Which is why, whether you’re a casual listener who bops along to the radio hits, or one of those die-hards who takes her every utterance as a modern Rosetta Stone, it’s easy to feel like you know Swift on a personal level. Listen to her songs and you’ll ache at the resemblance to the most dramatic moments in your own private history. There have been wobbles, most notably in 2016-17, but on the whole she has retained a command of her star image rivaled only by Beyonce and Bowie. As a celebrity, Swift’s most remarkable gift is her ability to keep art and commerce, public life and private life, operating in lockstep. “Like so many millennials born into the upper middle class, Swift has benefited from the demise of the concept of selling out,” Time noted in 2014. The Swift we hear on her albums is a thin-skinned, bighearted obsessive, prone to introspection, with a penchant for romantic moments huge and small.
Though the sound of her music has evolved since her debut, the voice at the heart of it has stayed consistent. To chart her journey - from the country romance of her teens, to the imperial pop of her twenties, to the ambivalent ruminations of her thirties - is to follow a generation coming of age. Meaning that, for millions of listeners, she is not just another pop star she is someone they have grown up with, and who has grown up with them. Taylor Swift was born in December 1989, near the peak of the Millennial Baby Boom, and has been famous since she was 16.
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