While I was recovering from breaking my face a couple weeks ago, I marathoned all two seasons of Succession, a show that feels like its target audience must be masochistic journalists. It’s like Arrested Development, except with media instead of real estate and on HBO.
Anyway. One of the companies that the show’s cartoonish, tycoonish family acquires is Vaulter, a fictional version of digital media companies like Buzzfeed and Vox. In the second season, the characters visit the Vaulter offices to announce that they’re shutting it down for not meeting the revenue demands of its new parent company — an ongoing problem for real digital media, too. Succession viewers also get a taste of the kind of journalism that Vaulter publishes, with headlines like “5 Reasons Why Drinking Milk on the Toilet Is Kind of a Game-Changer.”
I hate to side with the C-suite, but maybe there was a reason Vaulter was missing revenue targets.
My favorite Vaulter headline, though, has to be “Wait, Is Every Taylor Swift Lyric Secretly Marxist?” It’s the new age-old question I was born to answer.
Is every Taylor Swift lyric secretly Marxist? Marxism, in this case, being loosely defined as a method of analysis that looks at the production of the stuff we need to live (including the raw materials, technology, and human labor required to make stuff), the institutions and ideologies that govern how and why we make and use stuff, and the conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.
“cardigan” (folklore, 2020)
Vintage tee, brand new phone
High heels on cobblestones
When you are young, they assume you know nothing
And when I felt like I was an old cardigan
Under someone’s bed
You put me on and said I was your favorite
Marxism often deals with the way that capitalism separates consumers from the production that goes into making the items they buy — like, for example, a cell phone assembled in a foreign country and purchased at a store that looks identical to every other cell phone store. Taylor compares herself to a well-loved cardigan, but in a capitalist system, the true value of an object (including the labor and resources that went into making it) is hidden and the object is easily disposed of and replaced.
“Our Song” (Taylor Swift, 2006)
I’ve heard every album, listened to the radio,
Waiting for something to come along,
That was as good as our song,‘Cause our song is a slamming screen door,
Sneaking out late tapping on your window,
When we’re on the phone, and he talks real slow,
’Cause it’s late and his mama don’t know,
Our song is the way he laughs,
The first date man I didn’t kiss him when I should have,
And when I got home, before I said amen,
Asking God if He could play it again.I was riding shotgun with my hair undone in the front seat of his car,
I grabbed a pen and an old napkin
And I wrote down our song.
Marxist thinkers of the early 20th century were critical of the idea that art could be commodified and integrated into pop culture without losing its ability to be an antagonistic force in society. In “Our Song,” Taylor has looked around at the art that the “culture industry” has made available and decided it’s not sufficient. She becomes an active participant in the culture industry by creating art, but a Marxist like Max Horkheimer would say that no one working within the mainstream pop music template, as Taylor is with “Our Song,” can offer listeners something that’s not pre-sanctioned by the industry.
“Red” (Red, 2012)
Loving him is like driving a new Maserati
Down a dead-end street
As seen in “Cardigan,” Taylor loves comparing people to objects. You could consider this a critique of what Marx called commodity fetishism, the idea that capitalism hides the human relationship between the person who makes an object and the person who buys an object. That leads us (as consumers in a capitalist society) to believe that objects themselves have value beyond what they’re used for and the work that went into making them. In the context of “Red,” you could consider this commodity (the new Maserati) a literal stand-in for a human relationship imbued with the metaphorical value of love rather than the value of labor.
Like, you could consider that. If you wanted to.
“Macavity” (Cats, 2019)
He’s outwardly respectable, I know, he cheats at cards
And his footprints are not found in any files of Scotland Yard’s
And when the larder’s looted and the jewel case is rifled
Or when the milk is missing or another peke’s been stifled
Or the greenhouse glass is broken and the trellis past repair
There's the wonder of the thing, Macavity’s not there
Marx argued that the concept of crime is a tool that the ruling class uses to control other classes. Criminologists like Thorsten Sellin used a Marxist framework to describe the ways that private property laws disadvantage lower classes, meaning that theft becomes a response to —
Oh god I can’t do this anymore.
IS every Taylor Swift lyric secretly Marxist?
No.
Header images from the British Library and Wikimedia Commons (Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift’s signature) and by kaleb tapp on Unsplash.