Professor Stephanie Burt shares what she learned about the singer’s stardom, relatability, and her own course at a college famous for being famous.
Last fall I told Harvard’s English Department that I planned to offer a class this spring on Taylor Swift. No one objected; Harvard professors like me get lots of latitude in confecting electives as long as we also offer the bread-and-butter material our majors need. (Most of my work is poetry-related; I also teach our regular undergrad course about literary form, from Beowulf on.) I’d call my new class Taylor Swift and Her World, as in: We’d read and listen to other artists and authors (part of her world). But also as in: It’s her world; we just live in it.
I’ve been living in it ever since. I thought I’d be teaching a quiet seminar: 20-odd Swifties around a big oak table, examining and appreciating her career, from her debut to Midnights, alongside her influences, from Carole King (see her Rock & Roll Hall of Fame speech) to William Wordsworth (see “The Lakes” from Folklore). We would track her echoes and half rhymes, her arrangements and collaborations and allusions, her hooks and her choruses. We might sing along. We’d learn why “You Belong With Me” relies so much on its with (you don’t belong to me, nor I to you). We’d learn how the unease in “Tolerate It” speaks to its time signature (5/4). Maybe some English majors would get into songwriting. Maybe some Swifties would leave with old poems in their heads.
To be fair, almost all those things have now happened. We did sing along. Some undergrads learned to love the 18th-century poet and satirist Alexander Pope, or at least to pretend they did: Pope’s “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” depicts his exasperation with superfans, false friends, and haters in ways rarely equaled until Reputation. We cracked open Easter eggs, and we studied her rhythms. But we couldn’t fit around a table. At one point 300 students signed up for the class; almost 200 ended up taking it. We met in a concert hall on campus, with a grand piano at center stage. I gave what I hope were engaging lectures, with pauses for questions, and stage props: a melodica, or a cuddly stuffed snake (for the snake motifs on Reputation). We had theater lights, and balcony seats, and the kind of big screen few humanities classrooms now need…
“I’m not as much into technique as I am into the emotion of it,” the popular songstress has said.
For years, fans of Taylor Swift have speculated about the extent of her musical abilities, often focusing on the question of whether or not the extraordinarily popular singer-songwriter can read music.
“Fun fact: Taylor Swift Can’t Read Sheet Music. She Plays By Ear!” one Reddit post on the topic claimed, for example. “Does Taylor Swift actually read music notation?” a Quora user asked.
“She most likely writes a melody on a guitar or piano, and then the production is simply built around it. typical ‘reading music’ type of music is very mechanical to compose sometimes, taylor’s melodies are good because they come directly from her own creativity,” one Reddit user commented, while another wrote “I feel like this is the way she was shown doing it in Miss Americana [a documentary about Swift’s career]. She hums a melody into her phone when it comes to her and then works it out from there on a piano or guitar.”
A judge has dismissed a copyright case against Taylor Swift for her popular song “Shake It Off,” saying the lyrics within were too banal to be copyrighted. Ouch.
The BBC reports that the suit was brought last year by songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, who alleged Swift stole her chorus for the hit from their song for girl band 3LW titled “Playas Gon’ Play.” That song asserts “playas, they gonna play, and haters, they gonna hate,” while “Shake It Off” insists “the players gonna play, play, play, play, play and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.” You can see the similarities for yourself…
Think you can tell one of Taylor Swift’s musical declarations of independence from something on the “You Can Do It” shelf at Barnes & Noble? Take the quiz at BuzzFeed:
Think you can tell one of Taylor Swift’s musical declarations of independence from something on the “You Can Do It” shelf at Barnes & Noble? Take the quiz at BuzzFeed:
Every Moment Has A Song 