Rogueish

barthel:

agrammar:

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”).