'Taylor Swift: the hardest working, zaniest girl in show business…'

This paper explores the areas of interaction between celebrity, labour, authenticity and cute-and zaniness, through close analysis of the start text of Taylor Swift. The notoriously slippery and tenuous concept of ‘authenticity’ has long informed the relationship between rock, country and pop music, and its celebrities (see Frith, 1981; Grossberg, 1992). In the case of the rock and country star, authenticity resides in an image marked by labour; these stars are shown to be truly ‘authentic’ because they work hard, sweat on stage, sing about the trials of working life, and tell their own, highly personal stories. In opposition to this, pop music celebrity is marked by a sense of commercial artifice and construction. With Taylor Swift’s departure from country music to pop, her star text had to reinvent itself from one that was seemingly reliant on personal experience, self-promotion and hard work, to one more overtly perceived as constructed, girly, all-American, popular and cute. This paper examines how the star text of Taylor Swift negotiated such shifts, and looks at how her image, across a range of media platforms, has managed to resist and evade as well as embrace the notion of ‘pop manufacture’. By constructing her image as one of ‘the zany’ – a category marked by notions of performance, labour and ‘authenticity’ - Taylor Swift set up a new bridge between country and pop celebrity.