2025/01/01 by Jennifer Judkins · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Diverse Musicological Studies #Music History and Culture #Musicology and Musical Analysis
paper · doi:10.1093/jaac/kpaf033
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
If you follow Brandon Polite’s work, and you should, you will immediately recognize this anthology’s roots in his Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics Case Study “Taylor Swift, Fearless (Taylors’ Version).” The collection here contains an array of fierce essays, authored by many of those interviewed in Polite’s delightful YouTube miniseries “Nothing New? The Philosophy of Taylor’s Versions.” At the risk of explaining what is now legend, or for those of you new to this planet, Taylor Swift signed a recording contract with Big Machine Records in 2005, when she was fifteen years old. In 2019, this label was sold to Ithaca Holdings, owned by Scooter Braun, who thus gained control of the master recordings of her first six albums. (Polite offers a nice overview of the business end of things in his preface: “The Story of Taylor’s Versions.”) Braun is, to put it simply, a bad actor who has abused this professional relationship and bullied Swift, although it certainly seems that Braun may have met his match. For those of you playing at home, there are detailed timelines of the Braun versus Swift feud available all over the Internet, with lots of slings and arrows and some juicy quotes.