#I feel like a Taylor Swift fan setting her up for failure by comparing her to Michael Jackson

[capitalisticveins]

Darlin’ could’ve packed up the shades AND opened the ward that’s why Erik didn’t let them go to the E&E Games in the first place send tweet

[appears]

Has it been two weeks or two years? Notes on Taylor Swift's Lover

I got swept up in all of the hype of the new Taylor Swift album, reading retrospectives and reviews and analyses and theories, and listening and re-listening to what is basically another carefully crafted season of the Taylor Swift show. It was both over- and underwhelming, and though the album has been out two weeks now, it feels so much longer.

What Swift is really great at is good old-fashioned song-writing, the type with easy and instantly recognizable hooks and personalities, such that a listen or two is all it takes to get to know a song. I have listened to my favorite tracks a dozen times at least and the entire album straight through four times and it already feels as comfortable and familiar as an old sweater; this speaks to both an achievement of an album that contains eighteen songs and a failure of its level of sophistication. But no matter how catchy an album is, once the trail of breadcrumbs left in the form of puzzles and clues and hints and references and Easter eggs have been eagerly plucked, gobbled up and spat out solved, some of the excitement and almost all of the novelty disappears. Something gets lost. Something new takes its place. Longevity will vary according to fan-level, but as Swift herself once said three albums ago, I'm like, I just, I mean this is exhausting, you know.

This album cycle was not unlike the fatigue that follows binge-watching, like waiting a year and a half for your favorite sci-fi homage to return only to greedily consume all eight episodes in a nine-hour fog of sensory overload, blearily stumbling away from the screen to wonder if having instant access was a Pyrrhic victory, not because the show itself wasn't entertaining, but because it seems somehow a little sad and cheap, that something that could take so much time and care to put together, and generates so much excitement, can be consumed in a few hours and forgotten in a few days. What a banquet we can all feast upon at once! but reviews of Orange is the New Black's last season are already buried somewhere in the archives. Hey, people want they want, and they usually want it all right now; the fact that human beings are typically very bad at understanding what they actually want is irrelevant to the current pace of pop culture. If you're dizzy, the only solution is to get off the ride, keeping in mind you've exiled yourself from the conversation -- sorry, it’s been almost four months, no one cares what you think about Game of Thrones’s last episode anymore. It's no wonder Netflix is experimenting with the traditional model of staggering episodes on a weekly schedule rather than dropping them all at once: all the ice cream and pool inflatables are no match for the emotional and physical capital that can be generated from a sustained, long-term hype machine with weekly beats, like pulse rates that spike sales and interest intermittently, rather than once, all too briefly.

But this is where we live now, and Swift either shrewdly or stupidly tapped into the phenomenon, having us all spend the majority of the album's peak in the inception and pre-order phase, nudged with the help of a de rigeur Japanese model of releasing various editions with slightly different content to scoop extra sales during the album's limited maximum-sale window: the first week ("[b]ut it also leads to a front-loaded first week, as Lover burned off much of its sales once the pre-order period ended. Fans will certainly continue to buy Lover in big-box retail stores and on her website, but we’re not going to see the same astronomical traditional album sales week after week"  -Forbes). And like the end of all major events we spend so long awaiting, we now just live in its memory, a little burned out.

I grow weary with Lover. I find it interesting, a sort of pop-music quilt of patchy trends and too-little, too-late band-wagon jumping like “You Need to Calm Down,” and “The Man” two songs that have frustratingly great hooks (and wow “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” which I initially loved because it sounded like a lost track off of Born to Die, but which I'm starting to resent for the same reason), a couple of surprisingly nice old-Taylors (“Lover,” “Daylight”) a few hints of interesting new-Taylors (“False God,” “It's Nice to Have a Friend”) and filler “content” that is far too specific to be universal in any way that I now mostly skip over (you know the ones, and also the ones that sound too much like stuff off of Reputation). I've never been one to listen to lyrics over the actual music, but Swift makes it impossible not to, and I find myself so lost in her head that I can't really enjoy the forest for the trees.

I now find myself enjoying Reputation a lot more. It feels unfair to compare it to Lover, with its Max-Martin-and-Shellback-pedigreed production, and I certainly don't want to turn this into a case of Antonoff versus the traditional Swedish school of pop, but Reputation’s theme feels more cohesive and confident as a whole, and somehow more honest in its spite. The music is also better. Anyway, don't ask me, I'm a 1989 girl. Everyone reacted to it and everything we missed is in a YouTube video uploaded last week, and up next, here are some plan with me Taylor bujo spreads and I listened to every Taylor song for the first time and a mukbang set to Taylor songs, probably, but only for a few days more before it all disappears into the Internet’s deep drawers because the ride is already over now with too much to keep us busy until TS8, and I'm happy to get out of this only $12.99 poorer.