But, to pick a similarly influential modern fantasist, you could not do that with Tolkien. You could not write and publish a story that was called “The Cats of Mirkwood,” because the Tolkien estate would not let you do that. You’d have to set your story in not-Mirkwood, where cats do battle with giant spiders which may or may not resemble other giant spiders but nobody owns spiders, right, so….

At that point your story might be good and it might be bad but the one thing it would not be is building on something else. Yet the protectiveness of the Tolkien estate has hardly prevented people from making terrible (if authorized) Tolkien adaptations or naming their companies “Palantir.” It means you have to come up with your own elves. Which is not a terrible thing, inherently. Still, I at least wonder what it would be like if Tolkien’s work was something people could use as a basis for something new rather than something they had to reproduce before they could get started.

Right now, copyright is the main legal protection artists have, in addition to being the way that they can, in theory, get paid for their work. (One of the first actions of SFWA, the Science Fiction Writer’s Association, was to help Tolkien fight pirated versions of his books were being sold in America.)3 But copyright also creates a situation where people have to maintain a legal version of what creation and inspiration “are” that, in my opinion, doesn’t really bear much resemblance to how these things actually work. In actual practice, it’s fine to read a short story and want to write your own version. (Gene Wolfe talks about doing this twice in The Best of Gene Wolfe.)

But if you’re gonna tell people you did that… you have to be careful.

Somebody who really gets screwed over in this talking-out-of-both-sides-of-your-mouth approach to inspiration is Olivia Rodrigo.4 I had written most of this post before her interview with Popcast dropped, in which they ask her about how she feels about being accused of beefing with Taylor over having to give Taylor credits on her song “deja vu.” Olivia gives a truly incredible PR non-answer (“it comes with the territory, it’s par for the course”) which indicates to me that the actual answer is “I feel pretty bad” but that she doesn’t want to talk about it.5

I don’t think there are villains in the Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo “Cruel Summer” credits scenario (previously), though I’d imagine there are or were some pretty hard feelings on Olivia’s side, and, watching that clip, it’s pretty obvious that there are. In a better world, though, it would not be a huge mistake to say in an interview that you set out to mimic the bridge of a song you admire when writing your own bridge in your own song, as Olivia did. However, that’s exactly what you’re not allowed to do.6 And while the fallout for Taylor has been that this credits situation follows her around as the thing people can always bring up to prove she’s a bully, the fallout for Olivia has been a lot worse, because people dissect everything she does to prove she’s a thief. And she doesn’t seem to know how to deal with this except by ignoring it, but ignoring it doesn’t work. She’s not big enough to get away with that move.

I am, personally, not a big fan of Olivia’s music (my thought whenever I hit play on a new single from her is “I am too old for this”), but that doesn’t really matter. If anything, I suspect that this constant narrative of theft makes it harder for her to digest her influences and make them her own.7 She’s too anxious to show her work. So I end up reading comments about how the font she’s using this album cycle is a ripoff of Hole’s Pretty on the Inside, which it is not, or comments about how people don’t understand why Olivia doesn’t have somebody who tells her every time she writes something that kind of sounds like something else. And the obvious answer to that second point is just that you can’t create anything that way.

But another answer is also just that Olivia Rodrigo is not making atonal symphonies, she is making pop music, and a lot of pop music sounds a little bit like something else and borrows widely from other sources. That’s fine… as long as you don’t say it, apparently. In any case, I end up feeling bad for her—not over the original credits scenario, but the way it’s dragged out and out around the rest of her work. It doesn’t really seem fair that she gets punished for being honest in a way everybody else was trained not to be. I would like to not care for her music in peace.

This post is willing me toward an ending that is about “the age of AI” but I don’t really want to think about AI all the time. What I want is a situation where people can be a little more real about inspiration and creativity without forfeiting the things copyright really should protect, like your ownership of your own work. I hate the kind of scarcity mindset that leads to things like authors publicly complaining about library usage, which I’ve seen happen a couple times. There must be a better way, you know? Maybe there isn’t. At any rate I’m not going to solve it here. Instead I am going to make another cup of coffee, a move I stole from Twin Peaks.

Taylor Swift! Interviewed! About her music, not her life! When this interview dropped I was like a dog with the zoomies. Then I got sick which ended up delaying this take by quite a bit. Now we are here.

There’s a lot in this interview. For one thing, there is a major victory for resident swemo when Taylor talks about how emo writing influenced her.1 I also recommend ’s comments on it possibly more than my own post below:

The Other Dave Moore

Working the night shift to learn English

I was all set to write more about LØLØ, the Canadian artist who has been putting out somewhat anonymous but competent pop hits for a few years now, and her new album God Forbid a Girl Spits Out Her Feelings!, which in concept (“what if I just stopped mucking around and made a classic mid-aughts confessional alt-rock album without some…

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a month ago · 2 likes · 5 comments · Dave Moore

Anyway. Taylor mostly focuses on lyrics, which makes sense. One thing she talked about that I personally liked is that in lyrics, how things sound is as important, and sometimes more important, than what they mean. Her example is “talk real slow” from “Our Song,” which should be talk real low. But “talk real low” doesn’t sound as good (and, though she doesn’t say this, it’s more annoying to sing).

Or you know, you can look at a song like “The Prophecy” on TTPD in which she puts a series of whining, shrill “eeee” sounds on the higher notes: plee-EEZE, knee-EEZ. She does “sound like an infant.” Eeeeee.

For me, I think Taylor’s love of and playfulness with language is part of why her songs don’t get old. Even tics of hers that often do not work for me, like her pleasure in juxtaposing old language and classic imagery with new language (“a red rose grew up out of ice frozen ground / with no one around to tweet it”), come from this sense of hers of language as something that can be rearranged over and over, tossed up in the air, without losing something or being degraded. And some of that is made possible because lyrics are not poetry and do not contain the entire meaning of a song.

But… it’s also why I tend to think Max Martin is not a great collaborator for her artistically. Max also is only interested in how words sound but it often feels as if to him they are almost unnecessary. I listen to Showgirl, as an album rather than individual songs, frankly much more than I expected because it turns out it’s a great “put it on and grind through annoying tasks” album. But whenever I get to “Honey” I get… mad would be an overstatement but it just really feels like a wasted opportunity and an unfinished song.2 So much about it is so good but why is it going on and on about people being mean in the bathroom? The Taylor-and-Max collaborations I like best are mostly the ones on reputation, like “Dancing With Our Hands Tied.”

This is a Taylor Swift interview so people are gonna get mad about something; the main thing people have chosen to get mad about3 in this interview is Taylor’s comment that her fanbase is very big now, some of it is extreme in ways she can’t do much about, and some of it engages in “paternity testing” that she doesn’t like. I have seen this last comment referred to as “gaslighting” because Taylor, after all, was the girl who hid secret messages in her album liner notes, so who is she to say that she doesn’t like this now? And so on.

Now whether or not Taylor can change this aspect of her fandom is one thing. (I don’t think she really can.) However…. The last time the liner notes contained references to Taylor’s actual life was in Red (2012, fourteen years ago). The first time she said she did not like paternity tests—her term!—was reputation (2017, nine years ago). She’s been trying to shift this aspect of the fandom for a long time. As has come up in other contexts, like politics, the adoration of Swifties is not a blank check Taylor can cash however and whenever she likes. She can get her fandom to do certain things and she can’t get it to do other things.4 One thing she can’t do is get it to detach from its need to decode songs for secret meanings.5 It’s too much a part of the fandom’s basic character. What was fun when you were a teenager is maybe not so fun when you are in your thirties, but it’s the deal that was struck, whether or not anybody knew the implications at the time. Taylor would probably make it again.

The real change between what Taylor wrote in reputation and what she says in her New York Times interview is that she is now willing to say that the fans are part of her problem. Up until Tortured Poets, it was always “the media” or “the industry,” even if there were moments when she was clearly, unambiguously irritated at the intrusiveness of her fans. Taylor is and remains and probably will continue to be accommodating to people who understand boundaries and want to snap a picture. She likes being famous. Still, if you watch that clip of her briefly losing her temper at TIFF over the yelling about her scarf, you can see that she is realizing that this guy represents a problem. The TIFF interview, coupled with some other acts of Swiftie overreach like “hacking the livestream of a funeral during COVID to get a glimpse of Taylor and Joe,” gets you most of the way to “But Daddy I Love Him” before Matty Healy prompted an open letter from her own fans to stop dating him.

To be clear: Taylor mostly likes her fans, but she is now willing to say she doesn’t like all of them. She used to hang out with her fans online. Now she doesn’t. If she has kids, she will probably pull back even more.

Anyway, though. I’m bringing this up mostly because it gives me an excuse to air my own niche Taylor song reading, which is that “High Infidelity,” a song which is paternity tested by most to be about “cheating on Calvin Harris,” is… probably not about Calvin Harris. I mean, maybe it is, but if you follow the usual fandom assignments of songs to exes, that means Calvin Harris has exactly two songs “about” him. The other one is “I Forgot That You Existed.” To me, that’s crazy. It would be crazy for those to be the only two songs you wrote about somebody.

Per his statement in an interview in 2023, Aaron Dessner and Taylor collaborated on “High Infidelity” (along with “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve”) in 2021; it sounds like it might have been the second song she wrote for Midnights. “High Infidelity” is about being surveilled by a partner who doesn’t really love you, who resents you and regards you as a freeloader on his largesse, who is intrusive and possessive (thus, the first words are “lock broken”), and who keeps trying to force you into a life you don’t want but which fulfills his own wishes. Again, this is “supposed” to be about Calvin Harris.

But if you ask what is the force in Taylor’s life about which she’d say things like:

Storm coming, good husband
Bad omen
Dragged my feet right down the aisle

Or:

Put on your records and regret me
I bent the truth too far tonight….
Put on your headphones and burn my city
Your picket fence is sharp as knives

Or even:

Do you really wanna know where I was April 29th?
Do I really have to chart the constellations in his eyes?

Then I don’t think you can really pin this on an ex-boyfriend. I’ve never gotten the impression from Taylor’s comments in interviews that the big problem with her past romantic relationships is boyfriends who were obsessed with marrying her. She’s said she had boyfriends who did not treat her as a human being and that she’s had boyfriends who expected her to stop writing music. But dragging her down the aisle, no.

So… who does drag Taylor down the aisle? One answer is the media (as identified in “Lavender Haze”). One answer is the fans. That answer has been my preferred answer for a while, but a third and better answer is her old label, in allegedly trying to get her to commit to writing six more albums with Big Machine before selling it. All of these strike me as more likely—also more interesting—sources of the embittered and almost betrayed feelings that fuel the unfaithful narrator of “High Infidelity.”

It’s not that I think there is no chance this could also be alluding to real cheating on a real ex. One of the shifts folklore marked in Taylor’s songwriting was that she began consciously writing songs that are drawing on more than one thing. (To me, this is actually a way bigger shift than the character work she mentions, since she has lots of songs pre-folklore narrated by “characters,” such as “Speak Now.”) Many situations can form the “High Infidelity” stew. But even if you insist that it’s in some direct way autobiographical, the fact is that becoming obsessed with April 29th is just a dead end, and at best the answer to a trivia question. Similarly, in an interview Taylor did on the Showgirl promo circuit, she ended up clarifying that “The Black Dog” is not about a real bar called The Black Dog. She added that nobody knows what the song is about, which struck me as a somewhat extreme way of underlining that point.

But it’s also obvious what the song is about emotionally speaking: it’s about watching somebody move on and hoping that their life sucks without you. Throughout the song Taylor keeps shifting the referent of the “old habit”—the old habit is checking in on her ex’s location, the old habit is her loyalty, but also maybe she is the old habit that dies screaming. She reinforces that and even gives you a “ha / ha / ha”:

do you hate me?
Was it hazing? For a cruel fraternity
I pledged and I still mean it
Old habits die screaming

And so on and so on. I dunno. I’m obviously not a neutral commentator. Watching her talk about writing music with her big hand gestures I just thought man. I love her so much. But, to the extent that that is a statement you can make about someone you’ll never meet or know, I really do. I hope she writes one hundred more albums.

1

wild and unwise

i'm just a notch in your bedpost, but you're just a line in a song

Something kind of funny happened to me this month, which is that I really loved the new Taylor Swift album. This is not unprecedented (Folklore is no-skips; Lover has several skips but is nonetheless dear to my heart), but it’s not the norm, and given the mid-ness of…

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2 years ago · 49 likes · 6 comments · isabel

When you watch Miss Americana, it’s obvious that what you’re getting is not, in some new way, the “real Taylor.”2 I don’t mean it’s false,3 more that “Taylor Swift, the unguarded person” is something only a small group of people experience. In every other part of her life, Taylor already lives like she is on a hot mic. Inviting a camera crew in doesn’t make much of a difference. It’s still the public Taylor, telling the story she wants to tell about her life. I would rather listen to her songs.4 Taylor Swift is never going to be the subject of a documentary that is interesting on its own …

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To my mind, this question is really three questions:

• Should this famous person talk about politics (because they’re people who should be able to participate politically, like everybody else)?

• Should this person talk about politics (because they should feel free to speak their mind)?

• Should this famous person talk about politics (because their fame means they have a lot of influence over events)?

The answer to the first two questions is yes. The answer to the third question is no. If you think famous people should talk, or at least feel free to talk, about politics for reasons of principle, that is one thing. But if it’s a matter of pragmatism, that is a di…

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And I don’t really think that these talking points are getting much purchase. It’s more that there are a lot of them and they keep popping up. But ever since the affair of Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni I have felt a bit suspicious of anything where suddenly a lot of people all seem to dislike a woman for constantly shifting reasons.

So I am just going to say this: I don’t think this reaction is organic. I think somebody is see…

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Celebrities mostly benefit from this exchange, though. It makes them famous and it makes them rich and maybe it makes some of them crazy, but, well, that’s the deal. But there are a few big exceptions. One, naturally, is Taylor Swift.1

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At The Substack Post, I have reviewed a recent album from niche Pennsylvanian indie artist Taylor Swift:

The Substack Post

You wouldn’t be here for someone else

Editor’s note: Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl has dominated charts, airwaves, and social feeds alike—including Substack’s. We asked essayist and critic BDM to make sense of the album and Swift’s singular ability to drive the discourse…

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8 months ago · 10 likes · BDM

tl;dr: My verdict is that The Life of a Showgirl is a fun album, but it’s not a great album. I would rank it with Lover and Midnights. It’s probably one of the only Taylor Swift albums where there’s no song I skip the moment it starts… but there’s not a song I feel compelled to listen to over and over either. Sticking to album cuts: there’s no “London Boy,” but there’s also no “I Think He Knows.” No “Vigilante Shit,” but no “Maroon.”1 Though I also find that while if I like something I tend to continue to like it, stuff I don’t like can change up on me. In general, not just with Taylor.

Other notes: Two old posts, not by me, on Taylor’s use of language that I recommend are “i’m just a notch in your bedpost, but you’re just a line in a song” by isabel and “How You Get the World: Reflections on Taylor Swift, Pt. 5” by Dave Moore. My favorite track is “Elizabeth Taylor,” followed by “Father Figure.” It is sort of funny that what it means for this album to be reputation vol. 2 is that it’s like… “I bet my life looks pretty great to you.… And you know what? It is great. 10/10 life.” I hope all the people who have been saying “she needs to stop working with YES man Jack and start working with NO man Max” since Midnights are feeling a little embarrassed. I always wanted Taylor to write an anxiety-free love song, and now she has, and it’s “Wood.”

There’s a funny musical theater quality to this album that kind of comes in and out of focus for me. The title track, obviously. “Eldest Daughter” feels like the big second act ballad for a musical that doesn’t exist. “CANCELLED!” is like a Disney villain song. Even “Elizabeth Taylor” can feel that way, if delivered in a stripped-down manner:

Finally, I am not on the Taylor Swift “bribing critics” payroll that social media is sure exists but writing this book is expensive so… Taylor… I will stop blogging about you for at least five years for a cool million (post tax). Just PayPal me or something.

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Here we are, at the release day eve of a showgirl. I bought a cheery orange sweater under the assumption that in October it would be cool, in terms of the weather. It is not cool, in terms of the weather, which is also not cool, in the slang sense of being desirable. Now what am I gonna do with this orange sweater, I ask you? This is the only weekend of the year in which it’s legal to wear orange!

As with the TTPD open thread, I am paywalling the comments section so people can feel free to be cringe if they want with a certain level of privacy. If you want to hang but can’t afford to subscribe, reply to this email and I’ll comp you. I’m supposed to review the album elsewhere, so if all goes well that will probably appear next week sometime. (I will post it here in my usual “new writing” fashion.)

As far as Showgirl rollout goes, I’m hoping that Taylor’s appearance on BBC Radio 1 means we’re going to get a new set of Live Lounge appearances. Her prior appearances have been great:1

I’m going to declare this thread a leak-free zone. The album will be out in a few hours and then we’ll all be on the same page, you know? Stuff Taylor herself has done (her various lyric drops) are not leaks and are fair game. But this is my house (metaphorically speaking) and I do not enjoy leaks, so don’t mention them.2

That said, I am interested that Taylor’s approach to leaks this time seems to be more “resignation” than it has been in the past. The cover and some lyrics leaked and… she just acted like it didn’t happen! That’s new. It reminds me a lot of her approach to the Eras livestreams. There was a time (1989-ish?) where if you posted video from a Taylor concert it would get copyright struck. The landscape has changed. But certainly up through TTPD, she cared a lot about leaks, and the release styles of both Midnights and TTPD seemed designed to frustrate people who thought they could listen to the leaks and then check out—sorry, assholes, there’s a whole secret part of the album.3

If I had to guess, people who are really into leaks may just constitute a distinct subset of the audience and they don’t really affect streams or sales or roll-outs that much. But they do generate buzz, so they’re worth tolerating.4

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This started its life as a draft of notes for reputation (taylor’s version) which didn’t happen. A lot of this was written sufficiently long ago that TTPD wasn’t even announced, let alone out, but… I think it’s fine? I went through and tweaked some parts, but the bulk of it I wrote in December 2023 and I wanted to leave it alone where I could. If you do not want to read Taylor Swift posts, you can opt out of this section through your subscriber settings. :)

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In the newest edition of The Lamp, I have a short piece about Sydney Sweeney’s creepy Nazi fans. Is this piece also, in its way, about… Taylor Swift? Yes, obviously:

Meanwhile, the anti-Sweeney in this drama is Taylor Swift. Swift and Sweeney have been pitted against each other by spectators, including Donald Trump: Swift, who represents woke, is no longer hot; Sweeney, anti-woke, is hot. (Out with the old blonde, in with the new.) Like so many statements about both Taylor Swift and Sydney Sweeney, or, for that matter, by Trump, this one has no tether to reality, but it’s how a certain type of person wants things to be. There’s a level of personal betrayal at play here. Swift, who stays out of trouble, avoids politics, doesn’t do drugs, rarely seems out of control, and sings about love, was the crypto-conservative icon of an earlier era. Eventually, it turned out that she was not one of them. Their Brünnhilde was within another ring of fire. Now all their hopes are pinned on Sweeney.

Now, you may, after reading this piece, feeling like coming back here and saying: BDM, isn’t this piece more of a series of jokes at the expense of a bunch of weird losers than it is a piece of “reasoned analysis”? The answer is: first, yes it is and second, doing that was fun.

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Anyway, for brands, there’s Christmas, Black Friday, and Taylor releases.1 These seem to be the only common points of culture left.2 One post is fun, three posts are fun. Any individual post is a person having a good time. An avalanche of posts is something else and I find myself experiencing them both as “very fun” (as a person whose attention is being directly courted) and as “very annoying.”

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If you don’t care about Taylor, well, you were warned:

I think she’ll be unveiling the cover tomorrow but this thread will still exist tomorrow, for discussion purposes.

I’m going to be logged off for a few hours so, some rules: 1) be nice 2) you can reference leaks if you want but say you are doing so, since sometimes leaks are 100% wrong.

If you’re asking yourself, “why do this now? Why not wait?” it’s a good question. The answer is made me.

Stay beautiful,

BDM

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And Taylor’s statement is good. As always, she knows how to treat the reader like a peer instead of somebody who is beneath her; so she says, I did my research and here’s my conclusion, but you should do your research and come to yours (and make sure you’re registered to vote). It’s a message addressed from one adult to other adults. And it puts the emphasis where Taylor really does have a lot of influence—driving up voter registration.

All of this basically fits with what I already thought would happen when she eventually endorsed. It doesn’t mean she can hand the electi…

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At The Times, A Pet Peeve: Celebrity political endorsements don’t matter. They just don’t. They don’t win elections. They don’t change people’s minds! And that is because the relationship we have with celebrities is… an entirely different category of relationship than the one we have with politicians:

The fact that so much celebrity wattage produces so little social change might be at least in part because celebrities exist for us as aspirational figures, not practical ones. I might try Jane Fonda’s aerobics program because I envy her physique or join Reese Witherspoon’s book club because it will make me feel like we’re friends. But political candidates are ultimately public servants. They work for us; we’re not their fans, we’re their employers.…

[Celebrity] voices, in practical terms, should count for just as much or as little as any other individual’s voice. We shouldn’t look to them to solve politics for the rest of us — and it’s for th…

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I mentioned on Notes that I was reading Alfred Habegger’s My Wars Are Laid Away In Books, an immense and comprehensive1 biography of Emily Dickinson. Anyway, I’m done with the book now.

Perhaps predictably, I found myself thinking a lot about Taylor Swift while reading it, mostly because this paragraph in Habegger’s introduction struck a chord:

One of the reasons readers at all levels respond to her with passionate enthusiasm is that, knowing something of her life and character, they approach her work with these in mind. Again and again, readers feel that, remote and difficult as she is, they are on the track of knowing her. They feel a heartbeat; they receive the words as primal and immediate, as coming straight from life. Sadly, this way of reading is generally a mistake, especially if we succumb to the illusion that we can zoom into her life and penetrate her secret being. One of Dickinson’s paradoxes is that she both invites and deflects such intimacy. …

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