Taylor’s truth: how superstar authenticity appeals

As Taylor Swift fans took over his town, Nathan Betts contemplates the truth at the heart of the superstar’s appeal.

Nathan Betts

Nathan is a speaker and writer on topics related to faith, life and God. He lives near Seattle, Washington. His writing is featured frequently in The Seattle Times. nathanbetts.com

Taylor Swift wears a long yellow dress and signs with an outstretched arm against a backdrop of woods and a close up her singing beside it.

Taylor Swift performing on the Eras Tour.

Paolo V, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

If you have been paying any attention to Taylor Swift’s most recent tour, you will know why the last several months have been termed The Summer of Taylor Swift. The artist has traveled across America, boosting economies en route, and filling stadiums with contagious happiness.

I hadn’t realized the enormous impact Swift had made on entire cities until I was walking downtown Seattle earlier this summer for a Mariners baseball game. While walking from my car to the stadium I encountered an endless sea of Taylor Swift fans waiting outside the stadium in the early afternoon for her show that would begin that evening. I had heard about Taylor Swift before, had listened to her music, but seeing what I saw that day told me something more profound about her and something about us as human beings.

But what I saw on the downtown streets of Seattle leading up to Taylor Swift’s concert was different.

In recent history, we have seen different artists such as The Rolling Stones and AC/DC elicit strange (and frankly awkward) adulation where people throw their clothes onto the stage. U2 concerts have been hailed as a religious experience in which stadiums become cathedrals. And more recently, Justin Bieber gave many “Bieber Fever.”

But what I saw on the downtown streets of Seattle leading up to Taylor Swift’s concert was different. I’ve been trying to pinpoint what it was exactly that struck me that day. People of all ages packed into surrounding streets in Taylor Swift attire, countless groups lustily singing her songs, cars and vans marked up with Taylor Swift song lyrics. There was a unity, a togetherness and distinct humanity to it all. The feeling was more akin to a spiritual revival than merely a big stadium concert rolling into town.

I remember coming back home that evening and texting friends to see what they made of it. My question was: “What is it about Taylor Swift that has enabled her to connect with so many?” The answers I received all struck the same notes: A Taylor Swift concert was the best they had ever experienced. But more than the concert, it’s the vibe, the pure joy and happiness that you experience with everyone at the concert. There is something about her that makes people feel happy. And although she is a stratospheric star, she has deliberately made a point of seeming like the girl next store. People think and feel that she is their friend. She is relatable.

If you are a Taylor Swift fan, you already know this. But as these thoughts about Taylor Swift rumbled through my brain for weeks after that experience, they took on a greater meaning during a lunch meeting I had with a friend back from college for the summer. Midway through our time together he asked me, “How do you deal with people who are fake?” The pensive look on my face revealed that I wasn’t exactly sure what he was asking, so he sharpened the question: “How do you deal with people who are hypocrites?”

I now understood what he was getting at. He gave a few examples of friends and leaders around him who had acted in hypocritical ways. He saw through it. Although he had moved on from those relationships, the jagged edges of hypocrisy still dug into him. They hurt. My friend was asking me how or if it’s even possible to trust in people who let you down.

The truth is, I’ve lost count of the conversations I’ve had with people who have asked or expressed the same question. And yet, when my friend asked me this question, I wasn’t sure what to say.

I offered just one thought: “What if the antidote to hypocrisy is the real thing? As in, what if the medicine for the disingenuous and fake is seeing a life that is genuine and real—a person who is true, honest, who lives a life of integrity?

And in Taylor Swift, we’ve found a companion who knows the struggle of life and invites us to join her.

This is where my mind came back to Taylor Swift and why it is that millions of us feel a real connection to her. The answer is nuanced, to be sure, but I wonder if part of it has to do with the fact that when we see or hear Taylor Swift, we experience a person who comes across as real. Perhaps more than in recent memory, we as a society have a low tolerance for BS. Yet, despite our abhorrence for the fake, our attraction to the real and authentic has grown just as strongly.

Enter Taylor Swift. Among other qualities, Swift is not a fake. Isobel Jones, a cradle Swiftie, recently explained this to me:

‘Taylor Swift isn’t fake because we’ve known her since she was 14, she gave all of herself to us, in her songs, in her interactions with fans, sending her coat to a fan who loved it (During the RED era; Swift would have been 22ish). She’s one of the first Tumblr gen artists who has consistently connected with fans and grown up with them, proving her consistency.’

We can relate to the words in Swift’s songs. Her lyrics of sadness, anger, hope, and grace connect with us. She touches the human spirit, not necessarily because we’ve been through the exact same kind of struggles, but because we are all human beings trying to figure out how to cope with hard things in life, own up to our shadows and weaknesses and still engage our journey in life. And in Taylor Swift, we’ve found a companion who knows the struggle of life and invites us to join her.

In our age of loneliness and disintegrating relational bonds, I believe the message of Taylor Swift transcends her concerts and songs. She carries a message for us, a reminder of what we need as human beings. Truth, integrity, authenticity. We don’t necessarily expect people to be perfect, but we need an honesty in our relationships about who people really are, whether that is the good or the bad. Just please, whatever you do, don’t be a hypocrite.

Wounds from hypocrisy can be hard to recover from. As a person of faith, I have experienced first-hand and have heard myriad stories of hypocrisy in the church. There is indeed much to be disheartened by in our world, and far-too-often within church walls. But in my more sober-minded moments when I am looking for lasting and healing solutions, I encounter a balm for my pain when I focus on the core and centre of the Christian faith.

At its heart, Christianity goes beyond offering merely propositional prescriptions for the pain that paralyses us. Instead, hope is offered supremely in and through the person of Jesus Christ, God-in-flesh. Within Christ is a truth that rolls throughout the whole of sacred Scripture. It is the beautiful message that there is a God who can be trusted. We can trust him because he is real, he lived in our world of pain and hypocrisy, and he conquered its power. We might carry scars for the rest of our lives, but Christ’s life tells us that there will come a point, before we die or after, when he will heal the deepest of our wounds. He can be trusted, not because he makes everything in life work out the way we want it to, or because we will never experience pain, but because in Christ, we’ve found the one who knows the way through it.

There’s also a challenge here for those who follow Christ and it is simply to reflect his character of truth, love, and beauty in how we live thereby opening up a world into which people actually want to inhabit.

Recovering from being hurt by hypocrisy can be a long and hard road to travel. A recent conversation with a friend reminded me of how difficult that is while my experience of Seattle bubbling with Taylor Swift happiness provided a signpost of hope. And behind all of this I am made to wonder, more than I can ever recall, whether faith in Jesus Christ can help steer us in the right direction, if we are willing to engage who he was and the life into which he invites us.

Review

Attention

Culture

Film & TV

Weirdness

21 October 2024

5 min read

Ludwig’s clues to the answers we long for

Puzzles preserve a fully realised truth in the clue, and, if we are willing to persevere, we will be rewarded.

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

Two TV characters, a man and a woman, stand in front of a crossword cover walls of a room.

Anna Maxwell Martin, David Mitchell.

BBC.

The BBC have scored a bingeable hit with new comedy-drama Ludwig, starring David Mitchell as a maladroit puzzle-setter who is roped into a rather fabulous whodunnit. It involves his missing twin, a police detective whom he must impersonate in order to chase the trail of the disappearance. While on the case he solves a few other conundrums, giving the show many intriguing, if knotty, narrative threads.

It is not the first-time crossword setting and detective work have gone hand in hand. One of the very first cryptic crossword setters - the ‘grandfather’ of the genre - was Edward Powys Mathers, who also dashed off a mystery thriller, Cain’s Jawbone in 1934. The novel was provided to readers in the wrong order, with the simple but infuriating challenge to reconstruct the right sequence of pages based on maddeningly subtle internal clues. Despite offers of a cash prize, virtually no solutions were submitted.

Such is the dilemma of a cryptic crossword setter - when is clever too clever? Puzzles can appeal so much to our pride; our desire to be part of an ‘in-group’ which understands the highbrow references to opera, Latin oratory, and cricket slang. Those who can outwit them are part of an elite rank. The Telegraph crossword of 13th January 1942 was used as an exercise to recruit for the ENIGMA codebreaking unit. Indeed, when Mathers all but invented the idea of a fully cryptic crossword in the Saturday Westminster Gazette in 1924, his challenges bore the banner ‘Crosswords for Supermen’.

There is fundamental connectedness behind the world, and working on the presumption of such a unity allowed him to collect ideas and references from across the globe and throughout all history to form his tricksy clues.

I’ve often started out on a cryptic crossword, hoping to discover that I am one such genius, only to bitterly give up shortly afterwards, irritated that I don’t have that instant ability to see the solutions. I stare at the riddle, wanting to be one of those people who can naturally recall information, connect ideas, or see what has been hidden in the tortuous clue. Surely the appeal of a show like Ludwig is that it gives us an aspirational glimpse at the peak of human mental prowess, even if Mitchell’s wannabe inspector is a little socially awkward. He still possesses a penetrating gaze that looks through the surface of things, to see what no one else can. He is one of those ‘supermen’ - beholden to no one, able to uniquely see the way things are all by himself.

And yet, when Edward Powys Mathers died in 1939, he was referred to in his Observer obituary not as a kind of lone snobby genius, but “the gentlest of men… a saint”. It’s appropriate, as crosswords have long been a curiously churchy phenomenon: in the small list of great UK cryptic writers, two have been Anglican priests (Revd John Graham, known as Acaucaria, and Revd Canon A. F. Ritchie, or Afrit). Even Mathers’ fondness for Biblical allusions in his clues “led many to endow him with ecclesiastical rank” as Roger Millington’s book on Crosswords put it. Christian faith, because it is a religion built on the idea that God is with us in flesh, invites us to pay attention to the world around us. The world is not something to escape from, but is rather the place that, in Jesus Christ, God has come to meet us in. It makes you want to understand time, place, and culture, to better understand the God who has spoken through them, and given them meaning and destiny. In reference to this way of seeing things, Mathers was spoken of as a ‘catholic’ thinker in his obituary. This did not mean his church affiliation, but rather an instinct for seeing how everything is part of a greater whole. There is fundamental connectedness behind the world, and working on the presumption of such a unity allowed him to collect ideas and references from across the globe and throughout all history to form his tricksy clues.

There is also a negative hint in this obituary clue, ‘catholic’. Crossworders work under a nom de plume (David Mitchell’s character John for instance, who goes by ‘Ludwig’). And while Mathers was indeed a generous, open-minded man, he sealed his reputation for difficulty by adopting the pseudonym ‘Torquemada’, in reference to a former Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. So, if Christians are alive to the interconnectedness of all things, we also have a reputation for the institutional guarding of those very mysteries. History shows believers have tortured those who do not come to their idea of what the answer is; indeed, they have set the questions for too long, in the eyes of many hostile to the faith.

Puzzles preserve a fully realised truth in the clue, and, if we are willing to persevere, and learn a new way of seeing, and of paying attention, we will be rewarded.

But this is the tension that crosswords offer us - a very authentically Christian way to think about the way God spells things out for us which does not rely on a stark binary of ‘true’ or ‘false’. He reveals things like a puzzle; slowly, and cryptically. Some might fairly object to this comparison, on the grounds this would make God too ‘out there’ - far away from the intimate father that Jesus bids us address so familiarly. Does it make God too remote and enigmatic to say he is setting riddles for us? But actually, a puzzle does not deceive us, like a mask does. Puzzles preserve a fully realised truth in the clue, and, if we are willing to persevere, and learn a new way of seeing, and of paying attention, we will be rewarded. The answer is there, reaching out to us, if we only commit ourselves humbly to receiving it. It may cost us much effort and time. It may require us to learn things afresh. But this is part of the joy of trying to see, as St Paul puts it, "the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things”.

Jesus himself spoke in parables, very much like cryptic clues. But this was no elitism, designed to cut out those without the high IQ of David Mitchell’s ‘Ludwig’. Arrogant intellect or love of one’s own status is, for Jesus, just as much a bar to those seeking a solution, because to find the answer requires a certain submission - a discipline - to see things as the puzzle-setter sees them. If we proceed only to do things our way, we remain blind: seeing we do not see, and hearing we do not hear, nor do we understand.