one of them consists of things Taylor Swift actually does (like writing lyrics and singing songs) and the other consists in large part of other people’s decisions and perceptions. A lot of the most pointed criticisms of Swift go out of their way to ignore Swift’s own voice, which is a little weird.Here’s the thing: it’s not so much that the two camps are talking about different aspects of Taylor Swift as it is that music critics are talking about Taylor Swift in particular and cultural critics are talking about Taylor Swift as an exemplar of more widespread issues.
The problem is, though, that the kind of “cultural criticism” the anti-Swift people are engaging in is bad cultural criticism, and, indeed, is bad in a way that ends up being sexist. Ignoring the details of Swift’s lyrics and performance doesn’t just erase her voice, it substitutes the cultural critics’ imagined version of the response to the music to the actual responses of Swift’s listeners, erasing the voice and perception of her (mostly young, female) fans.
The model of cultural criticism animating the anti-Swift people seems to be didactic: if Swift narrates a sexist scene, this is taken to be an endorsement or even celebration of this, which endorsement is then transmitted seamlessly into the minds of the listeners. This underestimates the way in which listeners are able to negotiate these narratives and respond with both recognition and criticism, and the way in which this negotiation is an inherent part of Taylor Swift’s work (perhaps the best example here is “Love Story,” the patriarchial fantasy of which can’t be understood without paying attention to the way this very same fantasy is rejected in “White Horse”).
Of course I agree with this call for tenure for all academics. But in a way, it’s an overly modest demand. Tenure, after all, means you can’t be fired from a position except for misconduct or redundancy - in other words, it’s a status that, outside of the US, is legally granted to all employment of any length. So, yes, let’s have tenure for all - and not just professors.
Popjustice gets it exactly the wrong way round - the verses on The Saturdays’ records are often quite interesting, but the verses tend towards supposedly-uplifting cliché, as is the case here.
The market fundamentalist model, Kaletsky argues, has now run into the sand and will be replaced by Capitalism 4.0, an acceptance that both markets and governments are prone to error. Pragmatism will replace free-market ideology
Except that “pragmatism” is the name of free-market ideology.
Stieg Larsson has single-handedly redirected the techno-thriller away from conspiracy theories about incipient world socialism and away from narratives bashing the very idea of global warming, and he has pointed clearly to the true potential of the genre: the techno-thriller, after Larsson, can be and must be a vehicle for some weird customized combination of postmodern radical feminism, queer sociality, anti-fascist anti-capitalist neo-anarchist ass-kicking, and some “in your face” doses of what Jose E. Munoz in Cruising Utopia calls “critical idealism.” And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to the last book in the trilogy…
“Will the legalization of gay marriage lead to the mass consumption of the succulent flesh of roasted babies? It’s not an unreasonable question.”
Movements of non-violent resistence have always known how to turn unfriendly forums into propaganda opportunities — the early Christians, for instance, were being eaten alive by wild animals in some cases — but what do you do when there simply is no forum? What do you do when the “mass media” is segmented into mutually exclusive parallel realities? What do you do when the closest thing to a “public space” has been divvied up among private corporations? What do you do when protesters are given their own little area when they try to take to the streets?
Yes! Whenever I read the latest liberal demand that we moderate our protest to prevent the minutest hypothetical discomfort in some imagined mass audience, I wonder what century they think they’re living in (which isn’t to say that simply discomforting a mass audience is a productive strategy; rather, the whole question of the relationship between protest and “audience” needs to be rethought).
“Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart” is Alicia Keys’s best song by some distance because, in adopting a synthesized pop sound, she drops the tiresome emoting of her previous work, and lets the music actually carry some of the affect rather than being a mere backdrop to it.
I was thus a little worried when I saw that Robyn had covered the track on Radio 1’s Live Lounge, a venue which has traditionally imposed the most reactionary and emotionally incontinent understanding of live “authenticity” (the most tragic example being a cover of a Robyn song, by Girls Aloud). Luckily, Robyn has exquisite taste, and so produces a beautiful version in which minimal instrumentation is matched by a vocal performance of perfect restraint.
Robyn has basically been releasing the same melancholy throbbing electropop accompanied by a video of urban alienation since “With Every Heartbeat.” I hope she continues to do so because this new version of “Hang With Me,” like “Dancing On My Own,” “Be Mine,” and indeed “With Every Heartbeat” before it, is fantastic.
