“On Taylor Swift and Broken Glass: Confessional Pop, Psychological Intimacy, and Two-Way Authentication,” with Max Blansjaar and Jacob Kingsbury Downs

Show notes: I’m joined by Max Blansjaar and Jacob Kingsbury Downs for a wide-ranging conversation on their article, “On Taylor Swift and Broken Glass: Confessional Pop, Psychological Intimacy, and Two-Way Authentication,” we explore why honesty has become such a central aesthetic category in popular music and what it means when listeners begin to understand themselves through artists they consume. Throughout the conversation, we discuss how confessional pop music creates what Max and Jacob describe as a “two-way authentication,” where listeners are not simply consuming an artist’s private life, but actively projecting themselves into the music. We think through the politics of intimacy, headphone listening, TikTok, fandom, neoliberal selfhood, indie aesthetics, and the blurred boundary between performer and listener. Along the way, we unpack the genealogy of confessional expression from mid-century poetry to singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and contemporary pop icons, asking how authenticity itself became a marketable aesthetic. We also spend time thinking about fragmentation, mirrors, broken glass, fantasy imagery, monstrosity, reinvention, and the strange tension between vulnerability and hyper-capitalism in Taylor Swift’s music and public persona. We close by reflecting on the ethical and political stakes of confessional culture more broadly — from celebrity branding and fandom to politics, social media, and the contemporary obsession with “rawness” and transparency.Biography: Max Blansjaar is a musician and writer from Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He holds a BA in Music from St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, where he was awarded the Gibbs Prize by the Faculty of Music in 2024. His work centres around cultural politics in popular music and the negotiation of social identities and relations through music and sound, with recent essays published in Sound Studies, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Journal of Extreme Anthropology, as well as the popular magazines Dirt, The Mortar, and The Story. He currently holds a Clarendon Scholarship at Jesus College, University of Oxford.Biography: Dr Jacob Kingsbury Downs is Departmental Lecturer in Music and Chair of Faculty in the Faculty of Music, as well as Organizing Tutor in Music at Lady Margaret Hall. He is also Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield. He studies listeners’ and musicians’ experiences with music and sound technologies, combining qualitative empirical methods with historical research and theoretical approaches drawn from the fields of musicology, sound studies, phenomenological philosophy, and music psychology. He is currently working on two book projects. He Received his PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2021, studying under Nicola Dibben.Links: https://online.ucpress.edu/jpms/article/37/2/117/212143/On-Taylor-Swift-and-Broken-GlassConfessional-Pop