Taylor Swift: Culture, Capital, and Critique Paperback – 30 Jun. 2025 by Hannah McCann (Editor), Eloise Faichney (Editor), Rebecca Trelease (Editor), Emma Whatman (Editor), Routledge
"At the moment, it wouldn't be going too far to say [Swift] is one of the most powerful people in the world."
Georgia Carroll
How has Swift achieved such phenomenal success with albums like this? To some extent, her rise can be attributed to the persona she has cultivated, together with the music industry. In the interest of mass appeal, the singer offers something to everyone: a little bit acoustic and country, a little bit electric and urban, a soupçon of sexiness, a pinch of feminism, and a lot of spectacle. At the same time, Swift has taken pains not to offend anyone and to remain relatively “apolitical.” She won’t “corrupt the youth” or inspire critical thinking, which is music to the ears of the industry.
Eric Schreiber
“If the time becomes slothful and heavy, he [the poet] knows how to arouse it . . . he can make every word he speaks draw blood. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation, he never stagnates. Obedience does not master him; he masters it. …”
Walt Whitman
You've got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend
When I was down you just stood there grinnin'
You've got a lotta nerve to say you got a helping hand to lend
You just want to be on the side that's winnin'…
Positively 4th Street Song by Bob Dylan ‧ 1965
The essays in this book came about through a so-called Swiftposium held in Melbourne, Australia, before the start of Taylor Swift’s 2024 Eras world tour. The Symposium was the first of its kind. Its remit was an academic examination of the singer-songwriter Taylor Swift.
This, however, was not a regular academic conference. Despite the organisers going out of their way to say it was not a fan convention, it was pretty clear that the speakers and the audience had other ideas.
According to one report, “Fans were also desperate to take part, and on Sunday, hundreds of people—walking advertisements for rhinestones, cowboy boots, and Swift's signature red lip—flocked into Melbourne's iconic Capitol Theatre to hear lectures about the megastar. At a sold-out friendship bracelet-making workshop beforehand, 19-year-old Soumil says the event - run by RMIT University - is helping heal the wounds left by the ticketing bloodbath of last year, so much for academic impartiality.”
As this quote demonstrates, the degree of impartiality of these essay contributions leaves a lot to be desired . Swift fanatic Rachel Feder writes “ I was first introduced to Taylor Swift through my students, and then through my relationship with Tiffany, who grew up with the albums. She even has a picture of meeting Swift after a concert when she was 15. She's an OG Swiftie.
At the Grammys last year, when Swift announced her “Tortured Poets Department” album, Tiffany texted me, saying, “This is your album. This is your era,” because Romanticist tortured poets are my whole thing. I shot off a quick email to my editor that said, “Hey, sorry to email you at night about Taylor Swift, but do we want to do ‘A Swiftie’s Guide to Tortured Poets?’” The team had all these incredible insights on how to make it capacious, like a “Swifties’ Guide to Literature” slash “Literary Guide to Taylor Swift.” Then I brought Tiffany on board, and we wrote it so fast. We had seven weeks to do the first draft, and we got through every album before “Tortured Poets” dropped in April 2024. We experienced that album in real time, writing that chapter in two weeks, which was a nerdy, bookish Swiftie’s dream.”[1]
It does not need an academic to tell you that Swift is big business. With a fan base of over 500 million, she is the highest-earning pop star of all time and is now a billionaire and a member of the American oligarch club. Her billionaire status has largely come off the back of fairly routine and uninteresting songwriting. Swift admits that her favourite songs are the ones where she has to think.[2] If that is the case, then only two albums from her extensive catalogue, Folklore and Evermore, are worth listening to.
One thing is clear from the essays in this book and in general is that Swift is protected and defended by not only a group of fanatical academics, but she is a fully paid-up member of the #MeToo movement who defends her with vigour.
Two such fanatics, Mary Fogarty & Gina Arnold, launched an attack on the songwriter Bob Dylan, writing “Swift may be replacing Dylan feels a bit like reparations. Dylan’s work influenced a generation of singer/songwriters, as well as those who wished to write about music, rather than make it, but unfortunately, he is responsible for, among other things, a swath of material which relegates women to objects and does worse. The women of his songs, as many have noted, are, as Katrina Forrester (2020), put it, ‘Unappealing. They were clawing, childish, neurotic, and demanding, women who wanted too much or took what he didn’t want to give. The feminist invocation of Dylan inhabited the uncomfortable terrain between critique and homage: could they use his words to transcend the relations of a world that he described so well yet also embodied? When Ellen Willis (2012) later revised her classic 1967 essay on Dylan, she wrote that he exemplified the ‘bohemian contempt for women’.[3]
It is hard to know where to start with this venomous essay. My point is that Dylan had far more insight into the nature of relationships between men and women than Swift will ever have. As David Walsh writes “A perusal of Bob Dylan––Lyrics: 1962-2001, at least its first half a dozen years or so, reveals a lively imagination at work, and sometimes deep feeling. Dylan can be witty, satirical, insightful and, as well, genuinely outraged at American society’s injustices. The lyrics are capable of conveying physical and psychic longing, both for “the beloved” and for recognition by society at large.[4]
As for swift her songs the Marxist writer Eric Schreiber claims they are indistinguishable, vapid and self-centred. Instead of poetry, her lyrics resemble teenage journal verse, including the inevitable pretentiousness.
Making a further point, he writes, “Swift is best understood not as an artist but as a creation of the music industry and a reflection of the present state of cultural decline. She was born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1989. Her father is a former stockbroker for Merrill Lynch, and her mother worked as a mutual fund marketing executive. When she was growing up, Swift enjoyed the privileges of America’s financial elite. She spent summers at her family’s vacation home in Stone Harbour, New Jersey, where the median price of a house is $2.5 million.[5]
Her latest album, Life of a Showgirl, continues in the same vein as her previous work. As Alex Petridis writes in his Guardian review of Showgirl, “More startling still is the distinct lack of undeniable hooks and nailed-on melodies. The songs are well turned, but in terms of genuinely memorable moments, Showgirl evinces just one killer chorus (Elizabeth Taylor), some impressively unexpected key changes on Wi$h Li$t and the authentically heart-tugging Ruin the Friendship, which finds Swift returning to her home town for the funeral of a high school boy she regrets not dating. There’s a fantastic chord sequence on Actually Romantic, but, alas, 37 years ago, Frank Black wrote a very similar one for Where Is My Mind? by Pixies, a song you can literally sing along to Actually Romantic. The rest floats in one ear and out the other: not unpleasantly, but you might reasonably expect more given the amassed songwriting firepower behind it, and Swift’s claims of “keeping the bar really high”.[6]
Given what has happened in the world recently, you would have at least expected some form of comment to appear in her new album. Swift is an intelligent girl, but has chosen to stay silent. Again, like previous material, Life of a Showgirl deals with her feelings and past relationships. Her perspective has not matured appreciably since her early days.
Schreiber is correct when he writes, “Swift also arises out of the remarkable and ongoing monopolisation and narrowing at the top of the music industry. Record companies, artist management, broadcasting and concert ticketing and promotion, respectively, have come to be dominated by two or three corporate goliaths each. Of the 2 million artists on Spotify, less than 4 per cent account for over 95 per cent of streams. In 1982, the top 1 per cent of artists took in 26 per cent of total concert revenue; by 2017, the number was 60 per cent. In short, Swift’s great success is a symptom of the decay in popular music over the past several decades. It reflects an official culture unwilling or unable to look at itself critically and honestly.”[7]
Swift it would appear to be trapped in a prison largely of her own making. As Shakespeare writes in Hamlet ‘This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’As any great artist male or female this should be their starting point. Bob Dylan was a spokesman to a generation for a time and was true to himself. Swift has had plenty of chances to speak out against the injustices and inequality in the world but so far has chosen to stay silent. This will be the legacy of her work and she will not be able to shake this off.
Notes
1. “The Story of Us” (Taylor’s Version): Taylor Swift and Interconnections of Sociological Theory and the Music Industry- Reema Azzo
2. Are You Ready for It? Re-Evaluating Taylor Swift- Mary Fogarty & Gina Arnold
3. Left of #MeToo -Heather Berg -Feminist Studies, 2020, Vol. 46, No. 2 (2020), pp. 259-286
4. Does Bob Dylan deserve to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature? David Walsh
5. Ceasing to be the voice of a generation-Paul Bond
6. Celebrity, Music, and Public Persona: A Case Study of Taylor Swift
7. Elaina K.M. Junes Minnesota State University, Mankato
8. Campaign Problems: How Fans React to Taylor Swift’s
9. Controversial Political Awakening- Simone Driessen
10.Miss Americana: Taylor Swift as a Battleground for Feminist Discourse
11.Juliet Eklund University of Denver
12.Who Needs to Calm Down? Taylor Swift and Rainbow Capitalism Eric Smiale
13.“Blue Swift”: Popular Culture Meets Politics∗ Orestis Troumpounis† Dimitrios Xefteris November 2024
[1] www.du.edu/news/du-professor-explores-bookish-brilliance-behind-taylor-swifts-eras
[2] observer.co.uk/contributor/roisin-lanigan
[3] Are You Ready for It? Re-Evaluating Taylor Swift- Mary Fogarty & Gina Arnold
[4] Does Bob Dylan deserve to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature? www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/21/nobe-o21.html
[5] The Tortured Poets Department and the Taylor Swift phenomenon-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/21/wzwk-m21.html
[6] Taylor Swift: The Life of a Showgirl review – dull razzle-dazzle from a star who seems frazzled-www.theguardian.com/music/2025/oct/03/taylor-swift-the-life-of-a-showgirl-review
[7] The Tortured Poets Department and the Taylor Swift phenomenon-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/21/wzwk-m21.html
Some Thoughts on Art and Identity
One of the more reactionary and harmful dictums that seem prevalent in today's society is that artists should only write about their own skin colour or gender and not choose a subject, show a world or create a character that differs from the artist in skin colour or gender.
According to James McDonald in his excellent article Where is our Zola? "This position, taken up by selfish elements of the upper-middle class, ultimately boils down to a scramble for the limited number of dollars spent on Art, literature and music. "Stay in your lane" is the popularised refrain for this self-serving prescription, which is cravenly obeyed by a disturbing proportion of otherwise reputable artists.
Art is always an approximation, never fully successful, but when done well, one that embraces the otherness and the sameness of writer, reader and subject in the act of inquiry and compassion. To rope off subjects from artists is to deny the nature of Art itself and to deny activity that is fundamental to being human. A new form of censorship in publishing has accompanied the rise of identity politics. The new censors are called "sensitivity readers." Briefly, sensitivity readers function as the "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" inquisitors of the publishing industry, reading manuscripts and hunting for potentially "offensive" or "inaccurate" material. The imposition of upper-middle-class identity politics upon culture is censorious and philistine. But it is also reactionary. The ultimate targets of identity politics and the language of "offence" and "sensitivity" are the working class and its democratic rights. Concepts like "offence" and "sensitivity" are nebulous abstractions and subject to broad, not to say nefarious, interpretation. While today it may be deemed offensive to call someone "fat," in future we may be told that matters of class, class struggle and socialism are upsetting and offensive."
It is rare nowadays for any artist, let alone a writer, to go against the stream on this matter. To her eternal credit, the writer Rebecca F Kuang has opposed the idea that authors should not write about other races or gender. At the recent Hay Festival, Kuang spoke of the 'weird kind of identity politics in American publishing. It really does not make sense to categorise books this way. Kazuo Ishiguro: you'd never find his books in the sci-fi fantasy section, but The Buried Giant is.” Also at the Hay Festival was the world-renowned author Pat Barker[1] who said she distrusts publishers'' 'fashionable' efforts to boost diversity.
Kuang is a well-respected and best-selling author of books such as Babel and The Poppy War. Her most recent publication YellowFace" is a biting satire on the publishing industry. Saying of Yellolwface that "If I were a debut writer, I wouldn't have dared to write this book.
Kuang said she found the idea that writers should only write about characters of their own race "deeply frustrating and pretty illogical". Kuang believes that that problem is not just confined to the publishing industry but has become a political issue saying that the situation has "spiralled into this really strict and reductive understanding of race".
As the Marxist writer Niles Niemuth wrote, "The American ruling class (alongside its European counterparts) is promoting racialist politics and racial division to undermine the class unity of the working class amidst the rise of social inequality to ever greater heights, the eruption of mass protests over police violence and the growth of the class struggle in the US and internationally. The push to present every social problem in the United States as a racial issue is a reflection of the deepening crisis of world capitalism and an effort by the Democrats, the trade unions and the pseudo-left to stave off a united, independent working-class offensive against the capitalist system."[2]
Kuang recently wrote that "You have to imagine outside of your lived experience – to write truthfully, with compassion". While it is doubtful that Kuang has read much Marxist material on Art, her comments are perceptive. They should open up a debate about the nature of Art in a capitalist society.
She would do well to take on board the thoughts of one of the most important Marxist writers, A.K. Voronsky, when he asked, "When does the artistic image appear convincing? When we experience a special psychic state of joy, satisfaction, elevated repose, love or sympathy for the author. This psychic state is the aesthetic evaluation of a work of Art. Aesthetic feeling lacks a narrowly utilitarian character; it is disinterested, and in this regard, it is when he writes organically bound up with our general conceptions of the beautiful (although, of course, it is narrower than these concepts). The aesthetic evaluation of a work is the criterion of its truthfulness or falseness. Artistic truth is determined and established precisely through such an evaluation."[3]
He continues, "There is no need to confuse the artist's special gift of insight with the desire to strike the reader by producing a beautiful turn of phrase, a special style, or a totally new work of Art. Such a desire usually leads to pretentiousness, deliberate overrefinement, excessive floweriness and artificiality. The work becomes incomprehensible, and the reader, like Turgenev's deacon, says to himself: "Dark is the water in the clouds," and "Thus be it beyond our ken." Many contemporary poets and prose-writers commit this sin, and they confuse the ability of the artist to see what no one else has seen with a desire to astound the reader."
Kuang does not hold out much hope that the publishing industry will change. If anything, she believes it will get worse. Noises made in 2021 to support change went out the window. She says there was “a lot of chatter, but no substantive support for those authors, no real commitment to diversify lists or the faces of people working on the other side of publishing."
When the staff at HarperCollins, her publisher, went on strike for better pay and working conditions while her novel was in production – Kuang co-hosted strike rallies for the union. When I asked her about her hopes for the publishing industry and her writing going forward, she answered, "I hope everyone unionises."It is hoped this militancy is reflected in her future work. I highly recommend Yellowface and all her previous novels.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Barker
[2]Race, class and social conflict in the United States- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/06/race-s06.html
[3] — A. Voronsky, Art as the Cognition of Life
Becoming Frida Kahlo March 10- BBC2 and BBC iPlayer
Frida Kahlo
"A ribbon around a bomb."
Andre Breton on Kahlo's art
"I have suffered two big accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar ran over me. The other was Diego,"
Frida Kahlo
"Do you wish to see with your own eyes the hidden springs of the social revolution? Look at the frescoes of Rivera. Do you wish to know what revolutionary art is like? Look at the frescoes of Rivera. Come a little closer, and you will see clearly enough gashes and spots made by vandals: Catholics and other reactionaries, including, of course, Stalinists. These cuts and gashes give even greater life to the frescoes. You have before you not simply a 'painting,' an object of passive aesthetic contemplation, but a living part of the class struggle. And it is at the same time a masterpiece!"
Leon Trotsky
There is a lot to commend in this visually stunning and serious three-part series on the life and politics of Frida Kahlo. I say serious because previous documentaries or books about Kahlo have been pretentious and flippant. The complex nature of Kahlo's life deserves a serious approach. But having said that, there are several serious political weaknesses in the programs.
The first of a three-part series on the legendary Mexican painter, The Making and Breaking, manages to squeeze so much information into one episode that it nearly ruins the next two parts. Despite much being known about Kahlo and her work selling for obscene amounts( (Her 1949 painting Diego Y Yo sold for almost $35m in 2021), the program still manages to inform and enlighten.
There is no single narrator. There are interviews with biographers, art historians from Mexico and the US, and miraculously surviving family members. Kahlo's great-niece Cristina Kahlo and Diego Rivera's grandson.
Like programs two and three, the first program is divided into mini-chapters, each with its heading. "Everything goes wrong" details graphically the bus crash that almost killed Kahlo, causing her terrible injuries and ending her plan of becoming a doctor. She turned to art instead. "Most of my friends grew up slowly. I grew up in an instant." She was helped by her mother, who built her an adapted easel. Her first self-portrait and one of my favourite paintings was the stunning Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress.
She was an exceptional child born in 1907. Kahlo contracted polio in 1912. She later told people she was born in 1910 to ally herself with the new, post-revolution Mexico. She was born at The Blue House in Coyoacán on the outskirts of Mexico City. Kahlo was a fervent socialist at an early age, and in 1927, she joined the Mexican Communist Party, where she met Diego Rivera.
Rivera supported the Mexican Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Trotskyist Fourth International for some time. You would not have known the latter watching this program. Also, when historical figures such as Tina Modotti are mentioned, they are treated largely superficially. The Italian photographer Tina Modotti was a fellow radical along with Kahlo. Her lover was the notorious GPU assassin Vittorio Vidali, alias Carlos Contreras. Another lover was the Mexican painter David Siqueiros. Both had connections to Stalinism, and their murderous gangsterism was never mentioned. The BBC film ignores that Siqueiros played a central role in the unsuccessful attempt on Trotsky's life in May 1940.
Jesse Olsen points out in his article, "Modotti is an example of how the Mexican and Russian revolutions inspired young artists. However, she is also a tragic example of the many artists who came under the sway of Stalinism and paid a terrible price. Modotti worked for Stalin's KGB (the Soviet secret service) from the mid-1930s and was associated with the Italian Stalinist functionary Vittorio Vidali, who, as early as 1927, had been a Stalinist operative in the Mexican party. Together with the muralist Siqueiros, he tried to murder Trotsky in 1940. Siqueiros, the former communist, and artist—like the Communist Party of Mexico itself—had become part of Stalin's apparatus."[1]
While Kahlo is the program's central figure, her long-time lover and fellow artist Diego Rivera looms large in the films(no pun intended). Their relationship was stormy, but they both understood the beauty and importance of their artistic work. Kahlo described Rivera as "an architect in his paintings, in his thinking process, and in his passionate desire to build a functional, solid and harmonious society... He fights at every moment to overcome mankind's fear and stupidity." Rivera spoke highly and perceptively of Kahlo, saying, "It is not tragedy that rules Frida's work... The darkness of her pain is just a velvet background for the marvellous light of her physical strength, her delicate sensibility, her bright intelligence, and her invincible strength as she struggles to live and show her fellow humans how to resist hostile forces and come out triumphant."
As mentioned in the film Rivera came under sustained attack(primarily from the Stalinists) for taking commissions from American capitalists. The Communist Party smeared Rivera as an "agent of North American imperialism and the millionaire, Morrow".
Rivera was expelled from the Mexican Communist Party after receiving several commissions from the government and accepting an assignment from the US ambassador to Mexico, Dwight W. Morrow, to paint a mural in the former Cortéz Palace of Cuernavaca. In 1933 Rivera was commissioned to paint a mural entitled Man at the Crossroads by John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller objected when Rivera added the great Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin to the mural, and Rockefeller had the mural destroyed.[2]
Rivera defended the mural saying the portrait of Lenin was "the only correct painting to be made in the building [as] an exact and concrete expression of the situation of society under capitalism at present, and an indication of the road that man must follow to liquidate hunger, oppression, disorder and war."
Kahlo and Rivera came around the Trotskyist movement and briefly had a close relationship with Trotsky. In 1938, Rivera collaborated with Trotsky and Andre Breton in writing the Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art[3] , which called for "a complete and radical reconstruction of society."
For a while Trotsky held Rivera in very high regard, saying, "Do you wish to see with your own eyes the hidden springs of the social revolution? Look at the frescoes of Rivera. Do you wish to know what revolutionary art is like? Look at the frescoes of Rivera. Come a little closer, and you will see clearly enough gashes and spots made by vandals: Catholics and other reactionaries, including, of course, Stalinists. These cuts and gashes give even greater life to the frescoes. You have before you not simply a 'painting,' an object of passive aesthetic contemplation, but a living part of the class struggle. And it is, at the same time, a masterpiece! In the field of painting, the October Revolution has found her greatest interpreter not in the USSR but in faraway Mexico… Nurtured in the artistic cultures of all peoples, all epochs, Diego Rivera has remained Mexican in the most profound fibres of his genius. But that which inspired him in these magnificent frescoes, which lifted him up above the artistic tradition, above contemporary art, in a certain sense, above himself, is the mighty blast of the proletarian revolution. Without October, his power of creative penetration into the epic of work, oppression and insurrection would never have attained such breadth and profundity."[4]
Despite Trotsky's glowing tribute, he was aware of the political inadequacies of both Kahlo and Rivera. As Joanne Laurier perceptively writes, "It seems safe to suggest that neither Rivera nor Kahlo—remarkable artists and not first and foremost political thinkers—ever understood the essence of Trotsky's struggle with the Stalinist bureaucracy, including the theory of permanent revolution, and remained to one extent or another under the influence of Mexican nationalism and that primarily accounts for both of them ending up, chastened and demoralized, in the camp of Stalinism."[5]
While this three-part documentary has much to like and commend, there are some serious political flaws. For instance, trying to cram the last and most important fifteen years of Kahlo's life into 15 minutes is madness and politically unforgivable. There is also a tendency to concentrate on Kahlo's feelings without putting them in a wider political context. That context is the world-historical struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism. The fact that this struggle was at the center of Kahlo's and Rivera's lives is deliberately missing from the film.
The film is too preoccupied with Rivera's infidelities and Kahlo's "bisexuality", which is an adaptation to the current intellectual environment. The #MeToo movement has adopted Kahlo as one of their own. These layers of the so-called intelligentsia have become affluent and have moved far to the right. They ignore Kahlo's revolutionary politics and are hostile to the working class. Despite this, the films are worth seeing.
Further reading
My Art, My Life: An Autobiography by Diego Rivera (Author)
[1] Frida Kahlo retrospective in Berlin—Part 2: Frida Kahlo and communism- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/09/kah2-s11.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_at_the_Crossroads
[3] https://www.marxists.org/archive/bland/x01/towards-progressive-art.pdf
[4] Art and Politics in Our Epoch-https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/06/artpol.htm
[5] What made Frida Kahlo remarkable?- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/11/kahl-n07.html
