There’s this 2006 movie called The Fall that is one of those movies that sort of… disappeared… from the era of streaming. Possibly not undeservedly. (I watched it long ago, probably around 2010, because I loved Pushing Daisies and Lee Pace is in it.) Anyway, at one point there’s this terrifying stop motion bit where a group of shadowy inquisitor doctors cut open a doll’s head and pull out a bunch of wadded paper. I think of this scene basically every time I get a cold.
Which is to say: I have a cold and I’m very stupid right now. But I went on
to talk about… well, you know, Taylor. (No points for guessing that correctly.) You can listen here (it’s behind a paywall) but I thought I’d put some thoughts below.I don’t mean this in a conspiratorial way,1 but it’s obvious that for many people this album represents The End Of Taylor Swift Thank God and they’re having a bit of a party about it. The problem for them is that the way you would end Taylor Swift is not by listening to her album (to make fun of it) or by reading through all the album lyrics (to find cringey lines to tweet). But they did both of those things, so the album broke streaming records.
The basic rule of Online is this: attention is attention, and if you can survive negative attention psychologically, it will do great things for you. If you circulate that line from “I Hate It Here” about wanting to live in the 1830s without all the racists enough, someone’s gonna listen to it. Taylor Swift is “over” (in the sense of, no longer culturally dominant) when she can drop a new album and nobody feels the need to comment on it. When a thread for a leak of The Tortured Poets Department has over five thousand comments… she’s not over.
I am mostly not talking here about reviews—I think the mixed-to-negative reviews have been good and insightful, for the record. But this album got three reviews from Sputnik for some reason (one positive, two negative), and while reading one of the negative ones I found myself going back to this odd moment in the second paragraph:
Instead, Taylor opts for interchangeable melodies that never really threaten to take attention away from the lyrics, which function more as tabloid clarification than earnest poetry. I struggle to hum a single melody but, against my will, I can make an educated guess as to what song is a Matty Song or a Travis Song or a Joe song (Karlie truthers, it’s 2024, time to move on!).
Now Matty and Travis and Joe are all In The News. I sympathize as I also hear about them against my will most of the time. Karlie Kloss, however, is not. If you are aware of the existence of late stage Kaylors, you did that to yourself. You looked that up. That is not something you were forced to know.2 If you believe Taylor when she says she started writing this album two years ago, then probably many of the gossip connections people are drawing are actually wrong. And I do believe her because she was hinting at the existence of a “white album”3 before the Eras tour even started.
Kacey Musgraves is not an artist whose work I really enjoy, but she put out an album earlier this year. I listened to it once and I thought it was fine. All the reviews I read also said, more or less, “it’s fine.” The album did fine. Kacey Musgraves does not have haters in sufficient number to create a cycle of conversation around her work. Which is probably great for her, frankly. I would not enjoy having haters. But not being subject to that kind of negative attention means her reach ends up more limited. You just kind of appreciate Kacey Musgraves, if you do, in the quiet of your own home.
When Cowboy Carter came out, on the other hand, people immediately started dunking on the “Jolene” cover, because… Beyonce has haters. And that meant there was a conversation about what she was doing with the cover and what she was doing with the album more generally.
Haters are as valuable as fans. Blah blah blah. We talk about that a lot. But I think it is worth repeating this time because the same people who will tweet twelve times about how bad the new Taylor album is may also wonder something like, why isn’t so and so getting this kind of attention. Why does Taylor take up all the oxygen. And I honestly do think the answer is not that nobody loves Artist X enough. The answer is that nobody hates Artist X enough.
Here’s a post that’s supposed to be supporting Olivia Rodrigo on r/popculturechat.
This post… is not about Olivia Rodrigo! It’s about Taylor Swift. The degree to which conversations about Olivia Rodrigo are really conversations about Taylor Swift is a huge problem for Olivia, in fact. As I’ve said here before, if Taylor is pursuing an active feud with Olivia that’s really embarrassing for her. But it’s not actually a problem for her, because it means people are going to listen to Olivia’s music wondering what is and is not about Taylor Swift, and then the headlines for Guts pieces become: is this song about Taylor? is that song about Taylor?
And here’s a comment on a post in r/FauxMoi about how Hozier has his first number one hit in the America.
Again: why make the conversation about Hozier into a conversation about Taylor Swift? There’s basically no reason to do it except wanting to talk about Taylor Swift more than you want to talk about somebody you putatively like and respect more.
Is it good that things are like this? No, obviously. It’s actually pretty bad. Can individual writers buck the trend? Absolutely. (I try.) But I do think it’s a somewhat under-examined dynamic in modern media, which is, I guess, why I keep on repeatig myself about it. Attention is attention. Haters are valuable. Negative polarization is what sells albums and breaks records. I don’t like it, but it’s how it is.
Only clarifying this because some swifties are definitely a couple beers away from going full Qanon on this one.
You can listen to almost every song on this without caring about Men because this album has, among other things:
a song about getting abducted by aliens (“Down Bad”)
a two-parter about killing your cheating husband and running away to Florida (“Fortnight,” “Florida!!!”)
a song riffing off a Nancy Mitford novel (“The Bolter”)
a song from the point of view of Wendy in Peter Pan (“Peter”)
In other words, like just about every album except Midnights, it has a mix of more personal songs and clearly fictional songs.
White as in color-coded white… not white album as in The White Album…
You GUYS Taylor posting a Ted Hughes poem for Florence + the Machine’s book club really left a bad taste in my mouth. Taylor 🤝 Ted Hughes: putting their partners down for their depression. Someone please talk me down about this!
I hope you feel better soon! A cold after a new Taylor release is just brutal, I’m sorry. I LOVE The Fall. It recommended by Sherri DuPree of Eisley (now that’s a subject I’m too sad to speak about). I own it on dvd and just rewatched it with my parents. We all cried at the end. I’m always quoting that little girl after the scary claymation scene. “I didn’t give you up, even after they tortured me with needles!” Great movie. When I watched Lady Gaga’s music video for “911” I was like, this kinda reminds me of The Fall and lo and behold, Tarsem directed it! To shift gears: Haters and stan wars are tough. The toxic lifeblood of the internet and streaming. Then there’s Club Chalamet. It’s funny to laugh about her antics but also it scares me! When does a 60 something person running a stan account for a 20 something year old actor become creepy, pathetic, or both? At least Taylor is two years older than I am. At least there’s that.