broadcast POP TART [BY WENDY MCCLURE]
princess superstar LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE GOOD WITCH OF POP MUSIC MY BOYFRIEND AND I went on a road trip last summer to a Laura Ingalls Wilder fest in the Midwest. Scores of little girls were running around with their hair braided just like in Little House on the Prairie, no doubt daydreaming about wading in Plum Creek. But it turns out that those
shines apart from all the bedazzled Hannah Montana merchandise or the Twilight sparkle that gleams off the biceps of creepily possessive vampire boyfriends. For one thing, Swift is past her teen years. She also has more career autonomy than a lot of stars her age (she turned
Taylor Swift is Glinda the Good Witch. She appears in a big, shimmery bubble to guide countless uncertain Dorothys making their way through the baffling Oz of middle school and first boyfriends. sweet half-pints also dream about being Taylor Swift. One nine-year-old walked by our table in a restaurant, and when I smiled at her, she stopped in her tracks and declared proudly, “I’m gonna be a singer, and my favorite singer is Taylor Swift!” before marching off to refill her soda. At the time, I thought I knew who Taylor Swift was: another wholesome pop teen sensation who gets hailed as the anti-Britney. But on closer inspection, I can see she’s more than that. Swift’s star
14 / BUST // OCT/NOV
down one of those artist-development deals so she could perform her own songs), and what appears to make her so sparkly is her utterly charmed life. She reportedly excels at acting as well as songwriting, all while wielding a rhinestonestudded acoustic guitar that looks like it could’ve come from a fairy godmother. Speaking of fairy tales, the princess comparisons are inevitable, with her long blond ringlets, a tendency to wear swirly satin-and-tulle numbers, and, of course,
a song called “Today Was a Fairytale.” But the princess title doesn’t seem to fit Swift either. If anything, she’s Glinda the Good Witch. She appears in a big, shimmery bubble (a video screen!) to guide countless uncertain Dorothys making their way through the baffling Oz of middle school and first boyfriends. She also owes some of her magic powers to the classic country-music wisdom that’s perfectly suited to the needs of young girls. Honey, you’re going to get your heart broken, her songs tell them, and when it happens, it’s OK to be angry. These aren’t the most radical messages, not by a long shot, but for a generation of girls sold short by abstinence-only initiatives and inundated with the depressingly retrograde notion that you’re supposed to wait for “the one,” hearing Taylor Swift sing “Back then I swore I was going to marry him someday/But I realized some bigger dreams of mine,” can only help. No doubt, what speaks as plainly as her lyrics is the fact that they’re autobiographical; her song catalog is an open diary. And while her real-life experiences include dating that Jonas Brother with the purity ring, Swift also refuses to make pronouncements about whether or not she’s “saving herself.” When asked in a magazine interview if she’d chosen to remain a virgin, Swift replied, “I think when you talk about virginity and sex publicly, people just automatically picture you naked.” Notice how chaste she sounds. Then notice how she pointed out the totally hypocritical prurience of our cultural obsession with virginity. Hmm! The religious right loves to tell stories about “consequences” for teens, the kind where girls who have sex suffer endless regrets, but when you hear Swift’s lyrics about sneaking out to meet a boy at night, you can’t help but notice that regardless of what happened, she turned out just fine. Maybe she isn’t as much of a covert feminist as I imagine her to be, but I like that in her world, you’re entitled to a happy ending, not as a reward for virtue but just for being yourself. Or, as Glinda would say, for always having the power all along.
ILLUSTRATED BY JENNIFER HERBERT