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Tag: Taylor Swift Billie Eilish

  • The Darkness Surrounding Taylor Swift of Late

    The Darkness Surrounding Taylor Swift of Late

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    As the news of Taylor Swift’s three canceled dates in Vienna over an elaborate terrorist plot make the rounds, it seems a general “dark pall” has been cast over the singer of late. It started earlier in the year, with the “conspiracy theory” (a.k.a. totally plausible hypothesis) that every time another female pop star has a chance of making it to number one on the charts, Swift chooses that week to release a new iteration of The Tortured Poets Department. Which is why there are now thirty-plus variants of the album. Yet another reason many people felt that Billie Eilish was shading Swift specifically when she told Billboard, “We live in this day and age where, for some reason, it’s very important to some artists to make all sorts of different vinyl and packaging… which ups the sales and ups the numbers and gets them more money.” The shade was felt whether Eilish intended it or not because everyone knows that Swift is the “queen” of doing this.

    Eilish also remarked, “I can’t even express to you how wasteful it is. It is right in front of our faces and people are just getting away with it left and right…” While Eilish was sure to say “some artists,” it was difficult for many readers, Swifties included, not to automatically think of Taylor’s album release methods. Or tactics, if you prefer. And yes, she weaponized them just in time for Eilish’s release of Hit Me Hard and Soft, her third record. Alas, it was blocked out of the top spot thanks to the three variants of TTPD that Swift unleashed the same day, May 17th. This precise “phenomenon” (and hardly what Chappell Roan would call a “femininomenon”) also happened when Charli XCX released Brat (after which the world was never the same).

    A week after the album might have slid into the top slot on the UK charts, Swift conveniently decided to release six—that’s right, six—TTPD album variants that were exclusive to the UK. The geotargeting on this front felt especially calculated (to use that word Swift hates being called), and totally merited XCX writing a song called “Sympathy is a knife,” suspected to be about Swift specifically because of the lyric, “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show/Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick.” This being a reference to the brief period when Swift was “canoodling” with The 1975’s Matty Healy, for which XCX’s fiancé, George Daniel, is the drummer. There were other “nods” to being made to feel insecure by Swift throughout the song, including the part of the chorus that goes, “‘Cause I couldn’t even be her if I tried/I’m opposite, I’m on the other side.”

    Charli fans were “moved” enough by the track and its supposed muse to start chanting, “Taylor is dead” at a show of hers in São Paulo on June 22nd. When XCX was informed of the “mantra,” she spoke out on social media, saying, “Can the people who do this please stop. Online or at my shows. It is the opposite of what I want and it disturbs me that anyone would think there is room for this in this community.” So yes, that’s just the first piece of the kind of darkness that’s been following Swift lately, this “varietal” ostensibly of her own making. To be sure, this aspect of said darkness is rooted in her competitive nature and insatiable drive to “succeed”—or, as Lana Del Rey put it earlier this year, “She’s told me so many times that she wants it more than anyone.”

    That much was made clear early on in her career, not just in her willingness to take a bum deal with Big Machine Records, but even in the mention, during an 00s-era interview, of why she decided to play a twelve-string guitar instead of a six-string one. The reason, as she told the interviewer, in the country twang she was then putting on, “I had this one real jerk of a teacher… he goes, ‘There’s no way that you’ll be able to play a twelve-string guitar at your age and your fingers aren’t developed enough and there’s no way you’d be able to play it.’ …So I got that twelve-string guitar and I would play it every day until my fingers bled, and, you know, at first it seemed really hard, and then I just realized that if I put my mind to something, then it was really mind over matter.” This seeming to be her ongoing philosophy for “winning” at the charts. Yet even her continued “domination” in numbers hasn’t fooled “the culture,” with The Guardian publishing an article titled, “Taylor Swift may have captured the charts, but Charli XCX captured the zeitgeist” the same week Swift blocked XCX from the number one spot.

    However, even if the cracks in Swift’s “reign” have started to show this (Brat) summer as the “Gen Z girls”—namely, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan—take over, there was still The Eras Tour to prove her “crown” undisputed. What with the hordes willing to schlep across the world and pay any price to see her (this also resulting in the “Taylor Swift economy” effect, as the business the tour brought to each stop bolstered the revenue of restaurants, hotels and the like). Including an American stalker of Swift’s, who made threats to both her and her current boyfriend, Travis Kelce. The stalker in question flew all the way to the Gelsenkirchen, Germany show, where he was arrested the day of the July 18th performance. Thus, the dark pall surrounding Swift got a shade darker. Ratcheting up on July 29th during a Taylor Swift-themed yoga class where twenty-five children turned up to participate. Tragically, three of those children, all girls, would not make it out alive after a stabbing rampage by a seventeen-year-old named Axel Rudakubana.

    In the aftermath of the attack, misinformation regarding the “background” (read: ethnicity and origins) of the stabber began to spread rampantly online, prompting ongoing political unrest throughout the UK that was propelled by proponents of the far-right. With Swift in the eye of the storm as the “link” to it all, any theories that the use of her name and music might have been a factor in the targeting of this class seemed to be corroborated by yet another, more ambitious terrorist (two, in fact) attempting to infiltrate her August 8th show in Vienna. The plot was foiled (ergo averting another 2017 Dangerous Woman Tour-level tragedy), with Swift spooked enough to cancel all three dates of her slated Vienna performances.

    This means she’ll be “on break” until August 15th, when her next rash of dates for The Eras Tour have her circling back to London’s Wembley Stadium, meaning that she’ll be in the heart of one of the sources of her recent darkness (apart from Joe Alwyn). And it wouldn’t be surprising if she mentioned the Southport stabbings while onstage (then again, Swift tends to disappoint when it comes to being open about anything “too political”).

    To round out the recent tincture of darkness enveloping the pop star, and almost as though to mock everything Swift and her fanbase represent, M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap was released at the beginning of August. It’s a movie that takes place at a “Taylor Swift-esque concert” where, you guessed it, a trap has been set up to lure and arrest a notorious serial killer (played by Josh Hartnett, in his villain era). Indeed, Shyamalan pitched the premise as: “What if The Silence of The Lambs happened at a Taylor Swift concert?” It doesn’t exactly help the current non-rosy image Swift seems to be embodying/attracting at the moment.

    But perhaps this darkness all goes back to what was initially referenced above: Swift’s obsession with being “ahead.” And while Swift herself loves to talk about karma, perhaps she didn’t consider the way in which she might have tipped the karmic scales by being so consumed with the number one (not, in this case, thirteen) spot. For it doesn’t feel like a cosmic coincidence that all of these horrible things should be happening after her summer of chart-blocking, preventing other women in the game from getting their flowers. All thanks to this thorny rose by the name of Swift.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • A Gen Z Kind of Daftness: On Billie Eilish’s Lack of Awareness of Taylor Swift Singing “Picture to Burn” or What “Burn” Even Meant Within the Context

    A Gen Z Kind of Daftness: On Billie Eilish’s Lack of Awareness of Taylor Swift Singing “Picture to Burn” or What “Burn” Even Meant Within the Context

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    With each new generation that “comes up,” there is the constant accusation from previous ones that there has never been a worse sect of people than the “youthquake” currently dominating. In Gen Z’s case, however, it might actually be true (until Alpha comes along to overtake them). Of course, defendants of the generation would argue that they can’t help what they are, being the first to have grown up entirely in the matrix. Never knowing a world in which the internet didn’t reign supreme. Those who came before them, the millennials, at least have some vague remembrance of a life before being totally “connected” (thereby being, ironically, totally disconnected). And yes, millennials were, once upon a time, the most hated. It was they who were dubbed the “snowflakes” first. But that term is quickly shifting to apply to Gen Z. Not just because of how easily offended they are or how incapable of processing opinions and ideas that don’t fit in with their own algorithm, but because, well, they’re just not equipped to deal with much of anything at all outside the matrix.

    Nonetheless, for a generation as dependent on the internet as Z, they scarcely seem to understand how to use it to its utmost potential. Certainly not for research and fact-checking purposes, it would appear. This much was made starkly apparent by one of the few Gen Z spokespeople thus far, Billie Eilish. For, in an episode of her now-defunct “radio show” (a.k.a. Apple Music podcast), me & dad radio, Eilish unashamedly admits, “I used to love [“Picture to Burn”] when I was, like, four—no, probably older than that. Probably, like, six. It’s crazy. It’s very country. When I listen to it now, I’m like, ‘Wow, I totally didn’t realize how country this was.’ But I loved this song back then because I thought it was so badass. I thought it was so cool and mean. I just loved it.” And yet, she didn’t love it enough to 1) look into who actually sang it and 2) try to understand something as simple as what it means to burn a picture.

    To be “fair,” Taylor Swift was an entirely different person in 2006, when her self-titled debut came out and she was Country Barbie. Eager to neither confirm nor deny the ever-burgeoning rumors that she was a savior to the Aryan race and a God-fearing Republican. So there little four- or six-year-old (she was seven, per the math of when the single was released that Eilish ostensibly can’t do) Billie was, probably right to file away this country singer as someone separate from the Swift we would all eventually come to know. A being so far-removed from her howdy, yee-haw days that it’s understandable someone might not associate her with that girl from “Picture to Burn.” If, that is, said person had no access to the internet and/or was totally detached from interacting with pop culture. Such a person, needless to say, is not Billie Eilish. But her ill-informed, la-di-da statements reveal much about the generation to which she subscribes. One that is so out of touch with anything tangible that she felt no embarrassment in also adding, “I didn’t understand at all what a ‘picture to burn’ meant. The only word ‘burn’ that I knew, that I thought that she meant, was, like, when you burn a CD.”

    While one could say that associating “burning” with CDs is decidedly millennial, in this instance, not so. Eilish’s childhood spent in a world where the trappings of the internet (including downloading songs and, at that time, burning them onto CDs) were pervasive as opposed to peripheral is indicative of a generation that would scarcely grasp (or ever have to) anything related to the physical. That CD burning was, in fact, a “millennial thing” was far more telling of said generation’s lingering attachment to that which was concrete. But, as it turned out, the practice was just a launching point for eradicating all tangibility and turning everything digital with the advent of the first iPhone in 2007 that also combined the key elements of an iPod function for music-listening purposes. In other words, what Gen Z would come to view as more normal than anyone because they grew up with it as their norm. CDs (and records and tapes) be damned.

    Swift, who released “Picture to Burn” in February of 2008 (two years after Taylor Swift came out) offered an accompanying video that Eilish could have easily watched at some point for a keen understanding of what it means to burn a picture. Complete with contextual cues at the beginning of the Trey Fanjoy-directed video that includes Swift holding up a picture of her and her ex and asking her friend, who’s with her in the front seat of her car, “Would you look at how happy we were back then? I can’t believe he turned out to be such a jerk” (by the end, that picture will be up in flames, further “spelling it out” for Eilish). It’s the sort of comment one could imagine hearing in a Britney Spears interlude from Oops!…I Did It Again. And, yes, at that time, Spears was still at the peak of her influential powers, so it’s entirely possible Swift could have been “infected” with a touch of Spears in this regard (even if “Picture to Burn” itself was ahead of Britney’s curve by employing the same style of pyrotechnics as her months before the “Circus” video came out that same year). Unlike Eilish, whose undercover love of Swift all this time never seemed to creep into her own musical style. No overbearing Telecaster guitar strings or vocal warblings about how, “As far as I’m concerned/You’re just another picture to burn.”

    At the same time, some of Eilish’s “we are never ever getting back together” sentiments on Happier Than Ever might be traceable to this moment in her early sonic exposure. For just as Taylor rails against a no-good, low-life type with, “State the obvious, I didn’t get my perfect fantasy/I realize you love yourself more than you could ever love me,” so does Eilish on “Lost Cause” via such lyrics as, “I used to think you were shy/But maybe you just had nothing on your mind/Maybe you were thinkin’ ’bout yourself all the time/I used to wish you were mine/But that was way before I realized/Someone like you would always be so easy to find.”

    However, by this estimation, everything of “value” Gen Z has to “give” (read: repurpose and pass off as their own) was ultimately gleaned from millennials through internet osmosis. A phenomenon that’s only worsened thanks to TikTok and the increasing lack of “crediting original sources.” Leading one to believe that civilization truly has reached a “wall” in terms of everything having been done before (something Barenaked Ladies confirmed in 1998). And rather than being, at the very least, done in a better or more thoughtful way in the present, it seems that the “reinvention” of the same thing only gets worse in its presentation over time. Making one simply want to burn it all to the ground. Surely Eilish must know what “burn” would entail in that sense.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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