Taylor Swift - Midnights

i'm really just delighted that she's discovered the idea of consistency with these last 3 albums, after how all-over the place her albums had been for ages

Xp it's not tall girl angst, it's fatphobia masquerading as ED commentary. The music video makes it explicit. Pretty disappointing.

Haven't seen the video yet, but I do not really see the "fatphobia" reading. Earlier this month she was talking about how this song addressed her life as being "unmanageably sized":

💬 | “I struggle a lot with the idea that my life has become unmanageably sized […] the idea of not feeling like a person. Don’t feel bad for me, you don’t need to. This song is a real guided tour through all the things I hate about myself.” — Taylor Swift on Track 3 Anti-Hero pic.twitter.com/f1DzHpdBA2

— Taylor Swift News 🕰️ (@TSwiftNZ) October 3, 2022

Yeah well I'd watch the video...

i watched the video and you’re gonna have to hold my hand and explain bc it just registered to me as… tall girl angst

i don't think the scene of her as a giant is fatphobia or that she mishandled the pretty banal ED commentary?

there's layers of too tall/too fat/too famous and she's addressing all of them

I mean, the scales reading 'fat'... Pretty explicit. Basically as a straight sized person she's saying one of her deepest fears is getting fat. That's not ok even as ED commentary. Fat liberation fans of Taylor are pissed...

https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSRsqCAtm/

the video is pretty directly saying that obsessing over her weight is unhealthy?

It's the framing of it. Read the tiktok comments, so many people saying "her biggest fear is looking like me". She's upset a lot of fat fans. I don't think we should dismiss minority perspectives, from the very people this type of discourse affects.

the bass on this album is v deep and rich. the drums dont hit, though.

I dunno this feels like when cis people cisplain something isn't transphobic... When trans people are saying it is.

If fat people say it's fatphobic, I'm going to believe them.

i mean you know nothing about my weight but just falling back on 'we should listen to __ identity!' can get pretty silly because you can find people from any minority with weird unreasonable opinions about what is and isn't offensive to them and cherry-pick them to bolster whatever you want

i'm reading it as pretty clearly as yes, she has internal struggles around her weight, but the whole point is she's saying that it's an unhealthy mindset to be in! it's not endorsing the fear and you haven't put forward any argument that it is

"Read the tiktok comments"
this is not something someone should ever do under any circumstances if they want to preserve their sanity and feelings of goodwill toward humanity

like i'm happy to listen to a more detailed critique but "read the tiktok comments" is not that, yeah

Much of the Miss Americana doco dwelt pretty frankly on Taylor’s very unhealthy eating disorder issues. It’s somewhat reductive to equate her ED with fatphobia.

Yeah it's not the best argument but explaining this shit is tiring. I've said my piece and you're welcome to do your own reading around how the way we talk about EDs is often fatphobic. But I'm not going to put a bunch of energy into explaining something that will mostly be dismissed anyway. Guess we're not there yet with fat liberation.

I'll see if I can find a good article or something. Sorry I can't be more erudite right now.

As someone who's about 60 lbs overweight, I wanna say that anyone on TikTok getting all blustery about Taylor being possibly fatphobic can stfu. You don't speak for every fat person, damn.

regardless of the merits of the scales scene i don't think it means that my interpretation of the song & video were wrong when they were about a different scene that also relates to the same lyric that she's clearly layering with multiple meanings.

i'm happy to believe the scales scene could be bad, but i just haven't seen a good explanation - taking it as an endorsement of fat = bad just seems particularly uncharitable to me. in my experience it is very good to get a proper understanding of what the argument is rather than relying on some vague comments on tiktok or wherever as an article of faith.

I read the scale thing as just a pretty straightforward depiction of an eating disorder, which she's talked about before. If it's fatphobic to depict someone with an eating disorder seeing herself as fat regardless of the number on the scale, then I don't know how you can simultaneously avoid fatphobia and normalize talking about & getting help for eating disorders.

The depiction of herself as huge - a kind of overgrown Alice in Wonderland who never finds a bottle that makes her shrink - read to me as insecurity about the sheer amount of space she takes up, both as a celebrity and as someone whose favorite aesthetic is middle-class cozy family life but whose actual desires and ambitions are too outsize for her to ever fit comfortably into that life. And I think there's a suggestion of clumsiness, too, that she knows that her gestures are too big, that she tries too hard, that she can telegraph her meanings and crush her enemies but she can't do subtlety.

I'm about halfway through the album and so far I'm underwhelmed and finding it all a bit samey, but I do really like Anti-Hero and the video. I really enjoy her comic acting these days, esp. the scene with Messy Taylor giving a lecture headed Everyone Will Betray You as normal Taylor nods along and takes notes.

It was neat to see Mary Elizabeth Ellis in the video, an actress I enjoy… I saw her at a Pavement show recently! (she ended up posting it on Instagram, so I’m not betraying any secrets here... turns out she’s a big Pave fan)

xp that's a great description, and this part:

someone whose favorite aesthetic is middle-class cozy family life but whose actual desires and ambitions are too outsize for her to ever fit comfortably into that life

I thought Mary Elizabeth Ellis was Kaitlin Olson at first

Sweet Nothing is a youth lagoon song, and I hate it

One way to think about this album: Evermore was perhaps not just the peak (so far) of “storytelling” Taylor, but also the album whose songs most frequently and deliberately zoomed out in terms of their sense of time and space: so many songs which have a clear sense of past, presence and future, the last of these often imagined by the main character (e.g. “so I’ll go back to LA and my so-called friends who’ll write books about me if I ever make it”). If the songs’ narrators seem like some of Taylor’s wisest, that’s in part because they’re often some of her most omniscient.

By comparison, Midnight’s songs feel very now-situated: even when they refer to past events, they typically remain locked within the mindset and perspectives of the protagonist’s current moment. So even if not all of the songs feel literally tied to or obviously set in middle-of-the-night scenarios, they’re almost all consistent with the kind of “piecing together” of events and impressions and conclusions we might engage in at that time.

The tension between “what I knew then” / “what I know now” has always been an important recurring motif of Taylor’s songwriting and in particular a large chunk of her best songs (think “Tim McGraw”, “Fifteen”, “The Best Day”, “Back To December”, “Dear John”, “Last Kiss”, “All Too Well”, “Holy Ground”…. etc. etc.).

So it’s perhaps not surprising that she has now made a quasi-concept album whose concept is basically “what I think I know right now”.

only my first listen but i think i love this

side thought bc i have been in a sylvia plath rabbit hole for about a month or two revisiting her poetry in particular and i only mention that to say that the act of “mining” one’s self and everything connected to experience is never easy for anyone to do once, or a few times, let alone repeatedly let alone that it becomes a career
she keeps crafting these beautifully phrased expressions of her own love/sadness/discomfort & i really feel that idea of mining here in this album & the work/craft of that

anyway. antihero & mastermind are def repeaters for me immediately. oh and maroon. holy shit.

I’m finding this a little…er…monotonous, particularly the plodding midsection. “Vigilante Shit” is the diabolical nadir, featuring the kind of corny writing that I thought she had managed to shed with the -more albums; that said, “Karma” can probably be characterised as equally corny but I’m charmed by the punchier cadences; it’s one of the few songs on the album with any zip or vim.

At the moment for me it sits alongside reputation and Lover- nothing quite so grim as “Me!”, but lacking a standout like “delicate”, “new year’s day” or “False God”. Certainly I think it’s well below the Fearless-1989 run or anything she put out in 2020.

"sweet like hon-nay" in karma is the most memorable moment

The 3am tracks are a pretty weak batch, IMO

This album bums me out… maybe I was too jazzed up, because Evermore is one of my favorite albums of the past, I dunno, 10 years… but I def. wasn’t expecting it to be followed by what feels like the weakest Taylor Swift album (even the debut and Speak Now, neither of which I rate very highly, each have higher highs than anything here).

I was hoping I’d like it more as I returned to it, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, oh well

two more listens and I think it's fine. better than lover and reputation, doesn't touch folklore or evermore, 1989 feels like a special case that is unfair to compare to. I'm not a fan of anything much earlier tbh.

This one just feels like something I’d listen as a whole more so than her previous pop albums, which I always end up skipping tracks of.

yeah which is why i'm baffled by people saying it's her worst

i don't think it's as good as folklore but it's very solid, the only misstep is "vigilante shit" which is nowhere near as bad as the worst of lover and reputation

agree

yeah which is why i'm baffled by people saying it's her worst

It's simple: I skip more tracks than any of hers in years, therefore it's her worst.

yeah i just don't know what on here is more skippable than large chunks of lover & reputation

I wasn't mad about them either, but Lover has tracks I adore to death.

Much like her last two albums, I like this one & see her mainly as just a really strong singer songwriter, into the more stripped back approach on these last few albums, was never really a fan until these three projects. Don’t really like when she tries to wrestle w the production and structures of Pop qua Pop/ making Anthems on Lover/reputation

Agree too. But also I like this Vigilante song.

I wish you could actually hear Lana in Snow in the Beach.

I keep hearing "I don't dress for women/ I don't dress for men" in the voice of current-era Bob Dylan.

like the good songs on lover, this album is just fairly normal swift songs with synth-pop arrangements rather than trying to awkwardly force herself to be some weird idea of a popstar

antonoff has been the best of her pop collaborators but i hope she finds someone interesting to work with in the future because he's not the most inspired as a pop producer & i don't think swift brings a whole lot to the table in terms of real vision for the arrangements either. i did like his work on folklore though, i think that played to his strengths more, so a whole album of singer-songwriter swift produced by antonoff would be very welcome.

Given the similarities between this and the moodier tracks on Lover, I revisited that album, and feel like Midnights generally is at least as good as the best of those tracks? I suspect at the time stuff like “Cornelia Street” and “False God” (both great tracks mind) was boosted by being surrounded by tunes like “London Boy”.

Agreed though that Midnights probably exhausts the possibilities of working with Antonoff (though “August” had suggested they could produce a really nice burnished pop-rock album if they wanted), and it’s funny how the Dessner arrangement on “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve” (nb. Is this a naming mistake? Feels like this song and “The Great War” should swap titles”) feels like it pops just due to its novelty - in much the same way that “Gold Rush” did on Evermore (interesting thought experiment: would “Gold Rush” stand out if it was on this album? Perhaps not?).

idk i think "cornelia street" and "false god" would still be highlights on this but there'd be far less of a gap

Breihan alludes to "Cornelia Street (a song I like) in his review too:

https://www.stereogum.com/2203504/taylor-swift-midnights-review/reviews/premature-evaluation/

this album doesn’t really sound like chvrches to me lol, maybe “anti-hero” does?

It doesn't sound like Chvrches at all. For one, Chvrches have more forward momentum than this album (and I'm no Chvrches fan).

Funny, I mentioned to my daughter the other day that some people were comparing it to Chvrches (who she didn't know). She didn't seem interested, but told me this morning she actually gave Chvrches a listen and didn't hear the comparison at all, other than in a general (and I paraphrase) "pop songs doing pop things" sense.

Surprised to find I'm much less interested in this than I was in evermore/folklore. It just sounds kind of .... tasteful. Contra many on this board I do like "Vigilante Shit," it has a little more snap to it.

the breihan review made interesting points but it was hard to get into it after that very clearly, flat out wrong assertion that begins and frames it

xps

Bejeweled and Karma sound a bit like chvrches

Karma is a cat purring in my lap 'cause it loves me