“She’s an icon, she’s a legend, and she is the moment.”
—Sayings of Lady Marmalade Book IV, Chapter 9
Deeply as I wish that the Sayings of Lady Marmalade were a real ancient text, the holy writ above actually comes from The Wendy Williams Show. If you’ve heard the soundbite before, though, it probably wasn’t on T.V. Some people are said to have punchable faces—Williams, on the other hand, has a memeable face. This clip is one of those talk show moments that has made the voyage from Middle Earth (broadcast media) to the Undying Lands of Valinor (social media). It has, in itself, become and remained iconic.
Less so the woman Williams was talking about—Kimberly Denise Jones, a.k.a. Lil’ Kim, the late-’90s rapper featured in the cover of Lady Marmalade from Moulin Rouge. Back then, Kim was a household name. (I remember, kids. I was there when the Deep Magic was written.) Now, she features mainly as the nameless object of Williams’s praise, the negative space in the meme that you’re supposed to fill in with what you cherish. My favorite is the one where Lil’ Kim’s picture is covered over by a drawing of (the iconic) Peppa Pig.
Memes do this: they hollow out our icons. They invite us to scoop out the innards of things we once loved and stuff them with our preferred fillings. On the Internet, works of art both high and low are ground down into “content.” Fandom transforms with unprecedented ease into fanfic, in which we take the stories we love and refashion them as exercises in wish fulfillment: “this is mine now. In my version, Harry gets with Hermione at the end.”
All this was quite apparent recently as the world obsessed over Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, icons of the week. In one sense it’s an old story, perfectly (and perhaps actually) constructed for maximal narrative grip: America’s sweetheart falls for handsome football star. The press loves them; heads of state clamor for their attention. The cheerleader and the quarterback (okay, tight end) at a global prom.
But this venerable tale is now warped and distorted by the Internet’s house of mirrors. Taylor and her team know well that she’s not just a singer or even a role model: she’s the focal point of a vast exercise in collective myth-making, the parasocial bestie of an online egregore. Part of her genius is to leave tiny openings for obsessive speculation, little easter eggs that seem to drop by almost by accident from her shimmering fringes.
Or was it by accident—the coded reference in the lyrics, the glancing flicker of a message in the palm? Deciphering the “real Taylor,” constructing a picture of her private life out of the hints in her public persona, amounts to a kind of modern numerology. What did she mean? What does she mean? It feels like she’s inviting you, personally, to figure out the answer. Choose your own Taylor. Build your own icon.
Which is why she seems to mean so much more than she does. Today we use the word “icon” as Wendy Williams did: casually, almost like a synonym for “legend” or “star.” It means “really really famous person,” and it is almost universally a term of praise. But in the Taylor/Travis drama there is an older meaning of the word resurfacing. An eikōn in Greek is simply an image, an emanation—it is an object or even an experience that stands in for something more than what it is.
That is why our emotional reactions to icons are so outsized. In particular religious icons, cherished or venerated images of Christ, have elicited both overflowing passion and vehement disgust for centuries. And this is not, as critics have sometimes intimated, because those who venerate icons are in love with paint, or because they adore wood. Meditating on a sculpture can slip into worshipping mere clay, which is idolatry. But icon veneration is something else: it is treating an image of a thing as a vehicle for the thing itself.
Thomas Aquinas, en route to discussing the matter, wrote that “to adore the flesh of Christ is nothing else than to adore the incarnate Word of God, just as to adore a King’s robe is nothing else than to adore a robed King.” The act of kissing a hem is itself the act of adoration, even though neither the hem nor the kiss is the point of the gesture. We act toward the symbol as if it were the thing it symbolizes, because in this world of embodied souls they are fused together. Even the words of Scripture, viewed in a certain sense, are mere ink and pulp—but we treat them with reverence, because of what they convey.
Unlike the Word of God, Taylor Swift the pop star is not all that important in and of herself—though I admit I kind of love her music, and for what it’s worth I think hating her is pretty absurd. Hard to believe, I know, but someday she will be just as obscure a memory as Lil’ Kim. Still, people are reacting to her with wild passion—of practically every kind—because icons do not only elicit normal reactions proportional to what they are in themselves.
What we react to is what they mean—and Taylor, by design and as a function of the Internet, means practically all things to all men. She’s a hero; she’s a harlot; she’s a girlboss; she’s a puppet; she’s a psyop; she’s a fool; she’s a queen. This orgy of conflicting responses and outlandish fixations is, I would wager, one of the mass psychoses caused by the unbearable burden of having to generate meaning from within ourselves. What we would rather do—what we long to do—is find some true and stable meaning that can be given to us freely, as a gift from without. But that is not a problem that T-Swift can help us with. True icons are to be sought elsewhere.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer
Listen to the latest from Young Heretics:
One correction: um, she's actually an anti-hero: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1kbLwvqugk
One of the reasons I think Taylor Swift is the icon onto which US culture is projecting everything is because the culture is increasingly fragmented. She's one of the very few cultural touchstones everyone will recognize. Even if one professes their hatred for all things Swifty, they'll still get the reference if I come back with the response, "well, haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate." This kind of shared reference is increasingly rare, but necessary for a society to function.
I think a lot of this fracturing of popular culture is due to the algorithm and abundance driven media bubbles, but I also think a lot comes out of the secularization of US society. It's not just that people don't go to church; it's that Americans increasingly don't share religious cultural references.
In an earlier time, there was a lot of antipathy directed towards Madonna, similarly a pop star and savvy business woman. Many of those who liked Madonna described themselves as anti-religious, and many religious people felt the way she played with religious imagery was sacrilegious. But everyone recognized the Christian references. (The original video for "Like a Prayer" is, as they say, a very rich text: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fzeNUqQbQ )
Taylor Swift, who is just a mortal human woman, gets turned into the vehicle for so many conflicting ideals because for an icon to have power it must be shared. And there's so little in the way of cultural imagery that's shared in the US right now that she gets the whole burden.
Beautifully said, dear Spencer. Worship through the ages.