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, race, and class identity.
Including contributions by scholars, practitioners, and journalists, this book 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.
Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans 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.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
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
Swifts 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. Thats Why You Have to Stream the Re-Records: Copyright,
Messaging, and Fan Engagement in Taylor Swifts Re-Recording Project
Jocelyn R. Neal
Part 2
The Songs
Chapter
6. Lyrical World Building: An Exploration of Taylor Swifts Use of
Intratextuality and Intertextuality
Lauren Alex Hooper
Chapter
7. Write This Down: Writing as Motif and Metaphor in Taylor Swifts
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: (Taylors Version) and the Art and Experience of
Re-creation
Chelsea Burns
Chapter
11. Revision, Extension, and Repetition: Analyzing Taylor Swifts
All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylors Version) (From the Vault)
Alyssa Barna
Chapter
12. I Cant Find a Pulse: Encoding Sonic Intimacy in Heartbeats and
Heartbreaks
Ailsa Lipscombe
Part 3
The Fans
Chapter
13. Say It in a Tweet, Thats a Cop-Out: Problematizing the
Journalistic Practice of Using Tweets as Public Opinion through an
Exploration of Taylor Swifts 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 BraceletsOn Your Own, Kid: Wispy Community
in the Taylor Swift Fandom
Georgia Carroll
Notes on Contributors
Index
Christa Anne Bentley is a musicologist who studies the intersections of folk and popular song through the singer-songwriter movement. She is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Arkansas.
Kate Galloway is 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 Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago.
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