Taylor Swift
Taylor swift conforms to the Star image ideology as she voices opinions on cultural and sociological matters, such as changing Apple’s policy of not paying artists during the 3 month free trial on Apple Music. However, she also challenges this ideology as she is not sexualised towards audiences as her target audience is young and teenage girls, therefore she is represented as an idol or confident female figure to set an example for this target audience. She also copies and parodies the media’s view of herself: With her new album, she has turned media representations back on themselves. ‘Blank Space’, is written in the voice of the person people think she is, whilst ‘Shake It Off’ parodies these rumours. This frivolous, arguably postmodern, style of spinning the representations around is similar to that of Lady Gaga, but Taylor is given no equivalent ‘art statement’ credibility.
Background information
•Taylor
Swift, born in Pennsylvania in 1989, released her self-titled debut country
album in 2006, at the age of 16, and has since released four more albums,
including her most recent venture into the pop genre, 1989 at the age of 24. In
the years following the release of her second album, Fearless, Swift has
headlined three tours and received seven Grammys, whilst also experimenting
with several genres of music. As a star growing up in the public eye, Taylor
has kept her reputation as a more ‘organic’ singer/songwriter, consistently for
almost a decade. Like Miley Cyrus, who became an icon in the same year as her
own debut, Swift has been in the public eye from late childhood into
adolescence and early adult life; however, she has taken a sharp turn away,
representationally, from Cyrus, who has chosen to escape her ‘Hannah Montana’
label through overtly sexualised and
controversial performances, signifying her distinction from the Disney Channel
child star.
•Like
Lady Gaga, Swift reinvents her musical style with each album. While 2012’s Red
was filled with devastating songs about heartbreak that collided with a mixture
of pop and country, 2014’s 1989 is ‘80s pop Taylor’, and is all about New York
and a new attitude. Each tour is filled with new costumes, new stages, new
ideas. However, there are differences. Gaga is viewed as an ‘artist’, and the
re-construction and subversion of what she represents as a female
singer/performer is discussed as the (re)presentation of her ‘character’; but
Swift has not been granted this license. Instead she has been consistently trivialised
throughout her career, assumed by her critics to be presenting herself in the
same persona with each new release. I’ll focus on three aspects of the way
Swift has been characterised to
argue that she has been undervalued as a postmodern artist, a feminist, and an
inspiring role model for her fans
No comments:
Post a Comment