The title track of Taylor Swift’s new album is an entertaining tune, and perhaps the most entertaining thing about it is the structures and themes it takes up and twists from “Love Story.” In both tracks, Swift is vocalizing a fantasy about a relationship, a fantasy which she repeats back to herself in the voice of the fantasized partner at the end of the song (there’s probably something to be said about phallogocentrism here; why is it so important for Swift to have her words authorized by male repetition?). The difference is that “Love Story” is a fairy tale, while “Speak Now” is a daydream at an ex’s wedding, in which she imagines herself interrupting the wedding and running off with the groom, complete with hilariously vituperative descriptions of the bride (“wearing a gown shaped like a pastry”). This serves as a general model of how Swift has updated her songwriting now that she can no longer, quite, fictionalize her life into an everygirl story: she’s turned to her other strength, spite.
This might suggest a familiar narrative of spoiled innocence, in which disappointed naïveté sours into petty, reactive, vengeance. Swift herself endorses this conception of “meanness” when she attacks a critic as “a liar, and pathetic, and alone in life,” in the track “Mean,” which itself serves to prove that this is not true of Taylor Swift’s own meanness. The thing about this track, especially, is how joyful it is: the jaunty beat is accentuated by handclaps, while Swift’s voice is overdubbed to give it the quality of a playground chant. This track and “Better Than Revenge” are so brightly cheerful in their cruelty, they give the whole album a delightfully untroubled conscience.
I’ve recently returned from a month in coalition Britain, and I’ve been trying to figure out how, if at all, the general ideological tenor of the country has changed. Certainly Radio 1 is much more reactionary than it used to be; I think it’s managed to get worse every time I go back to the UK, but, now, with a new Tory government, it seems to be on a full-bore rush back to the DLT-days of the 80s. Well, actually, that’s not quite right, and the truth is possibly more disturbing: the Radio 1 of the 80s was about DJs in their 40s and 50s broadcasting for their patronizingly imagined younger audience, but today’s Radio 1 is built around young people patronizing themselves (and I know pop music isn’t that exciting at the moment, but surely there’s no excuse for Biffy Clyro).
Even as emotionally invested as I am in Radio 1, though, the reactionaryness of the coalition is obviously more worrying, although it does occur to me that there is a way in which New Labour was more neoliberal than the coalition are. Read more↴
It took me an unconscionably long time to listen to Rihanna’s Rated R (and, given my slow pace of blogging of late, even longer to write about it); unconscionable because it’s such a great record, a development of some of the best features of Rihanna’s earlier records. Luckily, the forthcoming release of “Te Amo” gives me an excuse for finishing this half-written post.
It may have taken me so long to get round to this because, for reasons I no longer understand, I wasn’t that impressed with “Russian Roulette” when I first heard it. I think to get it I needed to hear it in the context of some of the other tracks on the album. It was coming across the marvelously bizarre video for “Hard” on MTV that got me to look again at the album. “Hard” encapsulates the theme that is explored throughout the album: objectification as self-preservation, feminine superficiality as a kind of cold armor with which to avoid the pain which comes from interiority. Read more↴
The problem with MIA’s new video is not, as Anna Pickard claims, that it is “too shocking,” it is that it is not shocking enough. The video’s big “reveal,” that the state’s violence is directed at the redheaded, turns any possible shock into pure silliness. Read more↴
Despite his reactionary politics, I have a bit of a soft spot for Roger Scruton. This stems from taking an aesthetics course as an undergraduate, in which Scruton was the only analytic author who actually discussed aesthetics, who was interested in the sensory qualities of actual works of art. His genuine skill in explaining how the sensory qualities of music relate to its cognizable structure is, however, certainly used for evil in this viciously ignorant article on modern pop music. As Ian Mathers says, it’s a spectacular example of “erudition squandered on a man who refuses to actually engage with the things he wants to demonize; demonizing them because he doesn’t understand.” But it’s instructive to see Scruton going so wrong here, because it illustrates something interesting about aesthetics. Read more↴
In other music news, the new J Stalin album, Prenuptial Agreement, is AMAZING. It’s the best hip-hop record I’ve heard in a long time, probably since The College Dropout. It’s great enough that there’s a rapper called J Stalin; it’s really icing on the cake that he produces tracks as great as, say, “Red and Blue Lights.” One thing I find interesting about the album, and probably one of the reasons I like it so much, is how much some of its synths and beats sound like grime, particularly certain Ruff Sqwad tracks or some of Target’s productions for Roll Deep. This occurred to me a little bit when I heard Philthy Rich’s recent album, but it’s really true of J Stalin. My favorite track on the album, “G in me,” is a great example of how well this grime-hyphy movement works. I guess where grime took dance music and moved towards hip-hop, J Stalin is moving in the other direction, but I’m glad they both end up in such a great place, musically.
The title of this post comes from J Stalin’s “Rockin Wit Da Best”; I hope it’s the Trotsky reference it appears to be. Also, when did people start using the expression “hot mess”? I don’t think I’d heard it six months ago, and now it’s the title of songs by Ashley Tisdale and Cobra Starship (who I was going to call “incomparably shit,” but of course their shitness is precisely comparable to that of 3OH!3), and crops up in a couple of tracks on Prenuptial Agreement and Animal.
The title track of Taylor Swift’s new album is an entertaining tune, and perhaps the most entertaining thing about it is the structures and themes it takes up and twists from “Love Story.” In both tracks, Swift is vocalizing a fantasy about a relationship, a fantasy which she repeats back to herself in the voice of the fantasized partner at the end of the song (there’s probably something to be said about phallogocentrism here; why is it so important for Swift to have her words authorized by male repetition?). The difference is that “Love Story” is a fairy tale, while “Speak Now” is a daydream at an ex’s wedding, in which she imagines herself interrupting the wedding and running off with the groom, complete with hilariously vituperative descriptions of the bride (“wearing a gown shaped like a pastry”). This serves as a general model of how Swift has updated her songwriting now that she can no longer, quite, fictionalize her life into an everygirl story: she’s turned to her other strength, spite.