VOf all the outrageously successful things that Taylor Swift has achieved in her not so long life and her 16-year career, this one is particularly remarkable: With her current album “Midnights” it is the thirty-two-year-old as the first person ever managed to occupy the first ten places on the American Billboard charts, all ten songs are from “Midnights”, which was released on October 21st.
“10 out of 10 on the Hot 100? From my tenth album?” Swift wrote on Twitter, followed by something that is difficult to translate: “I AM IN SHAMBLES”, so she’s in pieces, probably shattered with happiness or shock or humility.
No album has been streamed so many times
Anyone who now thinks that Swift is actually only read in connection with some record breaking is not wrong. A few other successes that Swift have recently achieved: “Midnights” is their first album, which also made it to number one in the German album charts. “Midnights” was streamed more often on the streaming service Spotify within a day than any previous album, as Spotify announced.
It also made her the most streamed artist in one day in Spotify history. Since her album Fearless, released in 2008, every Swift album has shot to number one on the American album charts. Swift, who just received an honorary doctorate from New York University this year and has sold more than 200 million records, has built on previous success with these latest records.
So why is Swift so particularly successful? First of all, because it is so particularly good. Point. “There’s no limit to where she can go from here” wrote Rolling Stone in 2015 about Swift; At that time, the singer landed in the ranking of the 100 best songwriters of all time by the music magazine at number 97.
That would probably look different today, because Rolling Stone was right with its forecast: Successful albums like “Red” or “1989” were followed by the album “Folklore”, for which Taylor Swift together with the producer Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner won the prestigious Grammy for Album of the Year. Since this album at the latest, one can confidently put the artist in the top ten of the best songwriters of all time, as well as the “Rolling Stone”.
Taylor Swift kept going and delivering, not only breaking more and more first-hand records, but also writing songs that put fingers in wounds, that pierced the heart, that managed to describe the one thing we all always feel, but could never put into words as well as Swift: Zeitgeist.
She herself has become part of the zeitgeist and becomes so with every album, she is pop culture in its purest form, entire columns are written about individual lines of her songs in English-language arts pages – most recently with a line from her latest hit “Anti-Hero”, which mystically reads “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby and I’m a monster on the hill”. In the same hit, Swift also sings, “It’s me! Hi! I’m the problem, it’s me.” And there’s no other way to justify her insane success: It’s her.
