Taylor Swift managed to drive record-breaking numbers to voter registration website Vote.org after urging her 232 million followers on Instagram to take action.
On Tuesday (19 September), hours after the pop star, 32, called on her US fanbase to register to vote in honour of National Voter Registration Day, Vote.org’s communication director, Nick Morrow, announced that “our site was averaging 13,000 users every 30 minutes”.
“Fun fact: after @taylorswift13 posted on Instagram today directing her followers to register to vote on @votedotorg, our site was averaging 13,0000 users every 30 minutes,” Morrow wrote on X/Twitter.
“13! Let’s just say her reputation for being a mastermind is very well-earned.”
Earlier that day, the “Anti-Hero” singer had posted to her Story, asking followers: “Are you registered to vote yet?
To some extent, sure. However, I also think people grow out of music as well, at least I have.
For example, I used to love Dashboard Confessional, Plain White Ts, and Modest Mouse as a kid (went to concerts for the first two), but these days I rarely listen to any of them, and certainly not Dashboard Confessional. These days, I’m into very different music, like The Interrupters, The Hu, and apparently a lot of classic rock (from before I was born, and after my parents’ generation).
I’m pretty much right in the age range for Taylor Swift (I’m in my 30s), but I and pretty much everyone else I interact with (professionals in an office setting) don’t listen to anything from the era we grew up in. I even have a sizeable CD collection that I haven’t touched in over a decade that sits in storage with my other things from childhood.
My parents listened to music from their era all throughout my childhood and through to today, but I guess I never got nostalgic for it and listen to anything from the 50s to today, though I have trouble finding any pop music from any era after Michael Jackson that I actually like anymore.
It’s a bit of a downer but being in my 40s now, and talking to my siblings and peers, the almost universal call of nostalgia doesn’t really hit until after you’ve lost people, and depending how close they were to you = duh.
I can’t listen to Led Zeppelins Physical Graffiti without thinking of my dad the entire time. Same goes for Pink Floyd’s Meddle and The Final Cut. All three albums I listen too from front to back, at minimum once a year, on what would be his birthday.
My experience is far from singular, in my circles apparently the norm, so theres something for you to set aside for later.
Some of the tropes about aging are true. I AM more patient, understanding and forgiving now, and I’m grateful for all that as well.
I am not however, and if anything I’ve swung hard the other way, growing more conservative. I was raised on the lie of Meritocracy, the looting from economic Neo-liberalism, Orwellian language from deceitful institutions (Department of Defense instead of War - they changed it in 1946, Department of Justice - as much as you can afford anyway, “Protect and Serve” - the property owners, not the community, or guarding food laden dumpsters during the pandemic so people can get free food. Fucking EVIL). I’ve watched everyone get more poor and normal social reinvestment, think infrastructure, slow to a crawl and now everything is falling apart. Inflation is a lie, it’s a tool used to destroy any savings we might have stashed away from the greedy, cancer class.
Retirement is a carrot in a stick. We won’t have it, if this round of inflation doesn’t make that obvious. Idk why my parents and then Gen X aren’t up in fucking arms that bc if inflation their hourly now is most likely the same value or less their wage when they started working. How do you go your whole life without a raise? Just to get your retirement stolen inches from the end?
Better to die on your feet than live on yr knees. My retirement is dying in the revolution.
I hope to watch it all die a swift, permanent and unresurrectable death.
Lol. I clearly missed the growing more conservative memo. Like, if we were to start over, from scratch, almost no part of society would we remake how it is now. That’s all the surmising I need.