The Disneyfication of Pop
The Beatles, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and their Fairy Tales
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:18th Feb '27
£90.00
This title is due to be published on 18th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Explains how Disney—via the Beatles—shapes the production and reception of 21st century American pop music
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.
In her groundbreaking book The Disneyfication of Pop, Katie Kapurch affords readers with a powerful study of the Walt Disney Company’s vast and ongoing impact upon the evolution of pop iconography. Drawing upon the influential careers of the Beatles, Beyoncé, and Swift, Kapurch establishes a theory of hypercommodified pop in which these Disneyfied artists find their sparkle—and their enormous cultural influence—at the hands of an all-encompassing fairy-tale media. * Kenneth Womack, author of Living the Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans and Professor of English and Popular Music, Monmouth University, USA *
Katie Kapurch’s book incisively highlights intertextual realities in pop emerging from Disney’s machineries of illusion. Her cultural analyses also locate intriguing conceptual intersections connecting the featured pop acts and their audiences. The Disneyfication of Pop offers an essential, unflinching, and thoroughly detailed reflection on corporate commodification and the popular culture mobilization of fairy-tale storytelling. Her book may alter audience perspectives on Disney and the pop artists who mirror its money-making models, and who have also become part of its twenty-first century fabric. * Mike Alleyne, author of Black British Music in America, 1967–2000 and Professor Emeritus of Popular Music Studies & Music Business, Middle Tennessee State University, USA *
Katie Kapurch’s book is bold, imaginative, theoretically original, and her thesis is totally without precedent. Her writing is expressive, colorful, and breathes life and energy into cultural theory. The Disneyfication of Pop is brash, erudite and accessible. * Richard Mills, author of The Beatles and Fandom and Associate Professor of English Literature and Popular Culture, St Mary's University, Twickenham, UK *
A highly original study, brimming with surprising insights. The central motif—the connection between the mythology of Disney and the Beatles, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift—pushes scholarship on melodrama and fairytale in new directions, setting up a compelling ‘Disneyfied’ context within which to read contemporary popular music. * Jeffrey Roessner, Dean of Humanities, Mercyhurst University, USA *
ISBN: 9798765100035
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
368 pages