taCity

Swift performs at Gillette Stadium on May 19, 2023, in Foxborough, Mass., during her Eras Tour. Scott Eisen/TAS23 via Getty Images

My children are Swifties. I take this as an abject failure on my part to indoctrinate them with various hues of ‘dad rock’, but given that Taylor Swift has somehow managed to accrue the power, wealth and influence of a small G20 country, their devotion to her is hardly surprising. But I had the niggling feeling that I still needed to harness this new devotion to radicalise them at least in some way; I simply couldn’t shake it off. So instead of trying to extricate them from clutches of the insipid generic droning pop of a cultural megastar towards more radical and subversive musical genres, the next best thing was to use their infatuation as an opportunity to lecture them about some classic Marxism. Oh yes, I went there…

The first theory that immediately sprung to my mind at any rate was Walter Benjamin’s discussion of ‘aura’. If you’re unfamiliar, Benjamin was a German-Jewish philosopher and cultural critic and Marxist anti-hero, and he introduced the concept of ‘aura’ in his seminal and quite brilliant essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written in 1935. He argued that in pre-modern (read pre-capitalist, or at least, pre-industrial) times, art held an ‘aura’, a unique, almost mystical quality that was tied to its place and creation in time and space. Indeed, he writes “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art”. The aura of a painting, a sculpture, an image, or a text was intrinsically connected to the artwork’s singularity and its embedded history as a single, authentic object.

However, Benjamin posited that the advent of mechanical reproduction – such as the printing press, photography and film – had fundamentally altered this dynamic. Reproduction detached art from its context, eroding its aura; it “substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence”. In a new capitalist world where art could be mass-produced for mass-consumption, the unique value and sacredness of the original work were diminished, and a blank space was created for pure capitalist consumption.

Swift’s boring, mundane and achingly bland music, is often lyrically autobiographical. Her songs are (to ME! at least bafflingly) lauded for their storytelling, emotional depth, and perceived authenticity – elements that Benjamin attributed to the artistic ‘aura’. Yet, as Swift’s music reaches millions worldwide, its mass consumption and reproduction via digital platforms could be seen as eroding this aura.

However, it would be too easy to read Benjamin as dismissing mass-produced art as ‘opium of the people’. He is careful to articulate that the ‘release’ of the artistic object from the aura can bring ‘entirely new functions’ to the art, including politics. Indeed, the ‘aura’ of Swift is so geopolitically resonant that a single line of text on her Instagram encouraging her fans to register to vote for US elections created another 35,000 new voters, as well as righteous outrage within unhinged Republicans. Benjamin is clear that part of the ‘proletarianisation’ of art under capitalism can be an anathema to the regressive, perhaps even fascistic attempts to reclaim the aura as an incorruptible, traditional and ritualistic art form; the sullying of which will not be tolerated. We see this perhaps in other cultural trends more forcefully, notably architecture with inane cultural ‘critics’ arguing that cities embracing modernist architecture ushered in the death knell of civilisation. While these ridiculously blinkered and aesthetically impotent views rightly deserve ridicule, they do exemplify how a deification of ‘aura’ can lead us to some very dark place.

So it is laudable that she has sought to bring her aura into the mechanistic churn of late digital capitalism alongside her (slightly) progressive, if too white liberal politics, to a younger generation. Yet her conversion from girl-next-door, country music darling of small town Republican-loving Americana to planetary cultural icon and liberal saviour that ‘Mechanical Reproduction’ has come with the same bad blood that infects all scaled cultural paragons; namely a love story with private jets and their planet-destroying carbon emissions, and a resolute silence in against a genocidal occupying force. All this, notwithstanding, her recent Eras Tour has been credited (perhaps hyperbolically, but no less amazingly) as staving off a recession in the US, as well as causing the planet to literally shake.

And then there is Swift’s recent re-recording of her earlier albums (dubbed “Taylor’s Versions”). Created out of a battle for ownership of her music, she created ever so slightly different, but wildly successful – and to all intent and purposes of devoted Swifties, entirely new – cultural products. But from a Benjaminian perspective, Swift is not just reproducing her original ‘aura’, she’s altering the context, imbuing the new versions with a different kind of aura – one that emphasizes a new kind of artistic control and authenticity in the face of commercial reproduction that has enraptured her billions of fans with her entrepreneurial maturity.

Taylor Swift’s stratospherically career illustrates how modern artists navigate a cruel summer of complexities intertwining authenticity, reproduction, and artistic control in ways that Benjamin could never have foreseen. Her ability to maintain an aura of cultural demigodess, even as her art is mass-produced and consumed, brings together the positives of aura and mass-production together in ways that he certainly did.

So while my children immerse themselves in a mass produced, neoliberalised, but no less authentic Swiftian aura, I can’t help but feel that I’d much prefer them to be enchanted by a Kate Bush music video, singing along to Bobby Gillespie lyrics or headbanging to a Jimmy Page riff (but I’m not worried, there’s still plenty of time to indoctrinate them with my dad rock aura in their teenage years). Despite that though, never in my wildest dreams did I think Swift’s geopolitical, economic and seismic influence would extend to pontifications about Marxist thought. So if you’re reading this Taylor, please don’t blame me, but look what you made me do…