I hate Taylor Swift I hate Taylor Swift I h-

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hello!

Hi!

I have a book recommendation. I realise what I’m about to say may sound like a big claim but I reckon I can back it up. Behold! I have found the perfect holiday read. I do mean that quite literally - I was walking around my neighbourhood the other day and someone had left a pile of books on their stoop so I went to have a look and that is where I found it. Street books are the best books.

Anyway - the Perfect Holiday Read in question is Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero. It is, essentially, a pastiche of the “group of children meet up on holiday, form a detectives club and fight some big monsters who turn out to be local creeps” genre, but for adults. In this case, the child detectives have grown up and have to get back together to solve one last mystery.

It is very silly but not stupid - written very vividly and, despite the frequent winks at cliches of the genre, takes itself quite seriously. It is enormously fun. Oh, and there’s a dog. And lesbians. What more could you possibly need from a book, especially while on a beach or similar! Or you could just read it in your day-to-day life. That’s what I did. I still found it highly enjoyable. I would recommend doing that also.

On a completely different note - I went to the Neue Galerie the other week, in order to look at some Schiele paintings, for my mental health, and was annoyed that they only had one big Schiele up there. I went home and did some googling and, quite randomly, stumbled upon this review of their big Schiele show from 2005.

I am willing to accept that not everyone may be interested in a random review of a 20-year-old show but I found it nicely written and quite thought provoking, on the broader works of Egon Schiele, and how we choose to frame artists, their lives and their art. Maybe you will be interested in it too!

A rule we should all abide by

A column

Do you know what the worst thing is about hating Taylor Swift? It is that hating Taylor Swift is boring, and I know that it’s boring, and I’m having no real fun hating her, but I still can’t stop myself from doing it.

She became famous at some point and never really felt like my kind of gal so I let her do her thing in the background for a while, then for about a year I sincerely tried to like her music because somehow all my friends liked her music, and I realised that I just couldn’t do it.

It was roughly at this point - I want to say 2016? or maybe 2017? - that she really went stratospheric, just completely impossible to ignore if you spent any time out in the world or on the internet. It really wasn’t fun.

For a few more years after that I tried to keep my dislike of her as passive as possible, in the same way that you can not love beetroot but eat a few bites of it if it happens to be on your plate, but when the last album came out I had to come to terms with the fact that it was impossible.

If I put some beetroot in my mouth it will make me choke and gag until I spit it back out - true story! - and I loathe Taylor Swift with every fibre of my being. I don’t think she should die, because I am not a monster, but I certainly believe that the world would be a better place for me specifically if she could decide to retire forever, and never sing again. 

Does she ride horses? She strikes me as someone who does. Maybe she could do that. Buy some form of ranch and spend the next few decades of her life sleeping on a mattress made of hundred dollar bills, and be generically whimsical in some fancy stables. I would enjoy that a lot.

You see the problem, as far as I’m concerned, is that she’s not even compelling enough to enjoyably despise. There are people out there in the world whom I loathe, and that loathing brings me great pleasure. It feels layered, fulfilling; the sort of hatred that makes you feel like a richer person. Life-affirming hatred. 

I don’t have any of that with Taylor Swift, because my main criticism of her is that I find her very, very, very dull, and I just don’t see the appeal. I don’t love, say, Adele’s music, but I understand why she is beloved. She’s got a real voice and real charisma and she seems fun, you know? I’m not convinced we’d get along particularly well, because we don’t seem to have a ton in common, but I reckon she’d be really fun on a night out with other people.

Swift, on the other hand, just strikes me as fundamentally bland. She’s a tall blonde woman who loves cats and her female friends and who dates men and sometimes she breaks up with them and sometimes they break up with her. That is, as far as I can tell, the gist of it. 

Of course, human experience doesn’t need to always be riveting to be turned into great art. There would be little great art in the world otherwise. Clever and talented people can and often do take the mundane and make it sublime, and that is what makes them special. I recently spent five full minutes staring at a painting Vincent Van Gogh made of his shoes, so I can really vouch for that.

The only trouble here is that Taylor Swift does not, in my opinion, take all that trash and turn it into treasure. I’ve googled her lyrics before, in yet another futile attempt to convince myself that I was somehow missing something, and I really don’t believe I am. I have the page for the implausibly long version of “All Too Well” currently open in another tab and:

“We're singing in the car, getting lost upstate

Autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place”

“And you call me up again just to break me like a promise

So casually cruel in the name of being honest

I'm a crumpled up piece of paper lying here

'Cause I remember it all, all, all

Too well”

No! These are not Van Gogh’s shoes! And listen, it’s not even fun either. I love a stupid pop song! Rihanna is wonderful, for example. Her lasciviousness is so bouncy and infectious. I adore Lady Gaga, even if she occasionally tries way too hard. That’s actually why I find her endearing, I think - there’s something really human and good about even a global pop star occasionally going “hehehe look at me! I’m so quirky, I am!”

I also imagine it must be pretty fun to hate Lady Gaga, because you can look at whatever she’s up to and sigh and think “oh here we go, ol’ Germanotta is being a kook again”. She’s giving you ammunition, and that’s useful when you’re trying to be a hater.

I’ve got no real weapons in my fight against Taylor Swift because she’s not given me any. That’s the whole problem. She’s that girl in school who’s both pretty and seemingly, genuinely nice, and everyone loves her even though she’s never said anything of interest in her life, ever, and so you’re just stuck there sulking and wondering what you’re missing. It’s not enjoyable!

Still, despite everything, I can’t help it. She just strikes me as the lowest common denominator, and the surest sign that the internet lost itself when it discovered the concept of “relatability”. Have you, at one point or another, dated someone who was somewhat subpar and felt ambiguous feelings about them? Great! Then there’ll be something for you in Swift’s songs. There’ll be something for you and for literally every single adult currently alive on the planet. Tremendous.

Can’t we aim a bit higher than that? I like to think that we could, and sometimes we definitely do, as Beyoncé keeps showing us. A whole lot of people who didn’t think they liked country music started liking country music last month; I was never one for club anthems but now know every beat and word on Renaissance. Her pop music forces us to shift away from our comfort zone - it seeks to convince us that our horizons are wider than we’d thought. That’s a commendable effort.

Could the same be said of Swift’s so-called “eras”, which can only really be understood as distinct by people whose dedication to defend her would put some cult members to shame? And I mean listen, there’s no shame in occasionally needing an auditory comfort blanket. I once had a run of lousy dates with a guy I really liked and in response I listened to nothing but Natasha Bedingfield’s Pocketful of Sunshine for a full week. It brought me close to insanity but it’s what I needed at the time.

It’s fine to feel mournful about past relationships and need to sometimes crank up some insipid but warm little songs because they make you feel better. What I just cannot abide is this strength of feeling, and this insistence that she is a genius and the biggest popstar of the decade, maybe the century. What does that say about us, and our needs, and what we expect from our popular culture?

If adults are mocked for their Marvel obsession then they should be mocked for loving Taylor Swift as well. The recipes are the same, and they both encourage a stunting of emotional growth that should be frowned upon. That she is so universally beloved should make us all pause and wonder where we are headed, and how we are feeling about it.

Or maybe I’m being humourless! That is a distinct possibility. Maybe I just don’t get it, because I never got the popular blondes at school so it would be weird for me to start getting them now. Maybe not everything is for everyone, and she is for most people but I’m in that small, forgotten minority and I’m feeling left out, and it blows. 

I do really think she’s fucking boring though, and that’s the worst thing you can possibly be, in my book. It’s a lot more fun to hate other people, and I mean that’s the problem right? I just can’t find a single fun angle to her, love or hate, and now she has this new album out and it’s going to be all that everyone is going to be talking about.

Oh and while I’m still here - an album called The Tortured Poets Department? My good woman, you are 34 years old. Have some dignity. Just grow up.