Our relationship with celebrities goes something like this: they present us with charismatic objects of focus, we decide what those objects mean. In some cases, a celebrity finds a trusted mediator who is their first interpreter to the wider world—a photographer, a director, a producer—but ultimately, most importantly, they are not really in control of their own meaning. They are a kind of compost that goes into the bigger culture. We grow meanings out of them, and then we grow meanings out of those meanings. In its most pernicious form, that is the Britney Spears cycle: Britney is jailbait; Britney is out of control; Britney is a person we feel bad about.
Celebrities mostly benefit from this exchange, though. It makes them famous and it makes them rich and maybe it makes some of them crazy, but, well, that’s the deal. But there are a few big exceptions. One, naturally, is Taylor Swift.1
The thoughts below are not really about Showgirl, just kind of riffing off of various things floating around in post-release soup. Actually, this train of thought was not really inspired by Taylor herself, but by this meme I saw about Sabrina Carpenter:
Now it seems to me that this is not a meme you’d make about somebody you regarded as a person. I have no insight here as to how this meme would or would not affect the mental state of Sabrina Carpenter, the real person, because I do not know her, but “Sabrina Carpenter the real person” functionally doesn’t exist here, which is why even at stage one, she’s merely a representation of reality and not the real thing. I do sometimes feel that in exchange for a more aggressive tax policy we should give all women celebrities a gun and the right to execute one person daily,2 but let’s say that Sabrina Carpenter, actual person, finds this meme hysterical. That doesn’t really change how I feel about it, which is that it basically says that “in exchange for looking at your face, I get to do whatever I want with your image.” The aggression is disguised as good fun.
When people do this to Taylor, on the other hand, the aggression is usually not disguised as anything. It’s pure aggression. Taylor controls her image too tightly for an attempt to use it to seem like anything other than trespassing. So you get AI porn of her gangbanging the Chiefs, which is subsequently defended by saying it’s not like these were done to a real person.3 Sabrina is a normal celebrity. She has not demonstrated Taylor’s ability to control her own image; my guess is she won’t. Taylor had this down by her first album. From the beginning, she has been the person who says what Taylor Swift means.
One of the unending debates you see in pop culture spaces is whether or not Taylor has “cultural impact.” The reason this debate is unending is in part because there is no agreed-upon meaning of “cultural impact,” so people might mean that she has not released an era-defining record, but they also might mean that she doesn’t set fashion trends, or that she doesn’t have a clear lineage coming after her.4 A fourth meaning that I would propose here would simply be that people don’t get to decide what Taylor means. Unlike, for instance, Madonna, Taylor cannot be converted into a symbol of what “womanhood” is at a particular moment in time. Instead, you are stuck with the meaning Taylor gives you, and if you want to engage with her in that way, if you want to try and make her mean something, you are, at best, decoding some of the things in the art. Or, you can try to graffiti her image—i.e., bring some hostility—but the actual “thing” of Taylor is obdurate and opaque. Ten thousand op-eds cannot change that you are always talking, in the end, about yourself, not about her.
But you don’t need to engage with her that way. You can focus on the music and then you are free to decide what things mean. Speaking quite truthfully, I barely ever think about Taylor the person when I’m actually listening to her music, with the exception of her “bad girl” songs on reputation (and now “CANCELLED!”). If I listen to a sad song, I don’t think “Taylor must have been so sad.” Often, I barely think about me. I love The Tortured Poets Department; it’s a top three Taylor album for me. I can listen to it over and over and not get tired of it. I don’t “identify” with it. I just think it’s got great storytelling. And to go to Taylor herself, I don’t exactly identify with her either, but I root for her like she’s a shonen anime hero. We could say, that is also great storytelling.
A few months ago, I was at a dinner where one person really decided he wanted to fight with me about Taylor. He first did this by bringing up Travis, about whom I do not care, and then he tried a different tactic—he said, you know, people attribute all this business intelligence to her, but is it her, or is her male manager’s? When I told him that she doesn’t have a manager, he did not believe me. Eventually, the conversation moved on to American’s Grandmother, Dolly Parton, 100% Approval Rating—since Dolly, like Taylor, is an artist with a ruthless nose for business. Nobody trash talks Dolly Parton (now, anyway), so things drifted off and neither of us won the argument. I’m sure the guy left this conversation thinking I’m a credulous idiot, just as I left it thinking he was kind of annoying.
Of course, the thing is, many things are improbable but not impossible: it is possible that “Taylor Swift” is masterminded by a guy somewhere none of us have ever heard of, that ghostwriters write all her songs, that all the “making of” stuff she’s done for her albums are elaborately faked, etc. Would every person she’s ever worked with would not only waste their time making fake “writing the song” footage but keep their mouths shut, even in court, as Max Martin did during the “Shake It Off” lawsuit? Sure, it could happen: it doesn’t involve X-ray vision or time travel or the transmutation of lead into gold. It’s just not very likely.
In any case, that particular kind of skepticism is another reaction to her ability to control her own meaning; it insists “I can see around you.” But in the end it can only generate a perfect negative: she says A, so it’s not-A. You’re still stuck with her story. She will always decide what she means.
Is Beyonce also an exception? She might be but I am not wise in the ways of Beyonce Studies.
People claim to love “outside of the box” political thinking but let me tell you… they’re lying.
To these, I would say: she does, she doesn’t, she does. Prior to folklore, I would have agreed she did not have an era-defining album. As far as fashion trends go, it would be cool if she’s started a trend for vintage jewelry, but on the other hand maybe it wouldn’t be cool because what’s going to happen to my EBTH searches.