There’s a raging scandal going on regarding Taylor Swift’s latest album. A significant portion of the population thinks Swift is some sort of an intellectual and is emotionally invested into her lyrics. Which, I know, but most people have the intelligence of a fruit fly, so Swift’s lyrics sound profound to them.
In any case, Swift wrote a song in which she expressed a desire to have kids with her fiance. And now overripe but unplucked fans are throwing the most entertaining tantrums. Here’s one example:
The ones on TikTok and Instagram are funnier but I can’t link those.
Of course, I understand why these fans feel betrayed. Swift exploited their loneliness to project the image of being a lonely, rejected female, just like they are. Then she took the money fans gave her and invested it into looking marriageable at 35. She can also finance all sorts of reproductive technologies for herself. Of course, all the women who listened to her and thought, “see? There’s nothing wrong with being single and unmarried at 35, if the biggest pop star in the world is doing it” feel like dupes.
Don’t get married if you don’t want to but don’t trawl through song lyrics in search of validation. Taylor Swift isn’t a receptionist who validates your life success ticket. Enjoy the music but don’t turn an artist into your idol. The
Clarissa's Blog 
It was the 1980s (gosh! it feels like a century ago but it was only forty years in fact) and I was young and miserable. Young people turned to all sorts of music at the time – and to other not so legal types of comfort, if you get my gist – and l, like hundreds of thousands of unhappy teenagers throughout the world found relief and comfort in the music of The Smiths, particularly in the lyrics by the lead singer, Morrissey, “miserabilist” par excellence. It was five or six years only, the most miserable and the most intense of my life, but in Morrissey I had found a guru, a fellow sufferer in existential angst and an inspiration which made the pain of living bearable.
I grew up, grew into wisdom and hope, and learnt to deal with life, as one does. Morrissey left his band to embark on a not so promising, at first, soloist career which turned him into a millionaire, bought a grand house in California, became quite ripped physically and found love. You cannot imagine how many of his fans felt betrayed: they could no longer wallow in collective misery with someone who had actually left the miserabilist lifestyle behind in order to enjoy personal happiness and financial success.
Moral of the story for the young and the not so young: don’t follow your fantasies, get a life instead!
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That’s a great story, and the moral is exactly the one I’m trying to transmit with this post. I see people online all the time who think they know Swift’s feelings and her life because they heard her songs. Such low culture is theirs that they don’t see the distance between the author and her work.
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“found relief and comfort in the music of The Smiths”
I wasn’t so unhappy then but I loved the early Smiths. How Soon is Now is peak 80s music top 5 for the decade.
But Morrissey by himself was a bit like a turkducken…. misery stuffed into in self-righteousness stuffed into self pity stuffed into self-absorption….
At my worse times I also found relief in music, but I cant’ think of any musician that I had a para-social relationship with… As much as I liked their public personas I never really thought that that was real. I took what helped me, hoped that maybe they weren’t absolute monsters in real life but never invested more than that….
They say ‘never meet your heroes’ and I’m fine with that.
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I feel so relieved that all my adolescent artist obsessions were with dead people. They’ll never betray you like that 😉
-ethyl
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Mozart never lets you down…
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Also wrote the very best music for when you are angry at your mom…
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-ethyl
Mozart wasn’t my top-tier teenage obsession, but he was definitely on the roster 😉
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