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
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
