1st Edition
Taylor Swift The Star, The Songs, The Fans
From studio albums to stadium tours, Taylor Swift is a record-setting pop artist whose impacts are outsized and global in scale. At the same time, she has cultivated an audience base that finds her, her songs, and her voice eminently relatable. Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans positions Swift as a prismatic figure for the musical world of the 21st century.
This collection includes new work from interdisciplinary scholars who focus on Swift’s star persona; the lyrics, themes and meanings of Swift’s songs; and the ways that fans interact with Swift’s work and with each other. Together, the essays evaluate Swift’s career with attention to how her work has resonated in a changing global society, how she has navigated shifts in the music industry, and how she has negotiated changes in her musical transition from country to pop along the lines of her age, gender, and class identity.
Including contributions by scholars, practitioners and journalists, this volume offers a serious consideration of one of today’s most popular music stars that shows why and how she matters. Engaging a wide variety of disciplines and methodological perspectives, including fan studies, cultural studies, philosophy, musicology and music theory, journalism, and songwriting, Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans will be of interest to students and scholars of music, media studies, popular culture, fan studies, gender and sexuality studies, and sound studies.
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures and Tables
Introduction: The Star, The Songs, The Fans
Christa Anne Bentley, Kate Galloway, and Paula Clare Harper
Part 1
The Star
Chapter 1. Taylor Swift on Tour: Embracing Whiteness, Growing Up
Phoebe E. Hughes
Chapter 2. Stripped-Down Swift: Singer-Songwriter Performance Practice Within Swift’s Brand
Christa Anne Bentley
Chapter 3. Taylor Swift Controls Everything
Annelot Prins
Chapter 4. The Mediated Natures of Taylor Swift in folklore and evermore
Kate Galloway
Chapter 5. “That’s Why You Have to Stream the Re-Records:” Copyright, Messaging, and Fan Engagement in Taylor Swift’s Re-Recording Project
Jocelyn R. Neal
Part 2
The Songs
Chapter 6. Lyrical World Building: An Exploration of Taylor Swift’s Use of Intratextuality and Intertextuality
Lauren Alex Hooper
Chapter 7. “Write This Down”: Writing as Motif and Metaphor in Taylor Swift’s Songwriting
Nicky Watkinson
Chapter 8. Between the Fairytale Fractures: Queering the Swiftian Country Song
James Barker
Chapter 9. Register, Timbre, and Rhetoric in Two Duets by Taylor Swift
Cameron Steuart
Chapter 10. Make It Old: (Taylor’s Version) and the Art and Experience of Re-Creation
Chelsea Burns
Chapter 11. Revision, Extension, and Repetition: Analyzing Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)”
Alyssa Barna
Chapter 12. “I Can’t Find a Pulse”: Encoding Sonic Intimacy in Heartbeats and Heartbreaks
Ailsa Lipscombe
Part 3
The Fans
Chapter 13. “Say it in a Tweet, That’s a Cop-Out”: Problematizing the Journalistic Practice of Using Tweets as Public Opinion Through an Exploration of Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down”
Melissa K. Avdeeff
Chapter 14. What Does Taylor Swift Have to Do with Soccer?: The Culture of Speculation in the Practices of Brazilian Swifties
Thiago Soares and Lianna Genuíno
Chapter 15. Hearing #Gaylor: Queer Musical (Conspiracy) Theorizing in the Internet Age
Paula Clare Harper
Chapter 16. Make The Friendship Bracelets…On Your Own, Kid: Wispy Community in the Taylor Swift Fandom
Georgia Carroll
Notes on Contributors
Index
Biography
Christa Anne Bentley is a musicologist who studies the intersections of folk and popular song through the singer-songwriter movement. She is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Arkansas.
Kate Galloway is an Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research addresses how and why contemporary artists remix and recycle sounds, music, and texts encoded with environmental knowledge and the creative and social phenomena of internet music communities and practices of listening to the internet.
Paula Clare Harper researches music, sound, and the internet. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago.
You might think there is nothing left to say about Taylor Swift, one of the most scrutinized figures in popular culture. This brilliant volume proves otherwise. Probing the celebrity, sound, and social world of this larger-than-life star, each essay uncovers something new and astonishing about a 21st century pop colossus.
—Nate Sloan, Assistant Professor of Musicology, USC Thornton School of Music
