If you thought college was waste of time and money for you or your kids because our institutions of higher learning offered classes in tree-climbing, the history of surfing, or “the physics of ‘Star Trek,’” here’s one more – for our contemporary times.
Last weekend, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which charges about $55,000 a year to attend, offered a two-day – yes, two days – seminar on Taylor Swift.
The course, entitled “Taylor Swift Study Day: Eras, Narrative, Digital Music, and Media,” was put together by RPI music professor Kate Galloway, according to the Times Union in Albany, New York. The class “tracks her evolution from 15-year-old Nashville country star to multi-platinum pop success and her more recent pivot to more contemplative, acoustic songs,” the paper reported.
Galloway told the paper, “Why are there so many points of interest about her work, her persona as an artist, and her very robust and participatory fan culture?”
“In popular music studies, there’s a tendency to not study, or discount, your ‘guilty pleasure’ listening,” she added. “
“I always tell students in my ‘popular music and society’ class, you listen to this music for a reason. There’s something there. … your ear is being drawn to it for a multitude of different reasons. Why not take it seriously? Why not unpack why that is?”
Why not, indeed.
The seminar’s syllabus promised lectures on topics such as “Swiftian Lyrical Analysis,” and “Problematizing the Journalistic Practice of Using Tweets as Evidence: a Taylor Swift Case Study,” and “What does Taylor Swift have to do with soccer? Culture of speculation in the practices of pop music fans in Brazil.”
But, of course, no college seminar would be complete without the “anti-racism.”
Two of the lectures includes the topics, “But The Middle-Aged Men Understand…: How Grown White Men Created/Extended Stereotyping To Taylor Swift’s Personna and Fed Pop Culture Media-Troping,” and “Taylor Swift on Tour: Embracing Whiteness, Growing Up.”
The good news, such as it is, is that this two-day event, unlike an actual Taylor Swift concert, was free.
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