Taylor Swift’s Unwelcome P.R. Campaign
Taylor Swift has been named a Global Welcome Ambassador for New York City a week after the release of her single "Welcome To New York" — but for many listeners (and viewers of the surrounding publicity campaign), her depiction of the city is neither particularly accurate nor particularly enticing.
"Surprise!" writes Tessa Stuart at The Village Voice. "That wasn’t a single we were all listening to last week — it was a commercial."
She links the song with a multipronged New York-promotion effort, including Instagram posts starting last week (like this latte) and a series of videos praising various aspects of New York life (one of which also features a latte). She also questions Ms. Swift’s beverage choice: "A latte is not like a slice of pizza, or a bagel, or a pickle back, which is to say it is not a quintessentially, or even an overtly, New York foodstuff." And she writes:
"Some people might look at all this and say Swift is a marketing genius with an eye for ~ S y N e R g Y ~ …Others (us) will say she’s a cyborg sent to this planet to convince people without ideas to drink Diet Coke, and shop at Target, and move to New York."
At Gawker, Dayna Evans takes a dim view of the promotion (which, she notes, includes Taylor Swift defining the word "bodega"):
"I’m not sure who comes off worse in this public relations horror: New York City or Taylor Swift. When affordable housing is near impossible to come by and as monolith branded-cool companies push out arts communities and while entitled rich children run through the streets proclaiming ownership over everything and while minority arrests continue for low-level crimes, the least (or most?) likely choice for the promotion of a city with equal problems and triumphs is a whitebread out-of-towner who says, ‘Hey, don’t think about those scary, unjust things! Let’s talk about that night we stayed out late dancing instead!’"
And, she writes: "Her version of a 300-square-mile area, the most densely populated city in America, can be flattened into a good latte in the East Village and delivered via iconic yellow taxi cab a whole 10 blocks without paying tip. If anyone represents a New York not worth actually visiting, it’s the musician behind ‘Welcome to New York,’ a song as welcoming as the cluster of billboards cupping the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel from New Jersey."
"‘Welcome to New York’ celebrates as generic, flat, and lifeless a New York as has ever existed in pop culture. Think about the song, and try to pick out a single detail about the city. You can’t. Replace ‘New York’ in the lyrics with ‘Des Moines,’ with ‘L.A.,’ with ‘Pittsburgh,’ any city you can shoehorn into the beat, and you wouldn’t have to change a single detail. Taylor Swift’s idea of New York is as boring as any rich, sheltered person’s idea about it, but the difference is that most of them don’t get to sing about it."
And at Jezebel, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd calls Ms. Swift’s single "a gentrification anthem so obtuse it makes one wonder if she is, in fact, trolling at this point."
"Swift didn’t move to one of the most expensive cities in the U.S. to ‘make it,’" Ms. Shepherd writes, "she moved because she’d already ‘made it.’" As a point of contrast, she offers Jay Z and Alicia Keys’s "Empire State of Mind":
"Sure, they’re both millionaires now, but there’s a sense of struggle behind it, a sense of loving this city despite itself. A mean street you learn to love, as opposed to a playground for the happy-go-lucky and effortlessly moneyed. ‘The lights will inspire you,’ sings Alicia Keys, just after Jay Z talks about cooking and pushing crack as his hardscrabble origin story — at the very least, it’s aspirational. As opposed to Swift’s ‘The lights are so bright, but they never blind me.’ Of course they don’t."
"Welcome To New York" does focus on those who are coming to New York from elsewhere in pursuit of big dreams, a focus Dvora Meyers critiques in another context at The Brooklyn Quarterly. "To New York City natives," she writes, "the city isn’t simply a developmental phase or a symbol. It’s a place where families such as mine have lived for generations (since 1908) without somehow being drawn into the arts." And, she adds: "New York is where people have set down roots, built communities, and fought for social change to make the place more livable, just as folks have done in cities all over the country. The city is far greater than the sum of its writers’ and artists’ ambitions and disappointments."
At Brooklyn Magazine, though, Kristin Iversen sees the latte-loving Ms. Swift as a fitting match for a New York that doesn’t actually exist. She explains:
"Swift’s reasons for loving New York are as inarguably basic as it gets (which is not to say that Swift herself is basic, because if being ‘basic’ includes being a self-made millionaire by the age of 25, how is that an insult?), but the reasons people have for coming to New York — especially as tourists — have always been basic. The very nature of the desire to come to New York is broad and formless and usually has to do with things like the lights being bright and the air feeling electric."
And, she writes:
"At this point, what aspect of living in New York — up to and including leaving New York — isn’t basic? Everyone wants to do it. Who really cares if Swift is grossly misrepresenting what it actually means to live here? This is a campaign for visitors. And if anything, it’s kind of a great thing that she’s forcing us all to admit what the fetishization of this city actually looks like: a bland, boring version of what is actually still a vital, exciting place."
For Ms. Iversen, Ms. Swift isn’t talking about real New York — she’s shilling "New York," the shiny, touristy brand, and she’s an ideal choice to do it.
But Ms. Shepherd’s reading points to a darker possibility — that the high-gloss New New York of Ms. Swift’s single, represented by people with money moving in when they’ve already "made it," is actually devouring the New York in which other New Yorkers are trying to live.
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