Taylor Swift and the philosophers
Rick Moody, Gwenda-lin Grewal, Simon Critchley, Jack Condie, Claire Potter, and Jim Miller consider the mysteries of pop
Public Seminar has gone down the Taylor Swift rabbit hole. There are serious Swifties in the philosophy department at the New School for Social Research—and some serious dissidents, as James Miller discovers in a conversation with Jack Condie, Simon Critchley, and Gwenda-lin Grewal. The reason we can’t just be normal about Swift, Condie posits, is because she’s a modern-day Alcibiades. Claire Potter, meanwhile, argues that it’s the queerness of fandom, not the artist, that matters. And Rick Moody riffs on how a massive musical entity might prove her personhood.
Journey with us.
Taylor Swift: The Modest Proposal
Rick Moody
Songs that grapple with this same problematic of time and in which finitude figures in some way are some of the truly important songs, notwithstanding the outliers, and in the performance, while some musical artists can simulate appallingly well, and/or these artists imagine that virtuosity somehow is relevant to a discussion of finitude—Clay Aiken singing “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” say—the attractive power of the message of finitude somehow extracts from even the most mediocre performance the electrifying recognition, the blinding epiphanic majesty, that is an art form perfectly calibrated in the direction of human experience.
The Mysteries of Taylor Swift
James Miller, in conversation with Jack Condie, Gwenda-lin Grewal, and Simon Critchley
The masochism is in the many lyrics about her attraction to “bad” boys, and the way the danger and risks in the relationship excites her. “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do”—to quote Paul in Romans.
Taylor Swift, the Modern Alcibiades
Jack Condie
Like Swift, Alcibiades enjoyed both the dizzying highs and dizzying lows of public opinion (although both never quite fell completely out of favor). Alcibiades’s many betrayals and double crossings might be called the first “Reputation era,” named after the album Swift released after falling out of complete public adoration after the infamous Kanye West phone call.
You Belong to Me
Claire Potter
For all that country performers often reflect personally and musically Christian traditions, and LGBT artists struggle in the industry, it is also a very queer cultural site. Its narrative themes (tragedy, heartbreak, violence, sex, death), gaudy costumes, hypermasculine cowboys (known as “hat acts”), and big-haired women with large busts unselfconsciously teeter on camp.