Good morning!! Submissions closed last week. If you slipped one through the cracks before the Google Form was officially shuttered, congrats, you made it through (with special credit to my travel brain, which was OOO in body [I didn’t bring my computer] but not in spirit).
While traveling, I listened to The Tortured Poets Department to distract myself from the worst panic attack I’ve ever had while several thousand feet in the air. (I am a very bad flyer. I do plan to talk about this with my doctor.) With that, I thought this would be a great morning to send out this piece about, of course, Taylor Swift. In this piece, writer Beatriz Seelaender considers whether Taylor’s re-records can be considered re-dos, exactly, or whether they are brand new, separate art objects with their own layers of meaning attached. This one really scratched the center of a Venn diagram for me (linguistics, literary analysis, Taylor Swift), and I suspect I am not the only one here for whom that is true! If you’re wondering what kind of criticism TV is into, this is a great example.
Quick side business: Submissions for summer are closed! Submissions for fall will re-open once I’ve gone through them and get going on summer pre-orders. I’m SO excited for the summer edition, and already so f’n excited to announce fall’s theme. (The urge to unceremoniously spill it right here is very real.) Until then, if you’ve submitted work, hold tight and expect responses within the next 3-4 weeks. In the meantime, enjoy Seelaender on Swift, which you can also read online here.
We’ve got about 3 book reviews lined up for summer, but if you would like to submit one, those are always open. Send me a quick pitch at talk@talkvomit.com. They can be on the shorter or the longer side, older books or brand new. I also like to run them on the Substack before the big quarterly release, so, something to think about!
It’s no secret that, as singer-songwriter and international popstar Taylor Swift rerecords her albums, adding the parenthesized “Taylor’s Version” to the new original and devaluing the old catalogue, fans have been struggling with some of the changes made, sonically or even semantically. Those changes have ranged from failed attempts at reproduction (as a prominent Swiftie points out, the production of the new New Romantics sounds botched) to additions to well-established texts (ten-minute version). Moreover, despite public support, Swift’s project has confounded listeners at times, who are not quite sure what they are “supposed” to do – for instance, which is the canonical version of All Too Well? Are vault tracks canonical at all? And is she allowed some historical revisionism?
Often, in the most varied corners of the internet, I am confronted with these discussions, which I think could really benefit from a theoretical background. Taylor Swift, though some of the most fervent fans might disagree, is not a separate area of study. The world does not begin and end with her (unless, of course, you are Taylor Swift reading this, in which case I would love to go to the Eras Tour, do you have any last-minute tickets? The monopoly didn’t let me buy them).
Furthermore, I’m not arguing that she shouldn’t have started this project or rerecorded her masters. I’m only reacting to texts as they are presented to me, which already means I am biased. But here’s the thing: modern stan-culture, and even culture in general, has not yet discovered the concept of Close Reading, much less managed to grasp the revolutionary notion of Death of the Author (as described by Roland Barthes in 1968, not by some misogynist on Twitter). Or perhaps I am being unfair and they do in fact understand it, but have chosen not to follow it, despite the well-documented traps of genetic criticism. Because that is, overwhelmingly, the brand of criticism available to us.
There will always be people, both in academia and the general public, who can’t quite abandon that False God, still worshipping a holy trinity of author, narrator and character as one. Those are also the people most invested in cults of personality – go figure. So is Marxism a form of genetic criticism, though Marxist Swifties should have more urgent concerns than the canonical oeuvre of their fave: she has recently become a billionaire. In any case, Marxist theory exempt of all its merits still exists in the USA as neoliberal Identitarianism, the preferred ideology of the girlboss aesthetics that pervades so many of Taylor’s songs (I do love The Man notwithstanding).
This considered, it seems consistent that the idea of ownership and authorship have become too intermingled with Taylor Swift, the proper, the popstar, the performer. Far from me to defend Scooter Braun, nemesis extraordinaire, or the hedge fund that purchased the catalogue. Legally, ethically, she holds the authorship to the words and should be able to profit accordingly. Where interpretations differ is the point to which an author can affect the text (and here the text is any artistic media) once it is out there. Unlike tradition-centric models, reception-centric models prioritize a hermeneutic take on the interpretative process.
Hermeneutic theory, as proposed by Hans Georg Gadamer, argues that the artistic experience is not complete without interpretation. Thus, the actualized text belongs to the reader, the listener, the receiver filling in the blanks. She’s got a blank space, baby, but you’ll write your name. It’s why we are capable of taking autobiographical songwriting and applying it to different situations. Those songs are ours, and the author is dead, even if you’re a fan. That doesn’t mean you dislike the writer, it simply means you don’t care who wrote it.
Then again, it does come in handy when artists misbehave: fans declared Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling dead, for instance, when she began to voice anti-transgender views. “Death of the author,” said legions of Potterheads online. Having stopped listening to Rowling long before, I shrugged at the circus around her. There is still something to be said, thousands of years later, for the platonic scheme of muses taking possession of poets: authors, when out of “the zone,” are just normal people who might hold opinions antithetical not only to ideologies found in their writing, but also to the overall cohesiveness of the text. (I sympathize with that aspect, as I never remember anything I have written).
But back to Taylor Swift, as in her case it may seem impossible or even – and that is the gravest risk – pointless to separate the art from the artist. Indeed, the case might be made (by Taylor herself) for taking her discography as a decades-sprawling musical centered around her public persona. Moreover, reviewers of her work have made it their bread and butter to “decode” lyrics so that they reflect her personal life. Even as Taylor stirred away from autobiographical writing with Folklore, people still tried to find an angle into her life. While that’s all fine and dandy when it’s just for fun and gossip and footnotes on Genius dot com, it cannot be everything there is to a song or album as a unit of text. Despite metanarrative being an essential ingredient to her success, it is also what makes her omnipresence in pop culture so exhausting. If listeners are confused about the canonical implications of re-records, it is because she is in some way “rewriting history,” and much of her discography is dependent entirely on that historical context. Who is this song really about? What happened? Should we launch an invective against this public enemy number one?
As one of Taylor Swift’s 109.140.988 (no, I can’t read that) monthly listeners on Spotify, I’ve often been disquiet at the chance that I only listen to her music because it is inescapable – like sonically-transmitted Stockholm Syndrome. Perhaps I seek out the music that surrounds me, the way we sometimes would rather watch the newscast instead of a movie: we already know the shorthand for interpreting the news, so we don’t need to go out of our way to grasp new narrative structures. Plus, the news is, at least, presumed to be real, and Taylor Swift exists in the real world much more urgently than any other artist right now. It’s not just that she is omnipresent, but that her performance of herself is omnipresent. Bad Blood, for instance, is a bad song that did well due to Katy Perry fatigue – don’t take my word for it, take Rob Sheffield’s, who in his famed Swift ranking describes it as “melodically parched, lyrically unfinished, rhythmically clunky,” in the rare case where I agree with him. (Yes, I resent him because no one pays me to rank Taylor Swift songs. But also because his ranking is wrong.)
And here we could use some guidance from the outmoded discipline of Philology. Though philologists tend to attribute a lot of weight to doctrines that I personally consider irrelevant trivia, going on and on about the “author’s intentions,” “the writing process,” “the last will of the author,” I can’t help but look at Swifties like dedicated philologists. It’s always about what Taylor meant: they are reporting on her, not the texts. They are interpreting her performance as herself through the songs, those being simply vehicles of the self-referential myth-making she often resorts to, though the myth of Taylor Swift naturally has many conflicting versions.
Of course, we are building up to the re-records’ greatest sin, which is the historical revisionism of Better Than Revenge (Taylor’s Version). In the original (which by the way currently stands at number 15 in my ranking), twenty-year-old Taylor sings about a girl who “stole” her boyfriend: “She’s not a saint, and she’s not what you think: she’s an actress (Woah!) / But she’s better known for the things that does on the mattress (Woah!)”. Though that qualifies as slut-shaming, so does the rest of the song, which is a relic of its time, carrying the good and bad with it. Changing the most offensive line does not change the offense of the song, as that lies in its very premise. If Swift wanted to disavow slut-shaming, she should have written a note, not ruined it with a metaphor she tends to overuse (“He was a moth to the flame / she was holding the matches”). If only as a historical object, Better Than Revenge needs to be preserved from the damnatio memoriae instituted in the case of other original recordings.
For even Philology, in its genealogical obsession, concedes that at times the last will of the author is just no good. For instance, Torquato Tasso’s unfinished manuscript for La Gerusalemme Liberata was published without his consent in 1581, to tremendous success, dwarfing that of the author’s version, retitled La Gerusalemme Conquistata. The canonical edition, however, is the 1581 one, as that was the most widespread. As one Philology professor told us once, after spending the whole semester hammering down on us what the last will of this or that author had been and why that should be respected, cultural impact supersedes authorial intent. The cultural impact of the original We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together is therefore much greater than that of We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together (Taylor’s Version), which sounds off. Perhaps that was intentional, or maybe they just couldn’t replicate what they had once achieved. Though a philologist would lose sleep over this specific question, we can simply shrug and conclude that it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the re-recordings are attempts at reproduction – some more faithful than others, but we should not treat this as an updated “last will of the author,” we should instead take it as a copy. This is a case of the author as (bad) copyist of her own work.
In the Middle Ages, up until the advent of the printing press, monks all over the Old World occupied their days with ancient manuscripts – a thankless job that protected humanity’s thoughts and histories from falling into disuse. However, it was an arduous task, prone to quite a few lapses: even medieval monks, in their ascetic discipline, messed up. Some of the errors are what you would expect – repetition of words, misspellings, etc – and some hide ulterior motives – censorship, omission, miscorrections, etc. What you really want, as a philologist with a fetish for “the original” and “the author’s intent”, is a copyist who does his job without intervening. So what if you think Girl At Home (Taylor’s Version) sounds better? That was not the purpose of the exercise.
Again, I’m no philologist. I am, however, a compulsive scribbler, all too familiar with the impulse to comment, correct, note – especially when it’s your own work. Still, when a text is published and received by readers, it takes on a life of its own. At some point in the rerecording project, Taylor stopped copying and began rewriting – yet as the figuratively deceased author, she would’ve been locked out of her account. The author is also dead for herself. She cannot go back; she can only incorporate the past text into a new text. Inoperative as the author and inefficient as a copyist, Taylor Swift creates Taylor’s Version, not as the canonical version or an alternative version, much less (though the vault tracks might mean she’s pushing this) a new original. As listeners rewrite their own interpretations of the original albums through their interpretation of Taylor’s Version, literary theorists must acknowledge that post-structuralism has failed to cross into the mainstream (somebody go fix that, please).
It should not “add a new layer” to your interpretation, because those are two different objects from two different times. They are not two versions of the same thing, but two different things that share similarities: a text incorporating elements of an earlier text. Like Cursed Child appropriates and misunderstands Harry Potter. Or something nicer that doesn’t hurt to think about. The Harry Potter movies not as versions of the series, but as a separate text (and perhaps as separate texts in themselves as well). Or something more blatant, even, like Zadie Smith quoting Lenny Bruce in the epigraph to The Autograph Man – who is, come to think of it, a philologist of sorts. After all, autograph is a philological term for “a manuscript penned by the author.” The novel, first published in 2003 (and now you know why we say “published” not “written”), follows disoriented youth Alex-Li Tandem, who sells autographs for a living. He is obsessed with getting one from his favorite actress, Kitty Alexander, whom he does eventually meet – though she is no longer the girl from the 1940s film, to his subconscious dismay. And Taylor Swift, whoever she is, isn’t her canonized autobiographical persona.
By reinstituting genetic criticism, amateur philologists of her discography are incentivizing flawed reading strategies – which all know are actually at the root of most of the world’s many problems. Swift herself once told us, “Hey, kids! Reading is fun!” before getting made fun of and subjecting this, too, to historical revisionism. But you know what? Reading is fun. And it’s more fun when we do it for ourselves. After all, one part that always gets left out of the discourse on Death of the Author is what Barthes said next – that it signified the Birth of the Reader.
Beatriz Seelaender is a Brazilian writer from São Paulo. Her essays have been published by The Collapsar, Guesthouse, Drunk Monkeys, and others. The award-winning “All According to Norm”, her novella about a teenage conspiracy theorist, is coming out later this year with Black Spring Press. Since writing this essay, “Better than Revenge” has climbed two positions in her personal Taylor Swift song ranking, standing now at the honorable #13th position.