Taylor Swift's new album will be released this Friday and the fans in my area can no longer sleep with impatience. They are extremely curious about the musical paths their heroine will take this time, how the collaborations with Post Malone and Florence Welch will turn out, but above all what else they can find out about Swift. The singer is known for filling her work with so-called Easter eggs: small hidden messages containing references to both her life and art.
Two months ago it was announced that the singer is distantly related to Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), and fans immediately delved into the oeuvre of the famous American poet. A whole stream of books, blogs and YouTube videos have now appeared in which Swifties analyze Dickinson's verses down to the last comma and relate them to their idol and the impending album (which is also The Tortured Poets Department is called). Dickinson's poem '419' received special attention, since the new album will be released on April 4/19, which, according to the die-hards, cannot be a coincidence. The opening line reads: 'We grow accustomed to the dark' and describes how resilient humans are in dark times. That you just have to let your eyes get used to the darkness before continuing on your way.
Now you might think, yes, nice, all those fans and their sudden interest in nineteenth-century poetry, but there is more going on here. This constant hunt for Easter eggs ensures that Swifties encourage each other to read more thoroughly, so that they learn to deal with metaphor, multi-layeredness and intertextuality. It turns that large group of admirers (Swift has 283 million followers on Instagram alone) into extremely sharp readers.
When one of my students turns out to be exceptionally good at interpreting, it almost always emerges in a conversation afterwards that he or she is a Swiftie. In my opinion, the greatest gift that Taylor Swift gives to her fans is not even her music (although that is already a nice gift), but a critical reading attitude plus a sensitivity to ambiguity. And these are great qualities to hold your ground in a world whose leaders are increasingly taking refuge in untruths and disinformation. For them, someone like Taylor Swift is a danger, because both directly and indirectly she encourages people to take a closer look, making lies transparent and exposing ulterior motives. To quote Dickinson's poem '419': Swift helps her fans get their eyes used to the dark. So that they are no longer afraid of it and start looking for the light again.
Ellen Deckwitz writes an exchange column here with Marcel van Roosmalen.
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