Review: Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department

Here we go, more background music to perpetuate the Matrix of Existential Hopelessness

In case you’re new to this planet, the patriarchal establishment wants women to be obedient second-class citizens, focused on tedious, badly matched, purely sexual relationships, like 11-year-olds experiencing first crushes. That’s what this album accomplishes. It’s simply a less-overwrought Adele. It’s about private, individualist, closeted empowerment for enduring all the horribleness all women experience on a daily basis, and in that, it’s not the call to arms that the gender actually needs in a time of ever-dwindling rights for women. I mean, you do know that Roe is gone for good, right, that the New Democrat Clintonites who still own the party could have codified it for decades but didn’t, and at this rate they’ll never have the mandate to restart the whole business in our lifetime?

The tunes are all very listenable, of course; mellow, maudlin oatmeal meant to inspire the Professional Managerial Class ladies who can afford the concert tickets to wave their overpriced latest-gen iPhones back and forth in the arena. It zeroes in on Adele’s market, women possessed of some measure of clout and money, women the establishment wants kept distracted from the broad struggle, women who spend their social media time dabbling in niche woke-culture bubbles, anything to keep them from organizing and mobilizing to get their rights back, much less ending systemic unfairness toward all the working classes or building power against the fossil fuel gargoyles. There’s a lot of emptiness here. It’s not “a start,” it’s a white flag of sorts.

The left — which includes the feminist current — needs solidarity, not more white flags or single-issue scolding of fellow leftists. I interviewed Practical Radicals co-author Stephanie Luce for my upcoming book, and she explained it this way. “[Organizations need] to understand that they are just part of a larger eco-system, and that there are different strategies needed to make transformative change. An electoral organizer may believe their strategy is the best, but when they look at a larger eco-system they will see that other roles — such as organizations that do base-building and disruption — play crucial roles.”

Women deserve something more substantive than pop music albums if they intend to build any militant-feminist power and eventually join with the broader pro-worker/anti-authoritarian movement to put a stop to all the nonsense they’re enduring. Solidarity is everything in activist movements nowadays; this is a mournful commemoration of individualism and hence not a big help.

I will say that at least the record isn’t as embarrassingly hormonal as what Adele puts out, which is what TayTay’s trying to supplant with this stuff. Musically it’s decent, nothing with a pulse, largely composed of hypnotic, post-coital musings that are a lot less grown-up than Tay (read: her producers, who write all this stuff) thinks they are. The melodic verisimilitude hides itself under “hmm, what’s that sample” moments and controlled bursts of primal, from-the-mountaintop, wild-woman battle cries signifying nothing, epic-sounding richness to inspire her “fans” (the few million or so that aren’t actually bots) to look for Easter egg clues to figure out whom she’s dissing. Ultimately it’s an enablement of the misogynistic status quo.

And wtf is Florence Welch doing on here?

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If you want to be fully, genuinely informed about the political troll/bot invasion of Election 2016, 2020, and Elections-Yet-To-Come, buy my last book. There’s the tiniest bit of technical stuff in there, but you’ll get it, I promise. A second book, My Year In The Online Left, will be out in a month or so, but meanwhile, my Twitter is @esaeger, my Mastodon is @esaeger@universeodon.com, my BlueSky is @esaeger.bsky.social and my cursed Facebook is eric.saeger.9.