Good evening, class. It’s always exciting to see the new 1Ls and introduce them to our esteemed establishment. You’ve seen Legally Blonde so I’m sure you know that unlike undergrad, we don’t waste time here. You were given the readings for today’s class on the night of the Grammys, 2024. On that fateful night, one Ms. Taylor Swift won her fourth album of the year with Midnights. Tonight we function as defense lawyers for this case of Swift Justice. If you’ve done your homework and read the case file, you’ll know the goal of the prosecution. They sue to strip Taylor Swift of her very ability to claim she is human. In a novel move of judicial genius, they’ve constructed their case not purely from the right-wing bigoted nonsense, as expected. Perhaps they’ve learned that won’t hold up in court. Their brief also argues to dehumanize her from the left. Our goal in class today is to examine their case and destroy it for the dangerous horror it hides.
One - The Blank Page Baby
The Prosecution’s first argument is as follows: Taylor Swift’s music showcases a lack of interiority. Her poppy hooks and ear-worming sickness showcase a creature who has no soul, no life, and no thought. As she famously sang, she’s got a blank page. That’s because that’s all she is: a collection of blank pages that beg you to throw whatever relatability you can glimpse after staring at them so long you start to hallucinate something living.
When Taylor Swift won at the Grammys, a certain segment of people were furious online. That always happens at awards shows. People are angry that their fav didn’t win and so they kick up a stink, suddenly pretending like their tastes are the only good tastes, no one else deserved to be in consideration, someone not winning is actually a moral affront. And every year, inevitably, the response to an awards ceremony is to then attack the other artists. It’s one of the constants in life now. People go absolutely insane. This year, Taylor won album of the year. People were angry that SZA didn’t win. They were angry Lana didn’t win. And, somehow, they were angry that Beyonce didn’t win even though she had nothing to do with the category this year.
On twitter, one man upset that Taylor won over Lana, decided to tweet out that Lana’s music is complex. Meanwhile, Taylor’s shows that she doesn’t have an internal life. Not only is he calling her music soulless, though he claims to like some of it, he’s saying that Taylor herself is soulless. When people responded like “Yo man that’s a weird and fucked up thing to say about someone,” he doubled down. From there on, people picked up on what he was throwing down, saw much traction he was going, and went with it. For a little bit, a certain segment of the internet was united in the idea that Taylor Swift and her music are empty little nothings.
This argument is often shot at popular things aimed at the masses. Pulp fiction, bubblegum pop, popcorn movies. Not only must we see them as inferior, but we must also seem them as purposeless. Let’s take the perennial punching bag: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. You’ve got the Scorcese interviews, the constant think pieces, the boring constancy of the brand. Obviously because they’re big and flashy, because they were so popular for so long, they must have nothing to say and the people behind them must have nothing to say and nothing to think inside their heads. Only, that’s pure nonsense. Many of the actors and directors involved in the MCU are insanely skilled. Elizabeth Olsen is great in Wind River. Mark Ruffalo has Spotlight. Robert Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer, Barry Keoghan in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Angelina Jolie in literally anything. The list goes on and on. So okay, maybe the people behind it have interior lives, but what about the films themselves?
To just do a very brief dive into Marvel and Superhero comics in general, let’s look at Captain America: The Winder Soldier. The US government and its intelligence agencies are susceptible to takeover by violent right-wing groups. In the sequel, we find the US government is quite willing to dehumanize people and treat them as weapons, showcasing how they likely treat real life soldiers, especially special ops, calling back the popular ideas of bootcamp and sergeants screaming abuse at recruits in order to break them emotionally so it’s easier to control them and direct them to kill. In WandaVision, we see the government not caring about the people kidnapped by Wanda but purely wanting to retrieve a corpse and use it as a weapon, again commenting on the US government’s propensity for dehumnization and warmongering. You may not find the Marvel films particularly deep or adept at their storytelling, but they are saying things. They’re not pure blank pages.
So let’s look at Swift.
In the song Mastermind, she sings,
No one wanted to play with me as a little kid
So i’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since
To make them love me and make it seem effortless…
I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian ‘cause I care.
Here, Swift is plainly saying, “Yes. I have a very specific and cultivated career built out of creating sandbox mysteries for my fans to enjoy solving because my inner child never healed from the idea that I am unlovable. You’re aware that I’m doing this, and thank you for playing along.” She’s clearly aware of who she is, the perception people have of her, and the fans who go alone with her antics. That requires awareness that only humans are capable of possessing.
In a vault track from 1989, “Is It Over Now?”, Taylor sings,
Oh, Lord, I think about jumpin
Off of very tall somethings
Just to see you come running
And say the one thing
I’ve been wanting, but no
The somethings line seems like a silly, maybe odd forced rhyme, but it’s also easy to read and make sense of. The urge here isn’t thoroughly thought through. It’s a daydream, a wonder, not a plan, not a threat. If she was going to jump, would he save her? Would he admit his love for her? This isn’t the only song Taylor mentions the idea of self harm either.
In “This Is Me Trying” she sings,
Pulled the car off the road to the lookout
Could’ve followed my fears all the way down.
In “Hoax,” she sings,
Stood on the cliffside screaming,
‘Give me a reason.’
…
You knew it still hurts underneath my scars
From when they pulled me apart.
In Would’ve, Could’ve Should’ve, she discusses how a lot of those scars came from her heavy relationship with John Mayer. She calls herself the anti-hero. She says she understands why Joe Alwyn wouldn’t marry her because she’s incapable of being herself. Taylor’s songs are filled with lyrics that describe a hurt woman who cannot fathom the idea of her being worthy enough, that she is desparate for love, and the lack of it confirms her childhood bias that she’s unlovable to the point where, even briefly, it drives her to suicidality.
There’s clearly an internal life to Taylor, and she places it fairly obviously in her songs. The critique doesn’t care to engage with her as a person or with her songs as texts that can actually be examined though. When this is pointed out, people roll their eyes. They say those are surface emotions, pretty gems polished and sold in a pawn shop. They say she has no inner life and then, when confronted with her obvious interiority, they say she’s solipsistic, too concerned with her inner life. The point isn’t to make a coherent argument. It’s to make a blanket statement, an insulting one, one people who don’t enjoy her music can feel is true, especially if they are primed to want to call things they don’t like intellectually and emotionally inferior. They don’t care about what she has to say or how she says it or when she says it. None of that matters. They are upset she won an award. They’re upset that people are talking about someone they don’t care for. They’re upset that her songs are on the radio. They’re upset that they aren’t being catered to and in order to express that emotion, they have decided to strip her of humanity. None of her work actually matters. What matters is they want her dehumanized.
In a Medium blog post from 2016 by a user who calls themselves “Leftist Musings,” the writer claims they’re going to critique the entirety of Swift’s image. First, though, they make clear that they’re anti-Swift. They’re annoyed by her and by people liking her. If they were honest, they’d admit that’s the real reason they’re writing this article.
They go on to say, “Her songs may be emotionally resonant for some listeners, but that’s form over substance. Storybook romances are easy to recite. The tinge of anger in a breakup is a shallow emotional depth to plunge.” It goes back to saying they don’t like her music, they think it was nothing to say, and it never goes into anything of value. Insert a long ramble here about the work and understanding it actually takes to make storybook romances. Romance authors put a lot of work into their craft. Sometimes what you find is certain people on the left have no understanding of or care for the work artists actually put in to make things quote unquote “easy.”
The writer then decides to brand Taylor a sociopath. But of course they don’t mean in the clinical way. Reading the DSMR would require this person to read and engage with a text. They’re incapable of that. What they’re invoking is a cultural boogieman. A lot of people, when they say sociopath, they mean monster. Monsters do crime because they aren’t human. Taylor Swift with all those lame songs is a monster.
But, well, they’re wrong. Besides the ableist nonsense in diagnosing someone you do not know, especially when you’re not a psychiatrist, the idea that Swift is a bad songwriter… Well, let’s bring in some expert witness testimony. In an article for The Harvard Gazette, Christina Pazzanese has various experts weigh in on the titular question: So what exactly makes Taylor Swift so great?
Here’s Stephene Burt, an english professor at Harvard: “She has a terrific ear in terms of how words fit together… Her great genius and her innovations and her brilliance as a songwriter is melodic and verbal…. [P]eople speculate about the meanings of her songs, both because they are complex and meaningful works of art, and because some of them do speak to public facts about her life. … ‘Anti-hero,’... is an absolutely fantastic and extraordinarily self-consicous song.”
An assistant music professor from Berklee, Ralph Jaccodine said, “First of all, if you’re going to talk about Taylor Swift, you’ve got to talk about the power of great songs. … Number two, You’ve got to be great live. … Taylor Swift’s songs, combined with how great she is live, is a powerful combination.”
It seems the prosecution’s first argument falls flat on its face. Swift isn’t a blank page. The assumption that anyone who enjoys things you find tedious must be soulless… well that’s true solipsism. It’s a child’s understanding of existentialism. There are things they don’t understand, so all that exists can only be that which agrees with them. “You’re a non-playable character” type of argument. It’s meaningless and useless. What else have they got?
Two - Sl**! - The Capitalist Jezebel
Any good lawyer is going to come prepared with multiple arguments for their case. Dutifully, my students, I say we must go through those as well. What happens after you fail with your accusations that a famous woman is soulless with no identity? Why, you do the most sure-fire way to destroy any woman. You call her a slut.
Let’s take that article from Leftist Musings. What do they have to say about Taylor’s lovelife?
“Where Taylor Swift stands alone is the sheer number and specific “types” relationships she has had. Her list of relationships dwarfs most, and virtually all of them have that fake “publicity stunt” feel to them, even if the guys involved don’t seem to initially know that’s all they are. There’s also a serial killer-esque pattern to them. … Additionally, their connections to Swift seem completely generated out of thin air. … At no point has a relationship with her ever seemed to grow organically out of an incidental interaction. … It’s like her agent is running a dating site just for her, and doing a deliberately terrible job of finding a match.”
The writer then expresses anger at the heartbreak in those songs supposedly about each of these exes because, according to them, Swift’s relationships aren’t real and don’t involve actual connection, and so her heartache is cosplay. Their argument is that Swift, a capitalist sociopath, has no ability to love and uses man after man as a career boost, bedding them and tossing them out when their use has run out, devouring them and churning out songs. That’s a very long-winded way of saying they think she’s a slut.
It’s not fair to only examine the words of one person though. Recently, Taylor Swift was the victim of deepfake pornography when AI bros decided to be creepy, which makes sense for people who love the idea of AI. Now of course, this itself was a dehumanizing move. It’s not because sex, porn, or sex work are in any way negative or remotely dehumanizing. The point is the creation of spectacle and the removal of consent. More so than sexualized fanart or RPF, the realism of deepfakes can settle in with a person, violate them. I won’t go so far as to call it a form of rape. I struggle with classifying my own experiences on the receiving end of sexual violence. But I can see how one might make an argument to that degree. And of course, you remove someone’s consent because you view them as less than. You want power. You want to be served as a god who can take whatever you want from the creatures. The creation of the AI was an effort in dehumanization itself.
That act also played into this view that’s longed plagued Taylor and pretty much every famous woman since before the modern era. She’s a slut. Same. But we all know the people labeling women sluts aren’t doing it in a fun girly gay way. The point is to degrade them, to accuse them of being objects beneath other women, objects for use, objects.
When the debacle broke out, Swifties flooded Twitter to report the posts and to flood the mentions of her name and any related hashtags in an effort to defend her which was very sweet. Twitter briefly restricted the ability to search for her while they desperately tried to get a handle on the situation. And of course, all the attention led to discourse.
It’s unsurprising that in the “Is it okay to make deepfake porn of someone non-consensually?” debate, sane people sided on, “No.” I wish I could say I was surprised by how some people approached that. A handful of the popular tweets about the situation I saw that day went along the lines of, “Here’s why this is bad, even if Taylor is rich.” “Taylor may be a billionaire, but this harms everyday women too.” This past year I’ve changed my social media habits to generally just blocking people I find annoying. Unfortunately, when I want to write about some stuff I saw after the fact, that makes collecting tweets a task.
But isn’t that interesting? People wanted to talk about why AI porn is bad, why it’s a feminist issue that needs to be tackled, how it’s affected women with much less power and money than Swift. In order to do so, these people felt compelled to basically say, “Yes, she’s rich. Normally that precludes her from any sort of empathy. The Taylor of it all doesn’t matter. But…” There’s an instinct amongst certain people on the left to take the rich and turn them into inhuman monsters. It’s always easier to fight monsters. The Maoist urge to kill landlords is much easier when you pretend landlords aren’t human and therefore your bloodlust can’t be labelled murderous thirst. The need to tag on a statement about Swift’s wealth at all in relation to this does not reflect well on the audience those people have gathered.
In that blog post I keep bullying because of how shit it is, Leftist Musings writes, “Yet each of these two-month dalliances that consist of two-to-three dates ends up being the subject of one of her songs, or at least a rumored subject (the media loves to speculate on those).” The combined idea is that Taylor’s wealth precludes her from humanity, so it doesn’t matter if she is treated misogynistically outside of how that effects women in general. At the same time, her wealth is built on being a whore. It’s a way of calling her an archetype. Swift is where all the ills of the world can be placed, the Jezebel leading the kingdoms astray. And because she’s an evil queen, she’s a myth. She isn’t human. She’s the mascot of capitalism and therefore the enemy of the glorious revolution.
In an article accusing Swift of being the icon of another hated existence, White Feminism, Anika Sapra writes for Women’s Media Center, “Take Swift’s hit song, “The Man.” Swift states in the lyrics that the only reason she’s a “bitch” and not a “baller” is because she is a woman and that “every conquest [she] had made would make [her] more of a boss to you.” Of course, what she’s telling her audience is that she, too, wants to be a part of a patriarchal hustle culture but can’t because she’s a rich white woman instead of a rich white man. Exemplified here is how white feminism seeks control over systems of oppression instead of liberation for all.” Swift is capitalism. The problem here, as it was in the last section, is a matter of media comprehension. Even if Swift is guilty of doing white feminism, this is a terrible example. The opening stanza is about how she’s been called a whore since forever but she wouldn’t be if she was a guy. The conquest line actually comes from that stanza. It isn’t about financial domination or chart domination. Conquest there refers to relationships, how sexist men sometimes refer to the women they bed as conquests. Even more specifically, isn’t this about how the media treats women? Talk about what’s being worn, attitudes being taken… It sounds like she’s talking about gossip news.
But because people want to dehumanize her and because they want to dehumanize the rich in general rather than deal with the harms actual humans cause each other, Swift becomes capitalism. Her songs become empty. Her relationships become sociopathic. Her feminism becomes about dollars. She’s the Jezebel leading us to ruin. Taylor Swift isn’t a person. She’s a brand. And despite what SCOTUS might try to tell us, brands aren’t people.
“Looking at Taylor Swift’s seemingly genuine persona, you realize, that’s not the personality of a human being.” Their complaint is that Taylor’s image is supposedly showing off her “perfect life and personality.” You know, the one where she’s endlessly insulted by men, made fun of for dating, told her music is horrible, and dates people who genuinely cause her emotional suffering. She has songs about all of those things. That’s the perfect human being with a personality. They go on to a familiar refrain amongst supposed “leftist criticism” of Swift: she’s a brand, not a person. The writer acknowledges that this isn’t unique to Swift. It’s something that takes any public facing person. It’s how you get insane parasocial relationships. YouTubers, actors, writers, singers, intellectuals, politicians - all of them play a character of themselves for the world. All the world’s a stage as that bottom bitch Shakespeare would say. So why not cast a famous women as a famously misogynistic archetype?
What’s interesting is that sometimes the exact opposite comes into play. If you can’t call her a slut because you know that’s not feminist, you call her sexless. “I think Taylor Swift’s success can be boiled down to the fact that she’s sexless and therefore not a threat to women.” It’s not un-sexy. It’s not chaste or asexual. Sexless. A eunuch. A lesser. Still curating her sexuality to whims of whatever makes her the most money.
Oh, of course, to make that claim you just have to ignore “Dress,” the song about desperately needing someone. Or how about “False God,” where Taylor sings that religion is found in making love to her. She isn’t sexless. But why let facts, media comprehension, or basic empathy get in the way of a good dunk?
Three - Gaylors: The Lavender Haze
Around the time Swift’s album Midnights, my TikTok started feeding me videos from a community called the Gaylors. These people looked through Taylor’s songs, her personal and public history, and started sewing together a queer narrative from the threads they found. That, class, brings us to the prosecution’s next prong of their dehumanization campaign: the Gaylors themselves.
The first instinct when you here that Gaylors are dehumanizing Swift might be to bristle and think I’m saying that someone being queer makes them less than human. As a gay man, no. I’m not about that bullshit. But that is a fair thing to fear given society’s… everything.
When I came out to a couple of friends in high school, they told the rest of my friend group. One told my sister. Luckily for me, at that time, nothing went negatively. Those friends who turned out to be homophobic waited until after I was out to most people to show their hateful beliefs. I was in high school when gay marriage was legalized in the US. It was the summer before my senior year. A lot of people I knew went to twitter and Facebook to start talking about end times. Things have come relatively far in near-decade since. But growing up in a small, conservative, religious town in Kentucky, coming out was terrifying. Having other people out me? Getting a text from my sister about the crush I had on one of her friends’ brother? It hurt.
There has been case after case of celebrities being “forced” out of the closet by fandoms, whether that’s from constant speculation or from being attacked for making queer art while supposedly being straight. In H.Bomberguy’s video on Plagiarism, he goes in detail about the ways such a forced outing harmed Becky Albertali, author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, the Love, Simon book. Being outed sucks.
Look at the fits homophobes and TERFs have on social media and in proposed legislation where they want teachers and school administrators to be forced to out students to their parents. When they’re told they don’t have a right to that information, when coming out is a personal choice, that parents are not owed knowing that, they explode. This is something parents must know. Because children, to them, are not people. They’re property. And the queer has to get beaten out. Conversion therapy camps need to get booked. Queer children must be punished back into the closet so they can lock the doors. The first step to get there is to out them forcibly. These people view LGBT people as less than human.
As a queer man, as someone who has been outed against their will, as someone who has been called a faggot on the street, who has had religious people lovingly tell me I’m going to hell to send me to read about how being gay is bestiality, the idea that anyone has a right to anyone else’s sexuality is infuriating. It says you do not care about this person, even if they are queer. It’s saying this person is a product for your consumption, to fill your needs to gossip, to confirm your theories and light up your dopamine for being such a good little detective.
In the words of Rebecca Smith, “They are treating Swift like a fictional character to whom they can assign any sexuality they would like, with no regard for the fact that she is a real human being with a life outside of her musical career… (I)n reality, we don’t know her, and we aren’t entitled to this information about her.”
That recalls back to the people who view Swift not as a person but as a brand. Swift is a creation, not a person. You see this in all public personas. We’re all playing a version of ourselves. In the solo performance class I took in college, we talked a lot about how, even when you’re being yourself on stage, performing your own words about your own life, you have to make decisions about the character of you that you’re performing. I think instinctively, we know all know that’s the reality of existing in public. Everything is performance. We’re all playing characters. With celebrity, it’s just more obvious. The more famous someone is, the more we understand they’re playing a character version of themselves. Sometimes, unfortunately, that makes us more likely to treat them as a creation, a fictionality. Taylor Swift is not human. She’s a storybook character to do whatever we with. That’s dehumanization.
But hold up. That’s a little unfair of me. Dr. Hannah McCann is quoted in an article for The Sydney Morning Herald as saying, “These fandoms do not exist to – or aim to – ‘out’ these celebrities. … These fandoms are often a way for people to find queer representation in contexts that are otherwise saturated with straightness. From country singers to boy bands, these cultural spaces are assumed by the wider public to be entirely straight. Queer fandoms emerge within these contexts partly because people are trying to push against the grain.”
I think the wall Gaylors, and potentially Dr. McCann, are running into is not understanding what queering is. Queering is a form of literary analysis whereby you take a text, text here not necessarily meaning a piece of writing, and search for how it interacts with and deviates from heteronormativity. This often results in creating a representational reading, finding queer characters and themes within works. I recently queered my favorite film, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, where I explore a trans reading of the movie.
Based on the TikToks I used to see, Gaylors are actively engaged in queering Swift’s songs. They take details about the author’s life, often an important aspect of analysis, and use those details to suss out potential queer readings. Here’s a Reddit thread dedicated to quick explanations of their thoughts on the matter. The problem comes with how they’re engaging with the text. The queering is fine. But because Taylor is treated as a character, the queer character created in these readings becomes their view of Swift at large. Because they don’t recognize they’re treating her as a character and conflating that with her existence, they insist that she herself must be queer. Their reading of the text has to be the reading. That stupid blue curtain meme is so popular because people thought English class taught them that there is a meaning to a text. There’s a single correct answer. But that’s not how analysis works.
An example of queering Swift that I really enjoyed was Carolyn Gavinski’s article “What Taylor Swift and the Lavender Scare Have in Common” in Out Magazine. Gavinski looks at the song Lavender Haze and examines it with the historical Lavender Scare in mind, exploring potential references and queer meanings. Queering is a beautiful thing. I wholly support it as a literary practice. The problem only comes when you try to force your reading of a text onto the subject of your reading. Taylor Swift the character of her songs may very well be queer in certain readings. Taylor Swift the actual real life human being? You don’t get to choose that for her. To say otherwise, to get angry at the idea she won’t come out, to accuse her of queerbaiting because you queered her songs? That’s dehumanizing. It’s forcing her to be a doll to play with however you want.
Four - Ms. Americana and the Conspiracy Kid
Do you know who hates dolls? That would be the brand of conservative who went insane at the movie Barbie, thinking it was some radical feminist, anti-man movie. Just a pure inability to engage with the text or deploy basic thought. Well class, it’s finally time to talk about conservatives. Taylor Swift, the tall, blonde, slim, famous woman. What Barbie have the conservatives on the prosecution cast her as? Well, of course, she’s Puppet Barbie. She’s Deepstate Barbie.
According to a CNN article, about 33% of all Republicans believe Swift’s relationship with football star Travis Kelce is a a democratic ploy to get Joe Biden re-elected president. It almost sounds like they’re calling her relationship fake. Wow, if only there was a certain bullshit article that reminded me of… It’s almost like they’re calling her a slut again, a Jezebel…
People accused the NFL of rigging the season for the Chiefs to win the Superbowl in order to showoff Swift who would then endorse Biden. You know, Swift, who appeared for a handful of seconds every time she showed up to support her boyfriend. Everything was getting rigged to show her off. Mom can we get Friends, we have Friends at home Fox News Host Jesse Waters accused Swift of being a psy-op. Screeching man-child and utter loser Vivek Ramaswamy said, “I wonder who's going to win the Super Bowl next month. And I wonder if there's a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall.”
Part of the point of building conspiracies around Swift is to diminish her ability to serve as a threat. Dehumanizing her as an op, a plant, inorganic, means if she endorses Biden, the backlash conservatives will get for their inability to resist attacking her will lessen. She isn’t America’s sweetheart. She isn’t even human. Part of it is an inability to understand how things can get massively popular in the first place. And part of it is misogyny. They want to knock down a famous woman.
For them, Swift can’t make organic decisions. She can’t fall in love or date someone because there’s a true connection. People can’t enjoy her music and her concerts. Everything is a constructed plot against the GOP. Swift is an agent of doom, corrupting, harbinger of communism.
But… that’s just clearly insane. I’m not even going to talk about why it’s dehumanizing or explain how it’s nonsense. It doesn’t deserve time. It’s typical conservative lunacy piggybacking off a cultural moment in an attempt to stay relevant. The prosecution knew this tactic wouldn’t work. Facts don’t care about your feelings, and feelings so rarely care about your facts.
Five - Anti-Hero: Stan Wars
One of the facts that feelings simply refuse to take in is that music, much like every art, is purely subjective. There is no “greatest writer of all time.” Someone might pop in and say Shakespeare and insist that that’s a fact. But it isn’t. It’s an opinion. Likewise, there is no best singer, no best songwriter, no best director, no best artist. But when you ingest art in an insecure way that views all culture as competition, as sport, you can’t handle that. Your taste cannot be your taste. It must be objective fact. Not only must it be objective fact, it has to be moral fact.
When Taylor won Album of the Year at this past Grammys for Midnights, people who wanted Lana or SZA to win were upset. That’s understandable. There’s nothing wrong for cheering for the art and artists you prefer. But they went on to talk about apparent objective quality. Taylor didn’t deserve to win.
In an article for the Daily Beast, opinion writer Helen Holmes predicted that a Taylor win would be for the moment in culture she’s having rather than her actual album, which Holmes claims has several skips. It’s not as good as 1989, not as risky as Folklore. SZA or Lana should have won instead because they actually deserved it. I think speculation is fine. Perhaps the Eras tour was the driving force behind the win. Perhaps there are actors who have won Oscars as apologies for not awarding them for previous work. But when we start using the word deserves, we’re either making moral or objective stances. But music is not objective. Acting is not objective. This is all subjective. What you find brilliant, someone else might find tedious. What you find nonsensical, someone else might find sublime. Sometimes a wrong note is a wrong note. Sometimes it’s jazz or microtonal. I think the vast majority of classic plays are boring slogs, but I don’t think that’s an objective fact.
Now, while annoying and misunderstanding of what art is, I don’t think that really matters. Sure, you think one thing was objectively better. You’re wrong, that’s not a thing, but it doesn’t really matter and the debates can be interesting. The problem comes when fandom and the internet comes into play. When Billie Eilish won over Lana, Lana stans on Twitter launched into bullying Billie. When Beyonce lost to Harry Styles, both fan groups went batshit insane attacking each other and both artists. When Chadwick Bosman lost to Sir Anthony Hopkins, the internet sunk its fangs into that man’s neck. What happens is that people take their disappointment and refuse to hold it. They’ve decided that disappointment is bad and that anger is good. It’s the internet idea that bullying is actually based if you’re on the objectively correct side. Because they don’t understand art, they assume that’s them. So they lash out. It’s better to be cruel than to be hurt.
In lashing out, either in attack or defense of an artist, the stans rarely actually care about the people they’re arguing over. If you cared about the artist and the art, you would share your love in sincerity. “I love this thing and this is why. Here’s why I think you would love it. I want to share the experience it gave me. It’s important to me.” But we have to be ironic and detached. So rather than talk about what we love and why, we talk about why it’s objectively the best, why other things are wrong, factually and morally. This ends up ignoring the art. Throw it out. And it turns the artists not into people but into avatars whose existence only matters as a flag to hang our vitriol under. When fandoms go to war, it doesn’t matter the banner they march under. If art ceased existing, they’d throw something else on the flag. They’d still fight. The fighting is what they’re addicted to.
As such, in these internet slap fights, the artists, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Lana Del Rey, Harry Styles, they cease being humans. They became the god figures under which we march to war. And when the religion dies, we find a new god to kill in the name of. The god doesn’t matter. The killing is the point.
In this need, then, to fuel the desire to fight, we have to moralize. Someone’s personal distaste for Swift or her music can’t remain at that. It has to be objective. So her songs are easy. They say nothing. They’re written by someone with no interior, and they’re enjoyed by soulless machines. She’s a slut. She’s the epitome of capital. She is capital. She’s the boogeyman. She’s the reason the world isn’t going right. She’s the ultimate evil. She’s the deep state. She’s the intelligence apparatus. Taylor Swift is imperialism. We say all this so we can make our taste not only objective but morally righteous. And when it is objective and holy, we can harm in its name.
In his video examining Taylor Swift and the narratives about her, put forward by her, and even the factual narratives about her life, YouTuber Alexander Avila makes sure to first state multiple times that he wants to be careful of and emphasize the point that Taylor is a person. He’s not even building this around the idea he’s going to launch into a critique. He enjoys her. His next mention is that he’s not making an argument that she’s the best of all time. Like the video title says, he’s not really talking about her at all. What Avila shows here is an understanding that we often dehumanize artists. Many in the public have tried to strip Taylor of her humanity. Avila, a queer creator who’s had his own work stolen and thereby his humanity seen as lesser, is sympathetic to this idea. When you yourself have been on that receiving end, it’s hard to perpetuate that hungry need to destroy.
Six - The Tortured Poet’s Department
I framed this case in the name of Taylor Swift, but this is by no means unique to her. Look at Beyonce. She’s subject to many of the same critiques. They’re both also elevated above humanity. They became mythical figures and, in doing so, their humanity is stripped in a different way. When you make heroes out of men, human flaws kill them and you. Look at the way the internet treats any public facing individual: they must comment on every issue at all times, and they must agree one hundred percent. Timothee Chalamet was in a sketch on SNL that used Hamas as a quick joke. Suddenly a section of the internet decided that meant he was an evil Zionist worthy of being bullied. Look at the homophobia thrown at Noah Schnapp. We have decided that humanity is something we can bestow and take away at will.
Why is that? I argue it’s because it makes life easier. People want to be cruel, they want their bloodsport, but we can’t bare to harm other humans. So we make monsters out of them. Monsters are easier to kill. We don’t have to think about their lives, their loves, their inner lives. And when we make monsters, we have to make heroes. Suddenly we’re living life in a Marvel movie, but with less moral complexity.
One thing I found telling was the amount of people who laughed at Taylor Swift’s upcoming album title because she happens to be rich. How can a rich person be a tortured poet? To be a tortured poet is to be the struggling, starving artist, to be real is to be hungry. To accept the idea that Swift might still have an inner life, that money might not have fixed her brain, her relationships, her traumas, is to acknowledge that class is not actually the end all of the human condition. Some people can’t handle that. Their system is too fragile. And in doing so, they actually drive the tortured poet inside her. Because to be denied your humanity, as Satre might claim, is a deep form of hell. Taylor and every artist is in the tortured poet’s department. The way the internet treats everyone, how we have all become conservatives who view humanity as a conditional status that we get to knight someone with and a title we get to steal, we’re all in the tortured poet’s department.
At least the head mistress has some banging music.
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