WATCH the viral video that left Taylor Swift ‘speechless’

It’s tempting to dismiss Ryan Adam’s reworking of Taylor Swift’s 1989 as nothing more than a cheap trick, a symptom of an oversaturated media culture rapidly consuming itself. She’s a millionaire, and she’s friends with Lena Dunham, but there are also a lot of things that she can’t do.

Swift changed her costume nearly a dozen times. There couldn’t be any more reason for popstar Swift to feel elated right now. The whole lead-up was a welcome bout of earnestness and palpable excitement to see what Adams would do, so much so that it even (however momentarily) made slogging through Adams’ Instagram worthwhile. (Big Break Records), the 2012 re-release of ‘Til Tuesday’s 1985 debut Voices Carry (Hot Shot Records), and many others. It’s still kind of unclear whether it’s even partly meant to be a joke or not, but that’s not true of Father John Misty’s version of the same album – an explicit troll of Adams, presented as a “reinterpretation of Ryan Adams’ classic album 1989” (a description made in tweets that have since been deleted, along with the Soundcloud links). All You Had to Do Was Stay recalls Dancing in the Dark, while Swift’s ubiquitous smash hit Shake It Off becomes a low-down dirty I’m on Fire.

Both were completely sold out (or close), and both drew crowds that demonstrated how Swift’s popularity has spread far beyond the target of her music: pre-teen and adolescent girls enduring the tribulations of pubescence.

Ultimately the best part of Adams’ 1989 isn’t the music itself, but the atmosphere leading up to its release and the experience of coming together and listening to it, all of us and Taylor herself on Twitter at once.

Frankly, it seems a little odd to me that an artist as widely known and revered as singer-song writer musician Ryan Adams would ever determine to take on an artist as widely known and revered as a singer-song writer musician Taylor Swift. “I like to cover songs that people might deem uncoverable”. And when Adams invokes his own past, in slightly twangy takes like “Wildest Dreams“, he’s drawing a thread between rock’s modern patriarchs and his own generation, reminding listeners that even upstarts like Mould, Paul Westerberg and Adams himself benefited from the enduring rock truism that testosterone enables seriousness. Mandolin replaces the “Vienna”-style synth portents of Swift’s version of “Out of the Woods“, while the acoustic strumming on which his version of “Bad Blood” is built suits lines like “What was all shiny, now it’s all rusted”.

Todrick Hall now has his own show on MTV in America, and his YouTube channel – which is home to many a viral video – has got over 1.7 million subscribers.

New albums released this month from Lana Del Rey, Disclosure, Prince, Duran Duran, Don Henley, Keith Richards, Leona Lewis, Tamar Braxton and more will all be eligible.