Insert Foot: Taylor Swift divides America by going to the Super Bowl
Let’s talk Tay-Tay, Trav-Trav and how, yes, of course the biggest story in professional football continues right through the Super Bowl, because how could it not?
The points:
In this corner, the “Don’t be mean to Taylor Swift!” She’s a feminist (I guess?), doesn’t like Donald Trump, sells out stadiums and is awesome!” crowd.
And in this corner: “Taylor Swift is ruining the NFL by cheering for her sellout boyfriend (even though we whole-heartily endorse cheering women at football games, as long as they look and behave like strippers on the sidelines)” crowd.
But a cumulative 47 seconds a game of Swift? You’ve gone too far, NFL and your new superpop princess!
The NFL is not stupid. You don’t think it was spontaneous, a couple games ago, when they staged Swift’s boyfriend Travis Kelce’s brother (future brother-in-law?) Jason taking off his shirt to show America his hairy beast boobs while swilling beer in Tay-Tay’s suite, do you? “Awww … he’s lifting up little girls in the crowd to say hi to Tay-Tay, the greatest female singer songwriter of our time!”
I don’t even know what I’m arguing for or against at this point. I just think the whole thing is embarrassing. It’s not the people involved. The people who care, on both sides. You’re being manipulated, America. Again.
I shall only care long enough to finish this column and go back to filling out the 327 background check forms to coach my daughter’s softball team and be able to say I’m a decent dad for another year. Well … for about five months. Then I have to find another strategy the rest of the year.
Swift cares about her fans and gives away a ton of money. She’s also a record company money machine who makes music that doesn’t appeal to me—and not in a “Kim Gordon’s new 11-minute song on a Sonic Youth record is so out there that I’m not sure I get it” kind of way.
Furthering our theme of badass women, I’ve been rewatching “Peaky Blinders” lately, which has the best TV soundtrack of all time, and … where have you gone, PJ Harvey, when an alt-rock nation turns its lonely eyes to you? My God, but she was and still is incredible; Taylor Swift should go spend a month with PJ Harvey.
But 32 billionaire football team owners, the ones who control the television networks by feeding them money, keep laughing their asses off and firing off weekly memos to their network subjects to keep showing Swift in the stands, or else.
Just like the memos they sent making sure network cameras captured the best angle possible of Colin Kaepernick kneeling, while keeping those same cameras away from girlfriend strangler Greg Hardy and the other NFL charmers who abuse women.
It’s such a hypocritically yet American thing that more people have a problem with Taylor Swift being in an NFL stadium than they do Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson, against whom two dozen women accused of sexual misconduct. I mean, he says he didn’t …
Watson did get suspended for a season which is, what … like one week per accuser? Then he got to come back. Because he runs faster than Swift, and the Brown needed a quarterback. So he was OK until he started playing quarterback about as well as a pop singer.
But he gets to come back again, because he doesn’t kneel like Kaepernick, who had to go because conservative season ticket holders decided they own the National Anthem.
(This was the part where I was going to mention the National Anthem being written by a slave owner who once, as the district attorney of D.C., wanted to execute an abolitionist, but I’m not sure the anti-Swifties, anti-Kaepernick crowd would really care).
So a week from today, we’ll see Swift make half of the United States angry at the Super Bowl, which will also feature opening acts the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers, and their quarterback, adorable chipmunk Brock Furby. And between the inevitably embarrassing attention paid to the commercials, we’ll talk Tay-Tay, Travis, the halftime show, lip-synched National Anthem during which freedom of expression is hereby suspended … and maybe even some football.
One more week! Go America!
Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.