Death by Fun

# 610

Advice to the classics from the wisdom of Pop Culture

Those “Has-the-world-gone-mad-or-is-it-me?” moments seem to be recurring with increasing frequency. It’s not just that the newsfeed out of America looks increasingly as it were directed by Leni Riefenstahl, it’s bizarre moments such as Liberal leadership aspirant, Andrew Hastie, posing with a 1969 Ford Falcon GT, telling us it’s his dream that Australians will one day make such cars again. Great idea! Let’s return to a massively subsidised industry that produced petrol guzzling, exhaust spewing, unsafe vehicles for the common man. Now that’s progress!

One wonders why the aptly named Mr. Hastie didn’t wax lyrical about the refined elegance of the horse-and-carriage? So much more traditional than those “silent, soulless” EVs, stuffed with Chinese tech.

And yet, such outbursts of weirdness that pose as news, are merely passing sensations. When something dominates the media so comprehensively as the Taylor Swift craze, and shows no signs of slowing down, it feels as if our cultural values are undergoing a seismic upheaval. While we may be genuinely concerned about museums, universities and news outlets being transformed into strongholds of Trumpian propaganda, long before then western civilisation will have debrained itself at the altar of pop cultural fairy floss… if it hasn’t already happened.

One would have be living in a bunker in the Great Sandy Desert not to be aware that Taylor Swift has a new album and is engaged to a football hero, but there was one article in particular that caught my eye. While all the news outlets seemed to be competing with each other as to who could have the most Taylor Swift articles, on the ABC News website, there was a piece called Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl in the spotlight, a track-by-track look.

That strictly non-commercial broadcaster, Your ABC, had decided to invite “fan culture researcher” Dr. Georgia Carroll, to take us on a “track-by-track journey” through Swift’s new album. If you’ve never heard of Dr. Carroll it isn’t because she’s the shy, retiring type. Go to her website and this is what you’ll find:

Looking for an expert in fandom and fan engagement? You’ve come to the right place.

I have a PhD in Sociology from the University of Sydney, where I specialised in fan and celebrity studies (with case studies on Taylor Swift and Supernatural). As one of the only researchers in Australia with this speciality, I’m who you want to speak to if you’re looking to learn more about fans and fandom.

My research explored the commodification of fandom communities, exploring what motivates fans to spend money on their favourite celebrities. Combined with my experience as a talent-based publicist and community manager, I’m a leading fan engagement expert ready to help you and your organisation.

Dr. Carroll has even been featured on CNN, where we learn that she found her spiritual vocation in 2008, at age 14, when she first heard Taylor Swift’s music and became a Swiftie.

Among her intellectual insights into the new album, we read: “Dr Carroll says the song sounds fun, despite having dark undertones, and is a good start to the album… ‘From the very beginning, I was like, ‘oh, yeah, I’m into this’.”

With each new track, further insights abound:

- “I’m a big pop girly, so from first listen, especially the chorus, it is just so upbeat.”

- “Musically, I think it’s a very fun song and it’s clear that some of it is a bit tongue-in-cheek

- “And I would love it to be one of the other singles that she uses because I just thought it was fun.”

For Dr. Carroll, the crucial concept in the new discipline of Taylor Swift Studies seems to be “Fun”. One can see why leading media outlets have drawn upon her expertise. Only someone with a PhD in Fandom could serve up such revelations.

Dr. Carroll was also a keynote speaker at the Swiftposium, hosted by Melbourne University in February 2024, with the co-operation of five other universities. The ABC - and the BBC, and CNN, and everybody else – wrote stories about this event as well.

Among other academic Swifties, there was Kate Pattison, who told us: “Swifties are one of the case studies for my PhD research, along with fans of Harry Styles, Delta Goodrem and BTS. Essentially I’m looking at how participation in pop music fandoms can be beneficial in other areas of life, such as the workplace.”

Then there was Hannah McCann’s promised paper, ‘A queer reading of Taylor Swift’s œuvre.’ She explained: “My work on fangirls has specifically involved looking at the queer lens that some fans bring to their idols – whether their idols are out as queer or not.”

If you wish to sample the papers delivered at this landmark conference, you can purchase the book: Taylor Swift: Culture, Capital & Critique, published by Routledge in June this year, at a bargain price of only $287. You can read Pattison’s paper: ‘Taylor-Made Learning: Fan Labour, Skill Development, and Celebrity Interaction in the Taylor Swift Affinity Space’; while McCann’s paper has emerged with a much cooler title: ‘Monsters and Mad Women: A Queer Gothic Reading of Taylor Swift’.

One listed conference paper that seems to have missed out was Dr. Marc Cheong’s ‘‘Anti-hero’: A philosophical take on Taylor’s existential authenticity’. This is a shame, because the title had uncanny echoes of the one-off parody magazine, Art and a texta, which came out in 1983, and featured a piece called (from memory) ‘Leave it to Beaver: An Existential Analysis by Jean-Paul Sartre.’

By the way, when I tried to fact-check this title, po-faced AI informed me:

There is no known philosophical work titled “Leave it to Beaver: An Existential Analysis by Jean-Paul Sartre”. The phrase combines the classic television show Leave it to Beaver with the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre’s philosophy, centered on the idea that “existence precedes essence” and humans are radically free to create their own values, stands in contrast to the idealized American suburban life depicted in the show.

This opens up a new area of investigation: the complete lack of understanding when AI is asked to deal with humour, irony or satire. The more we rely on this dreary, straightlaced machine-brain, that draws all of its info from the dross on the Internet, the duller we will become. When AI develops a sense of humour that’s when things will really get dangerous.

I could spend thousands of words just trawling over the titles of the academic papers on Taylor Swift, although I confess to no great enthusiasm when it comes to reading them. I realise this leaves me open to the charge of mere prejudice, as I’m casting doubt on a booming intellectual enterprise without dutifully absorbing everything that has been written. Normally I’m far more scrupulous, having spent decades chewing my way through indigestible art catalogue essays.

One bitter regret, however, is the few days I devoted to The Da Vinci Code, and I’m inclined to suspect the new discipline of Swift Studies might inspire similar feelings.

When it comes to Taylor Swift, having sat down and sampled the music, it frankly left me cold. There was very little in my partial exposure to Swift’s œuvre that sounded fresh or original. These are formula pop songs calculated to strike the right chords with fans. As for Swift herself, I can’t see anything especially dynamic or sexy about her image, or the way it has been tweaked to copy numerous pop styles of the past 30-40 years. If I had to be blunt, the whole package struck me as shallow and cynical. To be a “Swiftie” it would help a lot if you’d never listened to anything prior to the early 2000s.

Formula and calculation need not be fatal in pop music. The Monkees were a completely fabricated band, but their best songs have never lost their appeal. The Sex Pistols were the invention of that professional sleazebag, Malcolm McLaren, but they certainly made their mark. David Bowie plotted his annual image changes like a major fashion house but came up with at least a decade’s worth of incredible albums. If you want “dark”, try Amy Winehouse. Swift’s “dark”, like everything else she touches, remains inside inverted commas.

This is all by way of opinion. I’m not going to argue about Swift’s genius, or lack of, with millions of die-hard fans. Fandom is not a rational state, and nobody wants to think their idol has feet of clay. Personally, I found Swift’s music to be so uninteresting I have no desire to spend more time listening to it, merely to add substance to first impressions. If Taylor Swift had written anything as instantly striking as Last Train to Clarksville, or Anarchy the UK, or Life on Mars, or Rehab, I’d be more willing to pay attention.

One of the most revealing remarks about the Swift phenomenon is a quip by Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, who said she was “the Margaret Thatcher of pop music”, because she was so focussed on economics. Strangely enough, Tennant said this in praise, because he approved of Swift’s battles for fair pay with Spotify and Apple Music, but hey, could anybody be compared with Mrs. Thatcher in a completely positive sense?? A more typical response might be Elvis Costello’s song about dancing on her grave.

It’s worth pausing to consider the cash nexus, because if there’s one area of Swift’s work that really justifies in-depth academic analysis, it’s the economics. In monetary terms, Swift’s success is staggering. According to the Swift studies crowd, who should be a reliable source of information, a 2023 survey found that more than half of all Americans consider themselves “Swifties”, while her Eras Tour of 2023-24 garnered over US$2 billion in ticket sales, more than doubling the previous highest figure of all time.

Swift’s personal worth is estimated at US$1.6 billion and rising. Her Instagram feed has 281 million followers. Her new Life of a Showgirl album sold $2.7 million copies on its first day of release in the US. The accompanying music documentary was the best-attended film at Australian cinemas in its opening week. The quality of Swift’s music may be debatable, but its success is beyond question - almost beyond belief.

Remember how that “big pop girly”, Dr. Georgia Carroll, touts her wares as “an expert in fandom and fan engagement”? One of her research topics is: “exploring what motivates fans to spend money on their favourite celebrities.” Armed with this invaluable knowledge, as well as her experience as a “talent-based publicist”, she’s “ready to help you and your organisation.”

For an appropriate fee, of course. And why not? A girl’s gotta get some value out of her PhD in Sociology. But who would be paying? Presumably those companies that have product to flog to Taylor Swift fans. Dr. Carroll will tell you what Pavlovian buttons to push to tap into this potentially lucrative market.

Swift’s monetary success is so overwhelming it seems to make fans’ eyes glaze over. Mere hard work won’t secure such a bounty, there must be some mystical reason why she has been so favoured. Her wealth is viewed as a form of Grace, a confirmation of her superiority over all other denizens of the music industry. The next step – via inductive logic – is to see how all her relationships, her songs, her statements, her lunch, her cats, etc – have helped create this dazzling image. Having established her cosmic saintliness, no-one could question the moneymaking efforts of whatever drones attach themselves to the Queen Bee.

It’s a classic example of the conflation of market values with moral values seen everywhere today. The American philosopher, Michael J. Sandel, has written a book on the subject: What Money Won’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. He looks at the way market logic has invaded the arts, sport, health, education, and just about every other form of human activity. At its most basic, he shows how thoroughly we have absorbed the alarming proposition that money confers virtue.

Note the title of the Routledge collection of conference papers: Taylor Swift: Culture, Capital & Critique. It’s the kind of subtitle one might expect to find on a book about Karl Marx rather than a pop singer. It has echoes of the Frankfurt School, although Adorno and Horkheimer wouldn’t have been nearly so up-beat in their approach to capitalism and commodification.

What we see today is that those ‘sociologists’ studying fandom, are themselves fans. They can’t be especially critical of this state without being critical of themselves and their own choice of study topics. They can’t view commodification as necessarily a bad thing, since they have surrendered themselves to the process. Instead, like Kate Pattison, they seek to demonstrate “how participation in pop music fandoms can be beneficial in other areas of life, such as the workplace.”

I’d have to read Pattison’s paper to understand the subtleties of this argument, as it’s not immediately apparent how being a Swiftie might lead to promotion in the public service – unless perhaps your bosses were also Swifties and you could share a secret handshake, like the Masons. One assumes there must be some moral benefit involved, although once again it’s not easy to know what that might be. Are Swifties necessarily more honest? More caring and sharing? More geared to success in the capitalist system? Adorno would probably argue that fandom is a form of false consciousness that works against critical thinking, conferring an exaggerated fetish value on the object of adoration.

I’m with Adorno on that one.

There seems to have been little difficulty in the attempt to make Taylor Swift an object of academic study – we learn the Swiftposium “attracted more than 400 submissions – 130 of these accepted – from 78 academic institutions worldwide, spanning 60 academic disciplines”. The broader problem is that such events cater to the mentality that one need not study anything that isn’t a source of personal pleasure. Why would anyone study something boring and difficult if you can simply extend your teenage fan fixations into a professorship? As Pop Culture drives Classics off university curriculums, it seems nobody recalls Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper.

Andy Warhol famously said, “Pop is about liking things”, and Pop Cultural Studies is almost exclusively pursued by those who are fans of the subjects they’re studying. Anybody who is not a fan is structurally excluded, as they believe such courses are utterly frivolous. The Pop Culture academics would like us to believe their chosen subject can be viewed as a fully fledged discipline, like Classics or English Literature, with Taylor Swift no less worthy of in-depth analysis than Plato or Shakespeare or Jane Austen. But such conceits don’t create an ideal equivalence between the Bard of Avon and the Princess of Pop, they highlight the yawning gulf between them.

If we shun difficulty, convincing ourselves that the tawdry tales of Swift’s relationships, her friendships and her spats with other singers are no less profound than Hamlet’s soliloquies, we are swimming in a very shallow pond. Swift’s stories may be more instantly relatable for 20-30-year-olds in the 21^st century, but that doesn’t make them especially insightful. I daresay there’s more wit and insight in one chapter of Jane Austen than in Swift’s entire discography.

A classic is a work that has stood the test of time and is rediscovered by each new generation, who find something of relevance to themselves. Swift’s music has yet to weather that test.

When it comes to simple enjoyment, I always think of Pierre Ryckmans (AKA. Simon Leys), who in his great essay on Don Quixote, confesses that he reads only for pleasure. What we need to understand is that for Ryckmans, pleasure could be found in Cervantes and Stendhal, but also in reading and translating Confucius’s Analects. Pleasure is not extinguished by difficulty. In many instances it’s enhanced.

What we see in Swift Studies, is the very opposite. In place of the intellectual pleasure to be found in reading and understanding a difficult work of literature or philosophy, we have the fatuous thrill of applying academic theory and jargon to a banal phenomenon. The aim is not to illuminate complex ideas in a classic text, but to add complexity to things every fan already knows. It’s a narcissistic process driven by the desire of the Pop Culture academic to justify their own life choices and prove their field is valuable and relevant to the present – perhaps more valuable than the traditional university subjects. Here, we need to understand “valuable” in both a moral and monetary sense, as Taylor Swift Studies will not only teach us to be better human beings if we listen to our idol’s lyrics and follow her example, it promises cash rewards to those who can turn their expertise into consultancies and professorships. This is entirely appropriate for an object of study who is one of the great success stories of late capitalism. If 53 percent of Americans considered themselves Swifties in 2023, how many of them voted for Donald Trump?

Dr. Carroll told the ABC that she hoped “the success of the Swiftposium will help normalise the studying of pop culture in Australian academia.” Given that Australian universities have become relentless in their search for a dollar, ready to drop unpopular traditional subjects in the search for courses that will attract students and sponsors, she need not worry. Academic circuses such as the Swiftposium, which attracted unprecedented attention in the media, are like catnip to today’s university administrators.

Pop culture courses are not fighting an uphill battle - they have all the momentum (and the media) on their side. By contrast, the Ramsay Foundation has attracted enormous flak by sponsoring courses on Western Civilisation, as if such studies were some kind of colonialist gesture. Perhaps there might have been less hostility had the Foundation not put a culture warrior such as Tony Abbott on their board - an appointment guaranteed to send the wrong messages. Nevertheless, the fact remains that we’re living in a world in which a course teaching Shakespeare is controversial, and one studying Taylor Swift is cool. Even as I write this, I recognise that most people might not find anything disturbing in this comparison. Shakespeare is perceived as highbrow, boring and difficult, whereas Swift is Fun – to use Dr. Carroll’s preferred technical term. And anything that’s fun must necessarily be good, no matter how much the Pop Culture academics might complicate the topic. In our growing obsession with pop culture, it seems we’re past the flirting stage and are entering into some serious commitments. In response, I’ll leave the last word to Rosalind in As You Like It, who says to her suitor: “Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing?”

The art column is devoted to the 2025 Portia Geach Memorial Award at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, which, as usual, has its good points and bad points. I got an extra buzz from reading about Portia Geach herself, whose name is kept alive through the prize but deserves to be better known today. Although it’s an anachronism to have a prize specifically for female portrait painters when women are now in the majority in many shows, the event seems to be more popular than ever. Like so many things in Sydney, it has carved out its own niche on the annual cultural calendar.

The cinema column looks at Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which – like anything by this exceptional American director, is obligatory viewing. The film may not be earning as much at the box office as Taylor Swift’s The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, but unless you’re the most abject of Swifties, it’ll provide a much better night at the pictures.