Pop megastar Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” came complete with an in theaters official movie release listening party experience, a music video for the album’s opening track “The Fate of Ophelia,” and features, according to the inestimable John Carney “the most aggressively natalist pop song ever.”
“Wish List isn’t about forgoing yachts and Oscars and rejecting the glamorous life to embrace ‘simplicity.’ It mocks going off the grid and childless celebrities who treat their dogs like substitutes for offspring,” Carney notes in this week’s Breitbart Business Digest.
“It’s about marriage, homeownership, and procreation. She puts down the glittering set of celebrity ambitions and says: give me a basketball hoop in the driveway and a cul-de-sac dynasty.”
Indeed, the song’s lyrics make her “wish list” obvious:
I just want you, huh (You, you, yeah)
Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you
We tell the world to leave us the f— alone, and they do (Oh), wow
Got me dreaming about a driveway with a basketball hoop (Hoop)
Boss up, settle down, got a wish list
“Swift is, in a way, re-romanticizing fertility and family life, making it aspirational again,” Carney tells me during our deep dive on what this new era for Swift could all mean. “That aligns her with a broader cultural undercurrent pushing back against childlessness-as-default in elite circles.”
Again, Swift isn’t subtle, singing “They want that freedom, living off the grid/ They want those three dogs that they call their kids/ And that good surf, no hypocrites.”
It’s a far cry from the circa 2016 “Shout Your Abortion” battle cry or the Grammy-winner’s Kamala Harris-endorsing “Childless Cat Lady” meme, these Democrat campaign machine fads that characterized so much of the gender politics Swift often found herself selling.
Should we expect to see Taylor Swift sporting a MAGA hat onstage any time soon? Hell no. But be it blatant or indirect, you could call Taylor Swift a pitchwoman for those seemingly harder-to-obtain things that for so long define for so many what was so great about America: The dream of starting a family and owning a home to raise it in.
“Not long ago, conservatives joked that the fastest way to revive American fertility would be for Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce to get married and start producing heirs. Suddenly, she’s writing the soundtrack.,” Carney writes. “‘Wish List’ may be the first pop song in decades to make the American Dream sound cool again. Privacy, kids, driveway sports equipment — it’s radical in its normalcy. The closest precedent is the Beach Boys’ Wouldn’t It Be Nice. But that one only dreamt of marriage. Swift goes further. She wants children. She wants enough kids—or maybe cousins also—that the neighborhood looks like Travis. The world is tilting.”
New Eras indeed.
Jerome Hudson is Breitbart News Entertainment Editor and author of the book 50 Things They Don’t Want You to Know About Trump. Order your copy today. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter and instagram@jeromeehudson
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