{"id":349250,"date":"2022-12-10T07:15:00","date_gmt":"2022-12-10T12:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/?p=349250"},"modified":"2025-09-25T09:35:34","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T13:35:34","slug":"taylor-swift-returns-redefines-the-modern-pop-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/2022\/12\/10\/taylor-swift-returns-redefines-the-modern-pop-star\/","title":{"rendered":"Taylor Swift Returns, Redefines the Modern Pop Star"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Taylor Swift\u2019s fans refer to the 32-year-old singer as \u201cthe music industry.\u201d According to Rolling Stone, during the past few months, Swift \u201cmay be as close to that moniker as she\u2019s ever been.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frankly, Swift has been at the forefront of everyone\u2019s minds lately, at least those who pay any attention to the music scene. With the release of her tenth studio album \u201cMidnights,\u201d Swift continued her streak of back-to-back hits. In addition, Swift hinted at a visual concept album, where each \u201cMidnights\u201d track will get its own visuals, most definitely chock-full of \u201ceaster eggs,\u201d or hints at Swift\u2019s next announcement or exciting career move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Swift emphasized that \u201cMidnights,\u201d an album with a nighttime, sparkly and moody aesthetic with 1970s-esque promotional photos, follows \u201c13 sleepless nights scattered throughout [her] life.\u201d In reality, it featured 20, as the extended edition released three hours after the standard on the night of Oct. 21.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Swift has reinvented the modern pop star. From her debut in 2006 to her fifth studio album \u201c1989,\u201d in 2015, Swift worked on a two-year album cycle, releasing a new project every other year, with tours in between. In 2016, however, Swift\u2019s life took a turn for the worse\u2026and then the better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a public falling out with rapper Kanye West, Swift became the target of cancel culture, perhaps beginning the trend of \u201ccanceling\u201d celebrities when they misstep or make small mistakes. From 2016 to mid-2017, Swift went on hiatus, a period that her fans refer to as \u201cthe drought.\u201d But Swift came back stronger than ever, releasing 2017\u2019s \u201cReputation\u201d which follows the events of the preceding year, where she lived as the target of negative public opinion and hate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since \u201cReputation,\u201d Swift has truly not stopped creating, setting her apart from her pop counterparts. In 2019, Swift released \u201cLover,\u201d another successful pop project, followed by pandemic-era sister albums \u201cFolklore\u201d and \u201cEvermore.\u201d These two projects served as turning points in Swift\u2019s sound; she entered the world of folk and alternative music with massive success, the projects especially impressive because of the short production time. They featured Swift\u2019s writing at the top of its game: poignant, completely imaginative, and for the first time not autobiographical. \u201cI\u2019ve found that the more I write, the more I keep writing,\u201d Swift said to \u201cTonight Show\u201d host Jimmy Fallon. \u201cI don\u2019t know what\u2019s been going on but in the last six or seven years I\u2019ve just been constantly making things, and the more things I make, the happier I am.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n

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Taylor Swift poses at the 2022 MTV Europe Music Awards. Photo: @rollingstone on Instagram.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Among these commercially-successful and widely enjoyed albums, Swift began to re-record her previous works after losing the rights to her albums to entertainment executive Scooter Braun. While initially devastating, Swift turned this situation into a way to strengthen her connection with her fans; now, she releases songs \u201cFrom the Vault,\u201d or previously unreleased songs alongside the re-recorded pieces. One could argue no other major singer today possesses the popularity or sheer amount of notable projects to make the re-recordings a worthwhile task. Most recently, Swift released \u201cRed (Taylor\u2019s Version)\u201d in 2021. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Swift\u2019s ability to produce complex writing with such frequency makes her unique. She had managed to reinvent the modern pop star; just last year, she created an entire short film to tell the story of her song \u201cAll Too Well,\u201d with the inventive medium receiving considerable awards recognition at the 2022 Video Music Awards. Finally, Swift\u2019s career has set unprecedented records in the music industry; this year, she became the first artist in history to occupy all ten spots on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles list, making it the first time the top ten artists were solely female. Her \u201cMidnights\u2019\u2019 release sold 1.5 million copies in its first week, a monumental number for the streaming era, and the record only beats the one Swift set herself in 2017 with \u201cReputation.\u201d \u201cMidnights\u201d became the fastest album to hit 1 billion streams on Spotify, shattering many other streaming records along the way. According to Rolling Stone, \u201cas Taylor Swift often does, she has once again moved the goalposts regarding what the music industry can see as possible from a major pop star.\u201d Fans at Pace can find Swift in Atlanta on April 28, 29 and 30 for her upcoming 2023 stadium tour. Not shockingly, this tour has already set records on Ticketmaster, prompting the site to crash multiple times during the November sale due to \u201chistoric demand.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Taylor Swift\u2019s fans refer to the 32-year-old singer as \u201cthe music industry.\u201d According to Rolling Stone, during the past few months, Swift \u201cmay be as close to that moniker as she\u2019s ever been.\u201d  Frankly, Swift has been at the forefront of everyone\u2019s minds lately, at least those who pay anyContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":458,"featured_media":349252,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[182,181],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-","post-349250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","category-lifestyle"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/files\/2022\/11\/TSRGB.jpg?fit=648%2C805&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1TYqQ-1sR4","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/458"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349250"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":349796,"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349250\/revisions\/349796"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/knightlife.paceacademy.org\/knightlynews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}