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[writerinherhead]

[writerinherhead]

dancing phantoms on the terrace, are they secondhand embarrassed?

@lgbtqcreators creator bingo: typography

[writerinherhead]

just trying to process these lyrics and how they’re actual poetry

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[writerinherhead]

The Tortured Poets Department is a great reminder that women don't owe the world pretty. Taylor Swift doesn't owe anyone an easily digestible pretty pop album wrapped in a bow with short songs you can make TikToks to. She's allowed to present something raw, uncomfortable, and vulnerable to the world.

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Sorry but if you're clowning on "down bad crying at the gym" then you've never lived. Like go have a breakdown in the grocery store dairy aisle like a normal person.

[writerinherhead]

now I'm down bad cryin' at the gym everything comes out teenage petulance fuck it if I can't have him I might just die it would make no difference

[writerinherhead]

On Fame and Normalcy as Context for Critique of TTPD It's surprising for me to see critiques of the album that essentially say, "We all know she's extremely rich and famous, so why is she pretending to be having the human experience?" Because this album reaches us within the real-world context of Swift's fame, we can't help but see her experiencing that fame out of the corner of our eye as we listen. But I'd argue that we need to ignore that glimmer over there and focus instead on how the songs make us feel and what they are saying within their own context—to consider the album on its own terms as a work of art.

In our culture, fame and wealth represent a kind of transcendence. One of the reasons prosperity gospel works so well is that the ideology of the last century has solidified the conflation of attaining wealth and attaining heaven—which was previously considered a mythological,* posthumous state. What surprises me about these critiques of Swift's work is that they don't seem to be able to question this inner ontology.

The lesson should be that her continued focus on the subject matter at hand reveals a truth about life—as all great art does: nothing saves you from the mundane experience of being a human, nothing removes precarious emotions and irrational, unobtainable desires. These are the burdens we all bear, they are the landscapes we all walk through. At the bottom of art is the desire to establish, I think, a shared humanity. In which the artist can express their humanity and reflect the audience's humanity back to them. With a receptive audience—and I believe the Swifties are a receptive audience—the artist can see their humanity reflected back in the shared humanity experienced by their audience.

I'm skeptical of serious or intellectual (as opposed to political or social) art critique in general because it essentially investigates and unpicks whether a work of art has accurately explained the human experience. Honestly, what the fuck is up with that? The experience is what it is, what comes out of a human is an accurate human experience.

The continued resistance to seeing Swift as a human woman is a resistance to letting go of the idea that success can end suffering, which is an innate, built-in feature of having a human form.

I think the impulse to see Swift as a god on the part of some of her fans is also tied to this resistance. It's completely natural to see god in the sublime—an impossibly high waterfall laced with rainbows; a mountain view on a clear, bright morning; black storm clouds like a floating city in the summer sunlight—and Swift's presence and her work is sublime. But to place the onus of the sublime on Swift alone is also unfair to her as a human being who will, inevitably, experience the quotidian, petty, and disappointing like the rest of us. The roots of the sublime, for Swift, and for her fans, have always been firmly planted in the mundane.

I'd like to enter into evidence the lines, All my friends smell like weed or little babies and You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist / I scratched your head / You fall asleep / Like a tattooed golden retriever and Now I'm down bad crying at the gym.

Swift has become more and more comfortable with, and skilled at, reporting from the front lines of being inside an average moment. Not a moment so sparkly that you're [dancing] in a storm in [your] best dress / Fearless. Not a moment that you're willing yourself to capture it, remember it! Not even a moment as romantic as dancing round the kitchen in the refrigerator light. It's not rare, but the narrator's there, we're there, and it's real and true in a way that poeticizing it any further would obscure.

To be an artist, Swift must be a person, as all artists must—it's our burden to be (maybe) more human than everyone else because it's our role to connect people to their shared humanity. Artists have to be open to the whole world of experience like a tide pool that lets things flow in and lets them flow out again.** Therefore, it's imperative to engage with The Tortured Poets Department as if it was written by a human woman who is an artist and not by Taylor Swift the brand, the star, the god.

It's this aspect of the her, the work itself, that is immortal and transcendent. To reference "Clara Bow" and it's allusion to the passage of female stardom, I'd like to say that Stevie Nicks (also referenced in the song along with the eponymous actress) may not be the sensation that she once was, but decades after her public "peak" Nicks' work has played a pivotal role in the development of my sonic tastes (via the way her style has inspired artists like Swift herself), my self-image, and my emotional world. Nicks' fame is not gone, it's just underground living in the subconscious of thousands of listeners like me who treasure every sublime and mundane artistic decision she made years ago.

I hate to make the parallel, but I will anyway because I love this text: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius—yes, the one that every philosophy bro in your life has told you to read—was a journal that Aurelius kept around 161 to 180 AD. The man was the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the biggest deal, the apotheosis of then-contemporary manhood. And his journal is filled with pep talks and frustrations, urging himself to get his shit together, to get out of bed on time, to stay resilient to conflict and criticism. Normal, everyday human stuff.

He writes, "At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: 'I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?'

So you were born to feel 'nice'? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?

You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you.”

Swift, hopefully, will continue to fix her quill, fountain pen, or glitter gel pen on her pedestrian experiences and inner feelings, expressing them as stories about other similarly flawed, confused, boring, passionate, loving, ambitious, sad, supportive, imaginative, foolish characters through her music. After all, she must continue to go to work, as a human being, just like the rest of us. And in sharing that work with the world as a human woman—not a god or an icon—we get the gift of experiencing a unique facet of our shared humanity in all its messiness and strangeness and contradiction and paradox and inadequacy and wonder.

I want you to know / I'm a mirrorball / I'll show you every version of yourself tonight.

More TTPD reflections under {#an experiential read of the tortured poets department} follow along!

Notes

*Mythological here referring to the mythology-as-worldview/ontology/truth that's upheld by religion or folk spiritual belief systems.

** This is a metaphor from Anne Lamott in this podcast episode: https://www.cathyheller.com/2021/03/how-to-quiet-your-inner-critic-stop-procrastinating-on-your-dreams-anne-lamott/ (a perfect listen for any artist who feels too sensitive for this world)

[writerinherhead]

Taylor Swift talking about her song 'Down Bad'

''A lot of the songs on TTPD deal with the idea of heartbreak or loss in a metaphor of something else. The metaphor in 'Down Bad' is that I was comparing the idea of being love bombed, where someone rocks your world and dazzles you and then just kind of abandons you as a alien obduction where you were abducted by aliens, like, this girl is abducted by aliens, but she wanted to stay with them.. and when they drop her off back in her hometown she said 'wait, no, where are you going? I liked it there. It was weird, but it was cool, come back..' and so the girl, the character in the song, felt like, I've just been exposed to a whole different galaxy and universe I didn't know was possible. How can you just put me back where I was before?''

📸 Via shesjustlosingit on TikTok

[writerinherhead]

wrap me tight in your rubberband man

THE STORY SO FAR | LETTERMAN (X)

Director: Eric Soucy

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I don’t wanna be here at all

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Leap year, February 29th, the Morton House. A tragic day. A day of souls bound in torment, of lives held in cruel balance. But the Ghostfacers, they did the best that they could.

[writerinherhead]

fuck the system!!!

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I agree! Would you mind going further into why you think this?

Taylor Swift is a victim of MK ultra control that has a hold over virtually every artist in hollywood and deserves to be liberated.

[writerinherhead]

watching the hobbit 🤎

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (2012)

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It’ll be just like in the movies. Pretending to be somebody else.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001) dir. David Lynch

[writerinherhead]

this fall 🌤️✨🍂