All is chaos—usually the monthly digest would go out today—but instead you have this and the June digest goes out in July. All the clocks are broken, as Auden said I think, about death but also he would have said it about my normal schedule.
I woke up the other day to an email from an editor at the Guardian asking if I wanted to write about Taylor Swift’s wedding. My initial response was “hell no,” because I don’t write about Taylor’s real life. But then I had some coffee and opened the email and read it past the subject line and discovered what the editor wanted was something about the way Taylor has depicted love and marriage over the years. That’s my line, so I was thrilled to be asked and very happy to write the piece. Here it is:
Swift’s narrators and heroines, faced with story-ending domesticity, inevitably run, even if they don’t really know why. “Sometimes you just don’t know the answer ’til someone’s on his knees and asks you,” broods the narrator of her 2020 track Champagne Problems. She imagines her jilted lover’s family and friends telling him “what a shame she’s fucked in the head”, and it doesn’t seem as if she really disagrees with that assessment. She just knows that she couldn’t say yes. At the same time, the permanent bond of marriage is something that runs through her songs as a real goal: from early tracks such as Mary’s Song (2006), to the lover you can trust “like a brother” in Call It What You Want (2017), to the multiple proposals of and allusions to marriage on her 2019 album Lover. These would represent a kind of domesticity in which no story ends, you have simply entered a new chapter.
You can read it here.
Now you may think, if you click through and continue to read: was this piece sort of kind of an excuse to write about The Tortured Poets Department? Well. Yes.1
Not to be a bit of an annoying person—BUT—the sheer amount of investigative energy that’s been dedicated toward figuring out where Taylor’s wedding is and when it is baffles me. Unless you’re invited, what is the point of knowing this info? And if you are invited, then like… you don’t gotta check TMZ. Trying to crack the secrets of her wedding in advance… what’s the point? A real case of “could this energy be directed toward something that actually matters.” Like here’s CBS parked out filming trucks pulling out stuff they can’t even see because all of it’s covered.
It also kind of annoys me because this is the way in which Taylor’s “overexposure” actually works—through other people grilling random celebs about Taylor on the red carpet, or aggressive speculation about the wedding and the wedding date and the wedding venue and the wedding guests. The cumulative effect of this stuff is to make people feel tired of Taylor Swift, but… all these places could just not cover the wedding until it happens and there’s stuff to know.
Since it’s possible that this newsletter will get a bit more visibility than is usual over here at BDM Industries, I wanted to mention some artists I like or have recently listened to who are not only smaller than Taylor (which is true of 99.99% of artists) but (with one exception) simply small. I don’t write about music here because… I don’t like writing about music. So this is my way of paying the “I like and write about the most popular of the popular stuff” tax that I think it behooves me (and all lovers of popular stuff) to pay now and then. I would not claim to have “good taste in music.” It’s probably more accurate to say that I have “no taste in music,” that is, it’s not even bad taste. Still, I can probably say I have “my taste in music.”2
For convenience, the songs below are also in this Spotify playlist, which you should feel free to transfer to your preferred music service. I did make an Apple Music version, which is slightly different (one artist is exclusive to Apple). I wanted to keep this post under the email limit, so you’ll see more songs and artists in the playlists. The yardstick I came up with for “small” was “didn’t have over a million monthly Spotify listeners when I added them”—I don’t know if that’s really the best measure, as at least one artist in the playlists is very successful in her niche, but it’s what I am using.
OK.… First up Davia, who I’ve mentioned before (here), and who has a new song out.
However, for any visiting Swifties: you might like this song about Sylvia Plath.
Leyla Ebrahimi wasn’t on my radar until Dave Moore mentioned her recently. Unlike me, Dave Moore actually has knowledge of music, so you should subscribe to him if you like getting playlists of new stuff. I really like her! She’d be a great opener for The Life of a Cowgirl or whatever the next Taylor tour is gonna be called.
Then there’s a group from Essex called AlicebanD that actually have a track in my top ten “most played of all time” on Spotify.
I love, love, love Hatchie. I own all her albums on vinyl! She’s so good. I keep trying to get friends aboard the Hatchie train but nobody really trusts my taste in music so I’m not having a lot of luck. (Hatchie has a cute, shoegaze-y cover of “August.” I’m not a member of Hatchie’s Patreon, but I think she posts more covers there.)
Ravyn Lenae’s not a “small artist” in comparison to everybody else here. However, I am looking forward to her new album (and even pre-ordered it), but will not be writing about it, so… I’m gonna mention her too. I have loved every pre-release single.
OK, that’s all from me. You know the rules for the comments: be nice, stick to the art, and as far as wedding location rumors go, Fran speaks for me.
For people who are new here, I’m aware there are a lot of people currently coming around to idea that The Tortured Poets Department is good in ways that involve denying anybody ever thought it was bad. Let the record show I am not one of these people. My first reaction post is kind of all over the place but my only real regret is I made a lot of concessions to people thinking it was bad. Those people were wrong! I was right! BDM Industries and its friends were right!!
I have also written a bit about Taylor and love:
Some of those are paywalled and some of them aren’t. And here is my review of Showgirl, not paywalled.
Here’s my attempt to demonstrate the spread of my taste.
too many people complaining about Swift maybe getting married at MSG because of the Nazi rally; not enough people wondering what it means for Swift to get married at Billy Joel's residency hall
i was literally JUST texting with a friend yesterday about how history will only continue to vindicate us, the wise, the proud, the day 1 TTPD warriors... but also i loved your piece! the romanticization of fraught, difficult love is a really under-discussed thread in discography (i feel like literally because she wore some white dresses said the word "fairy tale" once or twice and people struggle to hold multiple things in their brains especially where a woman is concerned...). even in songs where the love itself is portrayed as easy, it's often written that way as a contrast to the world/herself (e.g. call it what you want - well really this is like the thesis of rep lol; sweet nothing is another good example).
one thing i've noticed among swifties who really love showgirl is that a lot of what interests them about the album is the contrast between how she writes about love there and how she's written about it before... because many of them are very invested in the story of taylor's life they're interested, for example, in the contrast between cornelia street and elizabeth taylor, which are sort of thematically similar on the surface (please don't leave me, new lover i love so much) but with very different stakes (i'd never walk cornelia street again vs. i can't have fun if i can't have you). in a way i've almost come to think that for all the UNJUST!!!!! accusations of ttpd being excessively lore-reliant, showgirl, which seems less gossipy on the surface, is actually kind of a lore-dependent album because much of the depth you can bring to it relies on thinking about it in context of taylor's discography and her whole Deal, which i honestly do get but for me as a listener is a lot of work for songs i think are, as songs, generally Just Okay.