Braindead Takes

or, the power of the narrative you want to believe.

It was reading New York Magazine’s interpretation of Patient Zero that really hammered home to me how much people have the blinkers on about Taylor Swift. To me, this song was an obvious homage to a friend [1] who is “sick of him” but still might “rather die than let [him] go”, a clear anthem to grab your girls and “party with somebody who might know” what you’re going through, to wash a man out of your hair and offer advice to somebody on the cusp of “know[ing] she’s more than just the chase”. Swift has given this as the explicit inspiration, saying it happened to a friend of hers – and, although it’s perhaps more likely to contact your ex’s friends in the closed world of celebrity, where connection is made by assistants and any previous association you may have had is part of public discourse [2] the sentiment fits perfectly with the idea riding the charts for others that “feminine healing” can come from a night with your “baddest women,” whatever problem you’re facing (in the words of Raye’s Click-Clack Symphony). For Raye it’s depression; for Swift it’s your friend’s boy troubles; for you it could be work or body image or relationships or any one of a litany of problems which faces women under late capitalism. Patient Zero, thus, fits into a pantheon of current pop which offers dancing as a salve for the world’s ills (see: Brat).

This is not to say that Patient Zero has a single, simple, cut-and-dry correct interpretation: the song can be read, as many of Swift’s can, as a metaphor for fame. It might be read as a message to Sabrina Carpenter, for instance, whose reputation as a man-stealing slut in a celebrity drama propelled her to the upper echelon of fame much like Swift’s own reputation as a ‘serial dater’ pushed her to the cover of tabloids in the 2000s and helped make her the star she is today. The ‘bad man’ who “burst into your life like fireworks” and now “seems bored by you” could easily be fickle fans, news headlines, and the trappings of fame, which we all know are wonderful but come with a heavy cost. This song can be read as a post-reputation exploration of party culture, pop feminism and poor choices which intersected on that album to create an explosive cocktail of fan favourites. There’s certainly a sonic callback to reputation [3] on the track, which makes sense since she’s working with Max Martin and Shellback again. There truly are – as your high-school English teacher might say – no wrong answers when it comes to poetic interpretation… except the one New York Magazine gave. Columnist Zach Schiffman tells us this is a song to Joe Alwyn, and calls it “her final attempt at squashing Billy Lynn’s long halftime (pap) walks” – and my inner English teacher would like to demand a PETAL paragraph on that, because it’s missing a quote from the text that tells me where you’re getting this from. Did we listen to the same song? Because there’s a Joe Alwyn-coded track on this EP, and it isn’t Patient Zero. I’m sick of self-proclaimed swifties snarking outside of a group chat. I don’t believe that fandom comes with a requirement to staunch all negative commentary on the idol, but I also find it strange that fans can make statements like proclaiming there are “songs I would pay upwards of $1,000 to forget ever hearing”. My least favourite Swift song is Love Story, I find it boring and once wrote that it is “the song that originally turned me and my radio off from Taylor Swift” [3.5] but I wouldn’t take it away from the people who love it or wipe the memory of it at the Eras tour or screaming it with my friend at Swiftogeddon for the world, and (as I’m sure you’ll gather from its status in Swift’s oeuvre) that’s an opinion I came up with all by myself rather than the ‘hey kids! hating is fun’ opinions that pockmark this (and surely every other) fandom.

This is a difficult article to write, as my own Swiftian blinkers are likely self-evident to readers but not to myself. Perhaps my equivalent of negativity is scepticism: I do not believe that the art Swift presents to an audience is necessarily true, and nobody will convince me that aspects of her public personal life are not a performance. Do I believe that’s exhausting, ridiculous, and complicated? Yes, but it makes more sense to me that a woman who is a business wearing her heart on her sleeve for millions to see. As an academic I am well acquainted with acknowledging my own bias and recognising my role in the community I am criticising [4] whilst creating work which stands up to rigorous examination, and I am also willing to be examined on these biases.

The general consensus – as far as I have seen – seems to be ‘Swift is too rich and out of touch to have anything to say any more’, but I can’t help but wonder if people with this take are listening to the same EP as me? Of the four ‘Encore’ tracks, we have:

• A song about friendship and failed relationships
• A lovesong about being very annoying but your lover doesn’t mind
• A regretful song which questions her own behaviour [5]
• A clearly fictional song which creates characters and narrative

The mini-record is diverse both sonically and thematically. It’s enjoyable, and I do think it is relatable [6] to somebody outside of the life Swift and her friends live. Even Cleveland! which is very much about Travis Kelce and the gossip industry surrounding Taylor Swift contains a kernel which I find deeply relatable – I work with children, who think I’m very weird in my dress, manner, habits, and values, but I am not living my life based on what some 13-year-olds think of me. It may not be the tabloid press, but I annoy a lot of people daily and I spend my leisure time with people who don’t find me “completely insufferable” instead of dwelling on how I “was only [ever] a four”. One of the friends in my Swiftie chat [7] said that she cried to Babylon, and we’ve all got different songs on repeat. This drop has given us something to talk about, if we want to truly analyse.

I have also seen the criticism that Swift is ‘returning to the well’ of certain themes. My personal take is that it’s more an acknowledgement that previous songs are immature, perhaps not fully informed by the perspective age and experience can bring, and that the inherent concepts are interesting. Nobody thought that Daylight was reheating Red’s nachos, even though it explicitly referenced her use of colour in extended metaphors to describe love. Nobody thought You Are In Love was derivative and cringe, despite her self-referential lyric about “spen[ding her] whole life trying to put it into words”. Shake It Off and Anti-Hero are two of Swift’s biggest, best-received hits, and both wrestle with a self-awareness of her own public persona whilst making self-deprecating a danceable joke. I’ve written before about how many of my favourite artists used to be famous, and how much I enjoy considerations of industry, ageing and self, so why would I reject it from somebody who is still successful?

This addendum to the Showgirl era demonstrates Swift’s awareness that it’s this diversity within her music that gives her mass appeal: some people want to dance, some people want to cry; some people want lyrics that hit the beat, some people want syncopated lyrics that fit long words into the cadence of a song. Many people want all of the above. What fits these songs under the umbrella of the Showgirl album isn’t just the time they were written, it’s the idea of who is Taylor Swift? Can one woman be the mirrorball that projects an image of all things to all people, and what would it cost her if it were? This EP looks at the idea of the Swiftie like a marketing team creates personas and presents a song for each of us: the scarfer, the cynic, the one who misses Joe, the gaylor, the one who loves Travis, the pop fan, The National fans, the one who wants to sing along, the one who wants to scream ‘fuck the patriarchy’… There are tribes and sub-groups within the Swiftie community (politics like you wouldn’t believe), and Taylor Swift has distilled her selfhood into something palatable for each of her fans. We all know she’s going to sell it to us. [8]

I’m going to finish this article by extending my apologies to another artist I love who had the misfortune for her album to drop on the same day as TLOAS: The Encore. I didn’t listen to Joy Oladokun’s Hope Is A Heavy Thing on release day despite the fact I’d been looking forward to it, and having now imbibed the album I would like to tell you that it’s her best yet. The most fair criticism I think one could make about Swifties as a demographic is our obsessive relationship with one musician – but I also would like to disavow that image. Swifties are fans of music, and within that we an incredibly diverse group joined by just one artist. There is a life outside of Taylor, and we are all living it.

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On This Topic:

• I made a giant playlist of artists I think Swifties should know. Sometimes I think they’re discs Taylor herself is spinning, other additions are great pop songwriters of the past I think she’s studied, and still more are her friends and collaborators or artists she’s covered so we know she likes them. I’m open to suggestions for additions.
• If you take my advice to listen to Joy Oladokun then try this playlist with all of her work.
• Joe Alwyn changed his profile picture to a still from The Truman Show, which is objectively funny. The only way it could be funnier is if Ariana Grande slides into his DMs because she loves the movie and they debut as a couple at the next Met Gala.

To-Do:

• Everything
• Nothing
• All At Once.

Today’s Culture:

• Why are we not talking about the M&S halloween chocolate toad?? His name is Hocus Croakus, he is perfect, and I need him to join the permanent range.
• Finished Sense & Sensibility and now I have done all six of Austen’s major works. Husband asked if I wanted to see the new film and I have convinced him to stay home and watch the Emma Thompson version instead.
• Had my first PSL of the season yesterday. I will not be repeating last year’s labours, for they are still there for you to refer to.

[1] perhaps, in the public eye, Sophie Turner-Jonas, whose separation from Taylor’s ex Joe Jonas came at the same time as her friendship with Swift ramped up; perhaps Jack Antonoff, whose relationship struggles were recently in gossip headlines; perhaps somebody like Katy Perry, whose relationship with a man Swift had also been involved with (John Meyer) as well as some other alleged drama caused now-healed rifts in their friendship. The general consensus seems to agree with my first thought of Sophie Turner (https://www.thecut.com/article/taylor-swift-patient-zero-sophie-turner-joe-jonas.html) but I don’t like to be definitive because I do think ‘paternity testing’ songs ruins their mass appeal and turns art into a circus (and a circus ain’t a love story, and no I’m not sorry)

[2] if you’re with any of my exes, leave me TF alone. I do not have advice to give you beyond ‘they are all perfectly nice and it didn’t work out… except that one who’s a misogynist and unfixable’

[3] this is not me clowning. I clown only for Debut TV at present, because I need that 20th anniversary to drop me improved vocals on old songs and a boxed set of all 100 songs she allegedly wrote for that project.

[3.5] Full read from that (very old) article: “I’m not sorry that I hate ‘Love Story’. I hated it when it was new, I hated the video, I hate the sentiment, I don’t think it’s very well-written. I think it’s everything that her previous album wasn’t: babyish, unimaginative, with poor and generic references. I suspect Swift has probably actually read “The Scarlet Letter”, and definitely knows what it’s about, so why is she pissing about with innocent images that are transparently about saying yes to teen sex? With any other artist this young I would assume that their record label had pushed them in a direction of boring, uncontroversial teeny-bop-pop (which is why the country aspect is turned up to 11 – you have a USP, you stick to it), but Swift’s label is small and her drive is (allegedly) fierce, so I’m not sure. In the interests of fairness, though, I DID download a live acoustic version of the song so that I could listen without the country production and still found it a paint-by-numbers effort at an un-self-aware fairytale with a boring volta.” The post as a whole is archived, so idk comment or something if you yearn to read my hot takes from eleven years ago.

[4] criticising ie acting as a critic, not criticising as in being critical of. Important distinction.

[5] it’s this one – Pink Clouding – that I think more clearly winks towards Alwyn, referencing the aesthetics of Swift’s Lover era and his persona as the quiet man not seeking fame. Lyrics like “my kind of trouble wasn’t worth it” juxtapose with the idea that “I could never bring you peace” and the idea that “you met me at a cursed time” references the songs she wrote that were presented to the public as about Alwyn, when her “reputation’s never been worse, so / you must like me for me”. It’s probably my favourite here – I love her writing, and I think the sentiment is a perfect Swiftian moment, where she’s articulating something many of us have felt before without being given an outlet.

[6] not that this is the barometer for a pop song to be judged on!! Some of my favourite songs are completely alien experiences to me – or do Werewolves Of London and Heroes and Club Tropicana and She Will Be Loved and Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door all deserve to be called inane and myopic because they’re not relevant to my life?

[7] My Swift Chat Contains Multitudes is an article I have written but not posted because I’m not about to doxx my friends / ramble about how much I love them on main

[8] bitch it’s working I added all to cart. Please can we have physicals of the whole EP now, not just the single?