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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

It seems as though the author has a (relatively) specific view of both Taylor Swift and Disney that he is trying to generalize, while ignoring the social ecosystem that both currently exist in.

I don't know what knowledge can really be gleaned from this piece. Walt Disney's claim to fame were some of the incredible risks that he took, and his near Jobsian ability to predict what the consumer wanted.

Taylor Swift's claim to fame is that she is an attractive white woman from affluent parents, who is both highly malleable and a very hard worker.

This emotive nonsense doesn't jive with n+1.

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> Taylor Swift's claim to fame is that she is an attractive white woman from affluent parents, who is both highly malleable and a very hard worker.

You're clearly missing something, because she's many orders of magnitude more successful than nearly every other attractive white woman, etc. No one falls up from mediocrity that meteorically without unique expertise.

I encourage you to write a song on an instrument, and play it at an open mic; you'll remember those annoyed and disappointed faces forever.

> Taylor Swift's claim to fame is that she is an attractive white woman from affluent parents, who is both highly malleable and a very hard worker.

I don't think you understand Taylor Swift whatsoever.

I think if you take highly malleable to mean "can seem relatable to a broad swathe of people that she actually shares little in common with through a very American white bread vanilla mix of folk and pop" then that part of the comment is pretty accurate.

I'm so tired of this bullshit narrative. Same argument gets played for Elon Musk. How many millions of attractive white women from affluent parents are there out there trying to excel? Are you really going against that and take away the tremendously focused effort she's put forth for 20+ years? Taylor has taken huge risks and had her share of failures along the way. I remember her playing at fraternity house parties when I was in college.

It is such a harmful fallacy to reduce someone's life work life you have done here.

Im in the "fathers and daughters" camp that Ben Thompson talks about, where over the last ~5 years, Taylor has produced a body of work that is broadly appealing. I enjoy it. My daughter enjoys it. I personally cannot stand Swift's earlier work, seeing as it was written for teenage girls, that makes sense, my daughter loves it, and she cannot stand my weird 90s rock, so we compromise on Swifts new stuff. What Taylor Swift has done, shifting her musical appeal without abandoning her fan base, is super impressive and potentially unprecedented at this scale. Maybe Michael Jackson or Elvis level of mastery of entertainment.

> Taylor Swift's claim to fame is that she is an attractive white woman from affluent parents, who is both highly malleable and a very hard worker.

Swift's success is about much more than that. Fundamentally, she is targeting a market segment her competitors have left wide open. Her persona-- a hard working, self-deprecating, people pleasing young woman trying to navigate relationships--is immensely relatable to a huge number of young millennial women. That's especially true because Millennials are just more square than Boomers or Gen X. They are more inclined to follow social expectations, and have fewer vices than Boomers or Gen X at the same age. Swift's clean lyrics thus stand out in comparison to her contemporaries.

That also makes her more appealing across generations. I've been a Taylor Swift fan since the beginning, and I'm happy to spend $$$ taking my 10 year old daughter to one of her concerts. I'd never do the same with someone like Ariana Grande or Lizzo or even Beyonce, whose music is more sexualized and profane.

You should watch Miss Americana. Swift runs her operation like a business. It's quite amazing to watch.

I don't think that being from affluent parents is any part whatsoever of Taylor Swift's claim to fame.

Then perhaps you should read about the inorganic way in which her career started.

That’s still not her “claim to fame”, as the OP phrases it. She’s famous for her music, not her wealth. A better fit for the OP is someone that is “famous for being famous”.

Her music exists because of her parents wealth.

It typically increases the opportunities an individual has in their life; it's reasonable to assume it was a factor in her achieving fame in the first place.

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Swift#Early_life

This is the kind of opportunity that less affluent—let alone poor—families don't tend to have.

And yet the same goes for tens of thousands of LA residents who aren't worth hundreds of millions of dollars or selling out stadiums.

But that’s not what makes her famous (fans don’t say, “oh that rich chick”) Just as George Foreman’s claim to fame isn’t coming from a poor family (though he did).

I don’t think anyone is disagreeing. But that’s not what “claim to fame” means.

Isn't it relevant, though? It seems like a potentially beneficial part of the path to having a claim at all.

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