The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
- Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
You can't depend on the goodly hearted
the goodly hearted made lamp-shades and soap- Lou Reed, Busload of Faith
Take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die
- Taylor Swift, The Lakes
I never thought I’d actually be writing anything positive about the music of Taylor Swift. I briefly had this idea of “where is Taylor Swift’s Sgt Pepper” and I’d basically just say how Kanye is the greatest artist of the 21st century or something, it was vaguely about how those at the front of pop music aren’t innovating – nothing is fundamentally changing etc. The problem with that was mostly I didn’t want to have to go through the entire discography of both Swift and West. That was several weeks ago now. Then at some point I had this desire to listen to folklore, which I believed to have been an early album of hers. Turns out I was wrong, both because folklore was released in 2020, and I really like it. Her presentation of lost futures, especially around her own aesthetic subjectivity, captures a mood I think that hasn’t been presented with such precision since Joy Division’s ‘Unknown Pleasures.’ Her songwriting on tracks like ‘The last american dynasty’ and ‘the lakes’ is borderline Lou Reed quality. It's clear this is a much more serious and mature work compared to say 1989, an album I strongly dislike despite the strength of Folklore. In 1989 at the beginning of the year Reed released his late career masterpiece, maybe rivalled only by Lulu, in New York. Then at the end of the year Taylor Swift is born and 30 years later she releases the album of the 21st century in Folklore.
Why do we still listen to Joy Division? In their brief time together they only released two real albums, and they’re only remembered for the first one. Yet 40 years later, ‘Unknown Pleasures’ still retains its cultural relevance. I don’t think any other artist has been able to retain such relevance with as little a catalogue as Joy Division. Even their contemporaries in the same genre as the smiths and the cure never really captured what Joy Division did. Nor did New Order the Joy Division spin off after the death of Ian Curtis. It’d be like if The Beatles showed up one day, released Sgt Pepper, and did nothing else. “If Joy Division matters now more than ever, it’s because they capture the depressed spirit of our times,” wrote Mark Fisher.1 40 years on and it seems no one has been able to capture such a feeling. For Fisher it's the feeling of the transition out of the precarious post-war social democracy and into, I hate to use the n-word here, neoliberalism. It's the soundtrack to the slow cancellation of the future. “our present, their future.”2 It works especially because it's not explicitly political, other than some tracks on ‘Closer.’ There are very few things more cringe than earnest political music, sometimes it works like when it's coming from the oppressed. No one wants to hear ‘don’t they know it's Christmas’ in the same way they do with ‘fight the power.’ This is also why Rage Against the Machine sucks, it is laughable to end your song with the repetition of ‘fuck you I won’t do what you tell me.’ RATM is basically the as farce repetition of the Sex Pistols, a band already denoted as terminally lame by those that came after them. RATM were very time and place, making music that couldn’t come from anywhere other than the mid-late 90s. Where RATM faded out of the cultural consciousness, JD never left. They turned the ‘fuck you I won’t do what you tell me energy’ into the aesthetic of ‘it’s so over.’ Where there is no future there is JD, the soundtrack to the sad apocalypse. This is why it still resonates 40 years later because the future has not come to pass. The feeling that they capture is fundamentally depression. Depression in that the subject of their music is completely interiorized, everything begins to feel so worthless and empty. There’s nothing worth holding on to and its depression-in-itself as Mark Fisher says what separates them from others is “the lack of an apparent object-cause for their melancholia.”3 They’re not singing “Thatcher makes me sad but I’m very glad I know you.” And this also helps their relevance, on any number of their songs on YouTube you’ll find plenty of comments saying how it sounds brand new or is prescient for today. The same generational depression has stuck in the minds of people 40yrs on. It's specifically depression about the very nature of life itself. Life beyond the pleasure principle. Look at Curtis’ entrancing repetition of “dance dance dance to the radio.” On their pre-album single, ‘Transmission.’ No longer the pleasure of music itself can break through to the depressive subject. The compulsion to dance without enjoyment, all culture becomes a sickening lie. There ceases to be a point to anything, that’s the subject of Joy Division. If there’s any fundamental point to Mark Fisher’s writings on culture it's that there’s as much to gain from listening to Joy Division as there is from reading Marx. He’s not just writing about Joy Division because they were good but also because there is something to gain from analysis of their music and about the state of current culture. If no album has managed to capture a feeling as much as ‘Unknown Pleasures’ why is that? Why is music culture still haunted by Joy Division? They’re not the only ones with this style, and they’re certainly not the first. Lou Reed’s 1973 album ‘Berlin’ is a near JD record 6 years early. ‘The Bed’ could almost fit perfectly on Unknown Pleasures. As always Lou Reed was ahead of the curve but Berlin was a critical and commercial failure when it first came but is now considered one of his and overall one of the best albums of all time. In 1973 Rolling Stone called it a disaster, then in 2003 it made the list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. If Unknown Pleasures had also come out in 1973 I think it would’ve had a similar response. In 1973 they would’ve been competing with ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and ‘Aladdin Sane.’ In 1979, they had contemporaries in ‘Entertainment!’ and ‘London Calling.’ It was the perfect time and there has been no great work since…
Folklore and Lost futures
An Artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious full play in their life of phantasy.
- Sigmund Freud, Formulations On The Two Principles of Mental Functioning
The World is going through diiffcult times and America to actually
- David Guetta
You know the greatest loves of all time are over now
- Taylor Swift, The 1
2020. There were three great works of the early pandemic. In order, celebrities imagine, David Guetta’s George Floyd tribute and Taylor Swift’s Folklore. There was the ‘I take responsibility’ video as well, but it didn’t catch on as much as imagine did. But I am completely serious when I say ‘Folklore’ is a great album. I do find it quite perplexing as I haven’t been able to really listen to any of her other work. Before I had ever heard Folklore, when it was new, I tried listening to Midnights and never got too far in. Coming back to songs like ‘Anti-hero’ I still didn’t find much to think about nor did I enjoy it. The music video for anti-hero has this pseudo-surrealist imagery where it almost gets interesting, but it feels like there is something fundamentally missing. It ends on this bad pastiche of ‘Knives Out’ that’s neither funny nor meaningful. Although I do admit that I join in with the “and you love the game” when listening to ‘Blank Space’ despite that I don’t really like it that much. Just as ‘Unknown Pleasures’ was released at the precipice of the neoliberal transformation, Folklore was released as the pre-pandemic world died. The album itself is very melancholic and self-reflective of this desire for opulent life. The old world has died, the new world is struggling to be born, now is the time of monsters. The innocence of the world has gone. The Melancholia of The 1 is immediately apparent, an ode to the previous good times, the dead old world. ‘You know, the greatest films of all time were never made.’ There’s a real haunting beauty to it all, this internal mourning for the lost futures. The lost futures that are especially linked through Taylor’s own life. For instance, in the song ‘the last great american dynasty.’ This song in particular got me into the album. The story is of the previous owners of a beach house Swift now owns. She tells the narrative of their lives in such a manner that it wouldn’t feel out of place in Lou Reed’s New York, a misanthropic collection of poems about Reed’s home. The tale of Swift’s song is a tragic story of a woman that goes slowly mad living in the outskirts of the city after moving with her husband, who was the heir to old money. She herself inherits this money, but it doesn’t lead her to happiness. Swift sees herself in this story clearly, an artist who has everything, but everything isn’t enough. This misanthropic tale of the American dream is still set to the structure of a pop song and doesn’t sonically resemble anything like Joy Division or Lou Reed, but perhaps that is its strength. Swift does abandon awful radio-pop production on this record, and maybe that is partly due to Jack Antonoff. But Antonoff also wrote ‘we are young’ so anything I don’t like about the album is also his fault. Most of the songs, like ‘last american dynasty’, are quite small in their scale. There’s no big powerful hooks or choruses like on ‘Blank Space’ or Kendrick Lamar’s best work ‘Bad Blood.’ Even the chorus on ‘last american dynasty’ doesn’t really make its presence known. It's more of a continuation of the story than a break. In a brief clip of her performing it at the Eras tour she starts off sitting down and despite the limited perspective even on stage it seems much more scaled down. The pseudo-poppy nature of it works in that it doesn’t become alien to her main audience, she can sing and write mournful songs for a mostly female pop audience rather than depressed post grad art history students. In the essay on Joy Division in Ghosts of My Life, Fisher mentions Ian Curtis’ widow saying “whether it was intentional or not, the wives and girlfriends had gradually been banished from all but the most local of gigs and a curious male bonding had taken place. The boys seemed to derive their fun from each other.”4 Joy Division would’ve been a great space where life-denying philosophy and pop music intersected. Where you ‘synchronise love to the beat of the show,’ provided you were male of course.5 I do know women that like Joy Division, I think, but that’s not the point, I’m sure many women do like Joy Division. It was a predominantly male space though. There’s a general trend in culture that anything liked by teenage girls has to be derided and endlessly mocked, Taylor Swift has always been a part of that. Of course any crap liked by teenage boys mostly gets away scot-free. When I say Folklore is the 21st century ‘Unknown Pleasures’ I am dead serious in the mastery and capture of emotion that Swift is able to do in her songwriting. Previously, she was endlessly mocked for ‘only being able to write break up songs’ etc. Any of the ‘love’ and I use that term loosely here, songs on Folklore are mournful in tone like all these stories of love were false. Closer to ‘love will tear us apart’ than ‘we’re never getting back together.’ Freud says loss of the capacity to love is one of the distinguishing mental features of melancholia.6 It's not just that love has failed, it’s that the very nature of love itself has been called into question. Folklore starts to move beyond the pleasure principle. Although the bonus track on the deluxe edition, ‘the lakes’, my 3rd favourite song about bodies of water, is a lot closer to an actual love song. But still the main desire within the song is to disappear from the life of fame. Nothing is glamorous in the world of Folklore. Take the cover art for the album, Swift stands distantly in a black and white forest alone. She exists in this lonesome space staring into the sky. Swift is presented as small and unimportant, like an alienated subject in a world without meaning. Even in the album art she is this melancholic subject in a world beyond her. The forest contains these massive trees that easily overcome her, there’s no longer any real love for life and the album art reflects this.
There are the ruminations of something fascinating going on here. I don’t know what the future of Swift’s career looks like, especially after re-recording all her old albums, but if there is more stuff like this, I think she could be considered one of the greatest of all time.
Footnotes
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life (Hampshire: Zero Books), p.50
ibid
ibid., p.58
ibid., p.53
ibid
Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in (ed.) Angela Richards, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin Books), p.252