Take it from a music-blogging Kansas City Chiefs fan: This Taylor Swift thing is a turn for the surreal

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Several weeks after it began … what is all this, really? Will we get an album from Taylor Swift in the next few years about what CTE does to a man? Catchin’ and rushin’ to a concussion, think the gray matter’s mushin’…

Since about 1988, I’ve been a Kansas City Chiefs fan. In that time, the Chiefs have been a lot of things: a good but perennial also-ran in the 1990s, generally a non-factor and even a sometimes-laughingstock in the 2000s, and now the game’s best team year in and year out. They’ve won two Super Bowls in four seasons and hosted five straight AFC Championship games. Their fanbase – driven to palpable cynicism in previous decades – is generally happy now. Their brand is on rock-solid ground.

But one thing the Chiefs have never been in that time is Hollywood, or glitz beyond the realm of athletic stardom – to any degree, really.

So the emergence of the world’s biggest pop star in their world – in my world, I’ll be solipsistic enough to say – is, frankly, surreal. It’s an upset of the natural order. It’s a Good Samaritan intervening to save a moth from a spider web. It’s one of the six different timelines from a particularly memorable and insane episode of “Community.”

The rumors of Swift and superstar tight end Travis Kelce dating had been going on for a couple of weeks or so before Swift’s surprise appearance at the Chiefs’ home game against the Chicago Bears three Sundays ago. But the emergence of one of the music world’s most recognizable faces, standing next to Kelce’s mother in an Arrowhead Stadium suite that day, was the beginning of a does-not-compute era that’s ongoing. Swift following Kelce to New York for the next game against the Jets – with friends like Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds and Antoni Porowski  in tow – just added to the fever dream.

For a non-Chiefs fan, a very casual Chiefs fan, and/or one who’s not a music blogger, perhaps this whatever-it-is between the two isn’t such a weird injection of (very) popular culture into sports. Swift’s famous, Kelce’s famous – it happens. Except, when the Chiefs occupy a bountiful slab of your life, and music also does, that’s just not the way to see it.

Relationships with mega-pop stars, or mega-celebs outside the music world, aren’t for Chiefs. They’re for Cowboy quarterbacks, or guys who win seven Super Bowls, or maybe a New York Giant. “New man on the Minnesota Vikings” seems a little more in the ballpark of what we have here, but that most likely just emerged because it made for a pretty good half-rhyme. This was essentially a zero-to-60 transformation. Beyond Patrick Mahomes and Kelce hobnobbing with stars at the celeb golf Pro-Ams, the Chiefs went from basically no external celebrity footprint to having the biggest American pop star in the world in their orbit. It’s weird. This is weird.

Safe to say, my leanings slot me well short of Swiftie credentials. I’ve never centered an Ear Traffic blog entry on her music. Folklore was a fairly excellent album, but beyond that, there are a handful of pop stars whom I believe should be bigger who aren’t. When it comes to her worldwide conquest, and the fascination with her love life and her use of it as a musical springboard, it’s safe to say I’ve never quite “gotten it.” But regardless of any of that, she is the world’s biggest pop star, joining my team’s entourage and, it seems, bringing an entourage of her own.

It’s not a bad thing – at least not yet, because the Chiefs are 2-0 with Swift in the building, 3-0 since all this started. But there’s a Charlie Kaufman quality to the whole thing. I’ll be squinting at the world for awhile until it’s over or until I get used to this, whichever comes first.