jennate
laamyem
trigger warning:
swiftie behavior.
only a little tho.
parental discretion
is advised
i feel foolish.
this whole year has been marked by a myriad of questionings. about myself, my choices, all that i stand for, and the things i find myself enjoying. i say find myself cause i practice what i call: letting things come to me. now that everything is separated into niches on the internet by algorithms, letting things find you becomes harder and harder.
the self-questioning that i have reached is specifically tied to the ethics of the media that i consume. finding out about the zionist connections that are truly everywhere has made pressing play on a new beyoncé album a rather charged uncomfortable task. the awakening that came from the boycott movement around the world, especially to people my age, is how much of our comfort and pleasure is reliant on the labor of the less privileged, but especially racialized people in the global south. where i come from, basically.
growing up, uttering the word “isr@#l” was as much of a treason as burning your country’s flag. it meant normalizing the existence of a colonial state who is actively killing people who look like and speak the same language as i. i remember vividly how we were encouraged by our elementary school teachers to stop going to mcd0n#ld’s and to always check the labels for the products we want to buy so that they don’t support isr@#l. of course none of it sustained.
i wish it had.
with the recent uprising, i found myself resenting all the choices that I must have made since then. choices that reinforced this western imperialism i oh so hate right now: the fact that i didn’t listen to my elementary school teachers, the fact that i had preferred french over arabic my whole life until english came along, the fact that i came to europe, the fact that i knew all the US pop culture memes and songs. the fact that i could remember dates and places of “iconic moments” and i could talk at length about multiple teen tv shows that aired in the early 2010s because i was watching all of them. it gave me community and friends i still adore, but everytime it is brought up now, i jokingly call it a disease as this knowledge that seems to have taken permanent refuge in my mind is a result of cultural hegemony that only further aids colonizing states in their quest of dominance.
the artist i’m about to talk about doesn’t need much effort to find people, as she has reigned supreme over american pop music for the last decade, and american imperialism has made it so she has reached people outside of the united states’ borders.
so, this is
about taylor
swift.
i had started to know about taylor swift in the year 2012. as she started straying away from country music to pop music, this shift has allowed her music to reach places like moroccan radio, where it was the first time i have ever heard of her. looking her up on wikipedia, i was surprised to find out that she already had many accomplishment under her belt, a ton of music already out for me to listen to and most importantly for 13 year old muslim jennate, she was a good girl. a year later, i had listened to red, debut and fearless. just as i was starting speak now, my dad had passed away. that album helped me through it in a way. i have tried to track down the reason for it through the years. it came down to speak now being largely about grieving your teen years as i managed to retroactively parallel all the teenage emotional turmoil present in the album to how the passing of my father had prompted me to grow up a bit faster than my peers. traumatic experiences have a way to forever change your psyche especially when they happen at an impressionable age. i thought it had subconsciously resonated with me and i had only managed to put it into words way later in my life. nevertheless, it did help. And so, it has become one of my favorite of albums of all time.
i have always been the kind of person to embrace all that is “basic” about my interests. most of the things i consume has been made specifically for women as a target audience. as i believe that anything that is made for girls shouldn’t be looked down upon and is just as valid as anything else. moreover, i think it has made my viewing experience a whole lot better to stop seeking out things that aren’t made for or by women because my patience for poor female representation has grown thin through the years. but it also comes with its own challenges.
which women exactly am i reaching out for? how am i represented by them? do they uphold the same ideals that i’m running away from but dressed in a pink glittery body-suit instead of a tux?
in this essay, i want to dive into the ways that raising consciousness on questions of neoliberalism has opened my eyes on the cultural persona and icon that is taylor swift.
the true meaning of an artist in contemporary western culture has always been about the individual. the concept of a signature and “credits” have been western concepts as art in some cultures, taking for example numerous african cultures, was made in a very different format that considers the experiences of an individual are always impacted by the collective, and thus the art it produces is never truly individual. the concept of the signature and then the lonesome tortured, genius – or shall i say- poet, is an entirely invented concept by civilizations that love to flatten the artistic process into one singular linear thing, coming from one brain only. and this concept only was further instrumentalized by artists to market themselves in a capitalist society.
i don’t know taylor swift personally, but she has, for the past 20 years, cultivated an image that makes you feel like you do know her, in a way that no other contemporary pop artist has done.
“from an early age, taylor was constructed as an ideal neoliberal constituent, and produced as a brand, which involved creating a detachable, saleable image and narrative that could then be distributed within the cultural marketplace” – miriam rahali, on the genealogy of the american millennial ideal: a celebrity case study of neoliberal feminism in the 21st century, 2021.
while i dont mean for this essay to be a wikipedia page on taylor’s career and i certainly don’t want it to become a parasocial piece on her, she has never shied away from making her personality and experiences a central focus in her music, so it ends up being relevant to discuss some aspects of her life to analyze her as a cultural phenomena.
swift has always been honest about being bullied in school when she was young for singing country music and pursuing a career since the age of 11 years old. she had mentioned that embracing being different is what made her develop her drive to be successful. through that, she vehemently encourages her audience to embrace what makes them stand out. crafting a career out of diariastic entries made into songs, then albums and then #1 hits was a brave thing to do for a young girl. it brought in a new demographic to country music in the US and then made pop music fans care about songwriting. her life then became a monumental part of the artistic experience. her lyrics are full of metaphorical hints that connect through all her albums, and music videos. she left secret messages for her fans in album booklets so that they know each song is about what, until she discovered that she could do that with visuals, hair, fashion, and interviews as well, thus expanding the listening experience beyond the day the album drops. the taylor swift lore is an intricate web of stories about love, heartbreak, loss, hope, family and friendships that go into details about her life that are only revealed through listening, and watching her every move, owning the album designs that sometimes include actual diary entries of hers, or behind-the-scenes voice notes about the process of making a song, or owning the vinyls that have bonus tracks…it never stops.
this amount of lore goes beyond the image-crafting people are used to when it comes to celebrity. And oh, do the people love it. listening to reputation (2017) is inseparable from knowing about kanye west, kim kardashian, and the snake emojis. a casual viewer of the look what you made do (2017) music video will never come to appreciate the true genius of it all unless they have a true swiftie sitting beside them, pausing every 20 seconds to explain what each shot means and what exactly she references.
that is why for the release of the 1989 (taylor’s version), she prompted her fans to go on a scavenger hunt to solve 33 million “vault” puzzles that appear when you google her name. the puzzles show you hints of specific instances related to a song off the album, a famous interview, a music video, etc and the user has to guess the word to unlock the title of the new tracks of the album’s revisited version.
the puzzles were solved globally in one hour.
i personally solved 4.
you’re welcome, taylor.
but i’m getting ahead of myself. during original 1989 “era” in 2014, taylor swift discovered (white) feminism. and thus it became a part of her brand. as a fan, it was extremely gratifying to see her finally lift the veil on the misogyny that has plagued most of the criticism around her up until that point. coinciding with the rise of what is retro-actively called “pop feminism”, she has made it a point, through the press tour for the album, to advocate for herself and for the (privileged) women around her. she made sure to let the world know that people doubting her skill as a songwriter, that people scrutinizing her dating life, her looks and her image all came from misogynistic biases that are projected onto her as a major figure of pop culture. it was true. but that’s where it stopped.
swift’s complete shift to pop music has sprung a flux of positive reinforcement from the very institutions that have villainized her and her skills before. this positive reinforcement took various shapes but a pattern started to form in a lot of them as they were praising her for straying away from modern trap/hip-hop influences that were very prevalent in pop music at the time, for an 80s synth pop sound that was hailed as an instant classic.
authentic,
classic,
timeless,
relatable.
those are words that look harmless until used in specific contexts. neoliberal racial ideology doesn’t just outright come out and say “whiteness is superior” nowadays. they replaced it with something else:
“whiteness is everyone”
and when the critics are using those words to pick taylor swift apart from the “others” and call her classic and relatable, they’re saying her experiences that are largely shaped by her race, gender and class, can be used and understood by everybody around the globe. Regardless of any metrics.
“However, because (Swift) is white, her non-brandedness reads as uncool rather than a pathology: she doesnít fail to meet the imperative to be cool, she transcends it (…) She’s free to be boring and vanilla because that’s what she is. This freedom- this ability to succeed while being absolutely average- that’s the whiteness Swift’s hedged bet returns in abundance.” robin james, personal un‑branding and the financialization of whiteness: or, let’s actually listen to taylor swift as she shakes it off, 2015.
it’s this nothingness that is the crux of swift’s image. it doesn’t mean that her storytelling is meaningless or not complex, it just means that its packaging is disingenuous. this neoliberal view of her underdog storyline has helped propel her career to unimaginable heights that only a white capitalist patriarchal society allows.
while her personal experiences made her believe that she’s an outcast. in a broader gendered and political perspective, swift isn’t that at all. she is the status quo exactly: white, blonde, rich, skinny, blue-eyed, tall, attractive, heterosexual, an english speaker, and an american.
the only difference the system will accept is if it looks like taylor swift. this doesn’t come as a shock when her iconography has been used by neo-n@zis to prove that she aligns with their views because she looks like the exact person that they think is worthy to be their leader. in the year 2015, leading up to donald trump’s presidency, her silence on the elections only proved them right and her endorsement for the 45th president of the united states was taken as a very real and plausible reality that she hasn’t denied at that point. And so, there were multiple reasons as to why these assumptions grew in popularity, even with all the feminism that she was actively shoving down everyone’s throat (she still does).
i would lie if I said that her writing didn’t resonate with me. and i would be lying if i said that i don’t find myself, my affects, my intelligence and media literacy all dismissed when others seem to regard her art as simplistic and vain, or when her fans are categorized as a “white girls only” club. through the help of cultural hegemony, she has, admittedly, reached far beyond the white world. it doesn’t take much to look outside of america and its own definitions of race to see that swift’s crowd is diverse. while she has her demographic for sure, no one can look at the several filled stadiums she sold out across the continents to see that people of many and all races do enjoy her music. personally though, i can testify that throughout the years, i have watched as my north african girlfriends and i have welcomed her art into our lives in various ways and different times. it is then undeniable to me that her gender makes the rest of the world question her fame. because ultimately, she is one hell of an exception to the trajectory we often witness with most mainstream pop female artists: they go through a breakthrough album, a peak, and then slowly fade into nostalgia acts as they grow older, leaving room for the new batch of 17 year olds who look and sing like them. swift has managed to keep her grip on the zeitgeist for more than a decade now, reaching a new peak with every single era. and it is noticeably making a lot of feathers ruffle, to witness a woman that has as much creative and monetary control over her life and career as she does. this doesn’t mean that i condone the ways in which she got there.
if taylor swift was asked which year she would call the worst of her life, there is no doubt in my mind that 2016 would be a strong candidate. i will spare you the details of a 7 year feud she had with rapper kanye west that ultimately led her to disappear from the public eye for a year. but i will say one thing, it has forever changed the trajectory of her career and public image in more ways than one. one of those ways was swift finally taking the political plunge and coming out as a democrat in 2018. for the first time in her more than a decade long career, she has made her political side clear, and then made a whole documentary about it, where she vowed to never be silent on politics again and made a promise to be on the right side of history. since then, she hasn’t stopped speaking up when it mattered.
that was a lie.
4 years since the release of the said-documentary called “miss americana” on netflix, it has become abundantly clear that swift’s activism starts and ends with her. margaret thatcher once said: “there is no such thing as a society. there are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first”.
i think taylor swift agrees, subconsciously, at least. she has made the change from apolitical to somewhat-political-but-not-really not because it was morally just, but in response to a fandom culture that now judges the legitimacy of an artist through the lens of political correctness. And she knew she could never sustain the growing fandom she’s been cultivating for years if she didn’t show them that she stands by their side in their feminism and queerness.
only a little though.
because taylor swift has understood that true activism doesn’t sell. the aesthetic of it does. queer and feminist oppression were then used as narrative elements to craft her story all for people’s consumption. real resistance was co-opted to feed, what her own fans now call her business, the “taycapitalist machine”.
“neoliberalism upgrades systems designed to secure against; conquer, or otherwise cover damage (…) resilience discourse thus follows a very specific logic: first, damage is incited and made manifest; second, that damage is spectacularly overcome and that overcoming is broadcast and/or shared, so that third: the person who has overcome is rewarded with increased human capital, status, and other forms of recognition and recompense, because: finally and most importantly, this individualís own resilience boosts societyís resilience. the work this individual does to overcome their own damage regenerates surplus value for hegemonic institutions.” robin james, resilience & melancholy, pop music, feminism neoliberalism, 2015.
the taycapitalist machine has grown since 2018 though. taylor swift officially became a billionaire in 2023 following the massive success of the eras tour. thus, the pressure coming from her fans to speak up on politics doesn’t matter anymore. they will still sell out the stadiums, buy the 15 vinyl variants, the cds, the merch and stream the album whatever she does. after 248 days, after the #swiftiesforpalestine “movement” has gained enough traction to be featured on time magazine, she has yet to acknowledge the subject neither through words or donations.
but this isn’t about taylor swift actually.
this is about the crafting of narratives, the commodification of struggle.
this is about condemning other forms of colonial and cultural oppression when it exists in the past and/or when it’s safe to do so when it falls under an aesthetic and a brand, but not having the actual political education and foresight to condemn the ones that are going on today.
this is about creating “safe spaces” for violence to exist.
this is about the 7th of may 2024, after 248 days, and 75 years,
a week long strike, and several written and verbal exchanges between the students of HEAD geneva and the director lada umst‰tter, she sent them a letter asking why they haven’t condemned H@m@s in their activities to try and get the school to cut ties with isr#@li institutions.
neoliberalism continues to win.
this rant, disguised as an essay, wouldn’t have been possible without:
IM Fell DW Pica by Igino Marini