agrammar:

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Here’s the thing: it’s not so much that the two camps are talking about different aspects of Taylor Swift as it is that music critics are talking about Taylor Swift in particular and cultural critics are talking about Taylor Swift as an exemplar of more widespread issues. Alex…

I guess I’d like to see people talk about her less as a person with agency and more as an experience for the people who listen to and watch her.

[EDIT: Plz note that I’m not engaging with Mike’s conclusion — “let’s focus on us and imagine how and why someone might think about it differently” — because, as I say, I don’t really WANT to imagine why the opposing group in this debate believes what they believe. I’d rather just cut out the middle man and actually start to figure out what the hell pop culture “for kids” (or for “people younger than I am”) is actually doing to (and for) kids! I suspect I’m in the minority — but if that’s true, then why does everyone talk about this shit so much?]

Well, I guess the thing is that the end result of that thinking — which I’ve followed into a new discipline, basically — is that you’d actually have to ask those people who listen to and watch her what they think. And that poses a few problems (now we’re leaving the realm of musiccrit versus culture commentary fites, follow me, won’t you?):

(1) Audiences are ambiguous, and Taylor’s audience seems particularly ambiguous. I couldn’t say with any certainty that there is a “type” of person, or a general age of person, who likes Taylor Swift. It might be something like “people between the ages of 6 and 20, mostly girls.” But that itself would be totally a guess — Billboard would probably know better than I would; this is what marketers are pretty good at (right, Tom?): figuring out WHO’S ACTUALLY LISTENING.

(2) So let’s say I generalized “who was actually listening” reasonably (I’d feel comfortable enough doing so with some industry data — it’s not like it’s impossible; it’s just complicated.) Now I need to actually talk to those people to get more than a mere demographic group. But if we are talking about, e.g., six year olds, what they have to tell me is not exactly the same as what they experience — developmentally they don’t really know, or if they do know can’t quite express, what the music or wider culture is doing to them yet. (This is one reason why commentators like to use the 13-16 age range, just enough agency to do stuff intentionally/consciously, but still young enough to invoke manipulation when necessary. And both independent choice and passive manipulation DO actually happen — there’s a messy spectrum — but it doesn’t necessarily correspond to what you’d like it to, in my experience.)

(3) So let’s say we’ve got a range of responses, have figured out “what teen girls in a charter middle school in Philadelphia ‘do’ with Taylor Swift,” say. What do we do with that information? What questions did we actually want answered from these girls? Whether or not it reinforces particular stereotypes? Whether or not it makes them think about relationships with boys in a certain way? What’s the question we want to answer, and how can we trust that we’ve actually answered it, now that we’ve even attempted to answer it (which neither camp here is actually doing).

…Anyway, this goes on. These are all legitimate questions the people I work with, for instance, are asking these questions through research, though usually not about this particular topic or music taste specifically.

When I started talking about bringing some anthropology into music criticism in my Stylus column, it was a signal that these were the directions I thought might be more productive in actually doing this kind of analysis, if that’s what we say we’re doing anyway. And that’s if we’re operating on good faith, that by invoking “those people” we’re saying we actually CARE about those people and have an interest in learning about and maybe even shaping what they actually do, feel, believe, want, etc.

Thing is, in most of these debates, one side is not interested in “those people” at all (i.e. the music critics, who are speaking from their own readings most of the time and accordingly missing the point of the other side, as shitty as those points may, and often can, be) and the other side is operating in…let’s just say “questionable faith.” That is, it’s not that they don’t really really believe what they believe, but the arguments value rhetoric over experience or demonstrable impact on actual communities. That would require more, or at least different, work than what’s happening here — where we’re really just talking to one another as a kind of intellectual game. Which is OK, I guess, I’m not as interested in talking to all of those people (that is to say “you people,” or maybe “us people”) these days.