I got sent on a bit of a goose chase today. In another context it might have been just a frustrating amount of time wasted in my personal version of hell – too full parking lots and downtown streets. I can’t deny the cortisol has run me ragged. The reframing my mind has done is that the triggered memories were necessary for this essay. Necessary to fully understand what Taylor’s new album brought up in me, untangle the coughed up hairball of unprocessed emotions that emerged from listening to a voice from the other side of the storm.
The place I’ve ended up is the too-cool-for-me gen z coffee shop by the community college I went to last year. It’s dim and cozy and full of antique brickabracks. There are nooks I can nest in, put my back against the wall so I can survey the room while being minimally observed. The drinks have names I cringe at while ordering, but I still love the one I always order: “Dammmn Daniel” (white chocolate and honey latte). I never realized it was also the coffee spot closest to my tarot class – two eras of my life that barely overlapped temporally and never felt related geographically, despite being half a mile apart.
The place I had in mind initially was closer to the center of Phoenix proper. I forgot it was “First Friday”, a massive art/craft vendor event. If you live anywhere in the metro area, you know that is the one night a month you avoid downtown completely. Parking is always gnarly there, but it’s close to impossible at the exact time I made the mistake of going. I checked out a small paid parking lot, but had a cartoonish double take when I saw the price tag of $55 for the evening. Seconds later, my phone’s calendar reminded me that I had Tarot class in an hour – a very convenient pivot point.
Interestingly, I visited that downtown coffee joint while in school as well, but lost the memory. As I drove past I started getting flashbacks—
I remembered being delirious with self hatred and grief, struggling to find the entrance in a maze of false alleys. My lack of fear was both freeing and unsettling. Anyone who jumped me would regret targeting a gorilla sized woman, roided up on adrenaline and redirected rage. I found the shop eventually, took my breve to a secluded window-side table, and slipped into my disassociated drawing state. It took about 3 hours to fully render the decaying pronghorn carcass in snow, inches away from the first few grass blades of spring.
Those darker drawings from late last year make up a large portion of the prints I plan to sell. I’m often told, “Wow, these are really cool, why don’t you make more like these? More of this, less of this guy.”
Mine more of your grief. Vomit your trauma into procreate to make something “so sick”. You’re not at your best when you’re happy. It’s a cheesy self indulgent mess.
If I’m accepting the synchronicity angle, this unburied memory helped me contextualize why I have felt so reticent to be harsh on Taylor’s new album. TTPD was a torrent of heartbreak. It was catharsis and therapy. It was an exorcism. That album had a mixed reception, but I’m very sure it will be remembered more fondly than Life of a Showgirl.
Madeline, who co-hosts the TS podcast Evolution of a Snake with the Swiftologist, had a reaction that was a validating sanity check for me. The frequent shocked silences were not from amazement, but from discomfort and bewilderment. If I was a huge fan of Taylor, I would have felt similar. On first listen, the album was underwhelming and incohesive. There is one song I connected with thematically, but the lyrics feel like a first draft. Most of the critique I’ve seen online has resonated with my experience.
The thing is, TTPD was similarly messy. There was clunky writing, mixed metaphors, inconstant production, sprinkled with moments of blistering brilliance. But the mess felt raw, vulnerable. In Showgirl, the songs are pleasant milktoast, with a few unpleasent exceptions. Is this what being unbothered and unconditionally loved sounds like?
Eldest Daughter was the one song where my reaction differed completely from the EOAS podcast team – they were puzzled, I was balling my eyes out. I could feel the experience Taylor un-gracefully tried to convey, one that less people relate to than I thought. “Pretty soon, I learned cautious discretion // When your first crush crushes something kind // When I said I don’t believe in marriage //That was a lie.”
My mother’s oldest brother was born in the 1940s and was a soft, sensitive type. His father was not. He went into the navy to become the kind of man his father wanted, to buff out his “weakness”, and he left with a life destroying alcohol and drug problem. Perhaps because my mom grew up with 4 brothers and a hard ass father, I got the same message that too many men do – “if you hang your heart out, it’s your own fault if it gets hurt.”
It may also be the unnuanced 90s feminism. “No man will save you, there’s no such thing as a Prince Charming. They are socialized to see you as lesser, and you can’t trust any of them.” I found myself feeling safer with snarky, asshole guys, because at least I knew where we stood. I didn’t feel like I was being tricked or manipulated. It felt like honesty. How could a man have made it through childhood open hearted and vulnerable – he’s masking something more sinister than snark.
There are a few songs on Showgirl that speak to this theme, but Eldest Daughter does especially: In childhood, I was shamed and sold a lie. I filled the hole in my heart with success and fame and “girlbossing”, because I thought what I really wanted was a naive fantasy. I told myself it was stupid, and I didn’t want it anyway. (eg. “Midnight Rain”) I was drawn to brooding artists boys, because the bittersweet made me feel something. Romance was synonymous with drama. Uncomplicated affection felt wrong, but only because I let other people tell me what was right.
That last piece harkens to the song “Wi$h Li$t”, which in my mind is a companion to Eldest Daughter. The name evokes that same sense of childhood, like a list for Santa but cynically commercial. There’s a poignancy to it that is hinted at but left unsaid. In pursuing a version of success that was not entirely hers, she became the “monster in the hill” she talks about in Anti-Hero. She describes a peaceful suburban life – “we tell the world to leave us the fuck alone and they do.” I just had to think, her money and power can probably grant her a certain degree of privacy, but she can never buy back normalcy. Her children will always be Taylor Swift’s kids, with all the baggage that comes with it. I wonder, if Taylor had been allowed to hope more earnestly for her Love Story when she was young, would she have needed to make herself so big? Did she enter a Faustian deal not knowing that what she was trading away was possible?
Maybe I’m massively discounting Taylor’s ambition, but it brings me back to my frustration with how celebrities have to live. For whatever reason, I think of my empathy as a finite resource. I chastise myself for wasting so much of it on those who need it the least. Famous artists can polish their pain and present it with narrative clarity. The homeless and poor have struggles that are drudgery, and don’t have the time or money or energy to share art that would tell their story. How many geniuses are suffocating in the quicksand of poverty? How many people are robbed of that beautiful, universal experience of creative expression? Out of sight out mind, and the plight of the 1% comes to the fore.
My cope is – first of all, empathy is not finite. But also, the way we treat others becomes a part of us. When we dehumanize celebrities to the degree we do – since idolatry is a form of dehumanization – we open the door to othering in general. That is what facilitates genocide. The thought process is the same, whether they are seen as objects of worship or disdain and fear. When we culturally condone that kind of dehumanization, it will inevitably be weaponized by fascists.
How the fuck did I get from the new Taylor Swift album to genocide? Inner Chidi, what the fuck. To be fair, I have been watching the discourse around her song Cancelled and her recent hangouts with MAGA types. She has plausible deniability but it is…a terrible look. I’ve got a similar ick from Beyoncé, and Lana del Ray. I don’t want to sound conspiratorial and suggest there is a formal elite cabal, I think it’s more like a pay to play environment. Still, I can’t deny the paranoid feeling that the super wealthy seem to be angling towards solidarity with conservative politics, and people adjacent to Trump. It’s eerily like seeing more and more guards outside the castle walls, and more lords and ladies coming in with packed bags.
There was a devastating post on Danny’s subreddit from someone who canceled their tickets to his show because of the raids. They didn’t feel safe because of the color of their skin. As I looked at the news articles, it was hard for me not to see it as a turning point. The military descending from helicopters and abducting children in the night, in the middle of Chicago. I must still be in the nazi 2.0 timeline. I can only pray it doesn’t escalate.
Maybe I’ll return to that darker, angry art after all. Would it be cathartic, or would it continue to fuel my cynicism? I am what I consume, what I create is my reflection. Maybe people connect more with the dead pronghorn because it feels real, and hope feels like a naive fantasy. It will be, as long as we choose to believe it is.
>>robyns_ramblings 