The Weekend Snack 4.28.24
Old enough to know The Starting Line.
Welcome to the Weekend Snack - a quick roundup of my favorite bites from the past weekend.
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Happy Sunday, Snackers! I’m coming off a week of being sick and pushing a Sisyphean boulder to get caught up on my to-do list. Despite that ever-growing list, there were two highlights this week: 1. Watching David Letterman interview Alex Honnold at the new and very beautiful PAC NYC space. It’s fascinating to hear a person with an inherently high-risk tolerance discuss how he calculates risk. If you haven’t seen Free Solo yet, you should rectify that. 2. Attending a live taping of the Pop Pantheon podcast about Taylor Swift’s latest album and the state of her celebrity (a great listen with pretty balanced and thoughtful perspectives). There will be much to catch up on with this week’s upcoming menu. But for today, let’s talk Taylor.
🎧 The Tortured Poets Department. This is the part where I tell you that I like Taylor Swift. A lot. Probably more than the average person. And for some, that might mean you stop here. But before you quit reading, let’s take a trip down memory lane. The year is 2008; I’m a Junior in high school. I’ve just received my driver’s license, and that means the freedom to drive my cherry red Jetta Sportswagen wherever I want as long as I make curfew. Most times, that’s the movie theater or a policy debate tournament. But every once in a while, I find myself in my car alone, windows down, driving aimlessly through tree-lined suburban streets with my iPod Touch connected to the car via an aux cord. The playlist is varied, but Taylor Swift has just released her second album, Fearless and the titular song has me in a chokehold because I’m a sixteen-year-old hopeless romantic, and I’ve seen enough rom-coms at that point to know that peak romance is when protagonists declare their love amidst a storm (funny enough - there was torrential rain on my wedding day. Can confirm, it was stressful but romantic). Listening to that song made me feel like I was one of those protagonists. I was the main character! Because that’s what Taylor does so well. She makes you romanticize your life and feel like you are Vivian in Pretty Woman, walking down the street with shopping bags in hand after giving a speech that puts your naysayers in their place. Or sometimes you’re Bridget Jones, drunk in your pajamas, singing “All By Myself.” Either way - you’re the lead. And your internal life matters - even if it feels simple, or shameful, or petulant. With Taylor Swift, the personal is universal, and the mundane is heightened to a level that acknowledges the high stakes of existing as a person with feelings and ambition. And for me, her ability to both elevate and celebrate emotion in the face of a world that dismisses stereotypically female narratives as frivolous has made me continually appreciate her artistry (even if I don’t always like every song and the red string cork board conspiracy theory Swiftie vibes freak me out). With The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD), we have new heartbreak to parse, and we learn that even the world’s biggest pop star isn’t immune to a toxic situationship with the guy in a band.
I have three cardinal rules for listening to new Taylor Swift music: 1. A new album is best consumed on an extended neighborhood walk, laying on your couch with noise-canceling headphones and a silk eye mask, or on a long solo road trip (bonus points if some portion of the journey requires you to drive through adolescent haunts). 2. You must listen from start to finish. No skips. Then, you must repeat the entire album at least once before revisiting favorites and reading reviews/commentary. 3. You must listen with an open-hearted sensibility. The consistent theme here is that listening should be a focused exercise. That’s not an easy task with 31 songs and lore so extensive it can be overwhelming without a guide. It’s an investment that some people don’t want to make. And candidly, if you haven’t hopped on the Taylor Swift train yet, this probably won’t be the album to convince you (unless you are reeling from a toxic situationship - then this might just be what the Doctor ordered). In fact, I’m unsurprised by the general reaction to TTPD - many Taylor Swift critics have dug their heels in that this album serves as proof her star is overhyped, while fervent Swifties have dug their heels in that this album is her best work yet (maybe without even listening to the whole thing). Realistically, reaction to the album following this period of stratospheric rise was always going to be complicated, with mounting expectations and criticism growing. Do I think it’s a perfect album? Currently, no. There are some skips. But I will say that it’s growing on me.
There are three central plot lines: 1. Grieving the end of a long-term relationship (“So Long London” and “The Black Dog”) 2. Getting caught up in a controversial and toxic situationship and reckoning with the inevitable end (“Fresh Out The Slammer,” “Tortured Poets Department,” “Fortnight,” “Down Bad” - basically most of the first album) 3. Her celebrity and her relationship with the public (“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me,” “But Daddy I Love Him”). There are also hints of new love (“Alchemy” and “So High School”) and old grudges (“ThanK you aIMee”), but the strongest sentiments are in those three main storylines. I think the most powerful moment on the album happens in “The Black Dog” (notice, she has sole writing credit). In this song (presumably about Joe Alwyn, though some think Matty Healy, but I fervently disagree), Taylor’s ex hasn’t stopped sharing his location, so she tortures herself as she follows his whereabouts and sees that he’s entered a bar called “The Black Dog.” She then begins imagining him at the bar singing their song with a new woman who is too young to know the artist (The Starting Line). The song has a beautiful way of making a modern relationship concept (location sharing) feel like a timeless update to the pastime of processing a relationship’s end through unhinged behavior. Who hasn’t followed a significant other’s location and spiraled? The other big highlight for me is the “Supercut” tinged anthem for depressed but productive girlies, “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” In it, she recounts putting on the performance of a lifetime at The Eras Tour while reeling from heartbreak ("I cry a lot, but I am so productive, it's an art.”). A concerning amount of people I know (myself included) have found this a bit too relatable. We love a bop with sad lyrics! Other favorites include the heartbreaking “So Long London,” the “Florida!!!” tribute with Florence + the Machine, and the self-aware “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me.”
For those who say 31 is too many and she needed an editor (the best version of that argument I’ve read is here), I hear you, but I think that misses the point. The album gives off the energy of my first year of college when we’d document a night out with a digital camera and upload every single photo to Facebook the next day - just an unfiltered depiction of a moment in time. Yeah, some of it was messy and unflattering, but it was emblematic of that period in our lives. We’ve grown used to Taylor curating a perfect Instagram carousel of songs, but this album is an unhinged Facebook photo dump - a catharsis after an intense period of heartbreak and unprecedented fame. It’s a rite of passage to enter into a short-lived, toxic relationship while still reeling from the end of a long-term romance and to pin your hopes and dreams on that fling in the hopes it will make the heartbreak make sense. And it’s believable that amid the most chaotic period of her life, she just needed to put it all out there to close the chapter. Besides, if Taylor the businesswoman has learned anything from the re-release of her albums and the vault tracks, her fans want more and more, not less, and being prolific is a strategy (the more shots you take, the more chances you win).
The last thing I’ll say is, can we all just chill? She drops 31 songs, and within just a few hours (even minutes!), there are think pieces, countless tweets, and TikTok reviews. I know that our culture rewards quick reactions, and there’s always pressure to be the first (I’m guilty of this), but if we’re so concerned about Taylor needing an editor, maybe we need one, too. It’s been a week, and I’m still unsure what my definitive opinion is! Whether it’s Taylor Swift’s latest album or a new movie release, let’s all try to treat culture like fine wine and let it breathe. It’s okay for our relationship to something to evolve and to be open to seeing something in a new light after further aeration (this ends my limited knowledge of wine and thus the metaphor).
And I’ll leave you with music that is not Taylor Swift but a cover that brings new energy to a beloved song.
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I’m here for all of this. ❤️ a fellow Swiftie