Podcast Reenactments and the Sonics of Fictionalization from Cher to Swift

Abstract

Podcasts often blend journalistic investigation with personal reflection, from Serial to Switched on Pop. Their veneer of fiction-as-fact especially confounds representation when podcasts’ voice acting and sound design portray pop stars in caricatured dramatizations. This paper examines reenactments of Cher and Taylor Swift in podcasts that investigate popular music industries and technology. As I show, these stars often are ventriloquized on podcasts due to their respective ages and visibility as women. Podcasts interrogate them for being too old or too young and for trespassing onto the often-male domains of business and technology. To show how podcast hosts represent women pop stars in particularly gendered and ageist ways, I listen to the sonics of fictionalization of two episodes that mythologize Cher’s Auto-Tuning and Swift’s battle to take back her masters from record industry men. First, American Innovations reenacts Cher’s request to producers to create the Auto-Tune effect, but the male host’s ventriloquy of her voice reduces her artistic and technological prowess to parody as they make her seem outdated. Then, in Business Wars, multiple voice actors reenact Swift’s career from its beginning and depict her as a child who doesn’t know any better. These podcasts blur facts and public opinion with alluring dramatizations of what “really happened,” placing listeners in the scene with compelling voice acting and ambient sound effects. In these reenactments, podcasts’ affordances of intimacy and immersion—which hosts often herald as democratizing—perpetuate cultural mythologies about gender and age in popular music.