Lecture Description
Whether or not you love her music, it is undeniable that Taylor Swift is a giant in today’s music industry. Much of the existing academic work on Taylor Swift aims to critique her life and work based on some external set of moral or political standards. Contrasting with those critical works, this lecture will present Taylor Swift as an eminent cultural phenomenon in need of examination on its own terms. The argument of the lecture is that Swift and her music are best analyzed as symptoms of the culture in which they were produced, namely, 21st century American culture. The generations that have come of age with Swift’s career have experienced the dissolution of the social models of the ‘American Dream’ they were taught to embrace. The love/breakup theme driving most of Taylor’s music is an allegory for a social narrative that involves futures unrealized, potential paths now closed-off, and the subsequent condemnation of what went wrong and nostalgia for what might have been. Swift’s music thus serves her audience as a personalized manifestation of this underlying social narrative.
What this Lecture is Not
The lecture is meant to examine Taylor Swift as cultural symptom. It will not involve any of the following: an in-depth investigation of Taylor’s personal life or dating history; a piecing together of her many easter eggs; speculations about her situationship with Karlie Kloss; or analyses of the lyrics of individual songs.
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