Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a tight end playing in the Super Bowl -- The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift, April 19

Not sure which song I'm more excited for "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys Down Bad" or "But Daddy, I Love Him Fresh Out the Slammer"

Okay pre-cover people, your time is now.

The Tortured Poets Department ILX Pre-Cover Planning Thread

I think Taylor likes to give herself impossible challenges, like to write a song with the title “I Can Fix Him (Really I Can)” that isn’t terrible

well, what would you title a song about Matty Healy

"Love It If You Fucked Off"

"Did You Give Me Crabs?"

"I Knew You Were Trouble (When You Were a Shit to Ice Spice)"

“Fresh Out The Slammer” had better be wall to wall slam poetry about the American carcel state (or a 45 second hardcore song)

Out on bail, fresh out of jail, California dreamin'
Soon as I step on the scene, I'm hearin' Swifties screamin'

well, what would you title a song about Matty Healy

"Dont Worry (Your Band's Music Will Still Place High in ILM's Top 77)"

so at the grammys, taylor caught up with boygenius for a photo op. the latter were visibly distressed after having given an emotional interview about sexual assault. julien baker was crying. taylor asked them if she could rest her trophies on their heads for the photo -- the trophies she won by beating them, especially in the best album category.

earlier in the night, when taylor won best album, she dragged a visibly disappointed lana del rey onto the stage and made some condescending remarks to her about how she is "soooo grateful to be her friend." again, she had beaten lana for this award.

is she purposefully humiliating her opponents? like achilles dragging hector's corpse through the streets of troy.

the way i read this, taylor is relishing pop's final triumph over indie. the death of pitchfork is a key context here.

Or maybe she is just awkwardly confusing "friend" with "peer"? I have no idea what her relationship actually is with these people. Maybe she's like Whitney in "The Curse"!

Travis Kelce floating in the sky during the Super Bowl is gonna suck

FUTK

combination of what treesh said and the fact she's basically an overgrown teenager (of the popular-girl variety, taken to its logical conclusion) who's not had to do any real adult stuff ever

my sympathy for her is non-existent tbh but how can she really hope to be taylor swift anyway, such a person is impossible

There was that pretty public thing about a decade ago where Swift’s backup dancers ditched her for Katie Perry mid-tour seemingly because she was distant and not fun. Since then it seems she’s done a lot of photo ops with female artists—Haim, LDR, boygenius—raising their profiles and helping her image.

so at the grammys, taylor caught up with boygenius for a photo op. the latter were visibly distressed after having given an emotional interview about sexual assault. julien baker was crying. taylor asked them if she could rest her trophies on their heads for the photo -- the trophies she won by beating them, especially in the best album category.

boygenius mimed kissing taylor's grammy unprompted. what did that mean???

taylor swift is enormously embarrassing at any given awards show but please stop this ohnotheydidnt shit

FUTK

lol

I doubt Lana was humiliated or bothered. She posted this montage y’day (I think they genuinely are “friends”)

(I don’t know what the last pic with the gun is about….)

she is gonna murder taylor swift for her crimes

Both Lana and Phoebe have been on Taylor records before, which you have to presume means they are on decent terms.

It occurred to me that Taylor ignored Celine Dion in part bc she was still focused on LDR after convincing LDR to join her onstage. I think that's who she was talking to behind her when she reached out for the trophy.

Treeship I don't intuit that your observations are reflective of TS's intention. LDR is on the TS album and I think TS was trying to celebrate her despite her loss, an "a victory for me is a victory for humankind" sort of narcissistic benevolence.

I felt a breaking point on Grammys night, myself, I've always admired TS as a songwriter but had this odd mental move where the Walmart vibes of her business practice eclipsed my respect for her artistry. I remember a decade ago I installed a widget on my browser that muted an artist who I'd grown exhausted of engaging with as a reader/listener, no articles about them would appear, their name would be redacted in situations where their name were to otherwise pop up. I felt the same desire after the announcement of TS's new album, this sense of exhaustion, a desire to "read nothing, hear nothing" about her for a year or five.

At my local, a couple of bartender friends are big Swifties and often have TS in heavy rotation, which I like-- I like TS's music. I was chatting with them, after the Grammies, about the fact that I felt this tipping point, and I was trepidatious to express this, expecting some pushback or defensiveness from the Swift faithful; but they agreed. One posited that TS's current artistic goal is strictly quantitative, that she wanted to break more records (for Grammy wins, for streaming numbers), and that it had nothing to do with any personal sense of artistry. The other reminded us that, along with "Tortured Poets", we also had Reputation 2.0 and self-titled 2.0 on the horizon, and could anticipate LP12 shortly after, that another two to three years of Swift-omnipresence was assured. I said, "god, why can't she Rihanna herself for a few years and come back when we miss her," and the two of them felt the same way.

I feel like even posting these thoughts are "contributing to the problem", like I might as well be commenting on all the Home Depots I saw yesterday while driving through the suburbs, and that even pseudonymously posting anything other than "yay" about TS will cause my leftovers to spontaneously spoil or something... I just need a break ffs

Today I learned that TS ex-Joe and Phoebe ex-Paul were on a What's App group called the Tortured Man Club. Coincidence?

i completely agree with that fgti. feel like she’s at the same point she was at between 1989 and reputation, but on an even vaster scale! little worried about this record tbh!!!

I was thinking this, this morning, when I cast my mind back to moments in my life where it felt as if something was "culturally omnipresent"-- MJ in the late 80s, "Titanic" in the late 90s-- that it does seem like TS's achievements to this end dwarf all other instances of the similar. The respect I feel for her about this fact is similar to the respect I might feel toward a devastating earthquake or an enormous tsunami, it's an awful "wow"

after MJ died I thought we'd never see anyone get that famous again but I guess I was wrong

Feel like TS as hyperobject is the take that was missing from this piece https://www.theringer.com/music/2024/2/5/24061480/taylor-swift-new-album-tortured-poets-department-grammys-winner-super-bowl-imperial-phase

i hate fortnite but this is awesome

— Post Malone (@PostMalone) March 29, 2018

Great post by fgti above. I was already fairly Taylor-ed out (despite liking, even loving, some of her music), but something new “flipped” for me the other night.

(being a fan of her music probably makes it harder, actually, then if I could totally dismiss her on all fronts)

I loved that Ringer article and the quotes, but, goddamn, it's long.

We'd often send people away for years (sometimes decades) when they were this omnipresent. The Bee Gees, Phil Collins, LMFAO...

Does that not happen anymore because because of SEO?
Or does she do something that somehow makes her omnipresence more palatable?

There is no "we" left to send anyone away.

i was being hyperbolic earlier, maybe, but i do think she acted like a jerk at the grammys.

It's hard to remember anyone hitting this level of fame without becoming a mental wreck or an addict, maybe just Paul McCartney?

Maybe she really will stop after album 13, and retreat into the wilderness (Rhode Island)

TS as the walmart of music makes so much sense.

I was thinking of her album announcement a bit like when Tim Apple comes out and shows off the new phones. "And here's a secret we've been keeping from you for two years--do you guys like....Post Malone?"

Taylor Swift is like the Apple-U2-iPod debacle, except we are all the iPod.

It's hard to remember anyone hitting this level of fame without becoming a mental wreck or an addict, maybe just Paul McCartney?

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Wednesday, February 7, 2024 10:39 AM (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is a good point. i should have sympathy.

TS as the walmart of music makes so much sense.

― ✖✖✖ (Moka)

She is neither cheap nor poorly lit.

As far as sympathy goes, sure, but she also clearly craves this level of fame.

She is more like Target

https://external-preview.redd.it/nA5A7z_sab73B6b_larouoxyZf1drXHUYPJZ9cslibo.jpg?auto=webp&s=a76785971e6a46e809c6ed3701c620fe915cb7c8

She is like those limited edition designer fashion lines that pop up in Target and sell out immediately to people that line up for them.

Who is the Stanley cup of pop music?

One of the times I went to Target they had a display of TS vinyl near the registers

can't wait to hear AC/DC's Taylor Swift album

I think it's probably very difficult to be Taylor Swift and be friendly to people without it being scrutinized and overinterpreted, which is why one of the few things she's done artistically lately that I've enjoyed was the video for Anti-Hero that showed her as a giant clumsy Taylor looming over people and getting in the way. She's a naturally heavy-handed person and so famous that everything she does is constantly scrutinized for coded messages (partly her own doing, but when the NYT feels free to publicly speculate on her sexuality because OMG she used BLUE and PINK in her album cover and it must be a SECRET MESSAGE, you know things have gotten out of hand), and I can't really imagine how she could have behaved at the Grammys that wouldn't have come across as either cold, calculated or condescending.

That said, I do think she's overexposed, mainly because I think she's already rung all the changes on everything interesting she has to say, and I think her writing has been - just on a pure sentence level - getting worse.

xp I literally wrote and then erased a comparison of Taylor to Target. Personally, I'd rather have Target Taylor than the Taylor of Folklore and Evermore, which were - imo - more like farm-to-table restaurants where each menu item is lowercased italicized ode to how hard the ingredients were to source, and then the food is, like, an overcooked burger.