i do always like it when great artists fail

mad men

                January 8, 2021

            i do always like it when great artists fail

            i'm thankful i got a raise and, as i do whenever something about salary is involved, i thought of the mad men scene where peggy says don could say thank you and don shouts "that's what the money's for." i'm thankful for the money but i'm also thankful that my boss and coworkers thank me for things every day (and i thank them). i'm thankful that yesterday i helped my boss get started compiling a very tedious document, even though it was very tedious (and imo largely pointless) (that's what the money's for) (she also thanked me several times).

i'm thankful that the new evermore bonus tracks were released and i'm thankful, despite my desire for more taylor swift songs i like that i can listen to ten million times with d, that i think "it's time to go" is such a terrible terrible song; the instrumental bits are pretty and pleasant enough (like elsewhere on these recent albums, makes me think i really might like the national if they had another singer!) but the lyrics are so clunkily prosy and whenever taylor does the thing she does of projecting herself empathetically into the lives of generic normal people* who are not like her (as opposed to the specificity, both in character and detail, of something like "the last great american dynasty" or the sharpness and wit of "tis the dam season"), it feels so sentimental and cloying and makes me want to hurl (see also "epiphany" from folklore). i'm also thankful for the way that as the song continues she doesn't maintain consistency in that zone and instead later does another verse about her masters being purchased (because apparently the subtlety of "my heart ricochets" (a much better song) needed to be hammered home again).

(i'm thankful for the thing that kanye and taylor still have in common after all these years, which is feeling incredibly aggrieved about rich people problems and expecting others to give a shit)
* i also still can't get over "truck tires" being a repeated lyrical motif on evermore 

this is something i've written before but i do always like it when great artists fail! of course i would rather have more great art, but it's reassuring as an artist, like even people who i respect with all the resources and talent and everything can still do things that are total garbage. (the other bonus track "right where you left me" is...fine (d likes it more than me) but imo it feels so very derivative melodically and harmonically of other songs she's done in the past and not in a way that i enjoy and think is clever, like the way the upward key change in the last chorus of "betty" mimics the same move in "love story" a decade or so before).

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