Clueless UWS Boomer Enlists Savvy UWS 9-Year-Old to Teach Her About Taylor Swift

By Andrea Sachs

I have two grand passions: politics and music.

I pride myself on keeping up-to-speed on all matters electoral. As the consummate political junkie, these are my glory days.

Likewise, I’ve always loved listening to music and following the lives of the musically exciting. I grew up in Detroit, after all, Motown, where all the legends came to play. I saw Jimi Hendrix in his prime!

But I won’t lie to you. When it comes to contemporary pop music, I’m not quite caught up. In fact, I’ve been living in a Boomer bubble for years. Truth be told, many of my musical faves are headlining the obituary pages these days.

My two enthusiasms collided last Tuesday night with a flash of long-overdue insight. I was hosting a presidential-debate party on West 72nd Street. Moments after the candidates left the stage, lines of type sped across the bottom of the screen announcing that pop superstar Taylor Swift had just endorsed Kamala Harris. “I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them,” Swift declared In an Instagram post. My guests were transfixed. The TV anchors went wild. I was left with the question, Why don’t I know more about Taylor Swift?

As a childless cat lady, I don’t have offspring to propel me into this decade. So, I did the next best thing: I enlisted a neighbor, a savvy nine-year-old Upper West Sider, to give me a Taylor Swift tutorial. Miranda (a pseudonym at the request of her parents), told me that she had learned about Swift “in the beginning of second grade” from a friend. Confidently, she rattled off the elementary-school version of the singer’s vita: “Taylor has written 256 songs. She grew up on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania. She’s a singer because her grandmother was an opera singer who sang to Taylor when she was little.” Miranda’s favorite song? “Message in a Bottle.”

My nine-year-old tutor proudly announced, “I have a 14-hour-long playlist on Spotify that’s all Taylor Swift songs. I listen to it on car rides to keep me from getting nauseous.” Like many other pint-sized UWS Swifties, she possesses treasured items of merch like a Taylor Swift hoodie and poster, and wears bracelets that say TAYLOR on them. “I want more!” she said with youthful consumer enthusiasm.

Swift’s election endorsement is nowhere on Miranda’s radar. While UWS-kids are typically wise beyond their years, Miranda is much too young to care about voting. She knows plenty about Swift’s boyfriend, though. “His name is Travis Kelce, and he’s a football player for the Kansas City Chiefs,” she said.

Miranda confided that she would love to go to a Taylor Swift concert, “100 percent…110 percent!” But tickets are so expensive, she said, “every time I ask my dad, he says I can either go to a concert or go to college.”

I discovered in the following days that a Martian landing on the White House lawn wouldn’t have gotten more attention in the press than Swift’s endorsement. It had already led more than 400,000 Swifties to visit Vote.gov to learn how to register to vote. The superstar’s bank account is also part of her story: Bloomberg and Forbes place Swift’s personal net worth at an estimated $1.1 billion. That’s a fraction of the billions of dollars she and her Eras tour have brought to countries around the world. As my bubbe would have said, this is a girl with a business head.

But what about the music? On my current list of things to do, as soon as I figure out what Spotify is, is to assemble my own Taylor Swift playlist. It’s time for me to listen in.

That said, I’m not going to be donning a Taylor Swift bracelet anytime soon. I’m going to stay in the Boomer lane and stick with the (admittedly saggy) Woodstock crowd. After all, “we are stardust, we are golden.” Anyone in the mood to streak?

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