Reaction Shots: Look What You Made Her Do
Plus a review of Decision To Leave and the Noah Berlatsky Award for Terrible Take
Taylor Swift’s Silence on Her Political Trajectory in 2017 is Deafening
Taylor Swift is perhaps one of the biggest pop stars of our time, but one should give credit to her for being incredibly diverse in her music. Her career has gone through many phases, starting out as a young country idol who wrote plaintive songs about being in love, rapidly becoming its genre’s most shining star. Then she shifted over to pop in 2012 with Red and fully embraced it in her subsequent album 1989 two years later. In recent years, her work centred more on indie and folk rock, collaborating with The National’s Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver. Now with her latest album Midnights, it seems like she is going back to pop again and it has scored her more critical plaudits. Swift will continue to remain unstoppable for a long time if she switches her sound again, as well as strengthen her ownership of her catalogue.
But her career has experienced a dent in quality with an album called Reputation. Released in 2017, it marketed itself as a rebellious middle finger to her haters. It received critically middling reviews for being aimless and needlessly angry. One person being called out was Katy Perry, even though that rivalry has played out during those years as a marketing tool. In this newsletter, that’s not what I’m interested in. The hater that I’m interested in particular was the journalists who believed that Taylor Swift was an implicit Trump supporter, or worse, an avatar to the Alt-Right.
This notion was bizarre, even when you take a surface-level glance at her politics. A year after Reputation’s release, she supported a Democratic candidate against Marsha Blackburn, following the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, to which she called her voting record to be “appalling and terrifying”. She called herself a feminist when she was named Woman of the Year by the woman-respecting Maxim. in the wake of the overturning of Roe V Wade, Swift has been vocal about her stances on abortion, which are pro-choice, in the wake of the overturning of Roe V Wade. But there was a time when critics believed that the notoriously apolitical country-pop star was the Enemy of the People. And it says more about how those people approached art during the Trump era than about her work.
So why did some journalists make this case? Swift and the music critics that talk about her have a strange relationship. As the concept of poptimism came into the foray, which is that pop artists are to be given the same critical evaluation as your average emerging act, writers often confused the two for standing on the same pedestal. Therefore, Swift was seen as a cultural underdog, rather than an established artist that has just merged with the genre, rather than complementing it. But then, she turned into a villain as soon as Kanye West gave her a shoutout on his song Famous. She strongly objected to the inclusion, until it turned out that she actually gave him the go-ahead to do so.
2016 was a weird time for American politics, to put it mildly. I won’t go into an outline of what happened, because everyone knows the events. But Taylor Swift was dragged into the conversation when outlets like NPR and Vice reported on worship from white supremacist fans. I will spare you some of the narcissism of that sect, which involves The Daily Stormer and Milo Yiannopoulos, who was once an irrelevant star of the conservative movement before being outed as a nonce-enabler. However, I would mention Milo’s rationalisation was at least useful in understanding the backlash, which was that her quiet nature and being bred in an instinctively conservative environment played a significant part in the appeal.
Since then, the biggest (and baffling) controversy that surrounded her happens to be based on her supposed racism. Her music video for Wildest Dreams was alleged by NPR for playing ignorance of the colonialist backdrop in Wildest Dreams (I would say that the worst thing about that song was that it heavily resembles Without You by Lana Del Rey). Then there was a feud between her and Nicki Minaj when she went on a Twitter rant about Anaconda not being nominated for a VMA, and Swift tries to calm the discussion down by saying it was more about women, not the colour of her skin. The critical goodwill that she got from her 1989 album (to which a Stereogum writer once commented Taylor Swift > music at that time) was sometimes withered by her awkward judgements.
As we entered the end of 2016, many journalists and critics were aware that the pop culture we consume won’t be the same. Following Donald Trump’s victory, these people became hyper-alert to anything that hasn’t put that event into context, or when it did, these circumstances are considered to be covered incorrectly. Swift became a target because people thought she was big enough to make a statement that complements the accepted wisdom of the entertainment industry. The phrase “Taylor Swift's Silence on Donald Trump Is Deafening” became a meme. By earnestly taking white nationalist theories for granted, journalists like Amy Zimmerman of The Daily Beast took the beat very seriously, while critics took it upon themselves to force their political beliefs and their cultural presumptions of 2017 in their reviews of Reputation. Five years later Consequence and then memory holed their negative review around to give it the “actually it was good, and people misjudged it for no good reason” treatment. So much for treating your freelance writers with dignity.
By far the worst write-up of this was from Vulture’s Mark Harris, who reviewed the album’s lead single Look What You Made Me Do, which is designed to be a diss track and a statement of her reclaiming her own ‘narrative’. But it didn’t stop the author of Pictures of a Revolution and Five Came Back, to revel in the kind of politics that exists on his Twitter feed. Then, he compares the many feuds involving Swift - from Katy Perry to Kanye West - with Trump’s by linking their manoeuvres as one of the same. Once Harris finally gets to the substance of the song, he presumes that her politics in which it is “I win, but for the record, I’m the victim of haters and losers.” This seems odd because it’s not exclusive to right-wing politics. It’s quite the common bread and butter in political discussion. I’ve seen socialists proclaim that they’re winning, even though it doesn’t look like they have achieved anything much.
So overall, we haven’t learned much of Taylor Swift’s political trajectory back then, because her privacy only gives these journalists their own illusions of who she is as a person. Taylor Swift has faced fierce and unconvincing criticisms before and after this saga, but at least the source of that existed. Now that we knew she possesses the same beliefs as your average wine mum, it’s fair to say that the forecast was very wrong. This puts in question who exactly was this criticism made for; were they made for Swifties who held a particular viewpoint to rebel against their idol? Whatever the answer is, it didn’t set any precedent for stars of her stature to take political action. I don’t want to know what is Drake’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but he’s a bigger star than Taylor Swift and never had he been faced with that inquiry as much as this.
In retrospect, most of these people I’ve mentioned in the context of this story have become clowns themselves. While Swift remains in good graces with the media, Kanye has dwelled into some antisemitism, and Nicki Minaj becomes an anti-vaxxer after being hailed as a black feminist icon by pop culture writers during her VMA beef. At the end of the day, these people are human beings with an incentive to give attention to themselves by choice. But the politically devoted will invest in their ideals to justify whatever pop culture they want to enjoy is troubling. And the silence from everyone who, all of the sudden, forgotten it is indeed deafening.
Review: Decision to Leave
Critics have called Decision to Leave one of the sexiest films released this year (it’s not, because that title goes to Crimes of the Future), and I was certain that they were talking about the actors Tang Wei and Hang Hae-Il, who shares chemistry that is more than profound, even if the film didn’t hit all the right narrative notes. Wei, who is very great here as the Chinese immigrant femme fatale Seo-Rae, is no stranger to having been seen breaking sexual boundaries in Lust, Caution. But Park Chan-Wook is no stranger to that as well, as it can apply to his previous effort The Handmaiden, which is tasteful, yet sexually explicit about the autonomy and agency of its repressed characters. Decision To Leave is far more subtle and as usual, Chan-Wook’s plots are multi-layered and ultimately lead to a heartbreaking conclusion, but the motivations between Seo-Rae and Detective Hae-Jun become more complex than the fate of the relationship would have you. At 138 minutes, this can make the plot far more dense and bloated than it should be, but when these characters are far more detailed, you’ll forget that it’s not the narrative that is driving the wheel. Decision To Leave wears much of its classical noir influences on its sleeves, with some slick compositions and smash cuts that sometimes grip you. In the modern age, the technology being used might make it realistic, but the messages do serve their significance. Yet if the style leaves you underwhelmed, it’s the performances that pull it together.
You Must Watch This: The Housemaid (1956)
The Housemaid plays an important role in Korean cinema. It was restored as part of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project and the Korean Film Archive, and Bong Joon-Ho cites it as a significant influence on Parasite. The Housemaid has been remade in 2010, but the 1960 release has a tension that matches the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. The film centres around an affair between a piano composer and her housemaid, and much like Parasite, it blossoms into a class critique and a battle between the male ego and his temptations that’s wrapped neatly with a few unpredictable twists. Watch it cold and I feel that you will have an experience as great as mine.
The Noah Berlatsky Award For The Most Terrible Take
