LONDON – In a ceremony that left the nation’s dry-cleaning bills soaring and several elderly tuxedos sodden with maudlin brine, Taylor Swift was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame last night. Her acceptance speech, a 21-minute odyssey through the labyrinth of her own tear ducts, prompted the UK music industry to perform a collective wobble of approval, like a blancmange struck by a melodious mallet.
Let us be clear: I have nothing against Miss Swift. Her ability to market personal catharsis as product is the envy of any Covent Garden chimney sweep. But 21 minutes? That is longer than the average Busby Berkeley dance number. Longer than a Cabinet meeting on Brexit. Longer than the time I spent trapped in a lift with a mime in Birmingham, which is saying something, because that mime was arrested for impersonating a statue and I had to explain to the constable that no, he was not a public amenity.
The speech itself was a masterclass in the art of seeming surprised while reading off a TelePrompTer. She thanked her cats, her ex-boyfriends (presumably for providing raw material), and possibly the plumber who unclogged her sink in 2016. I say “possibly” because at minute 14 the gin had mercifully begun to blur the sensory receptors responsible for parsing celebrity gratitude.
The UK music industry, ever the obsequious lapdog of transatlantic pop royalty, hailed this as a “historic moment for songwriting.” Historic, indeed. Like the Charge of the Light Brigade, or the launch of the Spice Girls. One imagines Sir Elton John, from his throne in the Royal Albert Hall, wiping a tear from his rhinestone-studded spectacles and muttering, “Now that is what I call a sustained key change.”
Let us examine the actual content of her songs. They are, by and large, about love gone wrong, ennui, and the existential horror of being a billionaire. Should I weep for her? I have cried more over a broken pint glass. Yet the audience lapped it up, because British people are genetically predisposed to respect anyone who can string four chords together without setting the piano on fire. We made Ed Sheeran a star, for God’s sake.
The ceremony itself was a parade of nauseating sincerity. Tim Rice gave a speech that rhymed “Swift” with “gift,” which is the sort of doggerel that gets you thrown out of a decent pub. Someone played a medley of her hits on a harp, reminding all present that white women with acoustic instruments are the true heirs to the classical tradition. Chopin, eat your heart out.
But let us not be churlish. Miss Swift has accomplished something genuinely remarkable: she has turned the act of writing all about yourself into a billion-dollar industry. She is the J.K. Rowling of breakup anthems, the Marmite of millennial angst. You either adore her or you find her as cloying as a wet spaniel in a knitwear shop. I, for one, fall into the latter category, but I acknowledge the sheer bloody-minded persistence of her career.
In conclusion, Taylor Swift is now a Hall of Famer. She deserves it, in the same way that a particularly insistent mosquito deserves a slap. But let us spare a thought for the 21 minutes we will never get back. Those could have been spent doing something truly valuable, like discovering a new brand of gin, or reading a Dickens novel, or simply staring at a wall and contemplating the void. Instead, we listened to a woman thank her fans for validating her existence. The horror, the horror.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go drown my cynicism in a bottle of something stronger. Preferably something named after a Scottish island.
