before midnights

& tTPD & tLoaS: how TS became the 1 👁️ know

It’s Taylor Swift month here at JACKALS!, which I didn’t expect to feel abashed to announce. But the backlash was so (what’s the word) to The Life of a Showgirl, here in this amplified-outrage age, I feel bad about burying my criticisms in my appreciation post, which I’m at least glad didn’t neglect them. You love Swift in a qualified way, the trouble with Swifties (no, there isn’t any at all, I’m just kidding), and this record may have showed her ass in a less intentional way but has the music — too muted but otherwise sparkling — as excuse for both conceptual distance (camp, pop-as-faux, ironic tonal contrasts) and simply tuning her bullshit out. But too much is on fire to take anything less than totally seriously, or so one of many arguments goes. This is hardly the moment for us to cosign a vanilla queen feeling herself; too many petitions for too many actual imperatives, ones Swift is rich and powerful enough to influence quicker.

Rather than providing the perfect slim, perky corrective to those turned off by her weighty and morose Tortured Poets Department — crucially, a breakup album — Life of a Showgirl is the victim of its own indulgence as well, and better to grasp aimlessly through the ether for the truth than double down on the I’m-always-right. Taylor has actually been in a less outwardly-focused creative moment since Midnights, whose rollout was cringeworthy but whose textures were really alluring, and whose content was refreshingly candid. What the album was for was harder to grasp; a shift from the cottage to the loft, perhaps, or a temporary relaxation of her gift for fiction. But the records she’d proved that on, folklore and evermore, were gestures of consideration: she knew not to make the pandemic about her, but still to savor both a chance for outreach and a talent for making use of free time. She hasn’t been quite that shrewd since.

My skeptic partner boils down the other team’s case thus, in imaginary (she’s tired) response to a “why is everybody spending their energy coming at Taylor Swift??” post, the new liberalism. “I do think there are some dog whistles worth noting, for both fans and non-fans alike. This is admittedly the first album of her I’ve listened to all the way through since Speak Now came out [!!!!!!!!!!], so maybe she’s been writing problematic things before now that I simply haven’t listened to [well there’s always “Picture to Burn”]. ‘Have the whole block looking like you’ …yeah? And what does he look like? A lot of calling other women bitches, a diss track each for two fellow pop girlies who did nothing to her. It feels out of touch and very Billionaire White Woman, and I think we would see that. Sonically, I think it sounds great. [But] lyrically, very yikes for reasons that I think are bigger than why people have issues with her other albums.”

My friend Kate, a late-‘80s millennial like me, is dyed-in-the-wool indie — why bother with Taylor Swift when there’s Elliott Smith? Pitchfork converted a decade before she did. But she writes tortured poetry herself, and the last record got through to her, the way startling poetics are often the glimpse you get into how much is going on inside her pop machine. I talk about some of this in the piece below, one of the few non-Pop Report posts on our original tumblr. Kate appreciates what works about the album (fun music) and has issues with some of what others do (she draws the sex-positivity line at telling us all about Kelce’s cock). A dancer, she feels let down that the Showgirl theme didn’t extend to a behind-the-scenes-of-Eras theme, which would’ve been interesting indeed; “I Can Do it With a Broken Heart” is all we’ll get. A Swiftie so soon out of the closet, she wants to rush back in, now that TS has put out a Cars 2.

The thing about Cars 2 is it’s pretty good, though — lovelier visuals than the content justifies, terrific performances from Emily Mortimer and Michael Caine and (for real) Larry the Cable Guy, a great popemobile joke. And I’m sure The Life of a Showgirl is better. But this feels a bit like when Reputation came out, and my bestie said he had to get strategic about his Swift love, at least the public part. Not two years ago she felt like everybody’s hero, if not everybody’s savior. This overview was in March 2023, and I’m sure a surprising amount of it feels antique.

Taylor Swift has now reached a level of ubiquity where objections to her are not only broadly shared and commonly understood — they no longer threaten her popularity. More than most extremely famous people, she’s a lightning rod for speculation and commentary. Does she undermine women with an excessively curated public persona (see: Hillary Clinton) and the prolific, oft-cited dating history she’s never commented on directly? (As a Very Famous Woman, she of course represents all of them.) Is her prior hesitation to express herself politically ultimately as destructive as the Aryan Nation that’s been apt to embrace her as an avatar? (With great power comes great etc. — she could win this thing for us!) She has walked through such hurricanes unfazed.

You have to contain multitudes to pull off what she has, so why does this urge to boil her down to black and white continue to follow her? She’s rife with contradictions, and certain dualities are key to her deal — the girl who seems like she still lives next door posed against the relentlessly calculated self-made millionaire, or the pointedly private public figure posed against the living songwriter most famous for mining her own heartache for material. Sometimes I admire how unconcerned she appears with reconciling the parts of herself that don’t add up, especially because unconcern is not her vibe. More often, she’s as strenuously self-aware as someone with a compromised self-awareness can be (see: Hillary Clinton). It’s true, she seems a little awkward or a little aloof most of the time. But she can strike a balance like an Olympic gymnast.

For instance, when she was sexually harassed by a grabby asshole of a small-time DJ, she sued him for a flashily principled $1, yet it was so unflashily reported it had to be her call somehow. While one should really never render subtle a cry for justice, Swift recognized that her sincerity, so often called into public question, was more in doubt than usual. The incident occurred months into her withdrawal from a swiftly heating spotlight — you may recall a piece of media leaked by one K. Kardashian, followed by belabored fields of snake emojis. As for her apparent political neutrality, most would agree that her power was secure enough, and her reach large enough, not to warrant caution. Yet buried if not hidden in a possible vanity project of a Netflix documentary is a scene in which Swift does seem to be emphatically telling scared-shitless record executives that she’s refusing to remain disengaged from the political conversation.

I think it’s a mistake to assume guilelessness or ruthlessness, but there’s definitely a shrewdness to Swift that sometimes feels superhuman. She’s clearly dialed into the dialogue surrounding her, and when millions decide she’s earned their darts, not only does she usually find the sort of fixes (or careful evasions) that win PR firms awards, she seems to be the très-involved CEO of her own operation. Her solutions can be so eccentric, all you can do is shake your head in admiration and bafflement. Few stars have reached Swift’s sphere of popularity, and only in said sphere can you afford high-profile rerecords of great, recent albums — due to a business spat to which Heartland America cannot easily relate — that your fans may not just purchase but honestly prefer.

I can only tip my hat, for I once wrote Swift off, like any other idiot. She had millions of fans right when she hit, but as I think back on the beguilingly sincere, perhaps even cautious babyface staring off the horrible cover of a just-fine first album — a babyface that’s barely weathered — I see more of the underdog than she ever really was. Taylor Swift is the only album where she exaggerates a Southern accent throughout — in an outdatedly comic threat to spread a rumor that a guy is “gay”, she leans so yokel-deep into the vowel it sounds like “guy”. It’s also the one where the title of the opening cut signals her unusual high-riser savvy; if you’re an unsure shot a record label’s taking a stab at, calling your first single “Tim McGraw” is gonna get at least one celebrity’s attention. But the first line inaugurates a more relevant refrain: damn, she can write.

He said the way my blue eyes shined
Put those Georgia stars to shame that night
I said “that’s a lie”

In 2006, not that you asked, I was a manic depressive twenty-year-old in a go-nowhere bedroom-pop band with his best friend and no one else. Besotted by old things, I was more cynical about modern pop than ever, though in my defense ‘06 was an especially valid year to feel that way. It’s true, the visual marketing of Taylor Swift’s debut has a Mary Kay cloy not helped by Swift’s naturally cloying face. (The 2010 film Valentine’s Day is known as having made no good choices, but it did make one — casting Swift opposite Taylor Lautner. Two young Taylors who absolutely cannot act, with strangely vacant and rodential faces, not impossibly formed in a lab). But my writing her off on sight as a country-pop Disney princess was a dumb insult to her and those two things.

Two no-fun years later the follow-up, Fearless, was getting noticeably generous year-end praise from critics I trusted — critics who hadn’t, unlike me, written off an entire wildly popular genre of music or a first-timer on instinct alone, but who also hadn’t thought Taylor Swift (the album) was too special — so I put it on and took a long walk. I wasn’t taken in by the soft rush of the first songs, which I now hear as sun-dappled and splendorous. The rippling guitars, immaculately recorded; the so-sincere-you’re-not-sure unfurl of lines about dancing with boys in parking lots. Swift has relied on vivid details from the start (“the way the street looks when it’s just rained/there’s a glow off the pavement…”), but wasn’t yet finessing her lines into doubling as poetry.

But I was taken in by an incredible moment that jolted out of the end of the fifth song, “White Horse”, a born deep cut that ended up as one of her many perplexing choices for singles. It’s a slowburn about a bad boy who broke her heart, one of just two kinds of boys (the other kind makes her want to dance around parking lots) who appear in most of her earlier songs. The melody is solid and winning — Swift uses an extremely limited and dependable chord palette, rarely venturing into minors, and sometimes I wonder if she knows about 7ths — the lyric a sad reflection heading toward a resigned kiss off. But all of a sudden, the vocal heats up, around a single shoved-in polysyllabic word, the lyric’s meter suddenly tripled: “…someone who might actually treat me well.”

That triumphant (and a touch petulant, even) “actually”, a simple strategic choice so good you can practically hear Swift geeking out in her room as she comes up with it, sparked a permanent curiosity. Damn, she can write, I thought, and moreover, that’s good pop. I had graciously noticed that not only did Ms. Swift have a brain (duh), she was sharp, and felt a discernible joy in her own gifts. An American singer-songwriter myself, I began to hear her as a fellow traveler. This writer may not have known a lot of chords, but she knew how the least unusual ones had to go together, knew from hit-song structure, and evidently found a great hook every time she checked her pockets.

What happened next? Well, Kanye West made that [girl] famous, and for me, she was someone else’s concern again. Kanye did indeed behave like a “jackass”, in President Obama’s unkind but apt parlance, going on to make the greatest album about being one of all time. But I also remember watching Swift describe her reaction to his dumb stunt on a morning show, and the unmistakably affected way she recalled the incident (“Oh. Hi Kanye. Cool hair… Oh. Now I guess I don’t get to thank the fans”). She didn’t need it to capitalize on, but it probably did push Swift into a higher sphere of national recognition. She looked like the goody-goody in the squabble, but that wasn’t correct. On 2010’s Speak Now, all her songs, she put a starry eye on the world outside Nashville. Its sound was tooled for rock arenas, and that old twang had vanished without a trace.

That loud-ass record is stuffed with fun, clever songs, and songs that put a small tear in certain hearts every time they come on. But the production has a superficiality to it which can undermine its most emotionally resonant lyrics, though it helps that said lyrics are often married to melodies you hear Bach’s bones rattling with approval over (“I was en-chan-ted to meet you…”). Yet once again she had to slap my face directly to get my personal attention (for shame), and once again it took two long years in which I accomplished a lot less than TS. Picture it: summer 2012. Somewhere Jake Gyllenhaal is on a film set thinking, “well, at least my image is ‘inviolably likable’” (if probably not in those words), Max Martin is cashing a check, and the soul-swelling hard candy of “We Are Never Getting Back Together” is hooking me on this born pop star for life.

It was in this last decade that her transformation from a country- and folk-adjacent pop artist to a simply pop artist went into rapid effect. When the blockbusting Speak Now came out, the all-prefab ethic of modern pop was still in development; it was so much more common to hear a guitar on the radio. Though Red’s “I Knew You Were Trouble” and “22” were beefed up with inorganic noise, it represented one of multiple sampled approaches, a reverse-sugared pill. “State of Grace” was hi-octane, but in a U2 way, all cavernous and teary-eyed, live band drenched in echo. The little stuttered vocal sample on the title track evidenced her openness to artifice, but Swift publicly pointed out that Joni Mitchell’s fourth album was also named after a color, signaling an aspiration with typical subtlety. The acoustic guitar was still her weapon of choice.

In retrospect, Red is her working out her next direction, but though Swift has a habit of including four too many songs and was not yet gifted at sequencing them, it isn’t a confused album. The songwriting is consistent and ambitious and mature. Of course, “All Too Well” is now seen as a sacred text, a master class in putting just-right slow-building music to your aching crescendo of a lyric. Other pearls you pick out can be effortlessly poetic (“twin fire signs/four blue eyes”) or plain (“this morning I said we should talk about it/’cause I read you should never leave a fight unresolved/that’s when you came in wearing a football helmet/and said ‘okay, let’s talk’”), depending. It’s the first album where she doesn’t always play at innocence, where she drops the veil and reveals the inquisitive adult underneath — an adult who isn’t very different from the previous artist, but who feels less like she’s pretending even when she’s pretentious.

Swift’s flirtation with the mainstream she was born to inhabit brought with it a crisis about the country audience, famously unfriendly to desertions of tradition. But Red’s massive success compelled her to go whole hog with 1989 — the guitars slept in their cases as Swift sang through filters from a cathedral of synths. I have a taste for techno-flirtatious pop, and after a hot minute of contending with my suspicion that the songs weren’t as immediate or deep as Red’s, I couldn’t stop playing it. A handful of albums in the middle 2010s had this hold over me, all statements of pop liberation by female artists from non-radio milieus: Tegan & Sara’s Heartthrob, Jenny Lewis’ The Voyager, Grimes’ Art Angels. The (secondhand) production techniques never dulled emotional impact — they strengthened it, illuminating the songs’ sentiments and atmosphere.

What I think important to note here is maybe the most widely understood thing about Swift, something that doesn’t get trotted out half as much as her foibles. Few working artists, especially very popular artists, have her prolific knack for writing songs whose emotional inhabitability is so reliable. There’s a Swift hit for everyone; she can speak your heartache (or fairy-tale fall) in any edition — the frenetic tension of “Out of the Woods” (“are we in the clear yet — GOOD”), the doleful sarcasm of “Bad Blood”, the citynight hunger of “Style” and “Your Wildest Dreams”, the bittersweet self-parody of “Blank Space”, the gentle recovery of “Clean”. I have yet to clarify my major lingering problem with Ms. Swift, and that’s her insistence on occupying and then destroying my soul. Even in moments of constricted grief, Swift never fails to fix my tear faucet. When she’s on (often), few hit the emotional nailhead with such precision and facility.

I don’t think that 1989 is her best-constructed album — some arrangements are busy, some lyrics are tossed off. She had been so careful before. But with that care came the calculation, and on 1989 that stops at the choice of sonic profile, and awareness of the crossover it signified. You can hear an excitement in her voice throughout the album that feels like liberation, the sound of an artist’s music having an effect on her in real time — actual kid-in-a-candy-store stuff. Naturally, she’d brought on a well-curated shipload of collaborators, including fun. and Bleachers’ mastermind Jack Antonoff. fun. aside, Antonoff’s music has all the pungence of a vanilla Frappucino, but there’s a modesty and homegrown inventiveness to his sounds, technopop with a clear burning soul. His cuts weren’t 1989’s best, but it was the beginning of a fruitful little pairing.

Swift rode 1989’s triumph for two years, during which she won a second Album of the Year Grammy. Finally, she was too culturally pervasive for the pendulum not to swing viciously back at her, Anne Hathaway-style. In the wake of the snake stuff, I imagined Swift coming back, cold-eyed and brittly bitter, with a hip-hop inflected, bleak-hued kiss-off album. (I toyed around with a track I dubbed “Song from Taylor Swift’s Next Album”, which sounds like Young Thug and goes “surprise, motherfuckers” — but I couldn’t get the lyric, I’m just not her). And it came to pass: just as three years before it had been time for her open-armed synthpop album, now it was time for her “yeah I’m hard and fuck you too” album, Reputation, and she delivered. Like Red, it led with an attitude it didn’t stick with; many of the songs are sweet, startled love letters to the actor she was falling for. It was awkward, but spirited, and commendably audacious.

By virtue of the pandemic, 2019 — the year of Lover, whose pink and bright imagery was a deliberate course correction to Reputation’s monochromatic hostility — feels like a damn century ago. That version of Swift feels long gone. Lover was the first one she released after her acrimonious split from the label she’d called home since jump, but it still had the feel of calculation and capitulation — that sunny reversal felt so forced when the first single, the genuinely bad “Me!”, came bearing its banner. But as usual, way too many of its way too many songs hit, and all in different ways. The sugar rush of “Cruel Summer” melted quickly into the hearth-and-home folk of “Lover”, into the sly polemic “The Man”, into the broken prayer “The Archer”. Flighty fun cuts (“Paper Rings”, “I Think He Knows”) interspersed with increasingly vivid grand drama (“Miss Americana”, “Soon You’ll Get Better”). She could toss off a devastating breakup song and hide it in the filler (“Death by a Thousand Cuts”). Multiple coups every time out.

You know what happened next. COVID shoved us indoors, and Swift decided to be everybody’s hero. She recorded and released 34 songs in 2020, over two albums which introduced many to something called “cottagecore”. The chosen aesthetic was “self-consciously indie” — no foregrounded famous face, no text on the cover or capital letters, and an almost total banishment of electronic instruments. She pressed that button rich people have installed to summon things in front of them and used it on Bon Iver and Aaron Dessner; Swift is an indiscriminate and unguarded collaborator with any type. For the first time, her new songs were extremely downbeat: hooks that never pulled you into a bear hug, melodies that didn’t even show off. But all of it was good, and some of it good beyond prior expectations. You don’t start from the level of talent she did and not reach something like mastery after fourteen well-funded years.

At first, folklore and evermore didn’t reach me — I wanted my soul enlivened with some factory-grade pop, and I wasn’t alone in feeling a little chastened by Swift’s pandemic productivity. But playing them over and over in the wake of Midnights, I realized she’d pulled off one last trick: proving she could write like Joni. Well, okay, no, nobody can write like Joni — that magic was hers alone to conjure. But Swift’s songs had always been marked by cowboy-chord changes and clunky lyrics, though counterbalanced by her brilliant melodies and (sometimes accidental-seeming) great lines. In 2020, she saw the forest and the trees — here for our healing were songs of remarkable effort and grace, deep wells of detail, complex emotional conclusions, and no bad lyrics at all.

Well — the clock has signaled another shift. Back on a two-year schedule, with ample time for recreating old victories, our silly old popgirl has returned, having reached the level of ubiquity to where 77% of her thirteen new songs pulled off a hostile takeover of Billboard’s top ten. Midnights, the record which houses these hits, is lyrically flawed and sonically regressive, its career-reframing angle unclear for the first time, its social-media teases hilariously melodramatic. It’s my favorite album of last year, including my favorite song of same. I can stop playing it, but I miss it. My best friend is dead, and Midnights is somehow the only thing I can count on to entice that salt to stream.

tune in next time for the follow-up from a week later — about Midnights, and other things. a reminder: every reprinted or -posted piece is significantly, or at least not insignificantly, edited.