Are You Ready for It? Re-Evaluating Taylor Swift

Abstract

Taylor Swift is a monument to the idea that there once was a place called America. She recalls an old American dream—of high school popularity contests, apple pies, dreamy boys next door, and a very old, very white, Christian nation. She is classic, insofar as her lyrics are about ‘me and the boy’, rarely tag the present moment, and animate sing-alongs at her family-friendly concerts (she is a children’s performer by trade). With apologies to Greil Marcus, she’s ‘the old normal America’, made up into a meme-able, glitter-pink, red lip, femme identity, easy to co-opt into whatever paradoxical meanings her various twenty-first-century fans might need. ‘Mommy, is Taylor Swift still white?’ a young boy asks his mother as she tucks him into bed at the end of Saturday Night Live’s (2016) mock movie trailer entitled ‘The Day Beyoncé Turned Black’. The skit parodies white audiences’ confusion over Beyoncé’s music video (‘Formation’) and subsequent pro-Black Superbowl