#LookWhatYouMediaMeDo

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An Ode to Taylor Swift’s Approach to Self-Branding

In his book Stars, Richard Dyer discusses the way that movie stars’ personas are built and developed both within and outside of their films. Dyer suggests that the kind of characters that stars play feed into the overall narrative of their career. Taylor Swift isn’t a film star, unless you count a few brief cameos, but her persona is unique in that her personal presentation (Instagram, interviews and anywhere where she is pretending to be herself) and her performance persona (in photoshoots, music videos, live performances and arguably her music) are so nakedly constructed.

While she once may have claimed to have something in common with the girl she plays in the videos for Picture to Burn or Tim McGraw, these days, Swift is no stranger to drawing attention to how her image is created. If you don’t believe me, just look at the video for …Ready for It. She’s literally making a new Taylor.

Whenever T Swizzle releases new music, her fans are chided for combing through the lyrics and accompanying images with a fine toothed comb to find hidden clues or references to other parts of the Swift Mythos. Swift’s music videos are rife with call-backs, her lyrics shot through with veiled (and sometimes…not veiled at all) references to events in her personal life or previous work. As she proved with the Look What You Made Me Do video, you don’t need a cast of thousands of Hollywood stars and decades of comic books to create an extended universe; she did it with one name, one persona, reinvented over and over.

YouTube film academic Lindsay Ellis has pointed out that any text or product exclusively targeted at teenage girls (Ellis refers to the Twilight franchise of books and films) is received by audiences as being universally poor quality and worthy of spades of parodies and mean-spirited hot takes. A lot of media that is cherished by and targeted at young girls is considered extremely low art, and Taylor Swift, despite being a prolific songwriter and a consummate performer, is often dropped into this bucket with a loud, gangly thud. Regularly commenting on how much she loves Tumblr (a site often associated with the obsessive, single-minded fandom (you can read my Timeless reviews on this very blog btw)) as a way of connecting with her fans, Swift makes a big point of trying to connect on a personal level with the hordes of young women who connect with her music.

EM Forster wrote: “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”  Swift seeks to connect with her fans who connect with her art. She’s attempting to turn a one-sided exchange into a kind of contribution triangle, whereby she’s inspired by her fans who are inspired by her work, and both contribute in the resulting music. By creating this pseudo-give-and-take, Taylor’s music and images become something more than a disparate set of marketing images and tunes, but one mythology – “fragments no longer.”

I think it’s admirable for any star to try and do this. As I mentioned at the start of this article, Swift’s persona is fully constructed. Her desire to connect with fans is extremely marketable and played up in interviews and even the way that she speaks to the literal thousands of audience members at her concerts. However, Swift’s detailed, complex mythos, full of symbolism and self-referential intertextuality is the net result of all that connection. It is a mad and brilliant scheme that ultimately acts as a cultural studies training level for her fans.

It starts when Taylor’s hidden a clue to her album title in her latest music video. Her fans interrogate the text, which is a CGI ridden 4 minutes that is so unreal in its aesthetic that every element has been consciously constructed. They dissect, they discuss, they write about their findings. You know, just like when a big controversial movie comes out. That’s right, I’m saying ME! is the Roma of the Taylor Swift world.

I’m a fan of Swift’s music (eye-roll all you want, she writes good tunes, bite me), but I recognised literally none of the symbolism that fans and super-fans and beleaguered entertainment correspondents across the globe are writing adrenaline-fuelled blog posts about. I’m 25, I work in media and I’m doing a masters in film – did I notice that the seven suitcases represented T Swizzle’s albums or that the whole damn video takes place inside a cocoon? No. I did not.

While the details that fans are going nuts about might not be ground-breaking or important in the oeuvre of film and cultural studies, it is so important that these fans are being encouraged to explore and interrogate these texts. They’re sharpening their teeth for tougher meat. Not every Taylor Swift fan will grow up into a film studies academic (although I would read a sci-fi short story where this bizarre phenomenon happens and somehow brings down society) – but the fans that engage on this level are learning how to explore media as constructed work in the context of its creator. THANK YOU TAYLOR! She’s not the hero that media studies wants, but she’s the hero it deserves…

We live in a media dominated age. Our politicians fight in snarky twitter battles, news breaking across the world is available to us pretty much as it happens, and our sexy looking lunches are tiny headlines broadcast from our social media accounts. Interrogating media is a really important skill in this age. Young women and men reading “too much” (don’t get me started) into Taylor Swift videos are learning three things:

1)      Sometimes there is more to a media text than meets the eye, subliminal messaging is a thing.

2)      Taylor’s persona is constructed and she’s consciously creating each new incarnation.

3)      You can question the media that’s put in front of you, even if it is put there by someone that you like.

The way that people often dump on media studies and related fields as “reading too much into things” and “all bullsh*t” is frustrating. Not only is this argument kind of rude, it suggests that there really isn’t much more to a text than meets the eye. There is! Films, movies and music influence us every moment of every day, having the curiosity to ask how they’re doing that is not a bad thing. You’re not “making it all up” if you say that the way that Harry Potter valorises unrequited love is actually quite dangerous, or if you point out that the 2017 Baywatch manages to gently reinforce all the bad gender politics of the 1980s original (WOAH SHOCK) or if you want to write a gosh-darned 7,000 word essay on the bit where the snake bursts into a cloud of butterflies. That curiosity is empowering and exciting and exploring texts this way is fun.

There are caveats to this. Not everyone likes reading texts this way, and it is important to maintain your love for the movies, music videos and other texts that you explore even while you hit them with some cold hard theory. So here is my message to any Taylor Swift fan and budding media genius, stepping out into this wild world of media. Keep these things in mind:

Not everyone will share your passion, but that doesn’t mean your passion is bad - it just means that you might need to have other topics of conversation up your sleeve for when people just aren’t interested. 

Be sensitive to your friends and don’t dump on all their favourite movies and musicians.

Be aware that a lot of people might not share your opinions.

Be quiet in the cinema because shouting “Dutch angle” every time there’s a Dutch angle will make people really mad.

But don’t ever be embarrassed to read into a text and ask questions about how and why it was made.  T Swizzle has felt the brunt of a media age that says what it wants and airs your dirty laundry. She writes songs about how it feels to have a reputation you have no control over. Then she says to her fans “Hey, I’ve reinvented myself, come see if you can figure out what I’ve done! Dissect every frame of my video and every lyric of my song, and every damn pixel of my Instagram.” She sets up the media world as a puzzle which can be pieced together, and if not solved, then thoroughly explored.

Taylor Swift actually wants her fans to do this, and so do I.

#taylor swift #me! taylor swift #me! music video #media studies #cultural studies #film studies #LookWhatYouMediaMeDo