Tuesday is a big day, Internet. It has nothing to do with Drake, the start of the NBA season, the World Series, or the 2016 Presidential election. On Tuesday, we celebrate a very special anniversary: Exactly one year ago, social media sensation Taylor Swift released 1989.
I can’t even believe we have to work today. Are schools open? They shouldn’t be. There’s definitely no mail being delivered today, although, in all fairness, that could be unrelated.
While we could spend all day basking in the perpetual radiance and warming glow of the album, all while devouring hordes of thinkpieces outlining all of the wonderful ways 1989 has changed the way we live our lives and altered the pop culture landscape, I thought another course of action was worth pursuing. What if 1989 was never released? What kind dystopian pile of monkey dung would we be living in if we had never been graced with Swift’s surprising turn toward pop superstardom? Would we still have the Internet, happiness, joy, Instagram? Would we still have laughter? Would we even consider shaking it off when times got tough? Dear God, just the thought of a world without 1989 is enough to give a grown man nightmares.
So, here are 10 ways the world would have been different this past year if 1989 had never been released.
- Bridesmaids would have had nothing to dance to and sing along to at your cousin’s wedding.
- The phrase “this sick beat” would still be up for grabs for whoever wants to trademark it. I’m looking at you, Macklemore. You know you want it.
- Poor Ryan Adams. He would have had to spend his downtime covering someone else’s album. Which one, though? Funny you should ask.
- No one would know just how magical and wonderful New York City is. They’d still just think of it as a dangerous place where you get fondled by Iron Man in Times Square and have your pizza stolen by a rat. Oh, wait.
- #squad would have just been sitting there, waiting for the marketing team for Suicide Squad to make it all theirs.
- HAIM’s year would have consisted of performing “The Wire” at radio festivals, making scrap books, dating a Jonas brother and lounging on a boat that looked less this and more like this.
- An Ariana Grande corn maze isn’t nearly as exciting as a Taylor Swift corn maze. I mean, that’s just a fact. A Drake corn maze would really just be kind of sad, and a The Weeknd corn maze would feature veiled references to your past drug use, but man, it would make you wanna dance!
- You’d be pretty happy with how your Fourth of July BBQ turned out and not at all feeling slightly less patriotic and less of a good ol’ red-blooded American because it didn’t feature not even one world-famous model in an inflatable swan. I mean, you didn’t even have a Scottish-born DJ at yours, and you know what? You would have thought that was a perfectly reasonable decision made on your part.
- Poor musicians the world over would be feeling the effects of Apple Music’s policy to not pay them during the initial three-month free trial. As a result, tours would be cancelled, merchandise pulled from shelves and musicians would be occupying the bulk of space at your neighborhood shelter. The only artists that would survive would be the self-sustaining ones – the hippie bands who make a living off of touring, and the indie rockers who survive thanks to fans who actually buy their vinyl. Kanye would make it, but only because the money made from his fashion career supports his fledgling music career. But just barely.
- I don’t like someone, but I just don’t know how to explain it. If only there was a phrase I could use to accurately sum up how I feel about both that person and our relationship. It’s like, we have beef, but beef doesn’t feel the right word. We have, like, this thing between us and, you know, it’s not good. I just don’t know how to describe it. Such a bummer.
But thankfully, all of those things are hypothetical scenarios. 1989 was released and, yeah, it made the world a better place, a delightfully sweet world where we shake off our problems and attribute our issues with someone to us having bad blood with them. We lived vicariously through Swift’s Instagram, instantly feeling better about our lives because she feels so flippin’ great about hers, and we ooh’d and ahh’d at every one of her “friends” she brought on stage with her during one of her concerts. We called our own friends our squad, and we even pretended to like Ed Sheeran because Taylor Swift likes Ed Sheeran, and if Tay Tay likes something, it’s most definitely worth liking.
It’s been a good year. It could have been a terrible year, but it wasn’t. And we have only one person to thank.
