Pop culture is becoming clearer and clearer.
Although the internet promised in its optimistic early days that everyone could find publicity as an artist and possibly become successful, and although streaming platforms today promise that the entire history of music is available on them with one click, few names seem to really stick .
Only a few bands or singers are really big enough to fill large stadiums for several years or even decades, and only a few permanently establish themselves at the top of the sales charts.
When it does succeed, it is often with the support of a PR machine that constantly generates messages from the world of these stars, until Kanye West and Taylor Swift dominate all channels.
The grotesque provisional climax of this escalation is the news that Swift, as it became known on Monday, now occupies the top ten spots on the American "Billboard Hot 100" sales charts at the same time.
What initially sounds like an Orwellian or Huxleyian fantasy becomes effortless reality in the late stages of the culture industry: led by the song "Anti-Hero" at number one, the following nine top-ranking tracks also come from Swift's new album "Midnights".
Nobody had set such a record since the introduction of the hot hundred in 1958.
Flirt with the bad guy
Now, unlike West, Swift can't be said to have a tendency towards scandals if you don't find frequent flying or a music video in which scales indicate the word "fat" scandalous - the video has since been cleaned up after "fat shaming" allegations.
Born in eastern Pennsylvania in 1989, Taylor Swift understood very early on how to write successful songs. She had a music publishing deal by the age of fourteen and, after her first successes in country, was smart enough to break the boundaries of genres.
Meanwhile, her music is neither particularly good nor particularly bad, while on the album covers, in music videos and in her lyrics she tries to shatter her clinging image of cuteness through cautious flirtation with the wicked.
The songs on "Midnights" produce, although the blues tradition resonates in the title and the lyrics deal with depression and disturbed self-perception, but neither special melancholy nor any emotional peaks.
That's not a bad thing in itself, other listeners may feel very differently.
It only arouses the need, for example in view of the blatantly unfair remuneration of most music creators in the streaming age, which has recently been proven again in a study, to continue to receive attention for the musical diversity beyond the mainstream before Taylor Swift at some point one hundred out of one hundred places on the Billboard charts occupied.