![]() ![]() Footnote 1 Taylor may be a monument to an old, white America, but she’s also an avatar of a future that is female. As one critic put it, ‘She’s got the poise of a wax figure! … She’s a Human Statue’. Indeed, Taylor Swift has become an archetype of whiteness in the modern pop music world, a whiteness often encoded by commentators into her awkward dancing and stilted body movements. The punchline of the skit plays with Taylor Swift’s overcoding as white, even though it only works because she too, like Beyoncé, is one of the ‘Girls Run the World’ of pop. The skit pokes fun at white fans losing their minds when they discover that Beyoncé is Black. The skit parodies white audiences’ confusion over Beyoncé’s music video (‘Formation’) and subsequent pro-Black Superbowl performance that somehow don’t seem to be made ‘for them’. ‘Mommy, is Taylor Swift still white?’ a young boy asks his mother as she tucks him into bed at the end of Saturday Night Live’s ( Citation2016) mock movie trailer entitled ‘The Day Beyoncé Turned Black’. ![]() With apologies to Greil Marcus, she’s ‘the old normal America’, made up into a meme-able, glitter-pink, red lip, femme identity, easy to co-opt into whatever paradoxical meanings her various twenty-first-century fans might need. She is classic, insofar as her lyrics are about ‘me and the boy’, rarely tag the present moment, and animate sing-alongs at her family-friendly concerts (she is a children’s performer by trade). ![]() She recalls an old American dream-of high school popularity contests, apple pies, dreamy boys next door, and a very old, very white, Christian nation. Taylor Swift is a monument to the idea that there once was a place called America. ![]()
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