Here's an idea.
Taylor Swift gets her power from writing.
There have been subtle hints throughout Idea Channel,
but I think it's time to be totally honest.
I love Taylor Swift.
There, I said it.
And clearly, I'm not alone.
The critical response to Swift has only ever been great.
But it's becoming monumental, alongside her power
over the music industrial complex.
"1989" is slated to become the only record
to go platinum in 2014.
She removed her entire catalog from Spotify,
because she doesn't feel the streaming service values
music properly.
She's on the cover of "Time." "Business Week" decreed Taylor
Swift is the music industry.
And remember that time she gave $90 to a fan just for burritos?
Taylor Swift, megastar, friend of the people,
celebrity cat haver.
It's easy to say that Taylor's influence is derived
from her effortlessly catchy pop music backed
by a quabillion dollar marketing budget.
But hey, let's shelve the cynicism for a minute
and ask if there might be something more.
Like, part of me wonders if Taylor
is so powerful because she writes her own music.
Or more than music, she writes her own life
in a way that's distinct from other pop stars,
or, at the very least, other female pop stars.
And again, we can cynicize this six ways from Sunday
and say, no, there is no way any of that
"ah, shucks" nonsense is true.
She is as constructed as any other celebrity.
But what if we treat this a little bit
like the Taylor Swift version of Pascal's wager and ask,
what are the consequences if we assume there
is no grand Swiftian architect?
Well, so for the most part, as Taylor says in "Time Magazine,"
we don't usually ask if male pop stars write their own music.
It's absurd to ask if Pharrell, Metallica, or Ed Sheeran, which
is the example that Taylor provides,
write their own music.
But by comparison, it's often assumed that female pop stars
don't.
For a lot of people, it's surprising to learn
that Taylor, Nicki Minaj, or Lorde actually
write their own music.
Or it's weirdly unsurprising to learn that the Spice Girls
or Rihanna don't.
Taylor talks about the perception
that for women, quote, it's somehow
unacceptable to write songs about your real emotions,
that it somehow makes you irrational and overemotional,
the implication being that, in some way,
writing-- maybe writing popular songs,
especially-- is a thing that you need a dude around
in order to do, or to do correctly and successfully.
Taylor does work with male producers, most famously,
Max Martin, who's responsible for co-writing and producing
more hip hop songs than there are Grammys in Quincy Jones's
Grammy cupboard.
But is "Blank Space" Max's?
I would just say, no.
Clearly and famously, Taylor writes about Taylor,
with authority.
And it's through that writing that she publicly discovers
and creates herself.
And as it so happens, poet, playwright, philosopher,
and writer Helene Cixous has some stuff
to say on this very subject.
Not about Taylor Swift, specifically, but about
bodies-- both of flesh and of text,
and what it means to have a female version
of the former while writing the latter.
In her 1975 essay "The Laugh of the Medusa,"
Cixous writes that many women, herself included,
might avoid writing because it is, quote, at once too
high, too great for you.
It is reserved for the great-- that is, great men.
And it's silly.
Cixous says that for women to write woman--
that is, to wrestle with the limitations of communication
and write of women in an honest and unrestrained way-- is
something of a radical and important act,
because it's through this kind of writing that women can
explore and create their identity or physicality,
an identity separate, most likely,
from what is expected and assumed of them,
an identity that is at once personal but also
in relationship to that of all other women.
And so they invite other women to do the same.
Cixous writes that the woman writing woman
begins a new history that, quote,
woman unthinks the unifying, regulating history
that homogenizes and channels forces,
herding contradictions into a single battlefield.
Looking at the struggles of women all over the world,
it might be a bit overblown to say that Swift's feminism has
reached battlefield status.
But whatever her power as a pop icon in Western culture
is worth, I can't help but wonder
if what Cixous describes is somehow at the center of it--
meaning, if we buy into the mythology of Swift,
she is who she is, that she presents herself
the way she does because that's who she wants to be,
not what a manager or publicist or top secret cadre
of sorcerers for whom she is some source of power
or influence want her to be.
It's tempting to contrast to Taylor and Britney Spears, who
ended up shaving her head because there was
so much primping and polishing that she couldn't take it
anymore.
For Spears, her hair became a symbol
of this terrible process that had to take place
so that she could be herself.
It had to go.
It's tempting also to compare Taylor with Lady Gaga
or Madonna, two pop stars also seemingly
in control of their image, but much more
performative and frenetic in the practice of that control.
It's tempting and, perhaps most appropriate,
to compare Taylor with Nicki Minaj or Beyonce,
two other people who seemingly have
consistent and strong control over the set of things
that we, as audience, identify as contributing
to their selves.
And finally, it's tempting to call Taylor's and maybe Nicky's
and maybe Beyonce's thing authenticity--
to say that they are authentically who
they appear to be.
But I think it might be something different.
Authenticity suggests that someone really
is who they seem to be in some vague, deeply personal sense.
But for almost all of us, we're never
going to know who Taylor really is.
Heck, I don't even know that I know who I really
am, though I have been reading a lot of existential philosophy
lately.
Ocean look.
Our image of Taylor Swift is like a cubist portrait--
many bits from many different perspectives, all adding up
to make one complete image.
And that image, authentic or not,
seems purposefully managed, written, if you will allow,
by Swift herself.
That image is powerful, because it's charming, sure.
There has been no shortage of ink spilled
on Taylor's "ah, shucks, I'm just a simple country mega pop
star" demeanor-- but I think also
because she displays a clear ownership of it
and confidence in it.
That can be powerful-- and as long
as we're inhabiting the super palatable
zone of popular culture, even a little bit radical.
Cixous also wrote about confronting
the various struggles, class and otherwise,
inherent in pushing against this regulating history.
And one really only need listen to the first verse of "Welcome
to New York" to realize that class struggle is maybe
the furthest thing from Taylor's mind.
Cixous says that even the work of most female writers, quote,
obscures women or reproduces classical representation
of women as sensitive, intuitive, dreamy, etc.
In other words, instead of violently pushing forwards,
they reflexively or preciously hold on to the past.
They avoid the bodily, the truly personal,
and rely on the familiar-- familiar stories,
familiar uses of language.
She says lots of this writing is run
by the libidinal, or sexual, and political economy.
And whoa, it is so easy to see Taylor
in this light-- sensitive, intuitive, dreamy,
and increasingly part of the libidinal economy.
But are we maybe being cynical again?
And here, it becomes difficult for me, as a dude,
to weigh in with any authority.
So it's more appropriate, I think,
for me to pose this last thought as a question.
If we do assume that Taylor is writing
her way through her own life, that her lyrics and her image
are her choices, is her success--
her control over her own image-- somehow less meaningful or less
radical if she is reproducing elements
of a classic representation of women?
Or, as far as these criticisms go,
is it better to just shake them up?
(SINGING) Shake it off.
Let us know in the comments.
And welcome to the Idea Channel.
It's been waiting for you.
TAYLOR SWIFT: (SINGING) --waiting--
To subscribe.
It takes a lot to make a stew of comments.
Let's see what you guys had to say about "Too Many Cooks."
First things first, next week's Idea Channel episode
is going to be about "Over the Garden Wall."
So if you haven't seen that, you should.
And I was on the Thanksgiving episode of Grace Helbig's
podcast "Not Too Deep," in which I
do things that are both embarrassing and disgusting.
Links to both of those things in the doobly-doo.
And finally, before we get talking about "Too Many Cooks,"
there was a question from the Q&A video
that we ended up cutting because I didn't like my answer.
But it's a really good question.
And one that I want to answer.
So I'm gonna answer it now.
CaptainKnightMayor asked whether or not
there were any topics that we've covered
on Idea Channel where, after we've made the video,
I've changed my mind.
This is a really hard question to answer,
because as we continue to make Idea Channel,
my understanding of the world and culture
continues to change and become more complex.
So really, there's no shortage of things that I look back on
and think, like oh, we could have done that better.
We could have provided better context.
I left out this hugely important detail.
So from that perspective, there is no shortage of things
that I look back on and have sort of changed my mind about.
But insofar as the point of Idea Channel is to ask a question
and then see what happens as you try to answer it,
I look back on our episodes, and I don't-- I haven't changed
my mind about the utility of having asked any
of the questions that we've asked.
I think they've all repaid asking
and have been interesting to try to answer.
So I disagree with myself or have changed my mind
about a lot of details, but as far
as the way that we have approached most things,
yeah, still on board-- notable exceptions being ones
where I'm perfectly honest about it, like the trolling episode.
But yeah, this was a really great question,
CaptainKnightMayor.
Thank you for asking it.
And I'm sorry that it took me an extra week
to figure out an answer.
And finally, we arrive at comment responses
for "Too Many Cooks."
I ruffled a surprising number of feathers once by pronouncing it
"may-may."
I thought I was just making a silly joke.
Some people got actually mad.
You guys, I used to work for Know Your Meme.
I know how to pronounce.
It's pronounced "may-may."
Brandon MacDeichtine-- whose last name I'm butchering,
I'm sure-- so Brandon, I'm very sorry--
writes a really great comment about how even though you could
argue that "Too Many Cooks" posits the meaninglessness
of life, actually trying to find meaning in the video itself is
kind of a counterpoint to that meaninglessness--
that you create meaning out of a thing attempting to communicate
meaninglessness, and that if it was perfectly absurd
or meaningless, wouldn't it be an example
of Wittgenstein's "whereof one cannot speak?"
This was a great set of comments.
Links to this one and the rest in the doobly-doo.
Thank you for writing this, Brandon.
InNoWayRelatedTo from the Idea Channel subreddit
talks about how you can also read "Too Many Cooks"
as a response to the suffocating and intense production
environment that exists around television,
and that when you have too many production cooks,
you end up getting just nonsense.
And I think this is a really great and interesting Read
I'd never heard of this before.
Flipped Physics very accurately points out
some phrasing problems.
And I want to say that I recognize
that there are lots of people who find meaning in the world
and that the world is itself not inherently meaningless.
(SINGING) Here I come to save the day.
There are so many more awesome comments
that we couldn't get to because I
wanted to answer CaptainNightMayor's
question from last week.
So there are links to more "Too Many Cooks" comments
in the doobly-doo next to links for our Facebook, IRC,
and subreddit.
This week's episode was brought you
by the hard work of these celebrity cat havers.
And the tweet of the week comes from @hollowearths,
who points us towards a robot making minimalist art work.
It's rad.