Cultural Analysis of “the last great american dynasty” by Taylor Swift and Aaron Dressner
The item of popular culture chosen for this analysis is the song titled “the last great american dynasty”, written by Dressner and Swift in 2020 and performed by the later. In order to analyse this artefact, different features will be studied.
However, before starting this analysis, it is important to take into account the way the song is linked to the life of Rebekah Harkness, the protagonist of the story, as to one of its authors.
In this case, to Swift, who switches in the middle of the performance from being a mere storyteller into being the co-protagonist of the song. This change is clearly seen with the change in the use of the pronoun “she” into “I” as can be seen in:
“There goes the maddest woman this town has ever seen / She had a marvellous time ruining everything / […] There goes the loudest woman this town has ever seen / I had a marvellous time ruining everything”. (Dressner & Swift, 2020).
After taking this fact into account, it is important that we move into the composition of this cultural item. The composition refers to the way the item was created. As the object that is being analysed is a song, the clear answer to the question could be the bare lyrics, nevertheless, this song makes use of different idioms and expressions the media had used to refer to Swift’s life and this needs to be mentioned. Both, Swift and Dressden make use of these expressions such as mad or loud woman in order to build their own narrative and turn the story around.
The next feature that needs to be taken into consideration is the carnivalesque as it is a key element in this item. The forth line of the song makes a clear reference to how society worked in the 1950s and their beliefs “and the town said ‘how did a middle class divorcée do it?’”. The song is bringing to the foreground the hypocritical values of the past that are many times still present nowadays. Hand in hand with this, we can find the producerly; that in this case is very limited or closed as there are explicit references to what is happening in the narrative of the song.
The last aspects to analyse are the relevance and its connection with the media. The first one is easily defined as this song belongs to an album that became the best selling record of the summer of 2020. Even though the song could not be categorized within the style of pop, it became a hit in country and mainstream radios in several countries. And finally, its connection to the media is also great as thanks to the different streaming platforms and radios, the item could be appreciated around the globe.
REFERENCES
- Dressner, A., & Swift, T. (2020, July 24). the last great american dynasty. (T. Swift, Performer)
