Payton Ewalt - Supplemental Post #3

I missed out on much of the obsession with Taylor Swift and One Direction and all of the American pop stars when I was younger because I was completely preoccupied with Kpop. Many of the parasocial relationships people were forming with these pop stars, I was forming with Korean idols – so while I kept up with the news and what songs were coming out, I didn’t have much attachment to American pop music after the 2000’s.

But it’s interesting to me reading how McNutt looks at Taylor Swift’s career over the past few years, of how she’s adjusted her marketing campaigns to be as palatable to as many people as possible to make the most profit and grow her career. McNutt never says that being a woman in the music industry is easy and respects her choices and careers in the business, but remains highly critical of it. I feel similarly; having seen her career evolve over time from the outside, I respect the hustle and her making use of her father’s influence in the industry and her success, but I find her attempts to appeal to women and to queer people through her music and through feminism ultimately very shallow. (And people trying to queer-code her songs and say that she’s not straight makes my blood boil a little. Are we so lacking in queer female artists of color that we have to make gargantuan efforts to read a cishet white woman as anything than what she presents to the public?)

I bring up the topic of Kpop because I’ve seen a very recent trend of almost post-feminist themes in songs from fourth generation girl groups. Considering the conservative politics of South Korea and that fact that idols in the past have had an immense backlash for just reading a Feminism 101 book, I find it interesting that they try to build on a foundation of feminism that was never established in the industry of in their music for marketing purposes. In an industry where contracts for idols mirror old Hollywood studio contracts and allows for zero agency, marketing overseas allows for Western audiences to read the feminist themes they want as their girl groups reproduce patriarchal roles of being looked-at-ness in their costuming and performances. Does today’s media literacy consist of us trying to read too deeply into things that aren’t there?