The Princess with a Thousand Enemies

(This is (not) a music review.)

A new Taylor Swift album came out last month. This happens a lot, and people don’t shut up about it when it does. I am not going to shut up about it either.

The question isn’t whether the new album is good, exactly; that is never the point with these things, not when Swift is involved. She is a generational songwriting talent, and her musicianship is serviceable, but she is also prolific, with all that being prolific tends to imply for consistency. The Tortured Poets Department has a lot of pretty good songs on it (although they tend towards the “over-written”), a few standout ones, and one or two that are some of the most emotionally immature dreck you’ve ever heard in your life. The same, however, can be said about a lot of albums, by both Taylor Swift and other artists. What makes “TTPD” different? This question is more broadly social, cultural, and even economic and political in its way.

To understand Swift’s current cultural totipresence, we have to understand the tour. The Eras Tour, even in its attenuated movie form, is an almost premodernly ludic experience, a carnival in the original sense that included a sacral quality. I went to a showing of the movie last year in Saratoga Springs, a town I dislike for a lot of reasons, and at points it was like being at one of those Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight showings, if Rocky Horror were monocultural rather than countercultural. I qualify it this way, and yet there is something oddly non-monocultural and non-mainstream about the serious Swift fandom. The showing I went to was full of teenaged girls yelling things like “FUCK SCOTT BORCHETTA” and “FUCK SCOTT SWIFT” and “FUCK SCOOTER BRAUN” and “FUCK KIM KARDASHIAN” and “FUCK JAKE GYLLENHAAL”—the Land of Swift has a princess with a thousand enemies—as well as an almost gematria-like occultic treatment of the numbers 5, 13, and, of course, 1,989. Almost everybody in the world has heard at least one or two Taylor Swift songs, and probably most Millennials and in particular most Millennial women have a decent generalized understanding of her career, but it is still distinctly specialized knowledge what the fuck half this stuff means. This sort of thing is why my housemate and I have an inside joke about a semi-near-future eternal recurrence of the rise of Constantine where the “sign” in which “Swiftie Constantine” conquers is a snake emoji, and instead of Arian Germanic tribes there’s a Canticle for Leibowitz-style Great Plains culture that thinks the house from “The Last Great American Dynasty” was in Rapid City.

Now there’s an extended Eras Tour movie on streaming, because Swift likes money, and also there’s the new album. A lot of the album is about Matty Healy, the extremely racist, sexist, and religiously bigoted front man of a shitty boy band whom Swift dated for about a month last year. “But, daddy, I love him!” Swift protests in one of the album’s set-piece songs—indeed, this is the title of said song—which is compelling in The Little Mermaid, where the line originates, but here seems almost intended to be a Trojan horse to make the old-school familialist understanding of marriage look good by comparison. Swift, like most people, has yet to learn the trick of keeping a gun by her brain’s pleasure receptors so that she can shoot them if they look at her funny.

Speaking of Swift’s neurology, the album release has unleashed not only the usual flood of strange sexism that is directed at her as a matter of course but also a dismaying variety of terrible attitudes about psychology, depression, madness. Basic moral and political observations about Swift—she is wealthy; she is hypocritical; her private jet use has caused a truly unconscionable amount of terrible Pollution—mushroom into a dogged insistence that she must not have real problems, that she must just be a whiner who is appropriating the aesthetic of real emotional and spiritual struggle. This is, of course, bullshit. Swift has publicly protested too much about her own sanity for at least a decade. The sorts of things that people have made fun of her for the most consistently over the years—mood swings; embarrassing self-reinventions; almost unbelievably short and intense relationships; an increasingly obvious inability to keep it in her pants—are themselves oftener than not warning signs of serious problems in someone’s inmost depths. Nobody accuses Lord Byron of having been a poser, even though the “lord” in his name does mean what it usually means and even though his behavior was at least as calculated to present a particular aesthetic as Swift’s is. I’m not sure I would call Byron a tortured poet, exactly, but that is because I am still not sure “tortured poet” is a real set phrase; were people saying this six months ago? It’s become difficult to remember.

Even with someone like, say, Charles Bukowski, the torture came at least much from ways in which he had it better than other people as from ways in which he had it worse; it’s impossible to honestly think about Bukowski’s virulent misogyny as something of which he was the real victim, although various dishonest defenders of his have certainly tried to. It’s possible that Taylor Swift’s problems are about as self-inflicted as Charles Bukowski’s were, or at least an argument to that effect can be made that isn’t transparently and cartoonishly sexist. Can an argument be made that her problems are more self-inflicted than his were? No, not really, and this argument cannot really be made about Byron or Dylan Thomas (name-dropped in a strange context in the album’s title track, which sounds like it might be about Phoebe Bridgers rather than Healy) or François Villon (a poet who was almost certainly literally tortured on more than one occasion) either.

Even Ursula K. Le Guin’s Gethen-cold writing on Ernest Hemingway’s suicide, which is so bad that it permanently altered my opinion of her even though I don’t like Hemingway either, does not go as far as some of the anti-Swiftian commentary on the princess’s supposed mental haleness does. In fairness, it cannot. “I’m not saying that Hemingway wasn’t really suicidally depressed; that he was is beyond denial. I’m just saying he was suicidally depressed because he was a bad person.” That at least is connected to the reality of suffering, which Le Guin, to her credit, never denied; denying that reality would have vitiated her artistic, intellectual, and moral project much more thoroughly than did any of the specific topics on which she tended towards hypocrisy or self-righteousness. Le Guin is better and more honest than, for example, “Taylor Swift will succumb to depression if not for her emotional support private jet,” a real remark that someone on the bird app made. (If he by some chance reads this and wants to be credited by name, or wants someone else quoted instead, he can feel free to email me—but if I were him I would, in this context, prefer to go nameless.)

So it’s not even that Taylor Swift is above criticism or necessarily a particularly admirable person. It’s that her releases, for whatever reason, have a way of attracting unhinged attacks and unduly savage criticism from people who have even worse understandings of what the world is really like than she has herself. Swift, like an Athenian philosopher or a “populist” political leader, is remarkably good at exposing holes in her detractors’ worldviews by existing. Sometimes she exposes holes in their moral standards too, as with the Le Guin-Hemingway comparison that I just made. Taylor Swift the gadfly is an important contributor to the public sphere in ways that hold good regardless of the output of Taylor Swift the singer-songwriter.

Must Art Be Good?

For much of the Early Modern period the French were, to most tastes, not at good at playwrighting as the English. This was not because France lacked talented people in its theaters and its literary culture; there were Racine, Molière, and Corneille, to name just a few. The problem was, rather, one of standards being set at the cultural level, especially at the level of the elite culture; French playwrights were still expected to adhere to certain “unities” that artificially constrained things like time and setting, whereas in English theater Shakespeare and most playwrights after him, as well as some before him, had exuberantly dispensed with the unities and with the absolutist, prescriptive attitude towards “good” narrative that they represented. Some playwrights, especially Molière, occasionally mocked the unities, but the fact that they had to be responded to in the first place constrained the dramatic tradition in the French language for well over a hundred years, even as the language and the Parisian literary class that spoke it exploded with creativity in other genres.

Today we can look back on the unities, laugh, and mourn what could have been in terms of French theater in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is easy, however, to get complacent about this. The truth is that current artistic production, too, has rules for good art, especially good narrative art, that seem objective to us most of the time but are in fact just as culture-bound as were the unities. It is not at all obvious across all times and places that The Lord of the Rings having non-naturalistic dialogue and character writing that progressively reveals static personalities to the reader are objective problems with the text. It has these “flaws” insofar as current readers often dislike books that are written this way. Tolkien's audience first and foremost was himself, and the fact that a large audience of other people like his writing as well was, for him, a happy accident. This is without even getting into more expressly political or ideological aspects of artistic taste like the idea that a story should seek to “represent” the experiences of an abstract intended reader. I asked my mother once what she thought of representation as a priority in narrative art and she said that, when she was growing up, she wanted to read about practically anyone other than lower-middle-class white Catholic girls from suburban New England, an experience of the world that she already knew more about than she cared to by virtue of her self-awareness. In that sense my mother was more “represented by” the characters in books by authors like Kipling and Hardy than by those in, for instance, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, because her priorities as a reader were being represented and it isn't self-evident that every reader's priorities will include self-recognition. This is without even reaching the cases of those who might learn new things about themselves by encountering the apparent other in fiction, like religious converts, transgender people, and people inspired to learn a new language after reading or watching something in translation.

Some of these newer norms for “good art” are religious or religion-related in character. Yellowjackets, my favorite current television show and one that I think has the potential to be the most interesting mainstream American television show of the 2020s, is a survival horror story that treats the question of supernatural agency within the plot with a light (or, in less well-considered moments, muddied) touch. The effect is somewhat akin to that achieved in classic folk horror movies like The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General. Are the characters having the severe psychological problems that they are because of literal, external supernatural agency, or is the darkness entirely located within them? We don’t know for sure, although there are suggestions that something genuinely spiritual or paranormal is occurring, but this does not stop certain viewers of the show from arguing for the sake of “realism” that the supernatural must be absent—as if people who believe in the supernatural never have psychological problems in real life. The effect of this is to imply that what someone who has supernatural or religious beliefs sees in her own experiences of the world is deficient and can never rise to the same significance as what someone with no such beliefs sees in the experiences of her “believer” peer; the idea that Yellowjackets is a show where the supernatural events aren’t actually occurring isn’t itself a prescriptive or exclusionary one, but the idea that it “should” be that type of show for “realism’s” sake certainly is. Never mind that in many other societies in the past it would be seen as unusual for this kind of story not to include supernatural forces. As Doris Bargen points out in A Woman’s Weapon, the well-known episode in Genji monogatari in which Lady Rokujō possesses Lady Aoi and causes her to die in childbirth reflects Genji’s origin in a society where attempting to possess people one disliked was simply what one did as a woman in certain types of social situations.

Sometimes the implied preference for secularity as a precondition for artistic merit affects entire genres. Most of us take it for granted that, put frankly, Christian contemporary music, especially of the sort that burgeoned in Evangelical and some Catholic spaces in the 1990s, sucks. Why? Is it because it is religiously motivated? So is half of Bach. Is it because the artists are mostly right-wing? So was Ian Curtis. Is it because they tend to have bad taste in other media? So do tons of secular pop stars. Is it because it prioritizes achieving effects other than maximum artistic and technical ambitiousness? In the age of poptimism, that usually does not matter. I think the issue is less any of this and more that this music has the “vibes” of being for a narrow religious interest—which, to be fair, it is; the genre, especially today, pillarizes itself from outside culture in a way that gives the impression that most Christian contemporary artists would rather not be considered “good” by secular critics. If there were a Natalie Merchant song from the same time period as Rebecca St. James’s rendition of “Be Thou My Vision,” even if it was a cover of a hymn (and there are Natalie Merchant songs that are!), where halfway through the track the lyrics cut out and a combination of reverb effects and hi-hat cymbals and helicopter sound effects from a bad Vietnam War movie started eating the melody alive, the secular music press would take that song dead seriously. St. James, however, probably does not want the secular music press to take her “Be Thou My Vision” dead seriously, because the foolishness of God is wiser than Pitchfork.

Readers will have noted a generally author-focused approach in this essay so far; this is because I think that the pop reception of Roland Barthes and the “death of the author” harms attempts to assess art as a process of communication between a creator, or creative community, and an audience. The pop-Barthesian reader is solipsistic and is unable to assess what she thinks makes art good or bad because she is unable to assess the social and cultural pressures on the creator or creative community. This is once again relevant to Yellowjackets, a show whose fandom tends to misattribute its flaws to the screenwriters even though most of them are demonstrably the fault of other people, such as network and production executives. It is also relevant to essentially anything that is read or watched in translation, because pop-Barthesianism puts forward John Dryden’s attempt in his translation of the Georgics “to make Virgil speak such English, as he wou’d himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present Age” as the only kind of good or even conceptually apprehensible translation, for what amount to ideological reasons.[1] A translator cannot, instead, with Friedrich Schleiermacher, seek to build a conversation between two people, the (abstract structure of the) author and the (abstract structure of the) reader, unless she is willing to try to make the reader have a conversation with a corpse. Certainly it looks a bit morbid for a translator who takes the death of the author seriously to attempt to lead the reader towards the original author rather than vice versa, as was Schleiermacher’s own preference. Pop-Barthesianism’s extremely low understanding of “authorship” overthrows the tyranny of the author at the expense of imposing a tyranny of the reader that takes on overtones of cultural supremacism whenever the reader’s values are closer than the author’s to those values that are culturally dominant. (Barthes as a critic of the “dead white men” canon may or may not have believed that this was possible, but it obviously is.) Combine this with straightforward misunderstanding of what the artistic production process actually involves, as in the Yellowjackets example, and one gets the basic conditions for the infamously entitled reading style of modern media fandoms.

I do not mean to suggest that criticizing the quality of a piece of art or writing is always ungenerous or entitled on the part of an audience, only that it should be undertaken with some humility about what “quality” means, and what aspects of a work might come across as quasi-objectively good or bad to some generations of readers, or fans, but not others. I often see younger people recommending older anime series like Haibane-Renmei and the original Trigun with caveats about the sketchy art styles and choppy animation; I, conversely, can’t watch many newer anime series because they are so smooth and high-definition that they make me feel like I am swimming in a vat of motor oil. I can practically hear the rank-and-file animators breaking out into “The Red Flag” in my head. Arguing that a piece of art or writing or music “just isn’t good,” or for that matter that it “just is good,” is never as simple as one thinks it will be when the argument begins.

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[1] Dryden had, as we say nowadays, bad takes on the unities as well. In An Essay on Dramatick Poesie he accuses Shakespeare’s history plays of seeking “not to imitate or paint Nature, but rather to draw her in miniature, to take her in little; to look upon her through the wrong end of a Perspective, and receive her Images not onely much less, but infinitely more imperfect then the life.” It’s not impossible to imagine him having the same problem with the supernatural elements of Yellowjackets, the dialogue in The Lord of the Rings, or the didacticism of Christian rock “if he had been born in America, and in this present Age.”