This is the second installment of “Just Like Us,” a monthly Substack-only column on celebrity and online culture, by Grazie Sophia Christie. Read the first, on Summer House, here.
We are three weeks past Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s “royal wedding.” The venue of choice was Madison Square Garden, the country’s most famous arena, smack-dab in New York City, on July 3rd, the eve of Independence Day. The Empire State Building, all lit up, stood in as Swift’s “something blue,” though this was later explained to be a spontaneous gesture, on the part of the skyscraper. Streets closed, traffic diverted. Dignitaries were snapped arriving, like Tom Hanks. And yet reports about the Swift affair have been met mostly with bafflement.
Even Swift’s fans could not believe the choice of stadium—for a singer, a place of work—given a combined net worth that might have afforded the couple, say, an elegantly oxygenated tent on another planet. The other details that have been divulged only forced more questions. Adam Sandler officiated, the couple confirmed via a publicist statement. But why, on God’s green earth? To what cinematic universe-crossover could we attribute the presence of Brad Pitt? Or Hugh Grant? “The wedding has now soured me towards her,” confessed a representative fan on an online forum. Perhaps it was the caviar on chicken nuggets, for which Oscar winners had to wait in a buffet line. Or maybe it was something more—a certain lack of coherence, unusual for an event invested with such national significance. Why occupy the space of a public symbol, if you don’t intend to symbolize anything? If this was America’s wedding, why didn’t it have anything to say to, or about, America?
A study of Taylor Swift’s catalogue yields to my estimation approximately 22 songs (out of nearly three hundred) which are ostensibly about the country, or at least inseparable from it. And yet in nearly every case Swift flips the traditional script of using a story—about a couple, a party, a gesture, a road trip—to extrapolate outwards. Instead of pretending to talk about herself to make a larger point about America, as everyone from Bob Dylan to Childish Gambino has, Swift uses the stories and iconography of the country to help us better understand her. It’s a song-writing process which generates (lovely) ahistorical tunes like “Gold Rush.” “Gold Rush” is not about fortune-seeking miners or California, because to Swift the real gold rush is the romantic competition she faced, or feared, in her pursuit of her ex-boyfriend Joe. She writes songs about Elizabeth Taylor, Britney Spears and Clara Bow, not to help us appreciate them but to translate her own fame to us. Even the lead single off her social justice album is called “ME!”
From Swift’s 2020 documentary Miss Americana, one likewise takes away only the vaguest sense of her relationship to her country, expressed via a pleasant neoliberal politics and a garden-variety disgust for Trump. Fundamentally speaking, Miss Americana is about what America feels for Taylor Swift. Her early crowning as America’s sweetheart, and later, following a snafu with an abusive and increasingly twisted Kanye West, her fall from grace. Eventually, her comeback. What it is like to be followed, everywhere, by a zoo, given you are the eye of the tiger. Miss Americana documents Taylor’s foray into activism—her endorsement of two Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterms—and her corresponding reputational concerns. She has since gone silent (something a little too easy to judge until you imagine the bursting quality of the file her team must keep for death threats). Ultimately Miss Americana proves to be a misnomer. For what does Swift really know about America? Swift and her parents began submitting demos to record labels when she was eleven. Born in Pennsylvania, she assumed, and then just as quickly discarded, a twang for her country music rise. In the past decade and a half, she has been, in her music: a bosom friend of Ethel Kennedy’s, a hipster from Tribeca, a Vegas showgirl, a girl in a cardigan drowned in the Lake District. Swift has homes in Nashville, New York City, Rhode Island, Los Angeles and London, and she spends most of Miss Americana in the stratosphere, sitting beside her mother in her private plane. Fame is its own country.
Her songs can feel American, in the sense that they allude to high school, in the most basic root-beer-float style, and we’ve all watched Grease. But Swift’s references to high school and prom kings and queens are really less about American life than they are about her experience of celebrity. Just like the popular girl in high school, it’s not clear what she thinks about us, if she does think about us much at all.
Lana Del Rey is a different sort of American singer. Del Rey understands that though she herself does not really exist—California’s “Lana” was born Elizabeth Grant in New York—America certainly does. From her 2012 album Born to Die to 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! to 2023’s Did You Know that There’s a Tunnel under Ocean Blvd, Del Rey has advanced through her stories of disastrous California love a particular national theory. Basically, one way to think about American history is as a series of men and women, chasing each other West, on the hormonal brink of a murder/suicide. “Come on, baby, let’s ride / We can escape to the great sunshine,” she sings. “God bless America and all the beautiful women in it,” she croons, and she means the pregnant girl in the trailer park, the one on the back of the Harley, the hopeless sucker who froze to death in the Sierra Mountains because she would have followed him anywhere. There are problems with her theories. She’s a rich woman who enjoys making poverty look hot. Her dream figures are almost all fair, except when they’re rappers in love with her. Commandeering the American flag for your breakout album—posing with the stars and stripes, writing songs with titles like “National Anthem,” “Cola,” “Blue Jeans”—is presumptuous. Maybe more presumptuous even than calling yourself “Miss Americana” when other people have been calling you some variation of that for decades. But Lana has obviously thought hard about what it means to be one kind of American girl, or woman. For Del Rey, America is a country of turbo-charged desire, of upstart eroticism, where a cult of sex and high libidos will always lead to random pairings that flatten distinctions of culture and class. It’s why the singer dated, for example, the son of the Italian Vogue editor-in-chief, and then married an alligator tour guide.
Lana got married two years ago, down in Louisiana, where she lives these days in her husband Jeremy’s modest home on the banks of the Bayou des Allemands, which is the green of army khakis and sluggish with catfish. She had rather a weird wedding, too, as far as celebrity weddings go. Lana wore a lace ballgown of the Southern Gothic variety, a little too Scarlet O’Hara for comfort. The couple posed for photos on Jeremy’s airboat, kissed before its caged propeller. A false rumor went around that her dress had been thrifted from a local boutique called “Trashy Diva,” and everyone believed it. Both critics and fans of Del Rey understood the wedding to be a form of performance art, a real-life homage to the women she sings about, the ones who fall in love, lose their heads, discard their lives completely.
The thing about being very rich is that you can afford to be very trashy. It’s why everyone loves those photographs of the Olsen Twins with their Birkin bags torn to shreds. Vulgarity is the privilege of the wealthiest country on earth, which explains our national penchant for diet sodas and why Britney Spears’s 2004 wedding to Kevin Federline, with the Juicy Couture tracksuits and the stripper pole, was really the American wedding par excellence. Representative, I think, of a true naïve genius the likes of which we may never see again. Taylor Swift’s wedding to Travis Kelce, with its reported arcade games, the raffle they organized for luxury purses and a Chevy, played a little at this game. Too wealthy to be fancy or deign to impress. But the reason it struck critics and fans as bewildering is perhaps the very reason Swift’s songs will always seem to be about her, and never about us: we know her too well. A true, classy-vulgar wedding for Taylor would have hit a schmaltzier note. She might have dug a lake for swan boats. Waved from a stained-glass pumpkin carriage. She ought to have imported Rapunzel’s tower and climbed down her own long golden hair. Whatever sentimentality was achieved by her reported theme of “secret garden” was undercut, for the public at least, by the sheer fact of it being planted in a stadium arena. The irony of ironies is we all know the perfect Swift wedding would have been in Europe.
Lana Del Rey didn’t go to Taylor Swift’s wedding. But Taylor went to hers. Maybe Swift and Del Rey, former collaborators, fell out. Or maybe Lana’s invitation was intercepted by a bayou alligator. Either way, one imagines her absence might’ve been a relief to Swift; it can be degrading trying to impress your indie friend. And it’s true that some corners of the internet met Swift’s wedding with the groan usually reserved for what they call, in football parlance, a fumble. Me, I can’t get over the inclusion-exclusion of the public, like being given an audience to the queen but being forced to wait interminably in a vestibule—on Swift’s end, like approaching a microphone and then saying nothing.
Listen, the moment Travis Kelce won the Super Bowl, and Taylor Swift, accompanied by his mother, rushed the field, and he held her, and she looked small and dainty again, and believably sexual for maybe the first time ever, millions of us watching—it was done. It was over. She was going to be the American Princess Bride. Personally, I’m happy for her. But when it comes to performance art, you have to know what exactly you’re performing.
Previously on Just Like Us…
“Vampire Weekends,” on Summer House and the drama of romantic contempt.
Further reading from the Point archive…
“When Meghan Married Harry” by Jonathan Lear (2021)
“Overdramatic. And True” by Alma Igra (2025)
“On Pop Fatalism” by Philippa Snow (2020)
“Anti-Hero Worship” by Becky Zhang (2022)
Image credit: Winxy (CC BY / Wikipedia)
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