Dispatches from Youth Culture, No. 3
It’s hard to get songs to Billboard’s number-one slot without young people listening to you, so when a person with such potential for good comes awfully close to normalizing domestic violence, it’s time to ask what counter-narratives we need to offer the kids around us.
Case in point: the video for Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space”, which charted at number one. At this writing, its video has over 485 million views on YouTube—about 62 times every second since it came out in November on average.
In the video, Taylor disagrees with a boyfriend by vandalizing a mansion, throwing a vase at him, smashing his car, cutting holes in his clothing, poisoning him, and kissing his unconscious body on the pavement. “Got a long list of ex-lovers,” she sings. “They’ll tell you I’m insane. / But I’ve got a blank space, baby, / and I’ll write your name.”
There’s a defeatism at work here, suggesting it’s normal to enter a relationship assuming it can have only two possible fates: either to “be forever” on the one hand or “go down in flames” on the other, with no options for friendship or civility between the extremes.
But isn’t learning to navigate relational ambiguity part of the task of adolescence, along with how to treat former dating partners with respect and grace? If every relationship will probably fizzle out, then why pursue relationships in the first place?
That’s probably not the best example to show kids who are learning how to handle their emotions. Many relationships do fail, of course, as Taylor’s does in the video. Fair enough: that’s real life, too. Discovering that we’re not compatible with everyone is part of how we discover who we are. But kids may watch this and believe that it’s pointless even to try. How is that hopeful?
The saddest part of the performance is that amid all her influence as a public figure—when she has a platform to suggest justice and hope amid our culture’s constant objectification of persons—Taylor blows it. Rather than calling her audience to an alternative to the cultural norm of treating partners as commodities, she offers more of the usual: her partner becomes “that face” (not a name, though “Sean” is carved in a tree in the video), “new money”, and “my next mistake”.
People who work with kids already have a hard enough task trying to teach boys to view women as bearers of God’s image instead of the objects the media says they are. We’re fighting uphill as it is against male influences who are rewarded in pop culture for their exploitation and de-personification of women. How nice had Taylor said instead, “Here a video about how we really ought to treat people.”
Not that there aren’t moments of clear thinking from male performers amid the noise of man-to-woman objectification in the media. John Legend’s self-sacrifice and love-of-the-other’s-imperfection is beautiful in “All of Me”. There’s the bold, life-committing, marriage-minded devotion in “Rude” by the band MAGIC! And the pure exaltation for love in “Happy” by Pharrell Williams comes with a touch of poetry: “Sunshine, she’s here, you can take a break.”
All three of those songs made it to number one in 2014, which says that not every chart-ruler has to stoop to the cultural norm. Taylor herself has a history of positive messaging. She was a voice of inspiration for a youth I once served who was going through a rough time. The video posted to her Facebook page was of her 2008 song “Change”: “I believe in whatever you do,” she sang, “and I’ll do anything to see it through, because these things will change.”
I saw that student grow in some really cool ways. Rightly so. Taylor’s message at that moment was one of hope, and kids do listen. I’ve seen kids perform Taylor music at a talent show, and she won an award at Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice in 2012.
Her young fans are “discovering the music that tells them how they are going to live their lives and how they should feel and how it’s acceptable to feel,” she told Time’s cover-story reporter last fall. Yes. And what a chance she has to help them think big thoughts about how the world can be.
For the moment, let’s own to our kids that there’s a pretty powerful example of what not to do in relationships making the media rounds right now. Hopefully, it’ll pass; we’ve seen before what Taylor is made of, and it can be a tremendous force for good. While we youth-ministry people wait, let’s model treating each other with dignity—as Persons, not as Things—and look for the day when Swift’s number-one hits stop bespeaking vengeance, in favor of justice and mercy and hope. Taylor, I know you can.
It’s hard to get songs to Billboard’s number-one slot without young people listening to you, so when a person with such potential for good comes awfully close to normalizing domestic violence, it’s time to ask what counter-narratives we need to offer the kids around us.
Case in point: the video for Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space”, which charted at number one. At this writing, its video has over 485 million views on YouTube—about 62 times every second since it came out in November on average.
In the video, Taylor disagrees with a boyfriend by vandalizing a mansion, throwing a vase at him, smashing his car, cutting holes in his clothing, poisoning him, and kissing his unconscious body on the pavement. “Got a long list of ex-lovers,” she sings. “They’ll tell you I’m insane. / But I’ve got a blank space, baby, / and I’ll write your name.”
There’s a defeatism at work here, suggesting it’s normal to enter a relationship assuming it can have only two possible fates: either to “be forever” on the one hand or “go down in flames” on the other, with no options for friendship or civility between the extremes.
But isn’t learning to navigate relational ambiguity part of the task of adolescence, along with how to treat former dating partners with respect and grace? If every relationship will probably fizzle out, then why pursue relationships in the first place?
That’s probably not the best example to show kids who are learning how to handle their emotions. Many relationships do fail, of course, as Taylor’s does in the video. Fair enough: that’s real life, too. Discovering that we’re not compatible with everyone is part of how we discover who we are. But kids may watch this and believe that it’s pointless even to try. How is that hopeful?
The saddest part of the performance is that amid all her influence as a public figure—when she has a platform to suggest justice and hope amid our culture’s constant objectification of persons—Taylor blows it. Rather than calling her audience to an alternative to the cultural norm of treating partners as commodities, she offers more of the usual: her partner becomes “that face” (not a name, though “Sean” is carved in a tree in the video), “new money”, and “my next mistake”.
People who work with kids already have a hard enough task trying to teach boys to view women as bearers of God’s image instead of the objects the media says they are. We’re fighting uphill as it is against male influences who are rewarded in pop culture for their exploitation and de-personification of women. How nice had Taylor said instead, “Here a video about how we really ought to treat people.”
Not that there aren’t moments of clear thinking from male performers amid the noise of man-to-woman objectification in the media. John Legend’s self-sacrifice and love-of-the-other’s-imperfection is beautiful in “All of Me”. There’s the bold, life-committing, marriage-minded devotion in “Rude” by the band MAGIC! And the pure exaltation for love in “Happy” by Pharrell Williams comes with a touch of poetry: “Sunshine, she’s here, you can take a break.”
All three of those songs made it to number one in 2014, which says that not every chart-ruler has to stoop to the cultural norm. Taylor herself has a history of positive messaging. She was a voice of inspiration for a youth I once served who was going through a rough time. The video posted to her Facebook page was of her 2008 song “Change”: “I believe in whatever you do,” she sang, “and I’ll do anything to see it through, because these things will change.”
I saw that student grow in some really cool ways. Rightly so. Taylor’s message at that moment was one of hope, and kids do listen. I’ve seen kids perform Taylor music at a talent show, and she won an award at Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice in 2012.
Her young fans are “discovering the music that tells them how they are going to live their lives and how they should feel and how it’s acceptable to feel,” she told Time’s cover-story reporter last fall. Yes. And what a chance she has to help them think big thoughts about how the world can be.
For the moment, let’s own to our kids that there’s a pretty powerful example of what not to do in relationships making the media rounds right now. Hopefully, it’ll pass; we’ve seen before what Taylor is made of, and it can be a tremendous force for good. While we youth-ministry people wait, let’s model treating each other with dignity—as Persons, not as Things—and look for the day when Swift’s number-one hits stop bespeaking vengeance, in favor of justice and mercy and hope. Taylor, I know you can.
This article appeared in the March, 2015 edition of The Circuit Rider, the magazine of Salmon Creek Church in Vancouver, Wash. Visit Salmon Creek Church, which is a United Methodist ministry, at www.salmoncreekchurch.org.
