer, she’s known in the world as an acclaimed recording artist. She moves like water. Her pole dancing is pretty astounding, too. This is FKA twigs.On Thursday, she will make her debut as a dancer with the Graham company in the solo “Satyric Festival Song” (1932). “To me, this is, honestly, like winning a Grammy,” she said. “I feel like I’m winning a Grammy.”At the company’s gala performance, FKA twigs will slip into her costume, a bold and graphic striped dress designed by Graham. She will pop into the air as if the floor were on fire. She will twist and bend her body into jagged edges. And she will tease the audience with tilts of the head and dancing, expressive eyes. This is a solo inspired by rituals that Graham observed in the pueblos of the American Southwest, specifically, the kachina figures that served as comic relief at religious ceremonies. Graham was also poking fun at her serious, dramatic self.“To me, this is, honestly, like winning a Grammy,” FKA twigs said of dancing with the Graham company. Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesAn artist of vast imagination whose music defies genre, FKA twigs is adventurous in all of her pursuits. Her shimmering, fluent physicality, displayed over the years in videos and performances, is equally fearless and lissome. “My values of success and achievement are maybe slightly different to other people’s,” FKA twigs said in an interview from London. Many of her colleagues will be at Coachella over the next two weeks, “which is obviously such an honor,” she said. “But I’ve spent the whole of my life in the dance studio. I studied Martha Graham’s technique at dance school. I took the class many times when I was a younger dancer.”The Graham company, though, didn’t know she had studied the technique. So how did this solo happen? Through that unofficial dance network known as Instagram.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How are musicians supposed to survive on $0.00173 per stream? | Damon Krukowski

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      Many of the younger musicians I know – musicians in the full flush of their career – don’t see a path forward toward making a living. These aren’t artists failing to connect with a public; on the contrary, they are releasing widely reviewed albums, going on tours and communicating (constantly) with their fans via social media. But this work is not paying them enough to manage without second jobs or side hustles.That’s a broken system. It’s not just broken for individual artists, it’s broken for our society as a whole. We all benefit from music. And I believe we as a society want that music to come from as wide and deep and rich and varied sources as exist. How could we not?Yet that’s not what is paramount for those holding the finances of recorded music in their hands. In the platform era, the income for recording artists depends on a handful of massively capitalized corporations: Spotify, Apple, Amazon and Google dominate streaming, and streaming now accounts for 84% of all recorded music revenue in the US. There’s almost nothing left for recorded music outside that system.What that system is paying for content is an average, across these platforms, of approximately $0.00173 per stream. And that meager amount, believe it or not, doesn’t even go directly to the artist. It goes to the rights holder for the master recording, which is usually a record label – which then splits this income with artists according to individual contracts, with a typical artist share somewhere between 15% and 50%.The math, at this point, is beyond ridiculous. Which is why so many younger artists I know simply don’t see a path forward in recorded music. What’s more, this crisis has come to a head just as AI enters the scene, threatening to do away with much original recorded music altogether.What to do? We need to rethink the finances of streaming. We need to let artists have a say in how the money from this new technology – and there is a lot of it, it’s 84% of the entire recorded music industry after all – is shared. To date, artists have had no seat at the table as streaming platforms and the three major labels – Universal, Warner and Sony – decided how the revenue from this medium would flow.A new bill being introduced to Congress by the representatives Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman – from two of the powerhouse music districts in the country, Detroit and the Bronx – would do much to correct this problem. The Living Wage for Musicians Act would bring more money for artists into the system, and for the first time create a direct pathway for that money to flow from streaming platforms directly to recording musicians.The Living Wage for Musicians Act proposes a straightforward mechanism: an additional subscription fee, earmarked for artists, plus a percentage of platforms’ non-subscription revenue to cover ad-supported (free) streaming, is paid into an Artist Compensation Royalty Fund. That fund, administered by a non-profit, would then distribute money directly to artists according to their monthly share of streams. A maximum cap on earnings per track per month would insure a more progressive distribution of this new royalty, to help create more sustainable careers in more genres and in more diverse communities of music.This direct payment is not a new idea for recorded music, or for Congress. When satellite and internet radio first came online in the 1990s, Congress passed a law creating a pathway for payments from these new platforms straight to musicians. A non-profit was established to collect the revenue and distribute it – SoundExchange – and has been doing so efficiently since the early 2000s. The administrative apparatus for this already exists.However, when streaming emerged it – like so many other “disruptive” tech businesses – dodged existing regulations and has to date avoided any direct payments to recording artists. The platforms and the major labels have had a more or less free hand to develop this technology and its payment systems for over a decade, and they have failed artists as they did. Congress needs to step in and make streaming work also for those who create the music that we all – I mean, all of us, musicians and listeners – need.
      Damon Krukowski is an American musician, poet and writer. He is an organizer for United Musicians and Allied Workers More

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      in Elections

      N.Y. Philharmonic Adds 2 Premieres to a Diet of Classics

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      Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, led new works by Joel Thompson and Tan Dun amid pieces by Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn.When Jaap van Zweden, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, led the orchestra at the beginning of the year, the program featured repertory hits: a Wagner prelude, a Beethoven piano concerto and a Brahms symphony. Last week he returned with more of the same: a Mendelssohn overture, a Mozart piano concerto and a Beethoven symphony.This felt a little like “let Jaap be Jaap,” with van Zweden — whose short Philharmonic tenure ends in a few months — finally freed of the burden of presenting new works and past rarities, and able to focus wholly on the standards that have been at the center of his conducting career.But on Thursday at David Geffen Hall, he — or at least the administrators who have encouraged more adventure in his choices — offered a reminder that his time in New York had not been entirely without variety. In fact, the concert offered something unusual in the orchestral field: In a mixed program that will be repeated on Saturday and Sunday, the two (two!) premieres on the first half together lasted longer than the Mendelssohn symphony (yes, more Mendelssohn) after intermission.It was too bad that neither of those new pieces made a positive impression and that performing them together worked against both.First came Joel Thompson’s “To See the Sky,” obscurely subtitled “an exegesis for orchestra.” Two years ago, the Philharmonic premiered Thompson’s sumptuously moody song cycle “The Places We Leave.” Now 35, he has largely specialized in vocal music, and the 20-minute “To See the Sky,” heard for the first time on Thursday, is his longest instrumental work; you got the sense of a young composer trying to figure out how to fill such a substantial span.The titles of the piece’s three sections together form a quotation from the musician Cécile McLorin Salvant: “Sometimes/you have to gaze into a well/to see the sky.” From its beginning, with a series of soft rumbles that explode into violent bursts, much of the work alternates sections of loud and bumptious rhythms, like a parody of hip-hop beats, with periods of subdued lyricism. But these repetitive assertive-then-reticent cycles don’t accumulate interest or tension — though there are nice touches, like the sound of a trumpet flecked with harp.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      The voting bloc that could decide the US election: Swifties

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      After weeks of maddening speculation over whom Taylor Swift might support in the 2024 US presidential elections, the venerated pop star finally revealed her endorsement: the right to vote itself.“Vote the people who most represent YOU into power,” Swift urged fans in an Instagram story amid Super Tuesday’s primary elections, perhaps the last chance to stop Donald Trump from once again seizing the Republican nomination for president.Although Swift could still endorse a candidate in the months ahead, her “no comment” on who should win on Super Tuesday was a noted refusal to engage in party politics at this stage. Joe Biden’s campaign is still jockeying for her endorsement, while Trump has said Swift would be “disloyal” for backing Biden and rightwingers have suggested that her 18-year career is a “psy op” – a ludicrous theory that nearly one in five Americans have said they believe.What is true, though, is that Swift currently possesses unprecedented power: an endorsement from the most beloved singer in the United States could potentially tip the balance in what’s likely to be a close election. A reported billionaire, Swift can reroute economies, trigger congressional action and spur tens of thousands of people to register to vote. While her endorsement is unlikely to sway a voter who is undecided between Trump and Biden – if such an American exists – experts believe Swift could convince people who don’t feel energized by Biden to vote for him anyway.But whether Swift will wield that power or instead stay out of the electoral fray remains unclear. Although Swift endorsed Democrats in 2018, she has in recent years increasingly withdrawn from such overt displays of partisanship or making controversial statements. That change that has coincided with her return to the top of the celebrity food chain and, in the process, left some Swifties feeling like their idol could do better.View image in fullscreen“She’s at the height of her popularity right now, so I think she’s probably pretty hesitant to do any sort of political activism,” said Jared Quigg, a 22-year-old Indiana journalist who said he listened to Swift every day. “But because of the influence she has, if she came out and called for a ceasefire in Gaza, I think that … would put more pressure on the US government, especially if Biden wants her endorsement.“I don’t think that’s an exaggeration,” Quigg added. “She is one of the most popular people in the world.”So are Swifties a voting bloc the parties should be targeting?Usually portrayed as a blur of sequin-wearing women draped in friendship bracelets, Swifties are not quite so homogeneous as they may seem. More than half of Americans identify as Swift fans and 16% say they are “avid fans”, according to a March 2023 Morning Consult poll that was conducted before the launch of Swift’s Eras tour. While the avid fans are mostly white and suburban, 48% are men, contrary to the popular perception that Swift’s music appeals largely to women.If about one in six Americans is a Swiftie, there is simply no way they’ll all agree – on Swift, or on anything else.However, there is a clear political tilt within Swiftiedom. Swift’s own politics lean to the left, and her listeners follow suit: more than half of her avid fans are Democrats, while 23% are Republicans and another 23% are independents.Swift has long taken a pragmatic approach to politics. She timed her Instagram post endorsing Democrats in the 2018 midterms to hit the internet after the US leg of her Reputation tour concluded, breaking her career-long silence on politics but shielding herself from red-state backlash. Swift then portrayed her next album, Lover, as an embrace of liberalism and love – including queer love, in the song You Need to Calm Down.By any normal artist’s standard, both Reputation and Lover were wildly successful, but neither album sold quite as well as 2014’s 1989. Notably, neither garnered many Grammy nods; in her 2020 documentary Miss Americana, which tracked Swift’s political awakening, Swift was devastated by the snub to Reputation.Yet, at her (extremely relative) commercial lowest – and when politics could feed into the personal narrative linked to Lover – Swift was willing to use her cachet for divisive political causes. In May 2020, when that year’s presidential nomination process was all but sewn up – much like this year’s Super Tuesday – Swift took to the platform then known as Twitter to spit at Trump: “After stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency, you have the nerve to feign moral superiority before threatening violence? ‘When the looting starts the shooting starts’??? We will vote you out in November.”Today, three original albums and one Ticketmaster-breaking world tour later, Swift has managed to soar past even the stratospheric heights of her 1989 fame, becoming as ubiquitous as gravity and just as untouchable. Yet after endorsing Democrats in 2018 and 2020, including Biden, she only urged fans to “vote” in the 2022 midterm elections, just as she did on Super Tuesday.“I feel like a lot of the things that she has spoken out about are things that are directly benefiting her if they go one way or negatively affecting if they go the other way,” said Jess Simpson, a 21-year-old who is a member of the University of Oregon Taylor Swift Society, which holds Swift-related karaoke and trivia events. “She claims to be a feminist, but that’s not what that is. It’s not just speaking out about the things that you fall into. It’s about reaching past that.”Ryan Kovatch, who also belongs to the University of Oregon Taylor Swift Society, was frustrated to see the Eras tour visit states that had passed laws attacking the rights of LGBTQ+ children.View image in fullscreenSwift did give a short, relatively vague speech about those laws and Pride month. “There have been so many harmful pieces of legislation that have put people in the LGBTQ and queer community at risk,” Swift told a Chicago crowd in June. “It’s painful for everyone, every ally, every loved one, every person of these communities, and that’s why I’m always posting, ‘This is when the midterms are, this is when these important key primaries are.’”Meanwhile, far less successful artists, such as Swift’s friend Haley Kiyoko, took a risk by bringing drag queens on stage in Tennessee after the state passed a law banning drag shows. Ariana Grande, whose fame comes closer to Swift’s, has publicly pledged to donate more than $1m to fight bills targeting transgender people.“It feels like the stakes have gotten higher and she’s backed off pretty starkly,” Kovatch said. “It is strongly disappointing, as a member of the LGBT community, to see that and see the potential there and watch it be foregone time and time again.“Especially using the rainbow during the You Need to Calm Down set,” Kovatch added, referring to a song in which Swift struts amid rainbow lights and proclaims her support for LGBTQ+ rights.“What is there to lose? You have billions of dollars,” asked Trey Pokorny, a 21-year-old whose drag persona is Treylor Swift and another member of the University of Oregon Taylor Swift Society. “Small artists – their careers can be canceled by a tweet. It takes so much more than a tweet to end Taylor Swift.”Swifties have also repeatedly raised eyebrows at Swift’s use of private jets. In 2022, Yard named Swift as the celebrity with the worst CO2 emissions; a Reddit post about the topic on the main subreddit for Taylor Swift fans triggered more than 2,000 comments.“It’s a little rough to see how many celebrities abuse their power of flying all over the place in their private jets and clogging up the environment,” said 19-year-old Addy Al-Saigh, who said she paid $2,000 to sit in nosebleed seats at the Eras tour. But, she added: “In the end, I know that there’s not really much I can do about it.”If Swift does endorse Biden, Al-Saigh said she would probably direct her Pennsylvania college’s Swift fan club to get involved in the 2024 elections. “If she came out and actually did that, I think I would have a reason to also put it up and say, ‘Go vote for Biden,’ because we’re related to Taylor,” she said.View image in fullscreenWhen it came to the 2024 elections, the Swifties who the Guardian spoke to said they were confident any Swift endorsement would ultimately be for Biden – a move they support. (Or, at least, preferred to the alternative.) But Quigg also cautioned fans to think for themselves.“I generally believe that people should not get their politics from a pop star,” he said. “At the end of the day, she’s a songwriter. She’s not a political genius.”He’s not sure fellow fans share that view. He recently saw a post on X declaring: “I definitely believe Taylor could convince Swifties to do a January 6.”“There is something to that,” Quigg said. More

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      in Elections

      Cat Janice, Singer With Cancer Who Left Her Son a Dance Track, Dies at 31

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      TikTok rallied around the singer, who revealed during her cancer treatment that she had transferred the rights to her final song to her son, as an inheritance of sorts.Cat Janice, a singer and songwriter who released a buoyant pop track from hospice that galvanized her thousands of supporters online to sway, and even groove, in the face of tragedy, died on Wednesday at her family home in Annandale, Va. She was 31.The cause was sarcoma, according to William Ipsan, her brother.The singer and multi-instrumentalist, whose legal name was Catherine Ipsan, started writing music as a teenager and released it throughout her 20s. But “Dance You Outta My Head,” which she shared on social media alongside candid discussion of her grueling cancer treatments, quickly became the biggest hit of her career. Over disco-inflected guitar and exuberant strings, she sang about “dancing on the edge of disaster.”Ms. Ipsan released the song on Jan. 19, a few days after entering hospice care. The song caught fire as her health outlook darkened, with social media users — including celebrities like Jason Derulo — leaving messages of support.It became a common soundtrack on TikTok after Ms. Ipsan encouraged her followers to stream the song as a way of supporting her 7-year-old son, Loren, after her death. “I am leaving this song behind for my son,” she wrote on TikTok. In another post, she said she had “changed all the rights from my songs so every presave and every stream goes to Loren.”The song has been used in more than two million TikTok videos and became the singer’s first song to enter the Billboard charts.“I’m praying my story isn’t over yet,” she wrote in a post on her birthday, the day after the song’s release. “But if it is, this is a pretty incredible way to say goodbye.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Bite me! How Apple’s download chart became a new battleground for pop – and politics

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      Over 20 years after its launch, Apple’s online music store has found a surprising new life – as a battleground for online turf wars. Last week, at least five songs rose to the upper reaches of the Apple Music (formerly iTunes) download charts, powered by different internet factions. Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion fans waged war against each other as foot soldiers in the rappers’ feud; Britney Spears fans mass-bought the singer’s years-old songs Liar and Selfish as a way to troll her ex-boyfriend, Justin Timberlake, who released a song also called Selfish last month; and rightwing media influencer Ben Shapiro encouraged his fans to drive Facts, his new rap song with Canadian former wrestler Tom MacDonald, up the charts. Far from a measure of objective popularity, the chart reflected political biases, years-old feuds and outright pettiness.Fans mobilising to push certain albums or songs up the Apple Music download charts is nothing new – in 2018, a group of Mariah Carey fans mass-bought the singer’s 2001 flop Glitter as part of a campaign called #JusticeForGlitter. But musician and writer Jaime Brooks says that the cratering of the digital download market in recent years – around 152m digital songs were sold in the US in 2022, less than half of 2018’s 412m – has allowed campaigns that are smaller and far less coordinated than #JusticeForGlitter to disproportionately affect the charts. “I don’t think anybody’s actually using their phones and iTunes to listen to files any more, except people who have not upgraded their setup since 2012 – there are a lot of people like that in America, but not enough to sustain these huge numbers,” she says. “This [downloading] is a purely performative gesture – it only ever happens as a result of some kind of factional culture war that somebody has the money and inclination to try to represent on the charts.”Indeed, a lot of these sales campaigns have an implicit or explicit political meaning. Shapiro’s song, naturally, is part of an attempt to “own the libs”; Spears fans see their trolling of Timberlake as a kind of punishment for his perceived mistreatment of the singer when they dated, and for the unapologetic pose he has since adopted. In Megan’s song, she references Megan’s Law, a piece of legislation that requires the government to make information about sex offenders public, which many saw as a shot against Minaj, whose husband is a registered sex offender; Minaj’s song accuses Megan of falsely accusing Tory Lanez of shooting her.These relatively niche buying campaigns seem small fry in comparison with two campaigns led by the American conservative establishment last year. In July, Jason Aldean’s single Try That in a Small Town was sent to No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 after its video was pulled from Country Music Television amid criticisms, including that it was racist, which Aldean denied. In August, the total unknown Oliver Anthony debuted at No 1 with his libertarian – and, some say, QAnon-pandering – single Rich Men North of Richmond.Kristin Robinson, a senior writer at Billboard, says the Aldean song in particular was not just driven by his fans, but by onlookers who saw the track as a cause to support. “Anchors on Fox News and other kinds of conservative talking heads led a fandom – not in the musical sense but in a political sense – to support that song,” she says. That both songs were in the country space, she says, only helped. “Country music still does quite well with sales in general, because country tends to be a bit of an older audience that has more buying power, or might not be as technologically savvy.”View image in fullscreenSales also have a disproportionate effect on the Billboard charts. A single sale counts for 150 streams, which is why astute fans tend to focus more on downloads than the kinds of “streaming parties” that some fanbases hold. Brooks says that education on the charts – the ways in which certain formats are weighted more heavily than others, and how a fairer chart might be implemented – has been led by K-pop fanbases. “They’ve developed among themselves a whole ideology about this type of thing, and they really did teach the pop fan community about how this stuff works,” she says. “That’s factoring into the current situation, where you had Megan fans organising to try to put big numbers on the board to fight back against Nicki.”Of course, few of these campaigns create their desired impact. While Megan’s Hiss debuted at No 1 – with around 100k in sales, 29.2m streams and 2.9m radio impressions – Shapiro’s song debuted at No 16, Timberlake’s at No 19 and Minaj’s at No 23. Brooks says that, either way, we’re likely to see more of this in coming years, as music consumption drops on the whole and pop music becomes more tied in with celebrity and politics. “Politics is sort of eating music – in the case of the Ben Shapiro thing, it’s enthusiasm driven by the political media industrial complex, and with Britney v Justin, it’s the celebrity industrial complex,” she says. “It’s all ultimately pointless – it’s people competing to be into the virtuous product v the non-virtuous product. But ultimately, it’s all the same shit.” More

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      Tracy Chapman Returns to Grammys Stage, Performing ‘Fast Car’ With Luke Combs

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      In a major coup for the Grammys, an influential artist who walked away from the spotlight made a grand return to the awards stage on Sunday night: Tracy Chapman.Chapman, 59, released eight albums between 1988 and 2008, starting with her blockbuster debut — the self-titled album that featured “Talkin’ ’Bout a Revolution,” “Baby Can I Hold You” and what is perhaps her signature song, “Fast Car.” She won the Grammy for best new artist in 1989, and “Fast Car” was nominated for both record and song of the year.While the song has had notable staying power — it’s inspired dance covers, was sampled by Nicki Minaj and has been strummed in dorm rooms for decades — the country star Luke Combs’s faithful cover, which became a hit last year, has helped bring it a kind of renaissance.On Sunday night in Los Angeles, Chapman and Combs shared the steering wheel at the Grammys with their first-ever duet performance of the track. Chapman opened the performance playing the song’s signature riff on an acoustic guitar, as her and Combs exchanged verses before joining together on the chorus. Many in the audience could be seen standing and singing along throughout, including Taylor Swift. Combs bowed to her at the conclusion of the song as they received a standing ovation from those in the arena.Combs’s “Fast Car” — which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 as a single from his 2023 album, “Gettin’ Old” — was up for a Grammy for best country solo performance (and lost to Chris Stapleton’s “White Horse”). Surprising many in the industry, however, “Fast Car” missed out on a nomination for record of the year. (The cover was not eligible for song of the year, an award that goes to songwriters, because it was already nominated in that category in 1989.)Chapman has made few public appearances since her most recent tour ended in 2009, mostly taking the stage on late-night shows. In 2015, she covered “Stand by Me” as David Letterman prepared to retire from the “Late Show,” and in the lead-up to the 2020 election, she performed “Talkin’ ’Bout a Revolution” on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Being mean will only rally her fans’: Taylor Swift is winning whether she backs Biden or thumps Trump

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      The 2024 US presidential election campaign, lacking any defining story to tell and with a prevailing lack of enthusiasm in a rematch of candidates in their eighth and ninth decades, last week settled on Taylor Swift – and an endorsement she may or may not make – as its defining obsession.On one side, expectations emanating from the Biden re-election camp were that the 34-year-old superstar would cast her influence over tens of thousands of Swifties their way; on the other, furious Republicans who at first sought to denigrate and wrap her in conspiracy theories, and later thought better of the strategy.Rolling Stone reported that allies of Donald Trump were pledging a “holy war” against Swift if she sides with the Democrats in November. Some theorised that the National Football League is rigging games for Swift’s Kansas City Chiefs boyfriend, Travis Kelce, to sweeten the Democrats endorsement hopes.Fox News host Jesse Watters claimed that the Shake It Off hitmaker had been converted into a psychological operations asset four years ago. The Pentagon hit back, saying: “As for this conspiracy theory, we are going to shake it off.”However, not all Republicans are on board with the attacks on Swift. “I don’t know what the obsession is,” presidential candidate Nikki Haley told CNN. “Taylor Swift is allowed to have a boyfriend. Taylor Swift is a good artist. I have taken my daughter to Taylor Swift concerts. To have a conspiracy theory of all of this is bizarre. Nobody knows who she’s going to endorse, but I can’t believe that’s overtaken our national politics.”While many are preoccupied with whether Swift can cross nine time zones to make it back from an Eras Tour concert in Tokyo to see her boyfriend play in next weekend’s Chiefs-49ers Super Bowl in Las Vegas (she can), the intensity of political questions surrounding Swift mirrors the febrile nature of the election 10 months away.View image in fullscreenDoubtless, Swift could offer politicos lessons in values-based messaging, audience understanding and building genuine connections with fans or voters. Last week, Trump argued that he is more popular than her, even if the values-based narratives he presents are often more aligned with self-victimisation than self-empowerment.A survey last year by Morning Consult found 53% of American adults are Swift fans. There are almost as many men as women, almost as many Republicans as Democrats, including baby boomers, millennials, Gen Xers and young adults from Gen Z. In other words, a constituency that could make or break a national political campaign.The recent Republican primary in New Hampshire indicated Trump’s weaknesses with women, who make up much of Swift’s fanbase. But recent polling, too, has shown that Biden’s ratings and support among young voters has dropped and he’s now closely tied in the 18-34 demographic with Trump.“They’re not crazy about Biden,” says Democratic party consultant Hank Sheinkopf. “If they turn out at all, it may be to oppose Trump and with no intensity at all. But if you’re having trouble with younger people, and you need to do something, what better way to cure the problem, or at least show that you are sensitive to it, than to get Taylor Swift out?”David Allan, professor of marketing at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, who teaches a Swift-focused course, says the Republicans will have to navigate the singer.“Republicans need to be careful with Taylor because she’s extremely popular with all-demographic women and some men. You don’t want to appear to be mean because it will only rally her fans,” he says. Conversely, attacking Swift could bring its own counter-intuitive, culture/class war rewards.“You know she’s having some effect if Fox News is attacking her,” Allan says. “For Trump, having Taylor Swift against him gives him something to talk about.” A salient lesson comes from the Dixie Chicks – now the Chicks – who wrecked their careers before the Iraq war when singer Natalie Maines said from a London stage they were ashamed to be that President George Bush was from Texas.In Swift’s documentary,Miss Americana, her father fretted that an overt political position could put her in the same position as the Chicks. But Swift is now believed to be too big to be commercially vulnerable.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs the music industry newsletter Hits Daily Double put it: “Her domination of the marketplace from every conceivable angle is next-level. But she just seems to get bigger, and to rule every area she enters – the rerecorded albums, the massive tour, the blockbuster movie of the tour, the NFL games where her mere presence changes the center of gravity.”Whether or not Swift goes two-feet in with Biden, Allan adds: “It’s getting to that point in the 60s that if Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell didn’t speak out about the Vietnam war it would hurt them with their fans. If she doesn’t do something, even if just to help to get out the vote, it will hurt her authenticity.” In September, Vote.org reported more than 35,000 new political registrations, a 23% jump over last year, after Swift urged her 280 million Instagram followers to sign up.Swift, who was politically cautious until she endorsed Tennessee Democratic senate candidate Phil Bredesen in 2018 (he lost) and then Biden in 2020, has not shown any interest in being adopted by political factions. A 5,000-word New York Times essay that claimed her as more than just queer-friendly was criticised for making overreaching assumptions.View image in fullscreenBut US candidates often seek show business endorsements. “The tradition goes back at least 60 years when [John F] Kennedy brought out Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, Judy Garland and others to go stump for them, and country music stars, who have come out mostly for Republicans,” Sheinkopf notes.Other musical endorsements include the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd for Jimmy Carter. But musicians including Madonna, Bruce Springsteen and Lady Gaga couldn’t push Hillary Clinton over the line in 2016, and it hasn’t hurt Trump to use Village People’s gay paradise anthem YMCA as a walk-off song, which crowds greatly appreciate.Swift might not even need to formally endorse Biden, Sheinkopf adds. “Even to put it out as rumour makes Biden look less like he’s 81 years old and more like he’s listening to younger people, their subcultural desires and what they feel about things.”For Swift, he says: “She gets to become a decision-maker, and an even larger figure in American and international life. Her public persona becomes as important as her music and that means she’ll make a lot more money.” More

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      in Elections

      Wayne Kramer, Influential MC5 Guitarist, Dies at 75

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      Mr. Kramer was one half of the twin-guitar attack that drove the Detroit band’s incendiary live performances, helping to set the stage for punk rock.Wayne Kramer, whose explosive guitar playing with the influential Detroit band the MC5 in the late 1960s and early 1970s helped to set the template for punk rock, died on Friday. He was 75.The death was confirmed in a post on his official Instagram account, which said the cause was pancreatic cancer. It did not say where he died.The MC5 (short for Motor City Five) formed in Lincoln Park, Mich., in 1965.Mr. Kramer and Fred (Sonic) Smith teamed to provide the twin-guitar attack that was at the heart of the band’s sound, and the centerpiece of its notoriously loud and frenetic live performances.In ranking Mr. Kramer and Mr. Smith, together, at No. 225 last year on its list of the 250 greatest guitarists of all time, Rolling Stone said the two “worked together like the pistons of a powerful engine” to “kick their band’s legendarily high-energy jams deep into space while simultaneously keeping one foot in the groove.”Mr. Kramer performing with the MC5 in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1969.Leni Sinclair/Michael Ochs Archive, via Getty ImagesThe band, which also featured the vocalist Rob Tyner, the bassist Michael Davis and the drummer Dennis Thompson, splintered in the early 1970s after just two studio albums.Its debut, “Kick Out the Jams,” a live set recorded at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit in 1968, is considered one of the most influential albums of its era, and inspired generations of musicians, including the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and Queens of the Stone Age.Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine said on Instagram on Friday that Mr. Kramer and the MC5 “basically invented punk rock music.”Mr. Kramer was arrested on drug charges in 1975 and was sentenced to four years in prison.In 2009, after he returned to performing and recording as a solo artist, he established Jail Guitar Doors U.S.A., a nonprofit that donates musical instruments to inmates and offers songwriting workshops in prisons, in partnership with his wife, Margaret, and the British singer-songwriter Billy Bragg.The name comes from “Jail Guitar Doors,” a song by the Clash that opens with a line about Mr. Kramer’s struggles with substance abuse and the law: “Let me tell you about Wayne and his deals of cocaine.”“The guitar can be the key that unlocks the cell,” Mr. Kramer told High Times in 2015. “It can be the key that unlocks the prison gate, and it could be the key that unlocks the rest of your life to give you an alternative way to deal with things.”A full obituary will follow. More