IIn the middle of the afternoon, in a 600-seat lecture hall at the Yoko Ono Lennon Centre at the University of Liverpool, the audience was engrossed in an analysis of sexual racism in Taylor Swift’s music videos.
A giant screen at the front of the venue showed several screenshots of the singer kissing white men in various music videos, contrasted with three images in which she clearly is not kissing her black lover. How much of this is the product of a fundamentally racist society? Where does her responsibility as a pop star lie in combating social ills?
These were the questions debated by sequined, lyric-laden attendees at the inaugural Tay Day, an academic conference dedicated to Swift, held ahead of her three consecutive concerts at Anfield Stadium starting June 13.
There were no signs of a post-lunch slump on Wednesday. Attendees heard discussions of what Swift’s carbon budget should be, the notion that criticism of celebrity is a Trojan horse for misogyny, and parodies of the music used in her songs, but only from one speaker, who presented a paper titled “She’s a Billionaire Too: The Infinite Horizons of Socio-Political Criticism of Taylor Swift.” Another academic wrote, Nannarian SwiftA millipede named after a star.
“There’s genuine academic research, there’s people doing this as an additional interest to their research, and then there’s undergraduates talking about their passions, so it’s a really rich mix,” said Sam Murray, from the music department at the University of Leeds, who organised Tay Day with Amy Skjerseth from the University of Liverpool, “and it’s really just an excuse to get people together to talk about subjects that they’re passionate about.”
This intersection of academia and fandom is easily mocked by those who think the public’s obsession with the Shake It Off singer has gone too far – according to the British Geological Survey (BGS), fans danced so vigorously they set off seismographs when the star performed in Edinburgh at the start of her UK tour – but Murray points out that even the most cynical observer would find it hard to argue with the estimated £18m to £35m that Swift and her legions of fans have brought to Liverpool’s local economy.
He said: “Every now and then a big artist comes along and you have to understand how to get the most out of it, how to take it to a higher level. And part of that is understanding what your fans want, what they like, what can you offer them in terms of business and services.”
But no one in the lecture hall seemed to care what people outside the room thought. Beth Thomas, a postdoctoral researcher in video-game psychology, had traveled to the conference from Manchester with her friend and fellow researcher Ava Burcham, who studies fangirls. Thomas said she became a “Swiftie,” as Swifty fans call themselves, after rejecting “cool” music in favor of the music she really liked.
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“If you grew up in a certain era, there was this internalized misogyny that said you couldn’t like pop,” Thomas says. “I liked folk and indie, and I learned about music, especially from my parents. [Swift] That’s how it was introduced to me. I thought, “Oh, I love girly pop, so this is amazing.”
One of the Swift fans who traveled the furthest was Abdallah Alzam, who came from Jordan to see the star perform in Liverpool, traveling alone as he has no friends who are Swift fans.
“In Jordan, men listen to men’s music and women listen to women’s music. But to me, her music is for everyone,” he said.
Alzam came to the meeting to meet like-minded fans. “Liverpool is great,” he says. “Everyone is so friendly and so proud of their city. They don’t judge me or make fun of me for being a Swiftie.”
