archival material
Mostly just taking the occasion of the re-release of 1989 to remind you that I wrote a whole bunch of essays about the album when it was first released in 2014, for a Tumblr project called One Week One Band. OWOB has been off-air for a while, but when it was on, it was one of my favorite parts of the internet: a place where people got to range wide and deep and weird and funny about their favorite music. I wrote many favorite pieces for it, including this one, on Blank Space, which among the most viral thing I've ever written.
Also beloved: this paragraph from a post for a different week, about the song ...Ready for It, off of reputation.
There’s only one place where Taylor Swift has complete control. She can write a song, craft an album, and define its look as an “era,” but those projects will still be subject to speculation, gossip and critique. She can fall in love with a succession of handsome, talented, wealthy men, but she cannot turn them into the fairytale princes she needs them to be. (I’m so very tame now / never be the same now, she vows, and you can almost hear her scratching at the walls of the cage she’s locked herself in.)
There’s only place she’s entirely free, and it’s in the space of her head, in the landscape of her dreams. In darkness, in solitude, she knows herself without the warp of a reputation to distort her. All of her power comes from that unseen, unseeable space, and …Ready for It? reminds us that, amid all of the disasters of the last few years in her life, the press mishaps and poorly handled PR moments, one thing has escaped unscathed: Taylor Swift’s dark and frankly terrible imagination. In the middle of the night / in my dreams / you should see the things we do.
This is why I love Taylor Swift: because her image and her songs are two sides of the same fucked up coin. What transforms the former into the latter is the work of patriarchal repression on a psyche. Taylor Swift: The Celebrity is the nicest girl in the whole world, and Taylor Swift: The Music is the wailing fury of someone whose niceness has driven her insane. …Ready for It? is the closest she’s come to admitting that she’s waiting to unleash herself: to stop telling the stories she needs us to believe about her, and start admitting to all of the rude shit she wants just because she wants it.
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I wrote a bunch of stuff about an ex here, and then deleted it, because really the point was:
Never forget.
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My other OWOBs include Hanson, Harry Styles' debut album, and One Direction's Made in the AM.
I am also talking about Taylor on the regs on my podcast, On the Bleachers.
& since we last spoke, I've written three new installments in my Descript series of interviews with independent podcasters, featuring Ellen Scanlon of How to Do the Pot, John August of Scriptnotes, and Mark Pagan of Other Men Need Help.