What I Heard

 Very shortly after Taylor Swift was seen with the Kansas City Chiefs' Travis Kelce, sales of his jersey went up four hundred percent. Keeping in mind that Mister Kelce was already a pretty hot ticket and a star in his own right, but the Swift effect lifted his numbers into the top five jerseys sold by the NFL. Travis is a Tight End. A Tight End who is, apparently, dating Taylor Swift. 

In another corner of the pop culture maelstrom, after Ms. Swift encouraged her fans via Instagram to register to vote, the link she included to Vote.org received an immediate surge of thirty-five thousand new voter registrations. 

For the sake of full disclosure, I spent the past few years downplaying the music and the significance of Taylor Swift. Pop songstresses come and go. I don't listen to them because I am far too busy mining the nuggets of New Wave and Dad Rock that may still exist out there for me to consume. But somehow the algorithms of Spotify found a way to justify slipping her song Anti-Hero into my usual mix. 

A Taylor Swift song? In my Spotify playlist?

It's not like I was wearing a pledge pin on my ROTC uniform or anything, but when it was over, I paused. I went and checked the title. And the artist. What had happened to me was real, and I wasn't having an auditory hallucination. 

So I have decided that it will be perfectly fine for Ms. Swift to go on caring about things like voting and gun laws and the like. I would love to see a four hundred percent hike in the number of Blue Votes come this time next year. And if that seems like a bit of a cop-out on my part, handing over that kind of power to a thirty-three year old singer whose songs turn out to be quite listenable, then I'll take that humiliation. Who knows? In another few years we may be voting for her.