The Disneyfication of Pop: With the Beatles, Beyonce, and Taylor Swift reveals a new theory of hyper-commodified pop by shattering the mirrors that reflect the carefully crafted images of musical icons. This is the first-ever book to explore how pop stars dip into the Walt Disney Company''s glittery "Disneydust" to create and market their music, corporate personas, and related products. In doing so, this book exposes unseen relationships between the Beatles, Beyonce, and Swift, who are sexy but safe, exciting yet comforting-much like Disney media. The Beatles, Beyonce, and Swift have all collaborated with Disney, releasing films on its streaming platform since 2020. Yet the Disneyfication of pop is more than licensing-and more than Paul McCartney''s Bambi eyes or "Queen Bey" or Swift''s many versions of Cinderella. Disneyfication involves bundled media and marketing strategies that allow for massive profitability over a timespan much longer than the typical pop career. The Disneyfied Beatles began in the 1960s when the band laid the groundwork for legacy efforts that cultivated fans in subsequent generations. A classic Disney strategy, this kind of multi-generational appeal echoes loudly in the Bey and Swift phenomena, too. This book uncovers pop''s heretofore unacknowledged debts to Disney aesthetics and processes of production, distribution, and reception. Disney dynamics lead audiences to see their own reflections in Disneyfied superstars who function as both prince and princess and whose songs exist in imagined safe spaces as policed and protected as Sleeping Beauty''s castle. However awe-inspiring pop''s once-upon-a-times can be, they also signify, like the Disney logo, illusory promises.

Autorentext
Katie Kapurch is Professor of English at Texas State University, USA. Her previous books include Blackbird: How Black Musicians Sang the Beatles into Beingand Sang Back to Them Ever After (2023) and Victorian Melodrama in the Twenty-First Century: Jane Eyre, Twilight, and the Mode of Excess in Popular Girl Culture (2016).

Klappentext

The Disneyfication of Pop: With the Beatles, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift 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 unseen relationships between the Walt Disney Company and pop icons. Much like the fairy-tale media they interpolate and inspire, Disneyfied artists create and market music that is thrilling and comforting, sexy and safe, controlled and consoling.

As if dusted with the Studios' own sparkle, the Beatles, Beyoncé, and Swift use Disney techniques to become "princely auteurs" and "princesses adored." Occupying two roles at once, the artist is a hero worth imitating and a damsel deserving attention and rescue. These melodramatic dynamics let audiences see themselves reflected in pop superstars, 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 and uncovers unprecedented links between them, too. While these phenomena exemplify Disneyfied pop, Kapurch's insights have wide-ranging applications to mediated wonderlands and the engagements they demand throughout the broader pop cultural landscape.

Zusammenfassung
Disney Plus Beatles shatters the mirror holding the Beatles' carefully crafted image and reconstructs the looking glass to reveal its reflecting echoes today. This book explains how Disneyvia the Beatlesshapes the production and reception of 21st century American pop music. It probes Disney's and the Beatles' functions as cultural institutions, an approach that considers gendered, sexual, racial, and other implications of these joined phenomena in the age of streaming platforms like Disney+. After uncovering Disney tropes in visual aesthetics and storytelling related to the Fab Four, the book considers U.S. artists with controlling visions for their multiplatform media, specifically Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and Lil Nas X. As princely auteurs, the pop musicians in this book are perceived as self-made innovators while appearing to create safe spaces for audiences. These Disney dynamicsimpressive prince/adorable princesscultivate appeal, especially among fans who feel deeply personal relationships with these musical phenomena. Disney Plus Beatles offers an incisive look at the cultivation and collaboration of celebrity persona and corporate production.

Inhalt

Introduction: The Disney Mirror
Chapter One: Disney Mythmaking
Chapter Two: The Disney Version
Chapter Three: Disney Melodrama
Chapter Four: The Disney Brain
Chapter Five: Disney Icons and Backstage Passes
Chapter Six; The Disney Vault
Chapter Seven: Disney Dollification