Singing Swift’s praises for more than NFL impact
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Since her first appearance at Arrowhead Stadium in September, the media hasn't been able to fully separate her from her football player boyfriend, Travis Kelce. Now more than three months later and news feeds are still flooded with stories about the couple, but without focusing on what makes the pop-star as popular as she is.
When searching Swift on Google, the first four news articles that come up are about the Super Bowl, the Kansas City Chiefs, and Travis Kelce. Her singing career is unable to be found.
Even the inappropriate comment made about her at the Golden Globes just a few days ago isn't anywhere near the top of the page. The host, comedian Jo Koy said "The big difference between the Golden Globes and the NFL? At the Golden Globes, we have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift."
In response to the backlash he faced following his joke, Koy told the Los Angeles Times that his intent was to make fun of the National Football League, not Swift.
Despite his rebuttal, it is clear that the celebrity world is finding it difficult to separate Swift from a franchise she isn't even a part of.
So to remind people that she is more than a promotional piece for the NFL or Kelce's girlfriend, this is Taylor Swift.
In 1989 she was born in Reading, Pa. By age 14 she had signed onto Big Machine Records as a songwriter. In 2007 she'd sold over a million copies of her debut album and was touring with artists such as Faith Hill, Rascal Flatts, and Tim McGraw according to Britannica.
This week, an area genealogist also confirmed a connection by the singer to Dunkirk as her great-great-grandparents lived here and operated a music store.
With the release of her fifth album, 1989, she rebranded herself from a country artist to pop. This new brand of album for Swift spent 11 weeks on the Billboard 200 and sold 1.2 million copies in the first week says Biography.com.
Since her professional career started in her late teen years, Swift has put out eighteen albums -- ten original studio albums, four rereleases and four live albums. In addition to this, Business Insider reports that she's also written songs for Little Big Town, Hannah Montana, and Calvin Harris.
In late 2018 she signed with Universal Music Group's Republic Records in order to have ownership of her music, which she didn't have at Big Machine Records. Her previous recording company had sold her work to well-known manager Scooter Braun's company, who Swift has
openly spoken out against. This inspired her beginning to re-record her first six albums under "Taylor's Version," in which she also includes songs "from the vault" that had been written near the original album's release but weren't included in the final product.
Starting early last year she began her Eras Tour combining songs from each of her studio albums. In December 2023, Pollstar reported that so far the tour had earned $1,039,263,762 with more shows already scheduled for 2024. The Eras Tour was recorded at So-Fi Stadium in California and turned into a movie released in theaters and now available on Amazon Prime for rent. It became the highest-grossing concert film of all time.
It was also nominated for a Golden Globe in the Cinema and Box Office Achievement Category before ultimately falling short to Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" -- another entry to have been the butt of one of Jo Koy's ill-received jokes that evening.
Thanks to her music career and real-estate properties, Swift has been able to give back through more than just Grammy-winning songs. In 2011 she donated $70,000 in books to her hometown library, states Billboard.com. She wrote the song "Ronan" in 2012 to honor the little boy who suffered from fatal neuroblastoma and donated all of her proceeds to various cancer charities. In 2013 she funded the $4 million Taylor Swift Music Education Center at the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Each year since she has made sizable donations to different relief causes and individual groups of people, continuing the trend on her Eras Tour route by donating to food banks in the cities she was traveling through.
Prior to her September debut supporting Kelce, as well as the beginning of their relationship months before, Swift was on the world's radar and made her own name for herself. Their romance does not take away anything she had already accomplished back when she was cheering for the Eagles in Philadelphia.
She was even booed by football fans in the Chiefs vs. Patriots game in December. The NFL chooses to keep the spotlight on her, and it has sent people into rampages over all of the attention.
Sports Illustrated reported on her comments following backlash from annoyed fans over her attendance. "I'm just there to support Travis," she said. "I have no awareness of if I'm being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads."
She also said "I don't know how they know what suite I'm in. There's a camera, like, a half-mile away, and you don't know where it is, and you have no idea when the camera is putting you in the broadcast, so I don't know if I'm being shown 17 times or once."
Swift has faced controversy before, whether it be in the release of her Reputation album with its darker overtone than its predecessors or the hatred she got with her pro-LGBTQ+ community song "You Need To Calm Down" from the Lover album. In the end, she's standing by the fact that she is there to watch football and her boyfriend, and others who are doing the same shouldn't have a problem with it.