On Monday Night, Taylor Swift made a much anticipated appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show. It was the sort of perfect “apolitical” television that Fallon seems to be striving for. A pop star comes on to celebrate her best-selling album — and top-grossing theatrical release of an accompanying movie — and there’s nothing but glitter and giggles from the millionaire talk show host and his millionaire guest.
The entire display was insufferable. Swift, at the top of her career by nearly every metric, released an album devoid of the depth present in even her previous pop slop. As the reigning queen of music sales, she has milked her fans for every dollar through gimmicks even they are starting to identify as scams. Like, really, how many special prints can you have of one album that’s just been released? This new era — one where Swift is divorced from taking political stances, is engaged to a football player and is besties with a MAGA-supporting WAG — is the inevitable conclusion for someone who has amassed so much wealth and fame she has nothing interesting left to say.
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And someone with nothing interesting left to say is, of course, the perfect person to guest on Jimmy Fallon. The man who wants to keep his show down the middle, absent of divisiveness and thus perspective, is looking to have shallow conversations that won’t ruffle any feathers. More specifically, he’s looking to have conversations that won’t ruffle the feathers of our overly sensitive, thick-ankled president and his cabal of idiot fascists.
The problem with putting two people who have nothing to say on television is that it’s a terrible, mind-numbing watch. Who wants to spend time with two bags of nothingness doing a song-by-song breakdown of an album more focused on how much it can earn than its substance? Who wants to watch a man who is the human personification of the Goofy “hiyunk” sound force out gasped laughter as his eyes shift from side to side, in constant fear he’s about to be fired from The Tonight Show? Who wants to watch the most successful touring artist of all time speak vaguely about her big bulky boyfriend’s trunk-sized penis?
But both Swift and Fallon have reached an insulating level of fame that’s sheltered them from the performer’s obligation not to waste the audience’s time. So what do we get? A truly painful back and forth between two purposefully apolitical people about One Battle After Another, a film that centers on, among other things: the detention of migrants, secret groups of sinister racist men running the country and the sacrifices one makes for revolution. That doesn’t even get into the themes of motherhood, Black femininity, community and integrity in the face of fascism that are also present.
Swift’s thoughts?
“Leo was hilarious!”
