The Disneyfication of Pop: The Beatles, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and their Fairy Tales shatters the mirrors of music's brightest stars and reassembles them to present a new theory of hypercommodified pop.
In the first-ever book of its kind, Katie Kapurch reveals the often-invisible links between the Walt Disney Company and pop superstars, demystifying their enchantments in the process. Much like the fairy-tale media they interpolate and inspire, Disneyfied artists create and market hypercommodified music that is thrilling and comforting, sexy and safe, controlled and consoling.
Disneyfication is a postmodern mythmaking phenomenon that accounts for the intensely personal attachments pop musicians inspire and the near-religious status they occupy as cultural institutions for multigenerational audiences. As if dusted with the Studios' own sparkle, the Beatles, Beyoncé, and Swift use Disneyesque storytelling and visual tropes to become “princely auteurs” and “princesses adored.” Occupying two roles at once, the artist becomes a creator-hero worth imitating and a damsel deserving attention and rescue. These melodramatic metaphors encourage audiences to see themselves reflected in pop, whose dreamworlds are safe spaces as protected and storied as Sleeping Beauty's castle.
Disney's looking glass offers new ways of seeing the Beatles, Beyoncé, and Swift, while also uncovering unexplored links between them. Kapurch's insights have wide-ranging applications beyond these icons to other mediated wonderlands and the engagements they demand throughout the broader pop cultural landscape.