TAYLOR SWIFT - Midnights LP (colour vinyl)

Blood Moon + Jade Green colour vinyl editions.

You remember my step-daughter Lucinda from her recent Top 11 video that went viral? She will sing Swift songs in the shower but when she gets in the car for the journey to school, she'd much rather hear Jay Reatard, The Undertones, Cowboys, Sloan or Neko Case.

Waleed Aly wrote an interesting article for The Age recently, titled 'Enemies they may be, Taylor Swift and Donald Trump have a lot in common'.

He writes, "Billionaires were never popular, but they are almost reflexively reviled today in our time of rising inequality. Politicians profit from attacking them. Cultural artefacts such as Succession and White Lotus reflect our fascination with, but also disdain for the super-rich...

I got halfway to thinking Taylor Swift is a rare exception to this rule. Then I recalled two other crowds I’ve experienced in which ordinary people find themselves utterly in the thrall of hugely wealthy objects of devotion.

The first is a Donald Trump rally. The second is almost any massive sporting event: you can choose whichever you wish, really, but for the purposes of highlighting the wealth disparity, think of something like the Super Bowl or the Premier League. In all cases, the alienation that usually attaches to inequality gives way to a soul-deep sense of identification. Love - even intoxication - eclipses envy.

These might seem odd words to use of a Trump rally, which appears more framed by animosity. But my biggest surprise when I attended one was that the feeling in the air wasn’t nearly as septic as I’d expected. Here, too, the energy was overwhelmingly positive, even as the rhetoric was negative. The people were warm, excited and cheerful, not grizzled and aggressive. One teenage girl, her face adorned with glitter and a beaming smile, spoke to me wearing a “Hillary for Prison 2016” T-shirt with an incongruous lightness. If you told me she was a Swiftie, I would’ve wholeheartedly believed you."