The “Girl” Era of Taylor Swift : Exploring Identity and Representation in Code Switch : NPR
B A PARKER, HOST:
Heads-up – there’s going to be some salty language.
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PARKER: Hey, everyone, you’re listening to CODE SWITCH. I’m B.A. Parker. Now, did you know only four artists have won the Grammy for album of the year three times? Paul Simon, Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and Taylor Swift. And she’s up for the award again in a few days with her newest album, “Midnights,” along with six other nominations. Now, I’ve got no dog in this fight, no reason to compare “Graceland” to “Songs In The Key Of Life” to “1989,” but Taylor Swift is having a moment. I mean, she’s been having decades of moments, but having recently been named Time’s Person of the Year, her Eras concert tour grossed over $1 billion, the first concert tour to ever do that – I mean, even just the movie of the Eras Tour attracted almost 5 million fans on opening weekend. Heck, USA Today even hired a Taylor Swift reporter.
Swift is an American sweetheart. America has watched Taylor Swift grow up from the teenager with an acoustic guitar to the 34-year-old pop behemoth, all with her girlhood sort of enshrined. Taylor Swift, whether she likes it or not, represents a type of white girlhood that has become aspirational for many people. So then it begs the question, whose girlhood gets to be cherished or valued?
I’m not here to answer these questions on my own. Joining me on the mic today is our very own version of a dedicated Taylor Swift reporter right here on the CODE SWITCH team. Our senior editor, Leah Donnella, has been writing about Swift since 2016, but thinking about her for a lot longer. So welcome back to the show, Leah.
LEAH DONNELLA, BYLINE: Thanks, Parker. Good to be here.
PARKER: So are you a Taylor Swift fan?
DONNELLA: I never know quite how to answer that. I definitely pay attention to her, and there’s plenty of her music that I like. I’ve seen all of her music videos, I think. But is that because I’m a fan? I’m not sure. You know, it’s hard to ignore her cultural dominance, and she has the power to affect entire economies by which cities she decides to go to on her Eras Tour. She also has one of the most diehard fan bases on the planet.
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UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Singing) Or it’s going to go down in flames. You can tell me when it’s over if the high was worth the pain.
DONNELLA: That’s a huge crowd of Swift fans who didn’t get tickets to her concert, just singing along outside of the stadium.
PARKER: Good for them. If you like it, I love it.
DONNELLA: It’s sweet, right? And it feels like Swift has inspired this really kind of wholesome community in a lot of ways. But as with any person who holds a lot of power and influence, there are things about her and her persona that I think are in need of some serious dissection and critique, which I found myself kind of nervously admitting to a crowd of about 700 people, many of them diehard Swifties, in Bloomington, Ind., a few months ago.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: …Leah Donnella.
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DONNELLA: Hi, everyone. I am excited and very nervous to be the last presenter of this conference. I am not an academic. I’m not a scholar. I’m really sorry to say I am not even a Swiftie, at least not in the traditional sense.
PARKER: (Laughter) Did they say you need to leave? Hold up, OK? You’re going to have to go back a little bit and set up the scene for us. What exactly is going on there?
DONNELLA: Yeah. OK, so in November 2023, Indiana University hosted an event that was unlike anything I had ever been to before.
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NATALIA ALMANZA: I’m a program coordinator at the Indiana University Arts & Humanities Council, and I am so excited to welcome you to Taylor Swift: The Conference Era.
DONNELLA: That was Natalia Almanza, and she was one of the people who organized this big multiday academic conference all about Taylor Swift. She said that Taylor Swift was the soundtrack to her childhood and helped her understand how to process young adult life.
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ALMANZA: I’m sure most of us here have had similar moments, moments where we felt that she wrote songs about us or experiences in our lives. If you can’t find a single Taylor Swift song that resonates with you, I just simply don’t believe you. You’re a liar, and I hope that you figure that out.
(LAUGHTER)
DONNELLA: And, Parker, I haven’t been to a lot of academic conferences, so I don’t know what they’re usually like.
PARKER: Oh, I’ve been to a few. It’s, you know, usually in a hotel conference room. There are groups of academics who present their papers to about, like, three other people who are in their field.
DONNELLA: OK, well, this was not that. It was in an old movie theater downtown with a big marquee outside that said Taylor Swift: The Conference Era – sold out. There were people actually lined up with tickets waiting to get in like this was some sort of big premiere, almost all women, most of them pretty young. And then as soon as you walked in the doors, there were these life-sized cutouts of Taylor Swift from different stages of her career – her different eras. There were also snacks themed to the eras, like a Lavender Haze doughnut and Taylor cocktails at the bar next door.
PARKER: Oh, they were definitely committing to a theme.
DONNELLA: Yes. And it wasn’t just the people who were organizing the conference. It was also the attendees. Almost everyone there seemed to be dressed from a different Swiftian (ph) era. So you had your bright-colored sequins people, your stripey ’70s-style halter top people, the autumn-core cardigan scarf cohort – I think I’m actually combining a couple eras there, sorry – and then tons of people wearing these homemade beaded friendship bracelets, which has become kind of a symbol of Swift’s Eras Tour.
PARKER: OK, Leah, I’m not going to make any assumptions here, but what were the racial demographics of this crowd?
DONNELLA: It was mostly white. I think I noticed, like, one or two other Black people, a handful of Latinas and Asian Americans. But just at a glance, I’d say, like, predominantly white.
PARKER: OK, so, in that way, it was a lot like a typical academic conference.
DONNELLA: Very much so. And side note – not unlike Taylor Swift’s fan base more broadly. A poll from Business Insider found that about 75% of self-proclaimed Taylor Swift fans are white and a majority are women.
PARKER: So what were all these people talking about?
DONNELLA: So many things – about 30 people presented. So there was one woman from Harvard Law School who gave an amazing talk, actually, about whether Taylor Swift can copyright the aesthetic choices from each of her eras. Spoiler alert – no.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: …Because, to put it simply, you cannot copyright or trademark a vibe.
DONNELLA: There was a talk about queer temporality in Swift’s “Folklore”-era, timbral nostalgia in her rerecordings, the blending of genres in “Midnights,” how she wields her cats on social media to extend her reach and fan base.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: …Accordances of what media scholar Jessica Maddox calls the cute economy of the pet internet, which deploys aesthetics of cuteness, fuzziness, and warmth to draw user creators into ultimately engaging with them.
PARKER: All right, so people were going deep into the mechanics of the Swiftdom (ph).
DONNELLA: Really deep. Yeah.
PARKER: OK, so, Leah, why were you there? What is your extremely deep and nuanced Taylor expertise?
DONNELLA: Well, thank you for asking, Parker, and I will have you know that I was there because I was the closing keynote speaker. Hold your applause.
PARKER: I know that’s right.
DONNELLA: And my talk was called “Taylor Swift And The Politics Of Growing Up.” And it was kind of funny ’cause I came in thinking I was going to say one set of things, but I wound up having to change my speech, like, every 10 minutes. Because this theme, Taylor’s treatment of adolescence and girlhood, kept coming up over and over again. And so I really felt like I was learning on the spot. And one thing that I kept hearing people talk about is how Taylor Swift has really managed to tap into this kind of heartfelt, lyrical, nostalgic, sometimes cringey but, like, totally familiar depiction of what it’s like to be a teenage girl. Authentic and relatable are two words that came up a lot.
PARKER: Well, it doesn’t totally surprise me. I feel like for her entire career, Swift has been celebrated and at times also criticized for her focus on trying to capture the emotions of teens and young women.
DONNELLA: Oh, absolutely. The conference was no anomaly in that way. New York Times Magazine wrote this big magazine article recently, where the author suggested that you could understand the phenomenon of Taylor Swift, quote, “through the eyes of the idea that Taylor Swift frees women to celebrate their girlhood.”
PARKER: That’s a lot to put on to Taylor Swift. But OK, first, for people who somehow haven’t gotten sucked into the whole Swift universe, can we do, like, the quick backstory on Taylor Swift’s actual girlhood?
DONNELLA: Let’s do it. So Swift is from a small town called Wyomissing, Pa., about an hour and a half northwest of Philadelphia. It’s about 85% white, pretty wealthy. And Swift has talked a bunch in interviews about how she didn’t feel popular or cool growing up. Here’s her in a CBS interview from 2014.
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TAYLOR SWIFT: My life – my life doesn’t gravitate towards being edgy, sexy or cool. I just naturally am not any of those things.
DONNELLA: But she says she did think of herself as hardworking and creative. She was really into music and obviously really wanted to be a songwriter. So when Swift was 14, she and her family moved to Nashville so she could pursue that passion. And it was just a couple of years after that that her first album came out in 2006.
PARKER: OK, so that’s around the time that I first encountered her, because I think “Teardrops On My Guitar” was one of the first songs of hers I remember listening to.
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SWIFT: (Singing) Drew looks at me…
PARKER: …and she was talking about this guy she had a crush on in high school, and I’ve totally been there.
DONNELLA: Yeah. And then just a couple years later, she came out with “Fearless,” which was when she started being even more well known with these two really, really big hits and music videos – “Love Story”…
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SWIFT: (Singing) Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone…
DONNELLA: …And “You Belong With Me.”
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ADDIE MAHMASSANI: The year was 2008. My little sister was in her basement bedroom blasting a song that would never leave my ears. (Singing) You’re on the phone with your girlfriend – she’s upset. The twang of the banjo mixed with that infectious hook and lovely, inviting voice to create something like a pop song, but somehow deeper, more interesting, more human.
DONNELLA: So Parker, the voice you just heard was Addie Mahmassani. She was a speaker at the Taylor Swift conference. She gave her talk wearing black-and-silver paisley sequined pants, and she told the crowd that from the very first time she heard Taylor Swift at 17 years old, she was hooked, largely for the same reason so many others were. Taylor Swift felt relatable. I called her up after the conference to dig into that a little more.
MAHMASSANI: The women in pop were – They were so sexy. To be honest, like, I wouldn’t have used that word when I was 16, 17. The women in popular music were not accessible models to me in that moment of my life.
DONNELLA: But Swift was different in a way that shy, awkward teenage Addie could relate to.
MAHMASSANI: It was her look, you know? So first you hear the sound, and her voice is so sweet, and she’s singing these sort of, like, fairy-tale stories where she always starts as that really accessible, that dorky girl that you see yourself in.
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SWIFT: (Singing) She wears short skirts. I wear T-shirts. She’s cheer captain, and I’m on the bleachers.
MAHMASSANI: And then, usually, especially in those early songs, it was like she goes on a journey. The journey involves, like, getting the sort of, like, the man of her fantasies and sort of, like, this evolution into this, like, beautiful princess, fairy-tale girl.
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SWIFT: (Singing) …Knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring and said, marry me, Juliet…
MAHMASSANI: And I mean, I can’t believe I didn’t see it when I was 17 – how much like Cinderella and how much it was like that, I mean, but it just got me.
PARKER: I get that. And I mean, obviously at one point, Swift really was a teenage girl writing about things she was maybe more or less experiencing. And I’ve been there. I’ll admit, teenage Parker was into the whole acoustic guitars, sad-girl music thing. Were you?
DONNELLA: Not the version that Swift was doing. I should say, I’m close to the same age as Taylor Swift. I also grew up in suburban Pennsylvania, just about an hour away from where she did. We actually shopped in the same mall on occasion – fun fact. And I think because our circumstances were so similar in certain ways, our differences were what felt most pronounced to me at that time. Like her ability to imagine herself as this Juliet-type figure, you know, a Cinderella kind of princess – overlooked, but special, beautiful, someone who could possibly be the subject of romantic interest – that felt utterly unrelatable to me as a Black girl in this very white setting.
PARKER: I guess what I think is so fascinating is that even now, 15 years later, when Swift is arguably the most famous person on the planet and a literal billionaire, she’s still talked about within this framework of girl, not the 34-year-old business tycoon that she is. So what is it about Taylor Swift that lends itself to people thinking of this adult woman as a girl, or at least someone who can authentically represent girlhood?
DONNELLA: OK, well, first of all, you know, credit where credit is due. I think Taylor Swift thinks a lot about girlhood and cares about girls. And so a lot of her aesthetic and her lyrics and her interaction with her fandom is focused on her female listeners. And at the end of the day, Swift is also a very savvy business person, and she knows that it’s largely women and girls who consume her stuff. Also, you know, she’s in the midst right now of rerecording a bunch of her old albums, so she’s literally singing the same songs that she wrote when she was in her teens and early 20s.
PARKER: Right, right. That’s the concept behind her Eras tour. It’s all about her going back and revisiting those previous phases of her life, because we’re now all old enough to desire nostalgia.
DONNELLA: We are. But you know, the other part of the answer, I think, about why she’s still perceived as this authentic representation of girlhood has a lot to do with how girlhood is constructed. So, Parker, sorry to get a little existential for a second.
PARKER: No, please do, Leah.
DONNELLA: Girlhood is not a real thing. It’s an idea that we have