Taylor Swift: Immaterial Girl
A dive into pop music's dark night of the soul.
Bismarck famously referred to Napoleon III as “the sphinx without a riddle,” a turn of phrase Truman Capote once reappropriated for Andy Warhol, albeit the two probably meant two very different things. To Bismarck, Louis Napoleon was a hapless chump, an ineffectual LARPer whose projected fearsomeness was undercut by his lack of competency; the sphinx without a riddle has no pretext to be a threat to you. Capote, on the other hand, likely meant something else, in fact he more specifically said that Warhol was the sphinx without a secret; Capote was accusing Warhol of being deliberately inscrutable, acting the fearsome sphinx guarding its precious secret, in order to mask his vacuity, the absence of any secret to be discovered at all, a façade meant to make him intellectually-threatening.
Not having a riddle does not necessarily preclude one from having a secret. You can lack one, you can lack both. Taylor Swift lacks both. She has no riddle, and she has no secret.
When I look at Taylor Swift I often think of Robert Shaw’s immortal words in Jaws: lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes. Taylor was submitting demos at age 11 and had a talent manager at age 13, and it shows. By the time she got to us at age 17, there likely wasn’t much Taylor left in there. The ruthless machinations of show business at that level, when they work their best, scoop children’s insides out, and if the child is really lucky they’ll successfully scoop out every inch of them, and if they’re not that lucky, if there’s anything remotely human left inside, they are destined to breakdown like Britney Spears. The level of control necessary to maintain a brand image that grows this big requires a sort of discipline and obedience not dissimilar to the sort of training one receives at a military boot camp, the sort of conditioning that turns you into an able and ready tool, only far more totalizing. Taylor Swift’s personal management company, 13 Management, has its own “marketing research” department, and it's been there since nearly the beginning of her career—it takes a special sort of person to be this good at being a constant and deliberate product. There is simply nothing there, and it extends to (and is most obvious in) the music.
Madonna's humanity was available to us through its inversion: the material of the Material Girl was a façade, and with enough licks one might find the real girl at its center. The presence of humanity was implied among the plastic. Swift, by contrast, is the Immaterial Girl. Sincerity and authenticity is her primary marketable gimmick. Like wax fruit or Subway sandwiches, the utility of the "material," of the plastic substance on display, is to trick you into thinking it's anything but. The inversion, the "true" Taylor within, is a pneumatic vacuum. What makes the product so particularly successful is that Taylor, or more appropriately her handler, has allowed her audience to fill that vacuum with whatever they please.
A friend of mine sent me a deranged post in which a Taylor fan speculated about Taylor’s religious faith, resorting to fantasizing about how incredible it would be to die and be with Taylor Swift in heaven as she leads worship. Madonna’s name evokes the divine, but it's ironic, it's effectively anti-religious; Madonna is the rejection of the authentic and the sacrosanct. But sincerity, however actually insincere, is Taylor’s whole brand, and this naturally leads, at this apotheosis, to religiosity and pseudo-divine experiences, the ultimate expression of a spiritually-bankrupt culture seeking an outlet, a search for God in a post-megachurch world. Like megachurch Evangelicalism, it is religion without the mystery; it is the sphinx without the riddle, and it is the poverty of the soul in a commercial culture that has, to paraphrase Barthelme, carried out the theft of the worshipper from God himself.
Taylor Swift did not create this environment, she is a product of it. Taylor can spend half a decade badly-repackaging music trends so old they could drive cars—Bon Iver, the synth-pop thing, putting Florence Welch on a record—and be praised as an “innovator” and ascend to become a character out of Metalocalypse because our culture is dissolving into an algorithmically-generated slop, predicated on the obsessive mining of every single interaction you have online, the all-consuming soul-suck dilating madly in the heart of a dying empire. Taylor can become God, because we created a wall of feedback so dense it has made hearing God’s voice impossible.
There was that whole thing years ago where Jeff Koons did a series of prints of photos of him having sex with Italian pornstar Cicciolina in images reminiscent of perverted religious icons. Koons entire persona as an artist, something that can only be described as a used-car salesman act, is an obvious ruse, as we can see in videos of him as a young and snide hipster in the 1970s, and claims (whether true or false) that he had to go to Wall Street to trade commodities in order to raise the money to buy more of his “beautiful” vacuums for The New tie into a carefully-curated critique of commodity fetishism that seems to get lost on too many people. So when Koons wound up marrying Cicciolina after his exhibit, the whole thing seemed to be just another Koons gag. Har har, Jeff, a tasteless and mean-spirited bit, but an entertaining one. But then Cicciolina had a child, which begged the question: Jesus Christ, Jeff, how far are you taking this? Where do you end and where does this crazy fucking thing begin?