Taylor Swift turns 33: this is how she became a pop icon of a generation

Taylor Swift He turned 33 this Tuesday. The singer, songwriter, celebrity, friend of the stars, and also a pop icon, has been able to combine mass success with recognition of her work.

The artist’s last major public appearance was on Saturday, December 10 at Preservation Hall, a traditional establishment dedicated to jazz music in New Orleans, United States. Curiously, hardly anyone noticed her presence. She was accompanied by her partner, actor Joe Alwyn, who is in town to shoot a movie for director Yorgos Lanthimos.

This sighting comes after the singer won every award she was nominated for at the American Music Awards (AMAs), including Artist of the Year, Best Pop Album and Best Music Video.

“Thank you, highlighted with thirteen exclamation points. I don’t know what to say. I love you! ”, Swift expressed when receiving the recognitions from her at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, California.

From her early days as a teen country singer to her global coronation, here are some of the milestones that mark Swift’s 33rd birthday:

The singer who defined a decade

It’s impossible to remember this decade without Taylor Swift. And to Swift without traveling 10 years ago until the 2009 MTV awards gala. There, without wanting to, the singer -at that time unknown to the masses- starred in one of the most repeated moments of the pop imagination: When she collected her first MTV Kanye award West interrupted his speech to say that Beyoncé deserved that award.

Precisely, years after that show, and with many more awards under her belt, the artist was the star of the 2019 American Music Awards at a gala that crowned her as the “artist of the decade”.

That decade has seen Swift shed the label of “country girl” to conquer the world, which she put to dance with “Shake it Off”, to sing of heartbreak with “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and to enjoy of his polemics with West in “Look What You Made Me Do.”

And it is that in this time, the star has managed to make her pop an instrument with which to satisfy the most critical -hers are two prestigious Grammys for album of the year-, and also those who rejoice in the gossip of celebrities – his breakup with Calvin Harris or confrontations with the Kardashians have been recurring inspirations.

A voice for the present moment

swift He has taken advantage of his position as a global star to be a speaker for social causes or to position himself politically. As she has grown, the singer has left behind that suspicion, criticized in the American creative world, that she was an accomplice of conservative elites to openly support feminist positions and call for tolerance towards the LGTB collective.

“I don’t think a man is asked about this when he turns 30”, Swift recently responded when in an interview they questioned if, for her birthday, the time had come to “focus and start a family”.”You don’t have to ask that just because she’s in her twenties and she’s a woman.”, he said when defending that women “are more than baby incubators”.

Nor should we forget his LGBT anthem “You Need to Calm Down”, in which he literally asks the intolerant “to calm down” because “hate never made anyone less gay”, with a launch that was accompanied by donations to charities and a petition to approve the “Equality Act”, an amendment that would constitutionally prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or identity.

His crusade against the dark side of music

This year has been especially intense for the artist, since due to a series of legal problems with her old music label, she does not own the rights to her old recordings. She herself revealed it in a publication entitled “I don’t know what else to do anymore”, in which she recognized the difficulties in interpreting her songs during her own tribute due to a conflict with the businessmen Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta, who bought for about 300 million dollars. dollars (270 million euros) his old record company, Big Machine Label.

The young singer owns the lyrics but not the recordings, which is why she announced in 2019 that she would re-record her first five albums starting in November 2020 to recover her music.

celebrity magnet

During all this time, Swift has been a magnet for criticism but also for defenders and friends. The star has known how to surround herself with a large group of singers, models, actresses… who have made her a kind of epicenter where the most prominent personalities in entertainment arrive.

The models Cara Delevingne and Gigi Hadid, the actress Emma Stone and the singers Halsey and Selena Gómez, whom she applauded as one more fan on her return to the stage, form a group known as Taylor’s “squad”, her battalion. Swift He has ironized several times about that nickname, as with the accusation of being a snake or his alleged feuds against divas like Katy Perry. A varied show about how Taylor turns 30 showing that she handles the complex and surreal world of pop to perfection.

(Source: EFE)