Conference Agenda

The allure of the confessional singer-songwriter has a long and complex history (Frith 1998; Cott 2006; Dibben 2009; Murphy 2023). It is a story that both demands and assumes the “truth”; where the pain and grief woven into music and lyrics is born from autobiography (Lankford Jr. 2010). Central to this equation is the expectations of authorial presence ascribed to first-person narration (Muir 2009; McHale 2003). The “crossing over” of language from speech to song, both buoyed by the prevailing presence of the “I,” triggers a linguistic slippage that sustains such interpretive habits. In popular music contexts, the very physicality of the performer’s body—sighing, gasping, cheeks flushed, brow sweating—intensifies any links made between narrator and author (Abbate 1998; Gordon 2004).

In this paper, I analyze resonances between confession and embodiment by tuning into Taylor Swift’s “You’re Losing Me (From The Vault)” [2023]. The track—a ballad driven by samples of Swift’s own heartbeat—sings of a relationship on the brink of collapse. The lyrics unfold against a soundscape of precarious heartbeats, caught breaths, and pained sighs. In offering “You’re Losing Me” as a point of departure, this paper explores an embodied politics of sonic intimacy in popular music. It analyzes the sonic and narratological impact of a body’s love “sick” presence as it is encoded in Swift’s own heartbeat. It further models a form of diagnostic listening that is grounded in contemporary medicalization (Szasz 2007; Rice 2012). I argue that Swift’s heartbeat invites a listener to become an expert in auscultation: we hold a stethoscope to the narrator’s heart to in turn diagnose the performer. I characterize this practice as an intimate form of medicalized listening, during which the amplified heart indicates relational and embodied precarity (Van Drie 2015; Rice & Coltart 2006). Ultimately, I argue that listening to the heart is to listen to the performing (and performer’s) body. The heart’s acousticity signals relationality and discloses vulnerability: to the narrator’s lover, as to the performer’s audience.

On her 2020 album evermore, Taylor Swift teamed up with the all-female band HAIM on “no body, no crime” where an unnamed protagonist kills her friend Este’s ex-husband under the suspicion that Este’s own mysterious disappearance was the fault of her philandering ex-husband. In the 2023 music video for her song “Feather” (2022), Sabrina Carpenter dances over the coffin of the man she has brutally murdered for taking an upskirt photo of her without her consent. In the music video for “Breakfast” (2022), Dove Cameron takes on the role of a predatory boss, sexually harassing her male employees in a fictional, gender-swapped universe where women dominate men. These songs reflect a growing number of popular songs that reference, or outright depict, women committing acts of violence against men in a feminist spirit.

While U.S. popular music is no stranger to depictions of violence, scholarship has focused on those musical spaces, such as Rap and Hip/Hop, where violence is related to liberation, emancipation, and issues of unequal labor and systemic oppression. This violence is typically limited to traditional masculinity, male songwriters, and male listeners, and often partial to Black artists. Where violence is frequently an object of concern for critics on the potential negative effects of consuming what some see as gratuitous brutality, in the music of white, female artists, graphic violence reveals a new cultural moment for contemporary popular music and its fans.

In this paper, I demonstrate the use of violence in the music and music videos of white female artists as actions of reparative justice. Using feminist literary criticism from Audre Lorde (1978), Roxanne Gay (2014; 2018), and Saidiya Hartman (2019), I advance a “feminist theory” (Cusick 1994) to decode the expressions of female rage in these songs. I situate the songs within the ongoing discussion on intersectional feminism, putting them in conversation with the real-world violence—physical and legislative—against women which disproportionately affects women of color. And finally, I examine the songs’ reception amongst fans, critics, and scholars and question why this violence appears more acceptable than previous depictions of violence in popular music.

Having come of age with the rising significance of internet culture, Taylor Swift and her “Swifties” have developed a symbiotic producer-consumer relationship that disrupts traditional concepts of the popular singer commodity. This paper considers how her varied career and rocky history with fans (and anti-fans) fits into the greater narrative of late-stage western capitalism and the celebrity commodity market, specifically Alvin Toffler’s “prosumer” economic system (1980). Fandom studies scholars have already established that the celebrity commodity market thrives on a celebrity’s production output (like albums, ticket sales, merchandising, etc.) and the fans’ imagined relationship with their idol. In the past, celebrities have literally sold the official record of their life story in the forms of written memoirs, and more recently in documentaries for streaming services. Taylor Swift’s albums have become more than an extension of her public narrative; they have themselves become the commodified narrative. This began when she released her 2017 album Reputation, which represents a complete aesthetic departure from her former musical and public persona. More recently, her “Taylor’s Version” albums and her ongoing Eras Tour have become means to controlling her entire public persona.

In these cases, Swift acts as her own producer. However, an understudied part of Swift’s evolution from “confessional pillow talk” songwriter (Hadju, 2009) to international sensation is her “Swifty” fanbase. “Swifties” buy into the Taylor Swift narrative by purchasing her albums, official merchandise, and tickets to her concerts. However, the fans themselves are also producers. It was with their support that Swift bounced back from her 2016 fall from grace, and their powerful social media presence buffered her move to re-record her first 6 albums after a prolonged dispute with Big Machine Records. Swifties also play active roles in tailoring their personal experiences with the artist and her output.

Taylor Swift’s present career high presents an opportunity to study the evolution of a musical giant’s output and their fans levels of engagement. Her success speaks to a distinct shift in western popular music culture’s willingness to embrace fan-endorsed, female artists.

The success of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour dominated headlines in 2023, crashing Ticketmaster’s servers, boosting host cities’ economies, and earning Swift the title of Time’s “Person of the Year.” In October 2023, the singer added a new medium to her list of cultural conquests, releasing the highest-grossing concert film of all time. In her Eras Tour film announcement on social media, Swift told fans, “Eras attire, friendship bracelets, singing and dancing [is] encouraged.” While this invitation prompted some fans to enthusiastically prepare for a participatory concert experience, many argued that these “obnoxious” and “inconsiderate” behaviors would violate movie theater etiquette. Were fans buying tickets to a concert or a movie? During the film’s early weeks, attendees reported a range of outcomes from this debate. Fan investment transformed many theaters into temporary Eras Tour concert venues complete with friendship-bracelet-trading, screaming, and dancing, while other theaters housed placid and uneventful movie screenings.

In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research and participant observation conducted at multiple theaters to show how audience interaction played a vital role in the co-creation of a concert experience that took on many markers of a live concert experience for its audience. I show how the range of Eras Tour movie experiences depended not on the unvarying on-screen concert itself, but on the ways in which fans gradually negotiated the collective behavioral codes of their own unique events. I argue that a version of this process plays out in all musical performances to create a feeling of “liveness,” and show how studying the Eras Tour movie casts this process into sharper relief, owing to the film’s repeatability and the initial uncertainty around audiences’ behavioral codes at screenings. Drawing on research in fan studies on cultural co-creation by fans (Bennett and Booth 2016, Gray 2017), this research makes a timely contribution to an unfolding conversation in performance studies, which has recently shifted away from an exclusive focus on the actions of performers onstage, and towards a consideration of the ways in which audiences bring a performance to life with their attention and investment (Reason and Lindelof 2017, Kim 2018).