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Abstract
In 2018, Taylor Swift asserted her political advocacy to a public extent she had not previously done. Controversially, Swift’s music video ‘You Need to Calm Down’ (2019) showcased LGBTQ celebrities and aligned her with Katy Perry, whose similar identification as an LGBTQ ally has met stark criticism. As with Perry, I argue, criticism towards Swift’s advocacy involves unspoken tensions with gender, genre, and commerce. To untangle these tensions, I examine several assumptions: that Swift’s advocacy is exploitive and performative, that she conflates LGBTQ discrimination with her own struggles, and that she may have misled the public by feigning bisexuality. Using statements by critics, Instagram and Twitter posts, and footage from Swift’s documentary Miss Americana (2020), I argue that insightful criticisms towards Swift’s allyship are mixed with uncharitable and reductive mischaracterizations of her work. Comparing two approaches to interpreting her video, I argue that objections to Swift’s conflating personal problems with systemic discrimination make unnecessary assumptions about how narratives work in her song and video. I further examine how suspicions around queerbaiting draw on rumours and the circular citations of conspiratorial hermeneutics. Critics have long villainized Swift for her dating life and its role in her lyrics, revealing a distrust of young female subjectivity difficult to separate from the distrust of Swift’s political competence and intensions. By separating concerns with rainbow capitalism from spurious claims about intent and misogynistic fusions of mass culture with womanhood, I hope to achieve a more tempered assessment of Swift’s politics.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of IASPM-Canada, held online, June 7–18, 2021. For conversations about the material and helpful leads, I am grateful to Fred Maus, Mary Fogarty, Joseph Nelson, Karen Clements Conway, Cecelia McHugh, and Halee Heising. I am, of course, solely responsible for any errors.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Addressing the issues raised by Swift’s single, Caryn Ganz asks, ‘[W]ho ‘gets’ to be an ally, or a gay icon, and how—are allies only chosen by the gay community or can they be imposed from beyond, and is there a way for both to do important work?’ (Caramanica, Morris, and Ganz Citation2019).
2 One thinks of Jada Pinkett Smith’s defence of fellow actress Anne Hathaway’s Instagram statements about white privilege in the context of #BlackLivesMatter (Rogo Citation2019). My thanks go to Cecelia McHugh for suggesting this point of comparison.
3 According to Willman, director Lana Wilson was not present for the spontaneous exchange but had instructed others to film if anything of interest took place (Willman Citation2020).
4 GLAAD previously stood for Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation but dropped the full name because of its unintended potential to exclude bisexual and transgender issues.
5 In her most recent documentary, folklore: the long pond studio sessions (2021), Swift describes being inspired by ‘that country music narrative device’ that segments parts of the song into separate verses dedicated to separate characters that converge at the end (see 14:55 in the documentary). Whether Swift’s verses in ‘You Need to Calm Down’ converge into a kind of conflation or whether they exist independently in solidarity seems to be an open matter of charitability and one’s preference for interpreting narratives. My thanks go to Mary Fogarty for recommending this passage.
6 The underlining on ‘Quicksilver’ leads to a Wikipedia article on the comic-book character of that name.
7 ‘I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc’ (Swift, cited in Aguirre Citation2019, 512).
8 Shut Up and Sing is the title of a documentary about the controversy surrounding the Dixie Chicks’ declaration to their 2003 London concert audience, ‘Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas’ (quoted in Brackett Citation[2005] 2020, 533–34).
9 I credit the useful term ‘imperfect allyship’ to Lily Hillyer during the question period of an earlier version of this paper presented at the annual meeting of IASPM-Canada, held online, June 7–18, 2021.
10 I refer here to Kornhaber’s earlier cited objection that the argument of ‘You Need to Calm Down’ is ‘that famous people are persecuted in a way meaningfully comparable to queer people’. There is some irony to the word choice of ‘famous’, given Taylor Swift’s feelings of humiliation surrounding Kanye West’s song title of that name. In it, West brags about how he ‘might still have sex’ with Taylor Swift because he ‘made the bitch famous’ with his controversial interruption of her MTV Video Music Award speech in 2009. More than just a common word choice, both instances of the term ‘famous’ suggest a certain entitlement to Swift that automatically comes with her privilege: for Kanye, it is the misogynistic taunt that flaunts access to her body as a reward, regardless of her distress—made worse still by his non-consensual, wax depiction of her naked body in the video for ‘Famous’ (2016). For Kornhaber, it is the implication that her problems are comparatively trivial in light of her privilege. I hasten to add that by suggesting one problematic connection through the common term ‘famous’, I am not equating my first verse (West) and second verse (Kornhaber)!
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Eric Smialek
Eric Smialek researches musical meaning through music analysis and reception studies. His publications appear in Global Metal Music and Culture, Medievalism and Metal Music Studies, The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis, the journal Théologiques, and the forthcoming collections Heavy Metal Music and Dis/Ability: Crips, Crowds, and Cacophony; Music and Genre: New Directions; and The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music. He serves on the editorial advisory board for the journal Metal Music Studies and is a review editor for the journal MUSICultures.