Studying Taylor Swift
Definitely not an aberration in our celebrity-addled and pop music-ridden times is the following example from local mainstream media’s recent frenzied headlines: “Swifties ng Bayan! UP (University of the Philippines) Diliman to offer Taylor Swift elective.”
But considering that Ms. Taylor Swift is a global pop music juggernaut with a huge Filipino fanbase to boot, we can handily excuse local media’s lavish attention to the news the State University is offering a course elective on her.
Still, such news begs the question of whether studying Ms. Swift and her phenomenal global success merits attention or if it is just merely a case of nothing to see here.
UP associate professor Cherrie Brillon, who is to handle the elective offered by the College of Mass Communication, says in a Facebook post that the Ms. Swift elective “underscores the need to actually take a closer look at celebrities and their relationship and resonance with and to Filipinos, especially at this time.”
Bone-dry, though her academic description may sound, Ms. Brillon is actually saying that dissecting pop culture, no matter how trivial or modest, is a serious subject for academic scrutiny since it can tell us so much about Filipinos nowadays.
Surprisingly, too, Ms. Brillon says studying Swift also directly involves politics.
Her insight seems to have come about when she involved herself in an electoral campaign and noticed that “people (who) were doing political campaigns were very much fan-oriented and fan-driven… from something that is purely entertainment, they have fully crossed over to politics.”
The cat is out of the bag then, literally springing at us political addicts, forcing us to deal with the idea that we can’t politically disengage from the pop culture of our day.
Looking at politics through cultural elitist lenses is definitely out these days, in short.
Nonetheless, scrutinizing pop culture and what it means to society has always been a long-running political concern.
Notable German theoreticians Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, for instance, debated in the early part of the 20th century on how exactly to engage pop culture when practicing politics.
“Benjamin saw the popular arena as a potential site of resistance. Adorno, by contrast, viewed pop culture as an instrument of economic and political control, enforcing conformity behind a permissive screen,” pointed out music critic Alex Ross in a decade-old New Yorker magazine essay.
Nonetheless, investigating pop culture’s impact on politics is pretty heady and rarified enough to even thoroughly discuss here.
Sufficient it is to note, however, that nowadays is an era where “pop hegemony is all but complete, its superstars dominating the media and wielding the economic might of tycoons.”
Ms. Taylor Swift and her pop music career undoubtedly embody our times where “pop is the ruling party,” ensuring, to quote Ross, “celebrities have the status of secular gods.”
Confronting such cultic powers means we need to scrupulously study Ms. Swift since her transnational cultural appeal could possibly even shape modern Filipino sensibilities.
Nonetheless, some Filipino “Swifties” (heavily invested and involved Swift fans) are probably reluctant to go as far as that, preferring instead to indulge in feelings that Ms. Swift sings about: “disappointment in retrospect, and looking back and realizing that you’re not the child you were, even though you might want to be,” as literary critic and Harvard professor Stephanie Burt puts it.
Burt, who is similarly slated to teach a Taylor Swift course, says the singer undoubtedly has “melodic and verbal” virtuosity. But Swift, “harmonically, she’s not usually that interesting. It’s pretty normal pop chord progressions and pretty standard varieties of pop arrangement.”
Still, despite such a musical straitjacket, scores of Filipinos have taken to Swift in droves. And that may be important.
As Ms. Brillon argues, connecting through something Filipinos already like is perhaps the best shot at making Filipinos deal with their other personal and social concerns. Ms. Brillon has something going on there.
“Still,
such news begs the question of whether studying Ms. Swift and her phenomenal global success merits attention or if it is just merely a case of nothing to see here.
“The
cat is out of the bag then, literally springing at us political addicts, forcing us to deal with the idea that we can’t politically disengage from the pop culture of our day.