In the first of a series of 50 essays, published here each Wednesday across the year, Jonny suggests a way for very famous pop stars to lasso their fans into a political cause
I write this on Christmas Day 2024, hours before Wallace and his dog Gromit – or is it Gromit and his man Wallace? – return to TV screens and ensure millions of eyeballs are trained on the BBC, perhaps for the only time this year when it didn’t involve dancing celebrities.
About 40 seconds ago, I had an idea with which to kick off this series of weekly essays, which will replicate the Opinion Editorial section of a daily newspaper. They will therefore run to no more than 1200 words, and will cover a plethora of topics. All will be either big-p or small-p political, for which I make no apologies.
I spent 18 months working on This Place, a political diary from an imaginary independent MP in the English Parliament. Simon ‘Al’ Alexander, assisted by his political adviser Vishnu and his media adviser Emma, aka Vish and Em/Emdia, addressed issues within Westminster and in the constituency. I had a great deal of fun writing up to six pieces a week – I took Saturdays ‘off’ but wrote up Al’s Saturday on Sunday – and tried to incorporate my own interests: football, pop music, the rise of Nigel Farage and his Anti Elite Party (Which Is Actually Elite), and how the media covers politics.
Fortunately, Al regained his seat at the July election and gave a speech in which he said the following. You can read the whole thing here: https://thisplace3.wordpress.com/2024/07/05/july-5/
‘Above all, there is a feeling that I and the other 649 MPs are powerless in the face of world events like conflict, energy prices and migration, which often occurs because of the climate emergency.
‘In the face of all this despair, there is always hope, which I saw in the faces of first-time voters, even if some of the more experienced faces were far more cynical!
‘It reminded me of the time I first cast my vote, in 2005, almost 20 years ago: Apple had not yet invented the iPhone and nobody could add you as a friend on Facebook.
‘I do not know what technology will be like 20 years from now, but I do know that I can help make the laws that protect people and react to a changing world where progress is forever marching on.
‘Politics is necessary, difficult, enriching, frustrating and, since I became a Member of Parliament, the best job in Britain.
‘Parliamentary democracy, invested within me and other MPs, remains a noble calling, and I am delighted to stand here and have the opportunity to continue what I have started. Do let me know if I can be of service; I remain, after all, your humble, obedient servant.’
My idea was this: Taylor Swift should take over the Democratic Party, much as how Donald Trump has taken over the Republican Party. She made $2bn ($2,000,000,000) from her Eras tour, which is about 25% of the current value of X, the site formerly known as Twitter which is owned by a very nasty man who presents himself as a tech bro. How to solve a problem like Elon, let alone climate change, the Middle East peace process and why Mrs Brown’s Boys is still on air – sorry, easy target, and easy answer actually: Her late Majesty the Queen was a fan – is the defining question of 2025.
So let us meet SpaceX-Tesla with Exes and Antiheroes. Taylor Swift is, by all accounts, the most famous person in the world; Tom Breihan said so in his Stereogum column The Number Ones last week (read it here: https://www.stereogum.com/2291216/the-number-ones-taylor-swifts-look-what-you-made-me-do/columns/the-number-ones/). She has millions of fans and has made the music industry, often corrupt and always insane, bend to her will. At a time when new bands face bigger hurdles than ever to get their music a) made, b) heard and c) marketed, the daughter of a stockbroker – whose eponymous Swift Group is part of Merrill Lynch, one of the biggest American bankers (as opposed to Donald Trump, one of the biggest American…presidents – has more or less set the agenda when it comes to live shows, recorded music and, indeed, re-recorded music.
If folk did not know about publishing rights, they sure as heck do now, because Taylor has insisted that fans consume new versions of her old copyrights, which run alongside her new material. However, like Alexander the Great and Eric Bristow before her, there are no more mountains to climb. She has followed Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Paul McCartney, Mariah Carey and the team of Beyoncé and Jay-Z and to the very pinnacle of her profession, giving her nowhere else to go. She turned 35 years old at the end of 2024.
Thirty-five is the age of requirement for becoming US President, but a divided America which, in 249 years, has not elected a woman will hardly elect a pop singer. Reality TV mogul? Sure. Woman who wangs on about her feelings? Nope.
So here’s what she ought to do, when she isn’t cranking out novels and becoming the world’s top-selling author (my only prediction for this year is that she’ll come out with a direct-to-fan set of poems or short stories): she should set up a political party but let political figures run it.
Other figures in this party ought to be her pop peers: Sabrina Carpenter, whose album Short n’ Sweet is what happens when a record company, production team and singer hit 12 grand slams; Olivia Rodrigo, whose album Guts has soundtracked the composition of this essay and who is known as Cousin Liv by Filipinos around the world; Kayleigh Amstutz, who is still negotiating very sudden and very large fame resulting from her alter ego Chappell Roan; and Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell, the most significant songwriter of the post-Taylor generation who is, amazingly, only 23.
Billie and her brother Finneas performed the decade’s greatest pop song so far, Birds of a Feather, on Venice Beach at the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics, as France handed over to the USA in what is going to be a very interesting quadrennium, to put it mildly. Before LA 2028, there’s the 2026 FIFA World Cup where, presuming he is still president, Donald Trump will shake the hands of Mohammed bin Salman and sundry other global figures, including FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who now lives in Qatar.
Nobody knows what will happen to the world in 2025, but David Attenborough will be 99 in May and Dick Van Dyke will turn 100 in December. Coldplay, who made Van Dyke the star of the music video to their song All My Love, will play ten dates at Wembley Stadium in September once a billion bucket hats are bought for the Oasis reunion shows. Taylor Swift, of course, had her hootenanny over Summer 2024.
Whatever happens in Syria, Israel or Washington DC, Taylor Swift’s music will still be heard by millions of ears; she may defeat Beyoncé to the Album of the Year Grammy, or the billionaire pair will split the vote and allow Billie Eilish to win for a second time in that category.
The Grammy Awards, by the way, take place the week after the inauguration. Let’s see how pop music reacts to Project 2025.