Your past and mine are parallel lines

Taylor and Beyoncé go to the Grammys

YouTube

I have just learned that there is a kind of biography called “parallel lives”. These types of life stories pair two famous people from different backgrounds but who are more alike than different. Or at any rate, destiny conspires to give them similar fates. My thoughts went immediately to the twin stars of the pop universe, Taylor and Beyoncé. They’ve walked the same red carpets for decades, and dealt with the same industry and the exact same annoying men. They both care about the music but also the money and the accolades. They are the ones who rose up way beyond the Katys into the untouchable A-list where there’s no such thing as a flop era, just “fan favourites”. But a parallel biography would also have to trace their very different appearances on the Grammys Album of the Year Wikipedia page. One singer regularly needs a new shelf for her golden gramophones. The other is defined by a career of near misses - until now. Being nominated is not the point. No one remembers who comes second, unless they’re Beyoncé.

This year’s Grammys hit different. For a start, it celebrated one of the greatest years in pop music ever. 2024 gave us an absolute smorgasbord of treats from the only genre that matters - music made by women. Amazing-to-decent albums from Taylor, Beyoncé, Sabrina, Ariana, Billie, Charli, Camila Cabello (don’t sleep on this), and for a bit of crunch, not-decent records from Katy Perry and Dua Lipa. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! But to be a stan was very heaven!!

This past weekend, we saw Taylor show up for a game she’d already lost. Not even the most delusional Swiftie (me) thought there was a Grammy in Taylor’s 2025 draft. It was not a slamdunk! And there endeth my American sports vocabulary. I never thought for a moment that the epic, downbeat TTPD was in with a shot for AOTY. A lot was said about The Tortured Poets Department being wordy and too-long when it came out (read my review here) and the critics all gave it 5 stars out of fear while fundamentally saying that Taylor had failed to hit the cultural centre. Compare and contrast with Brat, which did what a pop album should: piss you off with its ubiquity. All of my own takes from last year are still correct except for when I compared TTPD to a “Drake mixtape”. What I meant was that TTPD is so long it seems that Taylor kept in everything and let the people decide. This means that But Daddy I Love Him and The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived became instant fan favourites (to the guy I saw with the entire Smallest Man bridge written out on his t-shirt, I’m sorry for what you went through). Meanwhile the only context in which I’ve heard someone mention Robin or Peter is as secret songs they hoped they didn’t get. It’s interesting that after the critical establishment had deeply questioned whether albums could survive as a format, they came roaring back in 2024. Yes, we can curate our own versions of albums from a huge number of tracks, but do we want to? In a world where everything feels fragmented, from my ability to focus to the plastic that now lives in my brain (related problems?), I personally want to know we’re talking about the same Track 5.

A Taylor album cycle normally isn’t complete until we see how many Grammys she gets for it. We know from Miss Americana that she used to see the Grammys as a referendum on the quality of her album. When Lover wasn’t nominated she declared she “just needed to write a better album”. Taylor can now take a wider view on whether her albums are important or not, whether they have legacies. Red was the highest-placed of her records in the Rolling Stone top 500 greatest albums of time. Lover is her biggest streaming smash and the people are never wrong. Maybe she has relaxed a little bit over awards. Or possibly she’s awake at 2am staring at the AOTY Wikipedia page while clutching a wine with ice, who can say.

Taylor’s last plausible shocked face, Grammys 2010. Via YouTube

A little Knowlesian Theory: Taylor and Beyoncé haven’t directly competed for AOTY since the notorious 2009/10 awards year. Taylor won her first Album of the Year for Fearless in 2010. She was in an overlapping album cycle with Beyoncé, who was promoting I am…Sasha Fierce. You may remember that it was while Taylor was being presented with her VMA for “Best Female Video” for You Belong With Me that Kanye West invaded the stage to say that Beyoncé should have won for Single Ladies. He shouldn’t have done it, but he was right on the merits. You couldn’t say the same for Fearless winning AOTY over I Am… Sasha Fierce. If any Beyhive want to set me straight I’ll submit humbly but I doubt it’s anyone’s favourite Bey album. It was a weak year overall: other nominees included The Black Eyed Peas, Dave Matthews Band and Gaga with The Fame. I don’t think Fearless would have won against the 2009 class, which had great country albums in Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, and a Lady A record. And by 2011 Taylor’s pop peers were peaking: Gaga had raised her game in the form of The Fame Monster. Katy Perry campaigned Teenage Dream and lost to Arcade Fire. So apparently someone does remember who came second!

Taylor and Beyoncé don’t compete again for AOTY until 2025. Red gets beaten by Daft Punk (fair as it’s not like Grammy voters disproportionately favour dance music) but 1989 wins against Kendrick Lamar; folklore has no serious rivals for best/only pandemic album unless you count Future Nostalgia, and Midnights ends up being the Grammy voters’ female singer-songwriter choice over Olivia Rodrigo and SZA. Beyoncé has an unluckier run, coming up against artists the Grammys just have an unfightable crush on, like Adele, and some men. Bey’s self-titled is one of her most incredible bodies of work and she lost to Beck doing the genre “skididdlyboop” on Morning Phase. Renaissance is Renaissance and I still can’t believe I am living in a timeline where she lost that AOTY to actual Harry’s House, an album that seems to have read the Wikipedia page on “Funk music” and decided that was enough musical knowledge. An album that sounds like Morning Phase but for supermarket radio. An album that decided to test the goodwill of the most lenient fandom on earth with lyrics like “choke her with a seaview”. An album that not even its artist seems to especially enjoy his lived experience of. An album called Someone’s House that contains No Houses. The Grammys found something precious and beautiful, Harry Styles, and took the bit too far.

Meanwhile, Taylor had finessed her way around various AOTY-threatening lasers such as Adele and Billie Eilish. Having four AOTYs already is part of why Taylor was able to show up “just for fun” on Sunday to show support for her parallel life twin. But I’d also like us to credit her with some good grace. If you knew you were running your weakest single ever against the best diss track since Mean, would you show up to clap politely while Kendrick Lamar brings the house down around you? Your dry industry executives suddenly caring about music at your personal Grammy awards? The main aim of all nights out is to look hot and have a drink, categories in which Taylor excels. She looked stupendous in slinky red Vivienne Westwood. But we’ll remember her contribution to the 67th Grammys mainly for her ability to sit back and let someone else have their moment. Popstar confidence comes with monstrous self-importance and an obsession with image. I can’t even imagine the calculations that go into how to dress, where to be seen, how much to smile or not smile. But Taylor uses her image to model decency. As always, she danced and sang along to every performance while the boring-ass crowd mostly stared on blankly. Imagine being Charli singing Guess and looking out on a crowd of Brads Chads and dads checking their Apple watches and wondering if their crypto stocks are up now Trump is president. The Grammys shouldn’t matter - only the people consuming the clips after should matter. But we have to have the ceremony to get the clips.

I believe in the respect between Taylor and Beyoncé. It’s always good to know there’s someone out there who gets you. I’d like to think I could show up to congratulate my greatest professional rival on their crowning achievement but I’m not a diplomat the way Taylor is. It’s one thing when your greatest professional rival is just some guy with floppy hair, but what if it was Beyoncé? It would be hard to keep the lid on the boil of your jealousy. Taylor’s good-girl nature means she’s always in a battle with herself over whether to do the polite thing or the right thing. On this occasion, it was both. But nothing comes without a price when you support other people. Tree Paine has already had to confirm today that “Blake and Taylor are fine”. Beyoncé is not only putting Taylor’s name into the same headlines as men who hurt women, she’s insisting she loves them and she’ll remain married to them forever. She’s naming her AOTY “Cowboy [Married Name]” after them. Jay-Z had better keep on Kendrick’s good side if he doesn’t want there to be a number 1 hit all about his own abuse of A Minorrrrrrrrrr. I get why Taylor smiled and clinked glasses with him during Beyoncé’s acceptance speech. We’ve all had to keep up a polite façade around the husbands and boyfriends of women we love and admire.

When you intertwine your life with someone, it can get cringe sometimes. At least Taylor isn’t in the trenches defending a dodgy husband with her life, although we know she would do it, plus I had a dream that she got married to Travis on a football field. Even though she is a 1/1, Taylor has always been enmeshed with other artists. Some of them are the Jonas Brothers and some are Kanye West. She floats right in the middle of the celebrities, the music establishment, the batshit renegades and the smooth alien cube that is Beyoncé. The index of Taylor’s life story will have a lot of entries for the ur-popstar, no matter what happens in their careers going forward. And although this Grammys felt like a victory lap for the millennial pop survivors, there was a big neon sign hanging over Sabrina Carpenter’s head saying “this way for pop’s future!” Rather than running parallel, I feel like Taylor and Bey might finally head off in their own directions.