from old blog: "Midnights" Musings from Someone Imprisoned in the Taylor Swift Universe
Midnights is Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album, if you’re counting the re-recordings, which the gold-plated 12-jewel bracelet from her merch store does. It was released on Friday October 21st (12 backwards), Taylor’s 12,000th day on earth at 12:00am. Taylor has described Midnights as a “concept album” of 13 songs that tell the story of 13 (her favorite number — I know she wishes clocks went to 13:00) sleepless nights scattered throughout her life. I’m still recovering from the pre-release hype generated around the album, which was centered around Taylor…just… slowly leaking the tracklist. Like releasing drops of water to thirsty little rats.
In these Midnights Mayhem with Me one-minute videos Taylor turns the handle of a bingo cage, reading a number off the ball, and speaks the name of tracklist’s corresponding song into a landline. These videos of course were meant to spawn the proliferation of teenage TikTok Swiftstorians espousing original theories from their bedrooms — what it might have represented that she’d worn her hair a certain way, or the way it sort of looked like she was counting down to something, maybe a lead single?, by the way her hands rested on her lap from Mayhem video to Mayhem video. TikTok breaks brains, but SwiftTok can break your soul. Imagine English 10 Honors high school sophomores using their budding analysis skills to find connections between signals and words and winks, and then imagine more than one. The thing is, in the Swiftie fandom these skills are coveted, and they are useful, 10% of the time. But these intrepid easter egg hunters completely bypass the other important part of analysis — critical thinking. Still, I scroll.
The same way Taylor leaned on the Tumblr Swifties to create buzz for her 2017 album Lover, the Swifttok community created buzz for Midnights. What’s nice about being a Taylor Swift fan is getting a new TS album feels like such a balm that you can sort of justify the time and brain cells wasted on joining in on Midnights anticipation (I’m not even going to go into the special edition vinyls, which she encourages her fans to collect. There’s 4 of them — in different colors, with different covers, and then you can buy these clock parts to make a giant clock out of the four collector vinyls. The complete set will cost you $160, and even still, yours might say “me me” at Midnight.) The cycle starts all over again with the next album. I couldn’t even clock how many hours I spent on Tumblr during the Lover-era rollout, back when Kaylors (k I was one) were sure Taylor was coming out of the closet. Back then, I vowed never to let myself be consumed by the pre-hype again, but here I am. That’s the basis of this relationship I’ve been in with Taylor for the last fourteen years: I stick by Taylor because she writes about her life alongside mine, in a way that makes me feel as though she’s writing about me. In psychoanalysis, that’s called transference.
Taylor began dropping her tracklist videos the evening she won the Nashville Songwriter-Artist-of-the Decade award, which was maybe supposed to signal something along the lines of, “Reminder: take this album seriously.” From the way it sounded Midnights would be full of vulnerable, taboo introspection, the kind that you can’t contain during those nocturnal nighttime hours, and yes, tell the STORY of 13 sleepless nights — a concept album that sounded like it was gonna be great. But it’s not what we got! I promise though, this won’t be an essay about how Midnights is not a story-forward album at all, if we’re talking on like, a narrative level. This isn’t an essay about how Midnights, a concept album, doesn’t have much of a concept — unless the concept is “Lover on a 1:1 THC:CBD edible.” NOT gonna talk about how Midnights doesn’t feel like a midnight album at all, and more like a Friday at 5pm album. One you’d write when you have to hit your pages but are feeling stuck, kind of sleepy, when you’re trying to hype yourself up for a night out and already hoping nobody looks too hard at your phoned-in outfit and attitude. I’m not going to get into any of this because I’m not a music critic. I also don’t want to hate on an album that I know I’ll eventually find a way to love, because that’s how Stockholm Syndrome works. This essay is simply me shouting from the void that is the Taylor Swift Universe, trying to communicate my feelings with the outside world. It’s me, HI! I’m stuck in this fandom and I have no idea how to get out! And I have no wisdom to offer you if you’re feeling the same way. I think we’re all fucked and I wrote a nine-page essay to explain why.
If a highlight of being a Taylor Swift fan is getting to channel her emotions to help you process yours, the most embarrassing part is listening to Midnights and recognizing you, a Swiftie, are a big part of what she hates about herself. I’m finally starting to realize that not only have I been in toxic relationship with Blondie for the last fourteen years — she’s been in a fourteen-year toxic relationship with me. If one of us broke away now, the half-life would have us getting over one another well into our forties.
What am I talking about? “Lavender Haze,” first of all. It’s the first song on Midnights, and from the jump we have Taylor begging people to stop gossiping about her and Joe Alwyn. “Talk your talk and go viral,” she sings — to SwiftTok, I’m imagining, where anyone can go viral by pointing out the number of stripes on her shirt and connecting it to a shirt Karlie Kloss wore in a magazine ad five years ago. “I just need this love spiral / Get it off your chest / Get it off my DESK.” Girlboss implores! Keep talking, she tells us, and yes, I think she’s talking to us (me). I think what she’s really saying here is, At the end of the day, I hate what I’ve created. Will you leave me alone? This is only my interpretation, but I think you should listen to me since I’ve been dating her for fourteen years. I am sure every pop star feels this way about their fans, but because of the diaristic nature of Taylor’s output, it’s like she’s in constant conversation with herself from both directions. It’s very fitting for our Antihero Girlie that her biggest enemy was borne from an appendage she grew herself.
Taylor recognizes how much of a struggle it is to root for her on “Antihero,” a song I love for its frankness and for the way she rhymes “narcissism” with “altruism” and “congressman,” because she feels it too. How many songs can I (we) hear about prince charming Joe Alwyn swooping her away from the Tweeps and the thieves? How many more songs must I (we) endure of her subbing Scooter Braun, Scott Borchetta, or any of her work enemies? Of her fantasizing about revenge like Nemesis? When I listened to the lyrics of “Could’ve Would’ve Should’ve” and realized this was likely about John Mayer, whom she was involved with when she was 19, I was simply aghast. The song is a bop but the re-recycling of the drama drives me nuts. She already got her revenge on “Dear John” from 2010’s Speak Now, a song SO radical, Jon Caramanica noted on this episode of Popcast, it “could be considered a felony in at least four European countries.”
But Blondie is never going to listen to me. To ask her to move on from anything is basically begging her to stop recording. As Lindsay Zoladz explores in this October 2021 New York Times piece about Folklore, Taylor has always had a peculiar relationship with time: to her time is a more cosmic, circular thing than a literal marker of minutes gone. (I was at a John Mayer concert recently in Livingston, Montana, and between songs he went on this tangent about how obsessed he is with time and its ticking away. In hindsight it seems inevitable that the two of them so quickly crossed paths, and that it didn’t work out; that Dear John messed with John Mayer’s head so bad it caused him to retreat to the mountains; that Taylor’s still not over it. Also, that he took her virginity?) Tay really leans into this celestial understanding of happenstance and human nature on Midnights — she’s arrived unfashionably late to her astrology era. Accidents seemingly written in the stars litter the album like constellations; on songs like “Karma,” her enemies will be paying for what they’ve done to her indefinitely, this infinite energy exchange with the universe.
Like Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote in her excellent book Everything I Need I Get From You, becoming a fan “involves a mystical change that seems to come out of nowhere.” The way I was ushered into this fandom felt beyond my control, like something predestined. I was a freshman at NYU in 2008 and I’d stopped into a West 8th Street Coffee shop that definitely doesn’t exist anymore. I was heading to Bobst to write an essay; I was hungover, bereft. There was a TV mounted in one corner of the café, a corner I wasn’t facing, and it was playing the music video for “Teardrops on My Guitar.” For whatever reason her voice, its sweetness and its longing, drilled a hole at the back of my spine and I’ve been possessed since. I remember turning around and seeing that Barbie girl with the guitar and the curling-iron hair I’d vaguely been hearing about and being like “Nooo. HER?!” I was horrified, but it passed. There was nothing I could do about it, the dominoes cascaded in a line….
…So I could talk about “Mastermind,” track 13, the final song on the Midnights album. I’m not counting the Midnights 3AM version, not today. On “Mastermind” Taylor muses about whether the universe is in charge of her successes, or whether she’s in charge of the universe. She seems to come to the conclusion that maybe… she is the universe, and thus, in charge? (It’s like “God is a Woman” if God was Taylor Swift). “None of it was accidental,” she sings, “and the first night that you saw me / nothing was gonna stop me. / I laid the groundwork / and then, just like clockwork…
INT: THE DOMINOES ALL CASCADED IN A LINE — MIDNIGHT
ME
Omfg I knew it. She’s talking about that time on West 8th Street in the coffee shop.
What spell am I under? Why can’t she leave me alone?
YOU, A NORMAL PERSON WHO IS SOMEHOW STILL READING THIS
Bitch are you sure this song isn’t just about… Joe Alwyn?
ME
NO. Listen to this quote of hers from her SiriusXM interview:
TAYLOR SWIFT
The idea that you're planning and plotting, that's an inside joke between me and my fans. I tend to do that, so this is the romantic version.
FADEOUT.
There you have it: proof that Taylor finds her relationship with her fans inherently romantic. It’s romantic to consume Swifties’ time, attention, and money, to dole out crumbs, clues, and messages, because it creates her aura of mystery and allure, something she’s always wanted. (She hates being read, but she can’t stop writing.) Do you know what’s also inherently romantic? Pining over someone inaccessible to you. See? She’s only cryptic and Machiavellian cuz she caaaaares. The foundation of this fandom is built upon longing for someone or something you can’t have, which might be part of what makes it so… sticky, so impossible to leave.
As that NYU freshman from New Jersey I desperately needed a space to be uncool, unironic, to stand in my petulant emotion. I’m glad Taylor Swift gave me that, and then proceeded to hold a container for my feelings by releasing music well into my 20s. Whenever her albums feel like a step forward, like a growth toward something, when it feels like she’s evolved from her previous album, I feel like we’re in the best relationship of my life! But MIDnights has really thrown me for an existential loop. It makes me wonder if she really understands what it means to live in the world we live in now — to confront the horrible realities that lie in wait at each horizon. You can disagree with me but on folklore and evermore, you could feel the isolation, the grief, the distance the world was feeling. But Midnights feels void of the rest of the world, like she was hibernating in an apartment in New York while her boyfriend was thousands of miles away (in Panama, which is closer to New York by private jet than it is to LA, but ok). You wouldn’t be able to tell from this essay, but as an adult living in 2022, I have darker, more existential worries than whether or not my enemies will pay karmic retribution for hurting my feelings. Taylor’s psyche seems not to be fazed by climate collapse, fascism, those 11 billion crabs that disappeared from the from the Bering Sea; maybe she doesn’t share these anxieties because she already has her first class Bezos ticket to the moon.
We know Taylor is only as political as what she stands for and who she purports to be. It means close to nothing that she deemed herself a LGBTQ+ “ally” during the Lover era (I mean lol we know she’s bi but, anyway) — anytime she posts to Instagram reminding Tennessee to vote blue, she might as well post nothing at all. Her songwriting eye (and her other eye) naturally turn inward. But whether Taylor writing with her “glitter pen, fountain pen, or quill pen” (seriously, what the fuck was she talking about lol), the self-proclaimed fan of Austen, Dickinson, Fitzgerald should know that the self does and cannot exist without the society it belongs to.
Problem obviously being that she’s hugely famous. Society is nowhere near her: it’s below her. Which she understands, sort of. She feels a sense of responsibility to pass her particular brand of wisdom down. But as is on display in her endearing NYU commencement speech, her wise perspective always feels like it’s coming from a little too far up sage mountain for the childish advice she’s actually giving.
I’ll need you to humor me once more. Below is the second verse from “Mastermind,” mentioned above:
“You see all the wisest women had to do it this way / 'Cause we were born
to be the pawn in every lover's game / If you fail to plan, you plan to fail /
Strategy sets the scene for the tale / I'm the wind in our free-flowing sails /
And the liquor in our cocktails”
My pal @tmccllm’s tweet said it best: “Taylor swift is in her 30s saying I’m a mastermind for … bagging a man[.]” Who is Taylor giving this advice to? It’s disorienting to come to terms with the fact that Taylor Swift is cheating on you with her new young fans — not just with the girlies who got 4s on their AP Lit test and work in Marketing.
Taylor’s music video for “Bejeweled,” a clangy, grating song about staying relevant (wow, I’m really hating now!) is going to drop in 52 minutes. In her Instagram post announcing it, she writes that it’s “SPECIFICALLY for you, my beloved fans who have paved this shimmering path.” There is speculation on Swiftie Twitter that maybe she’s only releasing the Bejeweled video tonight because it’s the only song right now that isn’t in the iTunes Top 10. But you know I’m going to watch it, because it’s for ME!!! (Not to be confused with her worst song ever, ME!)
I’m always surprised at how quickly I can memorize a Taylor Swift album — the day after it comes out I find I have six melodies stuck in my head at once; even the “quill pen” lyrics (lmao) don’t take long to learn. Even those are so simple, so catchy, so comforting. I believe my brain’s actually been wired to seek out her music because it dulls my grief, relieves my dread, and soothes my insecurities. It isn’t exactly like mind control. It IS mind control.
Tonight on Fallon, Taylor feigned surprise that people still care about Pop Star Taylor — she’s too old, she thinks: “They start trying to put us out to pasture at age 25.” But let’s not forget she’s a MaStErMinD. Regardless of age I know Blondie is going to find a way to keep profiting off every facet of the cyborg that is Pop Star Taylor. Thank God though, am I right? Because how will we ever be able to age alone?! Taylor has made us sure she will always be there. With her songs that swear us never to settle, to stay soft, but not soft enough that you can’t wage emotional war against our enemies. To find comfort in all the fantasies that could have been, that cannot be now. And as we all slowly lose our youth, our bodies, our minds, reproductive freedom, our Planet Earth…I know Taylor Swift will always be here to remind us it’s okay to linger, to look back and not forward. She knows exactly how to make us feel so soft, so baby, so good. This is the greatest relationship of her life, which is how I know we’re never breaking up, likEe, eVeRrRrR.
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