All art contains politics, no matter how overt or covert or messy or inconsistent they may be. This is inevitable because all expression emanates from a particular world view, and every world view is ultimately political. Sometimes the politics contained in art are quite submerged and we don’t immediately clock them. Sometimes we may think we understand an artist’s politics based on what they say, but then later discover that the art has been implying something else entirely. The past year has been a good chance to think about this phenomenon while we were hit with a firehose of images of Taylor Swift on her Eras Tour at the same time as we endured the onslaught of US election year amidst a US-supported genocide abroad.
Throughout election year we were served the message that Taylor’s politics are overtly progressive—she even endorsed the Democratic candidate for president, somewhat controversially. But at the same time we were shown a stream of images of Taylor Swift presenting herself in what resembled Miss America-wear or the getup of a small town patriotic drum majorette in a homecoming parade. This aesthetic obviously has its own implicit politics, and it’s an interesting choice at a time when America is facing growing fascism at home while being deeply complicit in apartheid and genocide in Palestine.
Of course no one is really expecting a shrewd billionaire businesswoman to have radical politics—that would be absurd. But it’s still interesting to look at the war between the overt messaging of her PR and the covert messaging of her aesthetics.
Even though Swift did make waves this fall by getting political and endorsing the more “progressive” presidential candidate in the US election, how are we meant to contend with the fact that her aesthetics betray something decidedly conservative?
Why the sparkly baton majorette getup with shiny tights if this isn’t a marching band or small town parade float? Is she Miss Sugar Beet? Where is her sash? She did originally emerge from American country music—is this rhinestone cowgirl without the hat? Perhaps the pink guitar is also a bit of a nod to Barbie, another paragon of status quo politics. And now there’s the trope of the small town football hero boyfriend too, who has also been appearing in rhinestones. I’m not trying to summon up various tropes in trad femininity here (though you could). Whatever else all of these references are, they seem to amount to a mishmash of the female version of Middle Americana. God bless the pink, white and blue!
Taylor’s anti-art ‘wink wink’ at the audience isn’t enough to convince me she’s doing all-American beauty queen ironically either. It’s pretty sincere. It doesn’t feel ironic or edgy; it just wants to get you onside. If you really want to mess with the pageant queen trope—and as an aside let’s remember Trump was a beauty pageant host—ask Courtney Love how that’s done.
If the medium is the message (and this is stretching that concept a bit), what is the unspoken message in all this? The thing about a sparkly parade baton twirler’s costume is that it always seems one step away from the US flag. Behind every smiling majorette you can almost hear Yankee Doodle on the piccolo.
As the year groaned on, the aesthetics of Swift’s shows actually began to resemble more than just a small town drum majorette. They started to conjure up memories of old USO shows for overseas troops. For those unfamiliar with the USO, it’s a military support organization that became most famous for producing “camp shows” in US military bases abroad during wartime. The intention was to boost troop morale and patriotism by providing a comforting and feminine taste of home. (Some of you may remember the horrifying USO show scene in Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now.) You don’t have to search long for images of these performances before you notice the striking similarity to Swift’s Eras Tour show.
USO show, Vietnam, 1967
No doubt this is all more striking to a Canadian viewer—though oddly it doesn’t seem to bother Canadian Swifties. Even from a vantage point north of the 49th parallel it took me a while to realize why Swift’s concert film (the 7 minutes or so that I watched) felt so jarring. The USO, patriotic Middle-America vibe didn’t fully hit me until I saw the set with the down-home porch gathering (“Folkore”). It’s straight out of an idealized American South.
I had always been a little mystified by Taylor Swift’s intense popularity. It couldn’t be down to the quality of her music, which is quite pedestrian despite the contribution of her many competent professional co-writers. As music analyst Rick Beato has pointed out, Swift is less an artist than a content creator. So if it’s not the music, what is the content she’s peddling? The answer is right there in the aesthetics of the stage show. She’s selling a comfortable, cozy, relatably dorky image of an idealized Middle America back to itself, where the only tension or hint of darkness is her quite stunted, dysfunctional eat-your-heart-out revenge benders on privileged exes with mansions and million dollar cars (this is another issue, but something that feels dangerously at odds with her image as a role model for young girls—more on that below).
Taylor’s opposition to Trump doesn’t quite override her barely disguised patriotic traditionalism. Even if all the Americana might have felt questionable before, this year it has come off as obliviously imperial as the ongoing Dem-supported Israeli genocide continues to kill thousands and thousands of women and children in Gaza. Swift is not alone in this game, either. There’s a long tradition of weakly ‘progressive’ nationalist politics from American artists. Don’t @ me, but Taylor’s self-presentation reminds me a little of Bruce Springsteen flashing the flag in the form of a dirty bandana. We’re told that he intended this as critique, but the problem with referencing patriotic items like the flag is that no matter how you do it, you’re still flashing the flag. Using such symbols, even if you’re implying they’re dirty and worn, re-centres and recuperates nationalism rather than displacing it. You start to wonder why the nation state is the theme at all and what particular project the artist is really involved in. But I think the real question for Swift has to be “why this getup now?” A friend who has lived on both sides of the border just said to me that the answer is that Americans always regress to the mean of patriotism and Americana during a crisis.
Selling a comforting and idealized image of Middle America would also explain why Swift has made a career of signalling ordinary girl-next-doorness despite her celebrity. She’s known for bad fashion (which any number of her stylists could have fixed) and the general consensus is that this move is deliberate. It’s an excellent smokescreen for the celebrity and riches set her apart from her fans. Meanwhile she wants to downplay any art halo by maintaining a jokey, winking persona on stage and in videos as if to say ‘it’s okay, I can’t take this art stuff seriously either on this most anti-art of continents and i know we’re all in on the joke.’ The built-in undermining of her own art may comfort those who would prefer not to discover that life has unseen depths, or that art and music might contain surprise, difficulty and mystery. This isn’t art; this is a club.
Perhaps I’m wrong and Taylor just really likes sparkly drum majorette fashion, her work is merely entertainment, and nothing ever happens for an underlying reason. But it’s hard to buy a dismissal as shallow as that when humans are such dedicated meaning-seekers. People don’t get so attached to a cultural project that they make its creator a billionaire for no reason. As a music documentary filmmaker friend said to me this morning, “this is the kind of comforting pap people want in a country where you can only fix healthcare at gunpoint.”
People who do admit there are problems with Swift and her aesthetics will still excuse her in various ways, and a key excuse is that she creates a sort of safe space for young girls. It’s debatable that she functions successfully at this (does she make this world safe for kids in a world destroyed by billionaires, or is “safe” merely a feeling? Are her violently dysfunctional breakups a model of safety?). But it’s not even true demographically, because Taylor Swift’s main audience isn’t the young girls it is touted to be. Curiously her fan base is overwhelmingly over 45: Millennials, Gen X and Boomers. This is not young girls taking their mothers to Taylor Swift; it’s mothers taking their young girls to Taylor Swift.
I know people have scruples about talking about what women wear as if it’s always anti-feminist to comment on women’s self-presentation. But Swift’s getup is a carefully curated costume and it invites comment. ‘Taylor Swift’ is a mega-corporation manufacturing a carefully structured cultural product. If we can’t discuss the visual language used and expose its unspoken politics, the greater the chance these will be unconsciously consumed & reproduced ad infinitum. We are already seeing that the tacit patriotism and conservatism of this aesthetic is being widely copied, including by Sabrina Carpenter who has appeared with Swift on tour.
Before anyone goes there, I am not advocating for art to be overtly, hit-you-over-the-head activist. That’s not really how art works (that’s yet another discussion). Art is complex. All I am saying is that culture (even “content creation”) is political no matter what and as such it gives us an excellent opportunity to learn about our historical moment. Ten years ago I tried to do this for the heritage hipster aesthetic, and even though the two styles are ostensibly different, they have some surprising political similarities. Both of them are not only nostalgic for an idealized traditional past that never existed; they’re busy trying to whitewash capitalism itself while pretending not to.
Even if we were to ignore what Taylor is wordlessly transmitting in her stage show, what about the overt lyrical content? It’s pretty iffy in itself. I noted a while back that Taylor Swift’s oeuvre largely comes down to an angry “eat your heart out.” It repeatedly acts out an antisocial and fairly teenage response to breakups. As someone who is friends with most of their exes I find the vengeful, swaggery acting out—manufactured or not—dismayingly dysfunctional and immature. How is sequin feminism and jilted rage a model for young girls?
“Got a long list of ex-lovers
They’ll tell you I’m insane
But I’ve got a blank space, baby
And I’ll write your name”
I appreciated it when Rick Beato said in one of his recent videos “A lot of broken hearts with Taylor Swift… You’re depressed, Taylor? Buy another jet.” Swifties were of course upset. Just spitballing here but I wonder if one of the reasons Swift’s work is so popular is that it provides a distraction from more stressful historical and daily realities and conveniently displaces them onto more manageable relationship conflicts which can then be resolved with a golf club.
In the end Swift’s oeuvre doesn’t seem to be entirely about her relationships or about being a woman in the 21st C, even while it trades in elements of those. Instead she functions as a salve to a self-regarding America and profits from public desires that are more closely related to a need for comfort or absolution. No matter what your nation has done to everyone domestically or to children abroad, Taylor Swift will keep handing out permission to Shake It Off and she’ll keep raking in your grateful dollars.
A NOTE TO TAYLOR SWIFT FANS. While I’m not in the habit of apologizing for opinions, and this is not apology, I thought it could be useful to explain why I think this kind of critique is necessary. This article was not intended as a mean-spirited takedown of Taylor Swift herself, but rather of some of the tropes and aesthetics that she is currently employing. Cultural analysis is not—or should not be—an attempt to vilify any one individual so much as to try to understand the underlying patterns and politics that surround us, things that we often miss because because by their very nature they work unconsciously. Having said this I know there will be pushback for talking about problematic aesthetics in her work. I get that people become intensely identified with and invested in their cultural heroes. They form parasocial relationships with them and find community in their fandoms, and I wouldn’t want to take away from some of the more positive experiences of that. However, we need to be able to talk about the major cultural phenomena that impact us all, and right now none of us can escape the biggest act in the world. If art is strong it can survive some criticism and even be improved by it. If fans can’t tolerate discourse (and many Swifties have demonstrated that they can’t or won’t), then we have moved into an area closer to religious fundamentalism than art. Also, we should remember that sociocultural experience cuts both ways. Many of us have views and desires that run counter to the needs of fandoms. These are valid and need to find community—a shared need to understand who we are as a society and to address the contradictions that give many of us a pervasive and alienating sense of cognitive dissonance. This is an attempt to make connection and get to the bottom of something that I suspect bothers many of us.
Reading list
Surprisingly little serious criticism has been written about Swift, no doubt because of the taboo around this which has been set up by her bullying fans and her own extreme litigiousness. It’s unhealthy. People have been sending me some posts on Swift that I had not seen until after I published this; I’ll continue to add them here. Let’s have a discussion.
Taylor Swift does not exist by Sam Kriss
—touches on my point about Americana
Taylor Swift and Totalitarianism by Sanjana
—touches on my point about revenge