'Midnights' in Paris
The Sunday's Cool post
I spent Friday morning cleaning up the crumbs from my wife’s early morning Midnights binge party. Get this: We’d been out extra late on Thursday, getting midnight snacks at the only Paris spot I’ve found with good tacos, and didn’t get to bed until around 3am. Midnights dropped at 6am our time, which means Liz got about three hours of sleep before dragging herself out of bed to mainline the moment. She gave it a listen and returned to bed, only to wake up a few hours later to a new round of those 3am bonus tracks. We’re getting into Tenant levels of timeline jumps here but one last plot device to really bake your noodle: One of the songs on Taylor’s 3am batch is called “Paris”! Just like the city we live in! How does she do it.
You can read Liz’s Midnights reflections over at MTV, which are both more studious and better written than anything I could put together. For my part, one listen through, and it’s not what I expected. The Stevie Nicks-y photoshoot had me thinking Taylor was entering her Laurel Canyon era, though maybe that was just wishful thinking. Instead, the album plays like a mashup of her 1989, Reputation, Lover and Folklore vibes.
As a writer, one of Taylor’s great strengths is crafting simple, singable little bon mots that are specific to her without losing universal energy. Dashboard Confessional pulled this trick off in my teenage years too, and I think (although I’ll have to check with my wife) that Taylor has copped to being a student of Chris Carabba’s. When Folklore dropped, it suddenly seemed like every girl had left a red scarf at their ex’s apartment. With Midnights, she’s got an easier go of putting this strength to use, since insecurities and intrusive thoughts are inherently both specific and universal. We haven’t all gotten dumped by Jake Gylasomeletters, but we’ve all had the dream about the college exam for a class we forgot we were even taking. We all have a complicated relationship with mirrors and scales. She can get as intimate as she wants about her experiences with this stuff and it still feels like she’s reading pages from your diary. I don’t think she’s being calculated or shrewd here. There’s a lot of comfort in hearing your private struggles reflected back at you.
There was some discourse around the “Anti-Hero” music video, which Swift wrote and directed, and some of the fatphobia claims it sparked. In the video, which plays as a performance art piece about Swift’s insecurities, Taylor despairs when she steps on a scale in which her weight comes back as simply fat.
Fat activists critiqued the imagery as fatphobic, and I think that’s probably true. I’d guess most of us have some internalized fatphobia of one form or another. Almost all of us grew up with “fat = bad” messaging blasted into our developing skulls, and it just might not be possible to talk about most types of body insecurities without also talking — or maybe even primarily talking — about fatphobia. So insofar as “Anti-Hero” is a laundry list of Swift’s internal flaws, it may also be about her fatphobia, deliberately or otherwise. And if we can see the criticisms of that as a teachable moment, maybe it can be about our own fatphobia too.
I do wish Jack Antonoff would bring some of his Bleachers energy to the production here. I don’t think we need to go back to “We Are Never Getting Back Together” levels of radio readiness or anything, and the less said about “Me!” the better. But the federal bop supplies are getting troublingly low and last Friday did not do much to replenish supplies, despite new releases from Swift, Carly Rae Jepsen and Arctic Monkeys — three acts capable of writing infectious bangers in their respective sleeps. It’s telling that “Paris” is the closest thing we have to a real pop song on the album, and it’s a winner. Rhyming “Paris” with “somewhere else.” How does she do it.
Stacking the Chairs
Highly recommend this Shamira Ibrahim piece in Essence about the rise and fall of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, interrogating how justified criticism of one nonprofit has been conflated in bad faith with the broader movement for Black liberation.
Vanessa Romo’s reporting at NPR about a moral panic over a high school kid’s mural is interesting reading for someone who grew up as the Satanic Panic was winding down. Can’t say I’m thrilled about mashing fear of LGBT folks together with fear of the actual devil into a single anti-intellectual movement. Pray for these poor kids.
This AP report is pretty horrifying. An Afghan couple is suing a U.S. Marine and his wife, accusing them of abducting their niece, who they adopted after she was orphaned in the war. The Marine is a Liberty University grad who is touting this, uh, surprise adoption (kidnapping) as an act of faith.
This is the first Sunday’s Cool, the free Substack for everyone. It’ll probably usually be something like this so if you signed up without having any idea what you were getting yourself into, now you know!