Paula Clare Harper, AB’10, studies music, sound and the internet. An assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago, she coedited a collection of essays brought together in the book Taylor Swift: The Star, the Songs, the Fans and is at work on another book titled Viral Musicking and the Rise of Noisy Platforms, which traces the history of online musical virality.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
How did you come to this area of research?
I was originally under the misapprehension that the music I might want to study was the music I was most interested in as a performer, which was and is Renaissance polyphony. But it turns out there’s a really specific type of person who is good at being an early musicologist, and I am not that type of person!
When I was in graduate school, I took a bunch of classes about music and media, and I really enjoyed those. The adviser I thought I was going to work with went on leave for a while. And while left to my own devices, I did things like write a paper about Beyoncé and performances of truth and authenticity in contemporary popular music, and no one stopped me. So I was like, all right, down this path I go.
You’ve written about topics including Rebecca Black’s song “Friday,” ASMR, and the Gaylor subculture within Taylor Swift fandom. Do you intentionally seek out topics that are marginalized or maligned?
I’m always interested in the edges of things—objects or practices that don’t feel like they’re in the center of the conversation. So right now I’m writing about virality and music and the internet, but I’m not really writing about music platforms like Spotify. Instead I’m asking, “In what ways is Twitter a music platform? In what ways was GeoCities a music platform in the early 2000s?” Thinking around corners and looking at things that feel more like edge cases is something I really find fascinating.
As someone who studies the internet, how do you handle its ephemerality?
Every single day I’m stressed about it. There’s this big refrain of “the internet is forever, the internet always has receipts”—which is both true and untrue. There are digital traces of people that they don’t realize are there. But there are also plenty of things that are no longer accessible because of funding and infrastructure: Whoever briefly paid for that novelty domain that thousands or millions of people interacted with in 2002 stopped paying for it in 2006, or the hosting platform went under or got acquired. So now it’s gone! Corporate takeover and lack of upkeep have really decimated some of the archives of the early internet.
That leads folks like me to rely on some archival methodology that feels really old-school. I’m in newspaper archives to see what tech journalists were talking about in 1999 and 2002. Sometimes I’ll find an allusion to something that is really fascinating and I have to piece together what it is, since I can no longer access it because of link rot—the thing that is being linked to no longer exists.
There are amateur archivists who post mirrors of content from less stable platforms to more stable platforms, and of course nonprofit organizations like the Internet Archive. It would be impossible to do the work I’m doing without those folks.
How did the book on Taylor Swift come together?
It happened in many stages. But in the first germination (which took place right around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic), it came out of thinking about this strange kind of absence—there had been a bunch of scholarship on Beyoncé and other female pop stars, including Lady Gaga. But at that point there wasn’t a lot of academic writing on Taylor Swift at all. So [musicologists] Christa Anne Bentley, Kate Galloway and I organized a conference, and then we proposed and edited the book together.
As we were brainstorming for the conference, we were thinking, “Who do we want to have in this conversation?” We knew we wanted music scholars, in part because a lot of the discourse around Taylor Swift focuses on her lyrics—but we didn’t want to entirely cede the territory to the English department. She’s a pop star, right? What is the music doing? We wanted some fandom studies people. This was also the era of the “Taylor’s Version” rerecordings, so we wanted to think about music and copyright. The list just kept growing.
That experience really helped us find the way we wanted to frame or use Taylor Swift as a figure to think about the state of 21st-century popular music, digital culture, global culture and global capitalism.
Do you consider yourself a Taylor Swift fan, and if so, how do you balance your identities as a fan and as a scholar?
I prefer to be called a Swift scholar rather than a Swiftie. I do not have the level of encyclopedic, detailed knowledge that many people who enthusiastically call themselves Swifties have, and I don’t want any Swiftie stolen valor, basically.
People in positions like mine get asked about this a lot, how to separate or combine or navigate the distance between fandom and scholarship. And I think the reason I’m an academic is because I enjoy critical close reading. The way that I relate pleasurefully to texts is through close reading and diving deep on their history and context. So I don’t have a separate methodology for the things that I study and the things that I’m a fan of, nor do I put them in separate bins. There’s always a bit of cross-pollination—there’s always a potential that a thing I’m really fascinated by is going to become a subject of scholarship or that a subject of scholarship is going to leave traces in my life.
A Swiftie question: Which version of “All Too Well” is your favorite?
My personal favorite is the “Sad Girl Autumn Version.” It’s partly because I love a pensive girl at her piano. But it’s also a little funny to me, in my more critical mode, because it feels very of the moment that everything becomes a commodity—you know, that a season could be a vibe and that a vibe could be purchasable in some way. And yet it still works on me! When I put on that song, I wish it were fall and I was wearing a sweater.
This article was originally published in the Summer/25 University of Chicago Magazine.