Taylor Swift has expanded her realm beyond the nothingness, becoming the Instagram filter through which all space and time must flow by taking on dual roles as the Global Welcome Ambassador for New York City and the headliner for ABC’s annual, Ryan Seacrest-hosted New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. So let it be written: As the world prepares to enter New York or 2015, it must first pass through the gatekeeper that is Taylor Swift, who bridges the divide between past and future, Hoboken and Manhattan. Taylor Swift is everywhere, particularly if it is in the general area of Times Square.
Swift—a Pennsylvania native who forged her country music career in Nashville—is an obvious candidate to welcome any visiting globes to New York, seeing as she purchased a $20 million penthouse there this past April. Since then, she has allowed New York to seep into her very being, becoming intimately familiar with the city known for being crowded with coat-clad people with hearts. This is heard in Swift’s recent single, “Welcome To New York”:
Walking through a crowd
The village is aglow
Kaleidoscope of loud heartbeats
Under coats
Everybody here wanted something more
Searching for a sound we hadn’t heard before
And it said, “Welcome to New York”
In addition to forcing all New Yorkers to hum this, the city’s new anthem, at all times, lest they face the NYPD’s controversial “stop-and-Swift,” Taylor Swift’s new ambassadorial duties include making a series of tourist videos about the real New York, as only a real, multimillionaire twentysomething who just moved there can show you. In them, she schools New York neophytes on tricky New York words like “bodega” and “stoop,” and how to pronounce “Houston Street.” (It’s not like the city!)
She also discusses some of the many things that New York has to offer that only real New Yorkers will understand, like really good lattes and walking around the East Village. “No one does it better than New York,” Swift says of New York doing these sorts of New York things. To experience some of them, Swift also suggests “just picking a neighborhood and walking around,” preferably with your enormous security staff in tow.
“The day kind of just happens in New York,” says Swift of all the crazy things that can happen, as you carefully pick your way through a series of prearranged, pre-screened activities across a narrowly defined part of the city, before returning to your luxury apartment.
It’s unknown whether Swift will make a similar video welcoming viewers to the New Year, or whether we’ll be forced to bumble around 2015 trying to find our own lattes.