This month instead of reviewing a separate sad thing and a famous thing, I’m going to talk about famously sad person Taylor Swift, who is also, as of her latest album release, sadly famous
Sad & Famous
I listen to every Taylor Swift album the exact same way. It comes out, and I put it on and I play it constantly, morning to night for days on end until I know the entire record by heart. And it’s funny because I would not say, if one were to ask me, that Taylor Swift is one of my favourite musicians—even though at times she’s been my most listened to artist of the year on Spotify. I would probably say that I like her a lot— because I do! But I don’t get the resonant, bone shaking emotional reaction to her work that, for me, would qualify a favourite artist. The fervent psychic joy/distress that goes along with listening to an album that deeply resonates with your darkest or saddest shit is not always what I need— even if it is always what I love, especially when times as tough and I am emotionally raw (for an example, read Niina Pollari on EMA’s Past Life Martyred Saints). When I cannot grapple with another complex emotion inside myself, Taylor is there. What I get when I listen to Swift is escape from myself through the familiar, relatable feelings she is relaying. I believe, as I listen, that I know how she feels and by knowing how she feels, I can imagine myself in her shoes. As an artist, or even as a public persona, she is like a keyhole you can look through into another world, but that keyhole is in the shape of yourself. Leaning into that is, I believe, her genius. This essay from a newsletter I subscribe to was paywalled but the basic concept I am putting forth is contained in the headline:
I say I’m sorry for talking about Swift and her new album, The Tortured Poet’s Department, because by this point we have all been exposed to ten zillion think pieces about it which we have either gobbled up (me) or been unwillingly inundated by (possibly you), after a year of her winning every Grammy for her last album Midnights, nonstop Eras tour coverage and romance novel come to life affair with the guy who won the Super Bowl, complete with a kiss on the field when the game was over. A stylish friend of mine asked me to make her a playlist to introduce her to more pop music with the caveat “please no Taylor Swift, I can’t take the cringe.” Another friend, with whom I share a vast amount of musical taste, and I had this exchange:
Without cringe, I would argue, Taylor Swift would supernova like a collapsed star. The cringe is the backbone of her empire. The cringe makes her real, the cringe makes her you. She is so incredibly famous, but her dorky, often petty, personhood is accessible and relatable, and even if you don’t like it, there’s something of a normal person in there, whereas many stars seem too distant, icy and remote at the edge of the galaxy (see Paris Hilton’s inability to stay on top of the fame pyramid). Swift would not be happy with this comparison but there is something of the Kardashian model to her success— let the public see your messiness and they will come to believe they are one of the family. I will say tho, I don’t believe her to be as curated and calculated as the Kardashian clan, I think her chaos is almost always genuine. And I think she feels free to be open in that way because her success has always been tied to it—imagine what you might expose about yourself if you were a talented writer with decades of confirmation that the world was rapturously invested in every morsel of your creative non-fiction—your every date, your every beef. Imagine what you might come to believe about what you were entitled to, about how much say you got in what everyone thinks.
Taylor Swift is also just fun. For anyone pondering her appeal to even sophisticates like me (lol)—it’s not that deep! She’s bonding to those who listen to her. Every album is like your favourite team coming back to play a new season— you get together with your community and theorise about the players, the injuries, the strategies. You can make/buy custom friendship bracelets to wear! Her fame itself reads as wholesome, it feels like the kind of ideal fame you might dream up for yourself—a beautiful, talented young girl without nepotistic connections, working hard writing songs in Nashville, gets her big break. As she hits the stratosphere she dates every millennial crush hot ticket— Jake Gyllenhaal, Tom Hiddleston, Harry Styles. She buys fun homes, has quirky cats, wears beautiful gowns. She is seemingly thrilled to have made it, going to awards shows and dancing enthusiastically to her favourite artists like she just won the lottery. She remains close to people she went to high school with, she is loyal and devoted to her girlfriends, among whom are some of the biggest stars of the day, she invites them to party with her on stage at her concerts, she names songs after her friend’s kids. She remains a little nerdy, openly herself. Authentic.
However. After almost twenty years of increasingly dense stardom, cracks are again appearing at the surface with The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD), as they did in 2017 when she released Reputation, her last album that was reviewed this poorly or with this much eye-rolling. At thirty-five, the dream life of Taylor Swift is feeling more and more stunted, a little too stuck in high school. On 2020’s Folklore/Evermore there seemed to be an artistic expansion taking place but now it’s back to songs about bad boys and Kim Kardashian. And there is, of course, the white feminism of it all.
Success is boring and failure is interesting which is why I kind of love it when Swift releases a mess of an album. Midnights (2022), her last album, was a tightly constructed adult contemporary release of interesting reflections on dark nights of the soul. I liked it a lot— but it didn’t tell me anything it didn’t intend to, where as TTPD is like listening to someone whose drunker than they think they are getting accidentally confessional. But, like Reputation, I don’t think it’s an accident per se, it’s a mistake, rather, driven by Swift’s desire to slash back people who have hurt her and let the world know, as only she can—having trained us all to dig like rabbits for clues and hints in her work. When she’s in that space, she reveals more than she should, is less critical of the quality of her output, as the quality is less important than the context and the context is: fuck you.
TTPD also feels and sounds quite rushed. When reviewing it for a friend, I said that many of the songs felt like they could have been an Instagram post or a private journal entry. According to Swift, “I've never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets.” I very much understand needing to write the bad thing out of you, but TTPD does have the vibe of someone’s desperate tumblr rants published in a rush of unedited emotion at 3am— re: the Roxane Gay tweet. Sonically it is split right down the middle between Folklore/Evermore collaborator Aaron Dessner (The National) and frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff (The Bleachers) who was a heavy hand on Midnights. The sound of TTPD is a bit splintered, like a smash of b-sides from both records without ever having a cohesive sound of its own. Like Reputation did, a lot of the songs on TTPD (31!) run together (for even the biggest Swifties, I challenge you to tell apart or even fully recall the following interminable thirsty-for-Joe-Alwyn songs off Reputation: ‘So it Goes’, ‘Dancing with Our Hands Tied’, ‘King of my Heart’, ‘Call it What You Want’, ‘Don’t Blame Me’).
This is not to say there are not plenty of absolute bangers on TTPD—there are! Like Reputation it contains some of her best work, it is just not a symmetrical pop masterpiece like she is capable of— a 1989, a Red, a Midnights, a Folklore/Evermore. The song ‘Down Bad’ rules, it’s lyrically hilarious, juxtaposing the mournful line, “for a moment I knew cosmic love” with the basic bitch line, “now I’m down bad/crying at the gym.” Whomst among us has not! Strangely, what I found myself thinking of as I listened to TTPD was Elizabeth Gilbert’s hot mess memoir Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert famously leaves her marriage only to fall into a consuming affair that almost destroys her as a way of coping with her divorce and disillusionment. It was clear to me, that while the most frequent subject of TTPD is Swift’s brief affair with renown fuckboy Matty Healy, the obsession with Healey is an escape from the more profound grief of ending her six year relationship with Alwyn. Arguably, the best two songs on the album are the two about Alwyn— ‘So Long London’ and ‘loml’, the latter being one of the best songs she’s ever written, imo, and one that makes me cry whenever it comes on. Also, like Gilbert, tip-taping away Eat, Pray, Love and presenting a woman who confidently does not understand herself at all, Swift’s revisiting of certain themes seem to unknowingly highlight her stumbling between self involvement and self awareness.
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There’s subject matter on TTPD that is deeply uninteresting to me— revenge, ‘don’t mess with me or I’ll come and get you’, ‘I’ll forget you but never forgive you’ (it’s clear at this point you will do neither, dude), ‘my mom thinks you suck.’ I was already tired of Kim Kardashian songs when they were on 2019’s Lover (another messy album—which will not be explored today!). Taunting KK that her kids will probably learn the lyrics to and enjoy Swift’s songs, in the year of our lord 2024, seems unnecessary to me at best, especially when I know from Folklore/Evermore Swift is capable of crafting interesting, moving storytelling beyond her own personal drama. There’s a self sabotaging streak on TTPD as well. ‘But Daddy I Love Him,’ has been widely covered as Swift’s first bite back at her fan base, whom she has arguably encouraged to be parasocial (so devoted they reform struggling economies following her Eras tour around), telling everyone who didn’t approve of her affair with Matty Healy they can go kick rocks. On ‘I Can Do It with a Broken Heart’, Swift revels in laying out how miserable she was on the Eras tour when her fans thought she was partying along side them— the song is fun, but there’s something bitter lodged in its throat. If TTPD has a theme, it could be heavy (and messy) is the head that wears the crown.
I’m including my own edit of TTPD here for your enjoyment, where I have taken off all the songs you only need to listen to once to get the tea and then move on from forever (like ‘thanK you aIMee’) and anything that is too self pitying (‘I Hate It Here’) or too, to me anyway, samey and earwormy (‘The Alchemy’). What I’ve left here are my faves off the album and highlighted songs I think are really good that are less of the headline makers (‘Robin’).
If you want to read more on Swift, I highly, highly recommend Candice Wuehle’s extremely interesting analysis of TTPD as an anthem of paranoia. Definitely my favourite take and essay on Swift at the moment. Also Wuehle’s newsletter rules, if you come here for my takes on pop culture, you should sign up for her newsletter, her perspective on and analysis of culture is top notch.
The Bottom Shelf
The Bottom Shelf is a feature about what skin/face products people “just like us” are using, loving, considering, buying repeatedly and depending on. No celebs in this section! If you’re interested in being the next Bottom Shelf, please reach out and lmk, I’d love to feature you. Today the lovely Jane C. Hu graces us with her presence and products.
“my routine!! In my 20s I loved to believe I was ‘low-maintenance’ and this meant never wearing sunscreen and rarely wearing makeup, and drunkenly sleeping in it whenever I did. My 30s have been a complete about-face (ba dum chh?) and I am now a person of many products. Embarrassingly, much of my skincare knowledge comes from TikTok influencers, where I heard that it’s good to cycle through physical and chemical exfoliation every few days, so my regime half-heartedly attempts this. For cleansing, I alternate between Philosophy’s Purity face wash, Glossier’s milky jelly cleanser, and Philosophy’s exfoliating wash. So after, I dab on a bit of The Ordinary’s hydrolauronic acid or alpha arbutin, followed by Kiehl’s eye cream and Philosophy moisturizer. When I remember (and am not planning to go into the sun next day, which in the summer, is basically never), I use a bit of retinol. The brand I use is Roc’s “retinol correxion deep wrinkle night cream,” which makes me cringe every time I look at it and reminds me of why I resisted skincare for so long. Wrinkles are fine! No “correxion” necessary! But I digress. To moisurize the rest of my body, I use Lauren’s all purpose salve, which my sister in law gifted me last year for my birthday and has become my go-to product for greasing myself up. For my lips, I’ve been obsessed with La Neige’s lip sleeping mask. If I have plans to leave the house, I use one of three sunscreens: Supergoop’s Invisible Shield if I only want sun protection, Supergoop’s glow screen for light coverage, and colorscience’s “sunforgettable” (lol) SPF 50 face shield, another gift from my sis-in-law, for medium coverage. Make-up wise, I am the ultimate Glossier millennial: boy brow for my brows, lash slick for my lashes, lid star for my lids, cloud paint for my cheeks.”
Previous Bottom Shelf:
YES cringe is the appeal!!! and it has reached a fever pitch on TTPD that i'm not completely sure i can abide. two random taylor thoughts:
1) i saw a tiktok theory (lmao) that in down bad, "crying at the gym" might be the same "gym" from "betty"???? which tbh makes more sense than like, taylor crying at the free weights at equinox
2) "so high school" kind of reads to me like "i hate you but you're hot"? like "you know how to ball / i know aristotle" is a line i would only ever write about a rebound that i think is not that smart.
and thank you for the opportunity to share my bottom shelf <3