counterprogramming
Because what could I possibly say about the election that hasn’t already been said. Also I’m starting with links today, because the first one is time-sensitive: I’m coming to Boston in a few weeks! You can catch me in Cambridge at the grand opening of Lovestruck Books on November 22nd. Tickets are almost sold out, but you can still grab yours here.
I also recently appeared on the Books are Chic podcast to talk BIG FAN. That’s a Spotify link, but you can find the episode wherever you listen.
Now, some assorted thoughts on Liam Payne, Taylor Swift, fame, etc.:
In November of 2017, an anonymous Tumblr user asked me which member of One Direction’s solo career had impressed me the most. My answer was: “everyone but Liam.” I found his solo music straightforward and uninspired; it bummed me out to see him dancing, forcing himself backwards into a generic pop star mold when he’d started out as such a specific one.
At the time his inability to find a musical niche felt very in line with how I perceived him generally: as the member of the band with the least personality, and the strongest desire to be famous anyway.
In retrospect, what I took for lack of personality was in fact a lack of compelling public narrative. Harry and Louis and how they and their relationship had been shaped by Larry rumors fascinated me; so did Zayn’s departure from the band, and seemingly innocent Niall’s friendship with a pre-redemption Justin Bieber. But Liam? I bought the Daddy Direction thing hook, line, and sinker.
It’s been a useful corrective to learn how many One Direction songs he wrote that I had loved— that I still love— that I have been listening to again and again in the wake of his death. Change Your Ticket, which was a critical touchstone for me when I was writing GRACE AND THE FEVER. Fireproof, an all-time favorite love song. God, it turns out that he has writing credits on like half of Four: Ready to Run, Steal My Girl, No Control (!!!). The songs he co-wrote for Made in the AM— an album about exhaustion and confusion and loss— now feel almost too prescient. Just as one example, What a Feeling: what a feeling to be a king beside you / somehow / I wish I could be there now.
Why couldn’t he channel that into his own work, I wonder? But then again, I may as well ask why he couldn’t manage his mental health, or get sober. Because sometimes people are gifted, but not in the ways they need to be. As the band put it in Long Way Down— which Liam also has a writing credit on— we had it all, yeah. But who could have planned it?
It’s actually quite striking, re-listening to Made in the AM, to hear how many times the band talks about falling. (“down to earth / keep on falling when I know it hurts” “nobody can drag me down” “with no way out and a long way down,” etc. etc.) Not because that’s how Liam ultimately, literally, died, but because it feels so impossibly clear that they knew exactly where they were: teetering at the top— and on the edge. Whatever happened next— no matter how interesting and exciting and creatively fulfilling— it would never be this big. They would never be this high up again.
In some sense, it would be all downhill from there.
When I heard the news, I went scrolling through my phone to see if I had any photos of Liam saved. I didn’t. Instead, I found a screenshot of a tweet from 2015, in which he wrote, “One time id like to be able to see New York without being followed chased and cornered like an animal until other people get what they want.”
I keep talismans like that for two reasons. One is simple reference— my own library of things people have said about fame that I find striking, or telling, or both. But the other is to try to keep my own self in check. To meet my hunger for intimacy with testimony about how it feels to be consumed.
Rave Sashayed says it best, of course, in a Tumblr post from 2016: “the endless “documentaries,” the social media – we had an unprecedented, and unprecedentedly intimate, degree of access to these people, and still what we valued most were secrets and accidents. What we wanted was their interiority, and when we could not have that we invented it. Wouldn’t you resent having to constantly be GRATEFUL for that grasping, rapacious love? I would.”
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Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, is in many ways about exactly that question. How to deal with grasping, rapacious love that also makes your life and career possible. On Folklore’s Mirrorball, she sings about herself as a circus act, but the song manages to come across as wistful: “I'm still on that trapeze / I'm still trying everything / To keep you looking at me.”
By the time we get to TTPD, however: “I was tame, I was gentle / 'til the circus life made me mean
/ Don't you worry, folks, we took out all her teeth.” Fame doesn’t just exhaust her anymore; it disfigures her. Which, of course, only makes her more exciting to look at.
When the album came out, critics talked about that strand of songs, the “I’m too famous to function” stuff, as existing alongside the rest of them, which are mostly about the end of a toxic, addictive relationship with an addict. But lately I’ve been thinking that both kinds of songs— about love, and about fame— are actually coming from the same place in her psyche.
My thing about Taylor Swift has always been that she’s a pop princess who writes about the deep abjection of being a straight woman. Nowhere is that clearer than on the album’s title track. “You left your typewriter at my apartment / straight from the tortured poets department / I think some things I never say / like who uses typewriters anyway?” The very first thing she tells us about her lover is that he’s ridiculous, and she knows it. Not only that, he’s self-destructive. “You’re in self sabotage mode / throwing spikes down on the road.”
But! “But I’ve seen this episode and still love the show / Who else decodes you? And who’s gonna hold you like me?”
Who else! Who else but a straight woman is going to look at this little boy pretending to be an artist (you’re not Dylan Thomas just because you type your stupid poems on a typewriter instead of a laptop!!), who she literally compares to a dog (a tattooed golden retriever) who’s asking her friends for drugs in The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived— and be like, this is actually a display of tender vulnerability and I am in love with it and you??
I am obsessed by this question in part because I recognize the impulse on a cellular level. To look at some broken boy and think, I can save you. And there’s a million things that go into that but the one I’ve been meditating on lately— that I hear so clearly in the album, whether I’m right to or not— is that it’s so much easier to love broken boys than it is to love our broken selves.
Because Taylor Swift takes her circus act life, the asylum where they raised me, and she contains her fury in a song that she makes part of her stage show. A spectacle; a performance that she controls. When Taylor tries to write about how work is killing her, she just makes more work for herself. She can and does do it with a broken heart. She channels her pain into perfection, which she performs endlessly, in stilettos for miles. Left to her own devices, she has no idea how to escape the prison of her own act.
So god, GOD, how seductive to look at someone who wears his damage on his sleeve— whose pain is public and messy and everyone’s problem— and is loved for it anyway. Does she want to be him or fuck him? I mean, one is much easier to achieve than the other.
The the key lyric, to me, comes late in Tortured Poets Department: everyone we know understands why it’s meant to be / cause we’re crazy. She shit talks and shit talks, and then she aligns herself with her love. Not he’s crazy— we’re crazy. And then she flips the question she’s been asking: So tell me, who else is gonna know me? Who else can a girl trust with the secret that she’s a lava spill, except a boy who doesn’t know how to be anything else?
Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately, when I’m not thinking doom doom doom doom doom doom doom. Sending you all love & hope for the best possible outcomes tonight, or whenever we get them.