University of Kansas planned small Taylor Swift symposium. Then Travis Kelce happened
All this Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce news? Swifties scooping up football tickets? Kelce jerseys selling out? TV ratings for Kansas City Chiefs games skyrocketing?
What we are witnessing, according to people who know these things, is more significant than a possible romance between a pop star and a hunky football player.
“I think her star power is greater than it has ever been in the entirety of her career,” said Brian Donovan, a sociology professor at the University of Kansas. “I think she’s the closest to what we think of as American royalty.
“You have large swaths of the population cheering for them who might not even care for her music, but they like her persona and they regard her as deep down a good person.”
Donovan is interviewing Swifties across the country for a book about Swift fandom and this semester is teaching “The Sociology of Taylor Swift.”
On Tuesday, the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at KU will have Donovan and Wichita State University communications professor Hannah Wing discuss her phenomenon at a symposium, “Taylor Swift: A Conversation on Influence & Advocacy.”
The KU Swift Society is co-sponsoring the free event with the institute’s student advisory board. It was planned weeks before the Swift-Kelce news broke, said Donovan, who expects a large student turnout now.
The event has earned buzz around campus. A pizza party with Swift music — what else? — will start at 6 p.m., an hour before the 7 p.m. talk. Guests are encouraged to wear their Swiftie merch and friendship bracelets.
Donovan, a self-professed Swiftie who saw Swift perform at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium in July, seems taken aback by the sway she is holding over football fans, though he knows not all are on the Swift bandwagon.
“If I think of a population that might be immune to Swiftie mania it would be football fans, just thinking about it in stereotypical terms,” he said. “And the fact that there are NFL fans who might now know the names of some of her songs is phenomenal and slightly shocking.
“The fact that there are NFL announcers referencing the song ‘Blank Space’ on national TV is a sign that we’ve turned a corner in her celebrity status.”
On a cultural level, everything that’s happened since Swift and Kelce became headline fodder “is combining the forces of two of the most energetic fan bases in the United States. You have the Swifties and the NFL fans and any combination of those two forces is going to be explosive,” he said.
So Swift’s spotlight is white hot. But to what extent does she feel empowered to use that spotlight to speak out on, say, politics and how might that voice be tempered, wonders Donovan.
She and Kelce seem well-suited in their politics, he said.
The recent commercial Kelce and his mother, Donna Kelce, made to promote getting both a flu shot and the COVID booster — which drew fire from the right — suggested that “his politics are in the same orbit as (Swift’s) and I think that spotlight might raise the intensity of the spotlight on her political commitment as well,” Donovan said.
A couple of weeks ago the students in Donovan’s Swift class discussed why the singer stayed quiet during the 2016 election when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton for president, even as so many female celebrities publicly supported Clinton.
“If you look at the timeline of the run-up to the 2016 election and the negative press about the Kanye West-Kim Kardashian phone call, it’s the perfect context for why she didn’t feel like wading into the national spotlight on that,” Donovan said.
He referred to the feud in 2016 between the three stars over lyrics in West’s song, “Famous,” in which he sings, “Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous.” Months of drama ensued.
The 2020 Netflix documentary “Miss Americana, shows a heated discussion among Swift, her parents and men on her team when she told them she was going public with her political views for the first time to support two Democrats for Congress.
She said it was “sad” that she didn’t say something two years earlier during the presidential election because she was in “such a horrendous place” at that point and cried as she criticized policies supported by Republican Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn.
That was “momentous for her,” said Donovan. “She had people on her team encourage her not to do that, and one person warned she could lose half her following, which obviously didn’t happen.
“She grew up in country music, which is traditionally conservative but more than that traditionally not very ... welcoming of left-leaning politics.”
Swift saw, Donovan said, how the Dixie Chicks, now The Chicks, were blackballed by the country music industry in 2003 when they publicly criticized President George W. Bush’s plan to invade Iraq.
“Miss Americana” gives insight into her political evolution “and raises questions about why she hasn’t been more vocal since that,” Donovan said.
“You get the sense that she’s ready to turn a corner and be more outspoken but she really hasn’t met that same level of energy that she had in 2018, 2019.
“I don’t think, and this is kind of a hot take, I don’t think she naturally speaks the language of activism. I don’t think that’s her strength. She’s talented in so many ways. I don’t think she’s a natural celebrity activist.
“I think her strength comes through her songwriting. I think some of her deep political moments are in songs, which don’t on the surface seem political.”
Last month on National Voter Registration Day Swift posted a message on Instagram encouraging her 227 million followers to register to vote. More than 35,000 people registered at the nonprofit Vote.org after her plea.
“Taylor Swift is dumb and her music sucks,” Sean Davis, CEO and co-founder of the conservative web magazine The Federalist, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Yet her stardom is shining so bright right now, “she’s gained enough political capital and public goodwill that she can weigh in on these issues and not suffer any consequences,” Donovan said.
“The backlash didn’t surprise me, but it was more muted than it would have been if she wasn’t at the level of celebrity she is now.”
Ah, but there’s a downside to all this new attention, he warned.
“As soon as the Chiefs lose, it will be blamed on her somehow,” he said. “I think there are some unintended consequences to this perceived union, and one of those might be Taylor and her fans get blamed if the Chiefs lose a game or two.”
This story was originally published October 6, 2023 at 10:00 AM.
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