Taylor Swift: Art or Artifice?

Amidst a sea of pop personalities, Taylor Swift remains one of the most divisive women in music today. Swift is one of the last decade’s most successful artists in the world, with a very loyal set of fans, and a plethora of accolades to boot. However, it is that success which begs the question. Is Taylor Swift as good as people say or is she just famous?

A more nuanced assessment of Swift’s legacy comes in Gina Arnold’s piece, which considers the double consciousness through which she is seen in American culture: as a wholesome icon and as a woke feminist icon of today. Arnold contends that Swift’s appeal is nostalgic and culturally familiar, if not boundary-pushing. Her talent for drawing on Americana and universalizing personal setbacks into the sort of catchy, relatable lyrics that have made her truly ubiquitous is one that has certainly helped solidify her cultural capital, but leaves you wondering if her praise doesn’t owe more to a sense of comfort than daring, challenge, or artist stamping (Arnold 2021).

Myles McNutt elaborates on this tension by analyzing Swift’s authorship and the boundaries of her paratextual feminism. He writes that Swift’s feminist empowerment is frequently compromised by her posture of calculated branding, by her dependence upon old-fashioned narratives of authenticity. While Swift has been hailed as the female voice of her generation, her public persona as she grew from country ingenue to pop superstar was carefully constructed, often perpetuating rather than subverting the gendered ways in which the music industry operates (McNutt 2020). This paradox suggests that Swift as a feminist icon is something to be treated with skepticism.

At the same time, intense scrutiny of Swift’s music indicates that her artistry may not be as innovative as the massive number of her fans might lead one to believe. An analysis of her single ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ breaks down the power and identity themes in the song. While trying to come off as powerful and self-reinventing, the analysis shows how the song simply reuses clichés without introducing new elements, such as concept or sound. It ceases to be a transformation and becomes a performance of one (“Power and Identity in Taylor Swift’s Song” 2023).

This performance of self is the subject of the edited collection Taylor Swift: Culture, Capital, and Critique. Together, the contributors mine Swift’s career as a master class in persona commodification. Her version of herself is her product, and so her rebranding with each album cycle — from the country girl-next-door to the indie folk poet — is a reflection of consumer whims more than maturity. Such performativity could suggest that Swift’s power is not in her art per se, but in her astuteness as a businesswoman, as a strategically cartwheeling performer (McCann et al. 2022).

The Harvard Gazette piece, in its praise for Swift, actually reveals the reason why Swift is considered so highly priced. Critics praise her for building a fan base that will never leave her, and for being a master of the music industry — but it’s about politics and power, not anything to do with pushing boundaries in complexity of music. The fetishization of Swift makes a fetish of her as commodity, slickly packaged and accepted in a media-saturated culture (Harvard Gazette 2023).

Thus, even Fourth Wave rhetoric, sometimes embraced by the mainstream liberal media, is not without critics. In a piece from University of Melbourne blog Pursuit, all that’s added up and Swift’s new gender-inequality critique anthem “The Man” is held at arm’s distance down at its surface level. The article claims that, despite her focus, Swift’s just-do-you brand of feminism is more about personal grievance than grass-roots activism. This constraints her ability to advance feminist debate and shapes her feminism in terms of palatability, rather than provocation ("‘The Man’: Taylor’s Feminism" 2020).

On the level of composition, Swift’s melodic writing is something that is a little more distinctive, emotionally charged and familiar. One chapter of Switched On Pop: How Popular Music Works, and Why it Matters lauded her writing in “You Belong with Me” for its storytelling structure and melodic simplicity. But it also highlights how Swift’s songs tend to adhere to well-worn pop formulas. Though these formulas work, they don't particularly set her apart from her musical peers in terms of innovation (Seabrook 2020).

Ultimately, whether or not Taylor Swift is Overrated depends on the standards through which one judges her. If cultural clout, branding prowess and fan devotion are the metrics, then Swift deserves her stature. But if innovation, lyrical depth and socio-political critique are central to artistic greatness, an awful case could be made for her being overrated. Swift’s is also a career of this moment, an exquisitely calibrated, hyper-visible, carefully deployed response to the feel and shape of the times. Whether that makes her a generational talent or merely the latest artful construction is a matter of interpretation.

References:

Arnold, Gina. “Are You Ready for It? Re-Evaluating Taylor Swift.” Contemporary Music Review 40, no. 5–6 (2021): 502–520. https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2021.1976586.

Harvard Gazette. “So What Exactly Makes Taylor Swift So Great?” Harvard Gazette, August 2023. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/08/so-what-exactly-makes-taylor-swift-so-great/.

McCann, Hannah, Eloise Faichney, Rebecca Trelease, and Emma Whatman, eds. Taylor Swift: Culture, Capital, and Critique. London: Routledge, 2022.

McNutt, Myles. “From 'Mine' to 'Ours': Gendered Hierarchies of Authorship and the Limits of Taylor Swift’s Paratextual Feminism.” Communication, Culture and Critique 13, no. 1 (2020): 72–90. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz047.

Pursuit, University of Melbourne. “‘The Man’: Taylor’s Feminism Could Go So Much Further.” Pursuit, 2020. https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/the-man-taylor-s-feminism-could-go-so-much-further.

Seabrook, John. “A Star’s Melodic Signature: Melody: Taylor Swift—‘You Belong with Me.’” In Switched On Pop: How Popular Music Works, and Why it Matters, edited by Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding, 56–72. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

“Power and Identity in Taylor Swift’s Song, ‘Look What You Made Me Do.’” Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 35, no. 2 (2023): 198–212. https://www.humapub.com/admin/alljournals/glr/papers/Q1oIs4yGEv.pdf.