Selling Empowerment?
Parasocial Relationships and Empowerment Branding in the Works of Taylor Swift, Charli XCX and Billie Eilish

Anna Haid-Schwarz

This dissertation explores how contemporary pop lyrics construct empowerment, authenticity, and intimacy, focusing on the work of Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, and Billie Eilish. In recent years, these artists have shaped not only musical trends but also wider cultural conversations, introducing terms such as “ being in an era” or “brat summer” that circulate far beyond the songs themselves. This project conceptualizes their work as Empowerment Pop: a mode of popular music in which narratives of agency, vulnerability, and self-definition are central to both artistic expression and audience engagement.
Situated at the intersection of literary and cultural studies, the dissertation treats song lyrics as complex narrative and rhetorical texts. Although pop lyrics are omnipresent in everyday digital culture — quoted, memefied, and repurposed — they are rarely analysed as sustained cultural narratives. This study addresses that gap by examining how lyrical strategies such as metaphor, repetition, and shifting pronouns, particularly the use of the second person, contribute to the formation of parasocial relationships and feelings of intimacy between artist and listener. Authenticity is understood here not as raw self-disclosure but as a carefully curated performance that balances emotional openness with control.
Methodologically, the dissertation combines close reading with an awareness of broader media contexts, including music videos and live performances. Drawing on theories of parasocial interaction, autofiction, and emotional capitalism, it investigates how empowerment functions simultaneously as personal storytelling and as a branding strategy. Through the three aforementioned case studies, the project shows how different pop personae negotiate empowerment in distinct yet interconnected ways, highlighting lyrics as central sites of meaning-making in contemporary popular culture.