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The next Tay

2019; Elsevier BV; Volume: 6; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s2215-0366(19)30260-3

2215-0374

Sarah Ditum,

Media Studies and Communication

On August 18, 2017, Taylor Swift deleted herself. Both her Instagram and her Twitter accounts were wiped clean, removing all evidence of the wholesome star persona she had built up over many years. 3 days later, she posted a picture of a snake on a black background. 2 days after that, she released Look What You Made Me Do, the lead single from her album Reputation. “I'm sorry, the old Taylor can't come to the phone right now”, she announces on the middle eight. “Why? Oh, because she's dead.” In the video, a new-model Swift in a black bodysuit stands triumphantly on a pile of the singer's past versions. Re-invention is a fundamental part of popstar life, particularly those with any longevity. Some perform as specific alter-egos (for example, David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and Thin White Duke eras); some adopt a distinct aesthetic and attitude with each album (Bedtime Stories-era Madonna is a different proposition to Ray of Light-era Madonna). Nor is digital self-destruction unprecedented in the music industry: Radiohead's campaign for A Moon Shaped Pool in 2016 began with the deletion of the band's website and social media posts. But, as a rock band with a reputation for abstruse gestures and tech-sceptical positions, this action was seen as consistent with Radiohead's past rather than a break with it. Radiohead are also treated as serious artists, which is something that Swift, as a female pop star, is less often credited with. Instead, she's frequently taken as an avatar for women in general and her fans in particular. Swift herself was born in the 1980s, making her a so-called millennial, whereas her fans include many born in 1995 and later, putting them in the bracket that psychologist Jean Twenge defines as iGen: “they grew up with cell phones, had an Instagram page before they started high school, and do not remember a time before the Internet.” According to Twenge's analysis of survey data, iGen is more responsible and more risk-averse than preceding generations, but also more anxious, more depressed and more suicidal. Twenge connects this phenomenon with the ubiquity of smartphones and, specifically, the way they make young people permanently subject to the attention and approval economy of social media. And young women, who are both heavier phone users and susceptible to the gendered pressures of objectification, are a particular cause for concern. From her pre-fame teenage days on MySpace, Swift had used social media much as all users do: to develop relationships, and to craft a public version of herself. By the release of her 2014 album 1989, that public version of herself was widely considered to be (as an article on the website Buzzfeed put it) “the human version of a sunbeam”. She left generous comments on fans' posts, and showed winning self-awareness about her own image, referencing memes from her fandom with goofy good-humour. Her representative confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that Swift ran her own social media accounts. That was a significant disclosure, because it meant that this was not the calculated work of someone on her payroll, but of Swift herself. It was, in other words, authentic, which is a concept of some significance when it comes to Swift. Although it's routine for pop artists to proclaim their realness, few have invested as much in the idea or played with it as cleverly as Swift. She began her career as a country singer—a genre so associated with the values of American blue-collar integrity that, in 1970, President Richard Nixon made it his vehicle for an attack on the hippy counterculture. Declaring October to be “country music month”, he said: “Its simplicity expresses the candor, the humor, the love and the pain of country people.” Candour is central to Swift's lyrics, from her 2006 debut single Tim McGraw onwards, not only in the sense that she describes emotions with great acuity, but also because throughout her career, it has been possible for fans to map her lyrics onto known details about her private life. In the song, cowritten by Swift and Liz Rose and released when Swift was 16, Swift addresses a boyfriend who will be leaving soon for college (subsequently identified in interviews as her actual senior year boyfriend). She anticipates breaking up with her boyfriend, but hopes to retain a place in his affections, symbolised by the music of country singer Tim McGraw. “Someday you'll turn your radio on, I hope it takes you back to that place”, runs the chorus. As an act of self-fashioning, the lyrics are exemplary, combining structured narrative, generic nous, and personal revelation in a strikingly mature way. The reference to McGraw establishes Swift firmly within country, both as a performer and as a fan herself, and the experience of anticipating a breakup is a highly relatable one for listeners, the experience of mediating that experience through the music that they also love is even more relatable still. But the most ingenious feature of Tim McGraw is a technique that has proved to be one of Swift's signature manoeuvres as a lyricist. As narrator of the song, she positions herself in two moments simultaneously: the now in which she expects the pain of separation, and a post-separation future in which her ex continues to think about her. It's poignant, because their separate futures are immanent in their uncertain present. It's also controlling, because Swift is crafting herself as a narrative, and ensuring that even though the relationship won't last, her version of it will endure—both in her soon-to-be-ex's memory, and, implicitly, in this song. It's a pattern she replays in the song Wildest Dreams from 1989; Swift similarly implores her lover: “Say you'll remember me, Standing in a nice dress, staring at the sunset.” Pop music frequently expresses the joy of the moment, but very seldom does it also anticipate how that moment will be perceived in the future. With this technique, Swift imposes narrative onto experience: and, as the Speak Now song The Story of Us shows, she's highly conscious of the way dramatic arcs and expectations can shape perception (“The story of us looks a lot like a tragedy now”). These songs make explicit a process that, according to the writer Will Storr, is universally and unthinkingly practised by all of us. In his book Selfie, Storr argues that the sense we have of existing as a consistent, coherent self is a fiction generated by an internal “narrator”: “the brain is a storyteller and it's also a hero-maker—and the hero that it makes is you”, he writes. That self-constructed hero is always in a negotiation, and sometimes in conflict, with other people's accounts of you—a process that is made even more intense for celebrities, given the level of public interest in them. It's something Swift discusses in a commentary on Blank Space, from 1989. The song, she explains, started out as a joke on the popular perception of her as a serial dater with a propensity for taking lyrical vengeance on the men who jilt her: “As a songwriter you have to be aware of who you are as a person, but I think you also have to have one eye on what people think of you…And in the last couple of years I've noticed there's been a pretty sensational fictionalisation of my personal life…I got to think about it, and I started thinking how interesting that person is. If she was a real person who had all these qualities and attributes, what song would she write?” The demand for authenticity is gendered, as Meredith Graves of the band Perfect Pussy argued in a 2014 essay. Men and women aren't given equal credit when it comes to self-creation. Men are treated as artists; women are treated as fakes. And the things for which a woman can be charged with fakery, says Graves, are often exactly the same things that are required of them by an industry that values attractiveness: stage names, personas, plastic surgery, makeup, sexy costumes. “[T]hose qualities have to be both present and completely natural in order for spectators to be satisfied”, writes Graves. When Ryan Adams covered the entirety of 1989 in alt-country style, some critics lauded him for finding emotional veracity by “stripping away” the superficial details of Swift's music: for some, a man's version is always the most the true, even if he's reworking a woman's art. For an artist whose persona resides as deeply in the concept of “realness” as Swift's does, this double-bind is especially tight. Any suggestion of foresight or planning can be presented as opposed to authenticity, hence the media fascination with (for example) the fact she has hired professional photographers to document her parties. A UK Daily Telegraph review of a London date of Swift's Red tour complained that her “simplicity was lost in an overproduced show”, almost as though the critic had forgotten they were attending an stadium concert that was part of an international tour. The label that Swift has been most resistant to—and the one her most hostile observers have attached to her—is calculating. By the time of her social media self-destruction in 2017, the calculating narrative had become the dominant one in coverage of Swift. The Katy Perry song Swish Swish, which was widely interpreted as a diss track (ie, a song providing negative comment on another person) aimed at Swift, tells its target: “you're calculated”. And the dispute with Kanye West and his wife Kim Kardashian, which had been simmering since West interrupted Swift's acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV awards, exploded in a recrimination and counter-claim over whether Swift had or had not given her blessing to a West lyric claiming that “I made that bitch [ie, Swift] famous”. Fans of West and Kardashian flooded Swift's social media posts with the snake emoji, implying that Swift was scheming and self-dramatising. In a 2015 interview, Swift told GQ that her career required her to respond to popular accounts of who she is: “if enough people say the same thing about me, it becomes fact in the general public's mind. So I monitor what people say about me, and if I see a theme, I know what that means.” “Killing off” the “old Taylor” in Look What You Made Me Do and reclaiming the snake tag was a direct response to the 2017 backlash, but it was also only the most audacious abruption in an arc that had seen her evolve from the country girl in the pick-up truck in Tim McGraw, to the red-lipped pop siren in a convertible in the video to Style. There are more Swifts still to come. The next phase of her career began with the launch of the single Me! this year: the video opens with another self-destruction, as a snake slithers onto the screen and then explodes into a cloud of butterflies, heralding the sugar-pop sweetness of her newest iteration. Although Swift is operating in a realm of scrutiny far beyond that applied even to most celebrities, the negotiation of public and private selves is a universal experience, now amplified by social media. The process of self-invention is continual; the reciprocal motion of destroying past selves is inevitable, whether we do so consciously or not, and the elements that survive from phase to phase are the spine of the story of us. For Meredith Graves's essay see http://www.talkhouse.com/meredith-graves-perfect-pussy-talks-2/ For Meredith Graves's essay see http://www.talkhouse.com/meredith-graves-perfect-pussy-talks-2/