How You Get the World: Reflections on Taylor Swift, Postscript 1

PS 1: Mixtapes and Magical Gardens

I am so productive it’s an art

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If, like me, you have spent a significant portion of your time at the Whole Foods on South Street in Philadelphia, you’ve at some point seen Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, a giant outdoor jungle gym masquerading as an art installation (or vice versa), comprising a haphazard decoupage of glass, concrete, ceramic, and junk—bicycle tires, dinner plates, vases, flower pots, beer bottles. The sprawling complex has long since spilled outside the boundaries of its headquarters into street corners and alleyways even in far-flung corners of the city (my kids’ school, over ten miles away, has its own Magic Gardens patch on an exterior wall).

It is the work of a single auteur, Isaiah Zagar, who started his signature sculpture practice in the ‘60s as a form of art therapy and never stopped cobbling, even as the original lot incorporated as a nonprofit, operating independently of his cockeyed vision of a jagged, magpie Xanadu.

Kids love the place; the public art scene in the city tends to be more ambivalent. The work is alternately kitschy and profound, genuinely immersive and full of eye-rolling gimmickry. Sometimes quotations will appear across tile mosaics, usually ponderous phrases (“the very essence of existence”) or on-the-nose platitudes. Visitors are welcomed with a quote from English poet Edward James: “I built this sanctuary to be inhabited by my ideas and my fantasies.”

There is no subtext in the Magic Gardens, but that’s part of what makes it magical: what you see is what you get, and you see a lot. Being there is a little uncanny, strangely comforting, just shy of feeling like a theme park, but not not that. The arrangements of common elements are samey but technically unique at a constitutive level and hypnotic taken as a whole. Like snowflakes. Or Taylor Swift songs.

Taylor Swift just put out The Tortured Poets Department, a fascinating album especially if you are skeptical of the whole Taylor Swift Project and approach every new release with some trepidation. Taylor Swift has long since given up on conventional narrative cohesion that lingered for years coming out of her country music days, and threatened to blossom anew in the Folklore era before receding definitively on Midnights. She has all but given up on even trying to write songs that you can tell apart, let alone take any wild swings into genre that ostensibly motivated her musical evolution to her current electro/folk soup. She works with the same two producers and she writes in the same way—an assemblage of pithy one-liners set to droning, minimally hooky melodies that, taken together, occasionally tell a linear story but more often achieve a particular atmosphere: what my kid calls the “very Taylor Swift-y” sound of the majority of her material.

This “Taylor Swift-y” sound’s bedrock is her melodies, which usually feel perfunctory, almost retrofitted to the rhythm of the words. I would guess that Taylor Swift starts writing many of her songs in a simple melodic pattern around a single note to work out her rhythm. As Holly Boson pointed out in her podcast about the Eras tour movie, Swift’s melodies are reminiscent of what used to happen in the 2000s and early 2010s when white people would set rap songs to acoustic accompaniment.

Taylor Swift seems to come up with lyrics like a rapper might, in disconnected bits of inspired wordplay or the perfect one-line evocation of an idea, which is then sometimes backfilled with other words to make it scan or, just as frequently, left stranded with other one-liners like a confetti of fortune cookie slips. This style is immediately noticeable on Poets, where those one-liners have never been sharper (even if they’re perhaps “sharp” in the way someone elbowing you in the ribs is sharp). Meanwhile the songs qua songs have never cohered less.

But I don’t mind this time. The album reminds me of the deluge of mid-aughts Lil Wayne mixtapes; I was totally unsurprised that she immediately dropped an additional album’s worth of material two hours after midnight of the album’s release. (She’s figured out how to make money on her mixtapes: replace unauthorized samples with wallpaper.) Swift isn’t a preternatural genius of wordplay like Wayne is, but she has been pushing the limits of her rhyme schemes for a decade to incorporate hip-hop’s expansive use of assonance, accommodating endless slant rhymes. My friend Isabel points out a representative chain in “So High School”: bottles, Aristotle, full throttle, Grand Theft Auto, scout’s honor, got her.¹ My favorite audacious move is on “Clara Bow,” where out of the literally thousands of rhyming possibilities with “oh” she decides instead to use “remarkable.”

Every Taylor Swift line is another bathroom tile, mirror shard, or empty wine bottle in a sprawling Magic Garden blown up to the absurd proportions of the city-within-a-soundstage of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York. (On-lookers feel trapped on the set, but this has never bothered me. You can leave!) On this album, some of her mirror’s edges stick out a bit more than usual—you wouldn’t want your kids to climb on them. There’s more “fuck,” sure, but also more blood. My favorite line so far is in “So Long, London” when she invents the tag line to a gruesome spaghetti western of a breakup: “Two graves. One gun.”

I say favorite so far—I haven’t finished it all yet, and probably won’t for a while, if ever. It’s a lot of content. Taylor Swift is a consummate millennial internet success story—a pathological poster. I won’t be surprised if she winds up dumping another batch of songs, and then another. She’s in her mixtape era. It continues to work because Taylor Swift has found a way to take enormous heaps of detritus—slogans and clichés and platitudes, along with an occasionally brilliant idea or nasty joke—and turn them all into phrasal earworms, if not always melodic ones. More than once I found myself rolling my eyes and then, like the kombucha girl meme, admitting that what I’ve just heard is…bars. The jewels and the trash all coexist indifferent to each other, though: they are the building blocks of an overwhelming palace, which you might find beautiful or garish, magical or boring, but cannot deny it is doing exactly what it has set out to do (whatever that is).

Continue to Postscript 2

1. In an interview, Lin-Manuel Miranda once remarked on how difficult it was to write some of the Hamilton songs because he felt that in musical theater, hip-hop’s use of assonance and delivery to massage slant rhymes is considered “cheating.” Taylor Swift isn’t in a milieu with as strict formal constraints as musical theater, but I do think she’s pushing past even her already lax approach to rhyme in her former work. There seems to be a bigger contrast than usual this time out with how phonologically pleasing her phrases are versus how bad they look on paper (much of the early criticism I’ve read excerpts a bunch of phrases that look weird, but sound great in context).