Happy Tortured Poets Department release day! Tortured Poets Department PLUS an additional 15 songs! Or, if you’re finding yourself annoyed/disgusted/fatigued by another Taylor Swift release, I send my thoughts and prayers. I promise this isn’t all about Taylor Swift, and I promise I’m not going to get obsessive and force you to listen to me attempt to convince you that there is something behind this insanity. You’ve heard it here first, folks: I am trying my best to retire from feeling hurt, rejected, sad, angry, confused, over others’ opinions on art. I SWEAR.
But I am energized and I am ready to babble so here we are.
I’d like to begin this gabbing with noting that today I walked around downtown Los Angeles running a few errands and listening to the album(s). When I’m downtown I don’t ever remember where I park or which streets are one-ways and despite how many times I go to The Last Bookstore I still don’t really know where it is. Anyway, I ended up parking next to this mural and it was a mural I posed with the first time I’d visited Los Angeles, May 2017. I was in town for a conference then, cosplaying a successful working adult and pretending like I wasn’t devoting every moment to forcing my relationship with my now husband to last. Look at this idiot lol she’s so cringe!
And yet!!!!! I had this feeling while posing for this photo that I could make this city my home. I could be enough for a big city and its open arms. I didn’t take a new photo today unfortunately but just know I looked mysterious and beautiful.
Anyway. I’ve been thinking about the tempo of my emotional landscape. Sometimes I get so mad about… things. People. Choices made. Depictions created. It’s funny how vague ‘I get mad’ sounds, but for me it’s a powerfully specific emotion. I’m an Aries sun and even if you don’t know about astrology you know Aries are annoyingly intense, impulsive, too forward. The first complaint my husband had about me when we began to fall in love was that I butted my way through everything, head down, incessant. Poor guy didn’t realize an Aries was a ram with big-ass horns and that his correct assessment made me believe even more in astrology. I want to describe the feeling I get when I’m enraged, how the center of my chest really does feel aflame; how my blood pressure rises, how I need a release, an outcome, a solution instantaneously. I’m trying, in therapy, to pin-point when that rage is a ‘good’ thing (I know emotions aren’t good or bad but I’m also a Virgo rising so let me process in the vocabulary I know best please) and when it’s ‘bad.’ And by bad I mean I get so obsessed with the subject at hand that I really can’t function outside of it. Instagram story posts. Journal entries, notes app stanzas I can’t make sense of a day later. Flurry texts that make my blue whale of an iMessage block too big to fit in the screen.
Here is an incomplete list of things I’ve gotten rage-obsessed about:
Airport security/boarding lines: the urge I have to direct everyone to STAY SEATED UNTIL YOUR FUCKING BOARDING GROUP IS FUCKING CALLED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! God, I fear I’ll just get worse with this one : /
Netflix’s BEEF Casting: OK, yeah, I posted too much about Choe being cast. Lost like an entire day to that. Embarrassing!
A group of white women loudly complaining about Cowboy Carter and Beyoncé at a VERY QUIET community pool at a VERY EXPENSIVE wellness resort: I am so justified in this one, actually. To be at a very nice, private, QUIET oasis the week after Cowboy Carter was lovely until a group of white women (said by a white woman but I was alone at that moment so I was maybe more bearable xoxo) congregated at the restful, I’ll say it again, QUIET, communal pool area and began to LOUDLY complain about Beyoncé ‘daring to cover Jolene.’ This conversation went on for twenty minutes and I could hear it THROUGH MY SONY NOISE-CANCELLING HEADPHONES! The audacity to 1. be so loud and 2. be so wrong… OK I know I’m getting close to crossing my line about art opinions I so loudly claimed at the top….. shut me up!
Most of Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan’s movies: Kill Bill I & II and Jackie Brown are faultless and Interstellar rips but otherwise I stand by this, sorry! It’s all *fine*
Ariana Grande’s Spongebob Lover album: I guess let’s just… let her be happy idk
Being drunk: number one hater (due to trauma :)) until I’m two Aeperol Sprtizes in and life feels incredible!!!!!!!
Promising Young Women and Saltburn: oh my hater energy for Emerald Fennell! Unquenchable at certain points tbh. Whatever, read my Letterboxd for my takes but I had to take it down a notch when my husband ended up liking Saltburn. I don’t care how cool it can look, how smart, being a hater can sometimes hurt if the person you’re being a hater to really identifies with something. At that point I think you have to gently say ‘I don’t quite get it but I’m happy for you and will try to maybe sometimes let you riff on it.’ Easier said than done and maybe this makes me a dumb girl and not an intellectual one but that’s fine, I am ok with and actually looking forward to being a dumb girl after a lifetime of being the smart one. Maybe I’d be fine never reading another Cusk or Maggie Nelson.
Rupi Kaur and other Instagram poets: sigh. IDK man, it is painful seeing only those books in stock at Barnes and Noble, but I am trying to ~let it be~ like the tattoo I got when I was 21 and knew
nothingeverything tells me.Everything Sam Levinson has put his yucky hands on but especially Malcolm and Marie: this guy used the facade of Blackness via his casting choices to bitch about a bad review of his first movie written by a woman and it is so weirdly misogynistic and racist??? Smarter people have written about this so do a google and come hate with me after <3 (Hunter Schafer and Zendaya deserve all of the credit for Euphoria IMO)
My therapist wants me to try getting “familiar with” the source of this rage. I think at the core sits the Justice card in the tarot. Something in me, as I’m glaring at the back of someone’s head as they stumble over the TSA line YET AGAIN, feels as if their inattention, their lack of respect for the agreed-upon rules of civility, has broken a contract. Hearing someone talk during a movie in the theatre sends me into a rage-induced haze. It feels personal and I know it’s not; I know it is annoying that I even take it personally! But I cannot control the fire impulse that comes up first— I can only control how I react to it, how I let it live alongside me.
That’s fucking hard, letting parts of yourself you don’t really like into the light. Most of the time I am unable to do this and things feel unsettled, bad, tense. I admit, I feel personally attacked way when my husband or my friends (literally any of them) does not like something to the same degree that I do. It is very hard for me to backtrack out of that feeling once I get going, but it never fails: when I do backtrack I get hit with a heavyweight-level shame for being too intense and/or too dense to accept criticism without feeling emotionally dismissed or unloved (my dad was right on that one!!!!). Like, it’s really fine that my friends haven’t watched Adventure Time even though I’ve told them 400 different times in 400 different ways that it is the reason for my ongoing existence. It’s fine! I think they still love me?
I want to be better at it though, dealing with that ugliness that is a part of me. I want you to be able to say to my face Erika, I don’t like Taylor Swift, I don’t like Beyonce, and for my face to remain unphased, my blood pressure normal. I want to be able to say Ok! and not think about it after.
It’s so silly! I know! But I’m trying. A mantra: my husband doesn’t have to read everything I write right away, he still loves me! Eek.
Here’s another list for you— offputting things about Taylor Swift/the Swiftie-verse:
The cringe of it all: when I first heard that this new album would be called The Tortured Poets Department I nearly wept with cringe. Bad name! I wasn’t really excited for the release until this week, and even that excitement felt half-baked. But then the song Tortured Poets Department makes me want to move my body and I’m realizing it’s not a serious proclamation it’s a sarcastic one, more eviscerating the artsy-boy archetype than claiming herself as a ‘tortured poet.’ Lyrics: You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith. This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots. There’s self awareness here and I sometimes find criticisms of Swift (and Beyoncé, as I’ve noticed similar hate at times for them both— whole other essay there) confusing; do you want self awareness or do you want the self awareness to be different, better, smarter?
Here’s the thing. I’m not going to ride so hard for Swift that I tell you she’s not cringe. We all see her dancing at awards shows and making over-expressive faces! Although I eventually went delulu with the easter eggs this week sometimes they give me the ick! She has a tendency to dress… in ways I don’t like (loathed the Grammys look). I do not like some of Taylor Swift’s songs. Example: Vigilante Shit on Midnights. Cringe, IMO!!!! But I do wonder about the reactions to women in general expressing anger in art— we want women to be done with anger as quickly as possible, maybe because it sounds desperate? Pathetic? But as a writer I think it’s cathartic to dip into feeling mad when you’re creating. It can be energizing, healing. Healing is also cringe by the way.
I like boygenius I like having fresh flowers on my dining room table I like A24 movies and POOG I like painting my nails I like loafers I like being a Sephora Insider I like oat milk lattes I think Sally Rooney is a powerhouse writer and I think Portrait of A Lady on Fire and Petit Maman are perfect films.
The Kanye/Kim of it all: Did you know my husband was a huge Kanye fan when I met him? That because of loving him I too fell in love with Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy? Did you know that when we drove from Jacksonville, Florida to Los Angeles, California together in my shitty Chevy Cruze we listened to Kanye and Taylor’s entire discographies, College Dropout and then Taylor Swift, Late Registration and then Fearless? We got into a few arguments because then I was really passionate about Kanye being an asshole (correct) and Hans was really passionate about Taylor playing the victim (also correct). I saw somewhere that there was a Kim Kardashian song on this album before I listened and I let out a deep sigh. No more! Please! But then I listened to the song (thanK you aIMee) and thought: huh! An admittance that Kim’s little snake emoji moment ended up amplifying Taylor’s legacy: ‘there wouldn’t be this if there hadn’t been you.’ The song is still a little ‘fuck you’ but it feels remarkably different from the ‘revenge’ attitude we’ve seen in the past???
The ‘grow up already’ of it all: Sometimes I think we all forget how young Taylor Swift was when we first met her. She wrote You Belong With Me at 17!!! Love Story when she was 19! All Too Well when she was 21. Was the poetry you wrote at 20 dignified or *artistic*!!! God mine was NOT. Emily Dickinson I am not, Taylor is not. She doesn’t think she is. I can privately file away the stupid metaphors I made in all my heartbroken states, never to be seen again in the depths of Google Drive; Taylor has gone the other way, unearthing those live-wire cringes and revitalizing them, empowering the past selves who once felt frayed. Maybe the rerecordinge feel like a capitalistic-fueled endeavor to you instead, and I hear that! Nonetheless the idea of doing that with shit I wrote in undergrad makes me hyperventilate.
You should see the garbage I wrote in my journals when Hans moved to LA 6 months into our new love and I thought I’d lose him. Unbearableeeee to read! You might be thinking but ERIKA she’s 34 now, can’t she let those feelings/moments/memories go? To which.. I guess it’s probably healthy to not be wrapped up in these emotions but… me? IDK, some nights I’m crippled by a nostalgia for living with my college roommates that is so strong I swear I must be coming down with mono. Some nights I want to call my best friend who isn’t my best friend anymore and tell her I still love her because her presence in my life was so neon I’ll never not see it. I often revisit the first months knowing Hans through google photos and yearning overtakes me. Just because I’m stable doesn’t mean I don’t have the same deep well (hi Kacey) for emotionality and overwrought intensity. Certain times/loves in my life were so hyper-charged with emotion that I do return to them, I write about them: I mean, my last essay I published was melodramatic and full of teenage angst, and you bet I feared that people would think ‘why isn’t she over that’ before I hit submit. I hope people think that essay is well written, but maybe they don’t, and that’s alright (spongebob breathing meme).
Also, thank god I’m not single because folks it is messy out there for single women in their 30s! So many love affairs I see in my friends end for sad, tragic reasons. Time becomes a threat against our will; months and years of casually figuring it out no longer a privilege we have. I am somehow married which owes to a whole lot of luck and delusional thinking and a little bit of intention but if I were single, what insanity would I be getting up to? I truly don’t want to know lol. And marriage of course brings its own stumbles and fears and unknowns and what ifs. Perhaps theres no escape :)The Matty Healy of it all: last night at 9:04PM my best friend Tori texted me ‘oh no. two songs in and they’re both about Matty.’ Taylor Allison Swift gets absolutely no remorse from me on choosing to date this guy. God, I was so mad in my groupchats seeing her hold his nasty hand!!!! No remorse for herself for that decision either, which is actually the main emotion behind this album IMO. There was this weird phenomenon when rumors about Taylor and Travis Kelce first surfaced— media outlets and a lot of people everywhere offered that she was faking it with Travis, doing it for the PR. Now that this album is out and the world knows that a lot of the songs are about the short-lived (t god) and ill-fated romance with H*aly, this kind of sentiment is back. She dated him just to have something to write about. Maybe this particular comment hits too close to home as a nonfiction writer trying to convince the publishing world to invest in a memoir about me but… The little introduction (I know, it’s annoying she does this but also whatever) to the album makes it clear that dating M*tty was self harm. She admits: It is the worst men that I write best. Maybe she could’ve written this sentiment differently, more… idk, originally? But this is true for me! I have so many poems about some dude (I literally can’t remember his full name and once was convinced he would be my husband) who broke my heart in 2016 before I met Hans. I fear if I did a count there’d be more Google docs about that idiot than about Hans. Sometimes good and (mostly) healthy day-to-day love is hard to write about! And god knows a loss like the one illustrated on loml is insanely hard to write about and get right. How Did it End? feels like a companion song to loml— there’s this ambiguous sense of unknown about what, exactly, went wrong. It’s easier to spurn someone when you can point to something (or multiple things) they did to hurt you. I thank a god I don’t believe in all the time that I am not on the dating scene because my single friends who are women in their 30s? They are not having a good time! Shit is messy! So messy that sometimes you’re back to the first time you ever felt heartbreak wondering how am I here again? They deserve better!!! Rolling Stone’s lovely review had a line I think is apt: ‘So many of these songs are adult Taylor, single again, revisiting the kind of zero-to-60 romantic crash-and-burns she used to cram into a weekend, back in her early albums, but from a new perspective. So there’s a dialogue between her teen and adult selves.’
The white woman problems of it all: I don’t really have much to say here because the criticism is very, very valid. Taylor Swift is a privileged white woman singing about privileged white women problems. She appears to love her jet too much and capitalism too much and I hate all these ‘versions’ of all these albums! Why isn’t Paris on my Midnights vinyl when it’s one of the few TS songs my husband actually LIKES?! Anyway, Taylor grew up well-off and in a seemingly-peaceful home and while I cannot relate I, too, am a white woman with white woman problems.
I will say that when I stood in line at Grove this week for the pop-up that line was varied-by-age-race-gender — a lot of white women, sure, but I think it’s incorrect to assume she doesn’t have an audience elsewhere. She appears to reach a lot of people, idk!The RED Fedora of it all: I can make no excuses for this but I swearrrrr you just had to be on Tumblr then. You just had to be there, drunk in your too-small college town scream-singing 22 after another one of your friends turns 22, laughing as the guys all rolled their eyes even then about Taylor Swift and women enjoying themselves.
Alright, that’s enough. I’ll end with saying that criticism is fine! Enjoy or don’t! Talk about it or don’t! My goal, moving forward, is to avoid the tone that Lauren Oyler has in her takedown attempts of skilled writers (that Jia Tolentino review I will never forgive) because I simply think it’s not good for me. What did feel good was, I have to admit, watching the Eras movie with beloved friends and singing aloud, texting with Tori last night rapid-fire and waking up to Erika and Jenn and Jessey and Amy following up, meeting two girls alone in line like me at The Grove and becoming kinda friends (I’m texting with them right now LOL) (god bless them they asked to see wedding photos and earnestly went through my entire album while we waited, a dream fkn come true for me LOL) listening to Long Live or seven and remembering the possibilities of childhood— those things, embarrassing or not, do give me joy.
My husband watched The Eras movie this week. I fear I owe him a few Zac Snyder movies… one cringe for another, that’s marriage baby.
Here’s my favorite Taylor songs. Take it or leave it, I am so chill either way 8)
And if I don’t get a Taylor Swift Fortnite skin out of this album I quit.
This made me lol and I relate to it so much. I also reeeeeally struggle when friends don’t like something I like — I think it’s (at least partially) bc I think that them not liking it = them thinking it’s bad = them thinking I’m dumb for liking a bad thing? It also contributes to my primary “can’t get over it no matter how hard I try” self-belief that isn’t even true, which is “no one understands me.” Like if I can see the greatness or entertainment value in this thing and they can’t, then they don’t really get me or something. Idk typing it out now it’s all so dramatic lol. But I agree that I want to change this and let people like or not like whatever they want without taking it so weirdly personally!!!! Like their opinions are not some secret coded judgment of me lol they’re just their opinions, IM NOT THE MAIN CHARACTER!! anyway thanks for this and I’m so so with you on the journey 🫡
I love this! I love you!
signed, a fellow Aries <3