A welcome cultural shift? Taylor Swift’s pro-natalist Wishlist

Pop culture has been hopelessly degenerate for decades—a big part of the problem. Taylor Swift seems to want to change that.

Taylor Swift’s Wish List

Taylor Swift just dropped the most aggressively natalist pop song ever. Wish List isn’t about forgoing yachts and Oscars and rejecting the glamorous life to embrace “simplicity.” It mocks going off the grid and childless celebrities who treat their dogs like substitutes for offspring.

It’s about marriage, homeownership, and procreation. She puts down the glittering set of celebrity ambitions and says: give me a basketball hoop in the driveway and a cul-de-sac dynasty.

Taylor’s wish list:

I just want you, huh (You, you, yeah)
Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you
We tell the world to leave us the f— alone, and they do (Oh), wow
Got me dreaming about a driveway with a basketball hoop (Hoop)
Boss up, settle down, got a wish list

And she sings it like this is the height of rebellion. Because it is.

Not long ago, conservatives joked that the fastest way to revive American fertility would be for Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce to get married and start producing heirs. Suddenly, she’s writing the soundtrack. Keep in mind, no one really knows why the Baby Boom happened in the 1950s. One factor was a labor market in which demand for workers outstripped supply. Another was a cultural embrace of family life and a celebration of domesticity.

Wish List may be the first pop song in decades to make the American Dream sound cool again. Privacy, kids, driveway sports equipment — it’s radical in its normalcy. The closest precedent is the Beach Boys’ Wouldn’t It Be Nice. But that one only dreamt of marriage. Swift goes further. She wants children. She wants enough kids—or maybe cousins also—that the neighborhood looks like Travis. The world is tilting.