Swinging Modern Sounds: Observations on the Occasion of a 100th Column
The clash of opinions about music is music itself.
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Posts Tagged: Taylor Swift
Welcome To South Bend: A Weekend with the Boot Edge Edges
Yeah. I just quoted Taylor Swift.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #89: In Praise of Tom Petty
Because Petty was so prolific and so popular, the intense craftsmanship of his body of work has been hiding in plain sight.
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When We Were Friends
Our eyes are bleary, but we are laughing, the kind of laugh that comes before tears.
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On Self-Reliance: Frank Ocean as Emersonian Hero
As Emerson recognizes, someone who couldn’t care less about how they come across is all the more charismatic and convincing.
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#Betrayal: On Instagram, Is Hell Other Women?
Instagram: an app powerful enough to blow a million Think Pieces to smithereens in everything it says about female relations.
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The Rumpus Interview with Andi Zeisler
Andi Zeisler, co-founder of Bitch and author of the new book We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrl to CoverGirl, discusses capitalism, breast implants, pop culture, and feminism.
...moreArtists Petition Against Streaming Enablers
A long list of known and respected musicians from a wide variety of genres have signed a petition against the systemic enabling of illegal streaming provided by entities such as YouTube and Google. The petition urges Congress to reform the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects companies that host user sharing from being held accountable […]
...moreDavid Lowery Sues Spotify
The frontman of Camper Van Beethoven filed his second suit in favor of musician’s rights on December 28th, Pitchfork reports. The suit claims that Spotify published tracks without sufficient efforts to obtain copyright permission, and thus illegally distributed. This case adds itself to a number of legal issues facing the musical subscription service—since last year’s Taylor […]
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Sound & Vision: Tony Visconti
Legendary producer Tony Visconti talks to Allyson McCabe about working with David Bowie, his own touring musical super-group Holy Holy, and his thoughts on the music industry today.
...moreCamille Paglia on Feminism and the #GirlSquad
Camille Paglia, a feminist writer and theorist, wrote a damning critique of Taylor Swift’s tendency to curate her group of “friends” and bring them onstage as testimony to her good taste, or dominance, or what have you—namely, the phenomenon that has become attached to the use of #GirlSquad. In an article for The Hollywood Reporter, Paglia […]
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Rick Moody
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Rick Moody about his new book Hotels of North America, unreliable narrators, hotel porn, how titles are uncopyrightable, and Internet comment sections.
...moreCrowdsourced Publishing
A new book about Taylor Swift will be crowdsourced. GalleyCat reports that Simon & Schuster plans a new, unauthorized look at the singer. The publisher has organized a series of contests for fans to produce the content of the book.
...moreOpen Books, Open Worlds
I wouldn’t be a songwriter if it wasn’t for the books I read as a kid. … When you can escape into a book it trains your imagination to think big and to think that more can exist than what you see. Taylor Swift doesn’t just sing about books (You know the words: “Here I […]
...moreTaylor Swift, Feat. Willie Shakespeare
Taylor Swift, Cole Porter, Joni Mitchell, Mumford and Sons—they’ve all got a surprising musical forefather in the Bard of Avon. Looking for more literary musical references of the week? Check out the favorite tracks of Man Booker prize-winning author Marlon James over at the BBC.
...moreRyan Adams Finishes Cover of 1989 Album
Ryan Adams recently announced he planned on covering Taylor Swift’s full album 1989. While fans were excited to see alternative versions of hits “Blank Space” and “Style,” many didn’t believe Adams would really finish covering the whole thing. Well… he did! While there isn’t word on when the album will hit the public, for a more comprehensive […]
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“Happily Ever After” for African-American Romance Novelists
Romance novels can’t erase the past, and the present. Chapter by chapter, they do strive toward agency.
...moreSonnets and Songs
“All good love songs are sad,” Paul McCartney, who knew, once told this reporter. The mystery is that while what we want is love fulfilled, what we actually feel most deeply about is love frustrated. What do Shakespeare’s love sonnets and Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” have in common? The answer might just leave you breathless. […]
...moreJoan Says Goodbye, Taylor Says Hello
Andrew Bomback steps into the conversation between Eula Biss and Joan Didion about “Goodbye to All That” and the myth of New York City, bringing along Taylor Swift as his guest. In its author’s privilege and its message of youthful possibility, “Swift’s ‘Welcome to New York’ is far more Didion than Biss,” he writes.
...moreRevenge Writing
After about two years of writing essays, I learned about something I will hereby in these pages name the Passive-Aggressive Writer’s Conundrum: People, particularly non-writers, are an optimistic, delusional bunch. If you mention people in an unflattering way without naming them, they will never recognize themselves in your story— even if you name actual details […]
...moreTaylor Swift: Grammar Crusader?
Proving that the quest for high scores on the SAT is as tragically unhip as ever, The Princeton Review is making headlines for setting off a grammar grudge match with pop sensation Taylor Swift. Swift’s lyrics are not only included in a section on pronoun agreement errors, they’re misquoted (although as Eugene Volokh points out […]
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Swinging Modern Sounds #63: It’s Supposed to Be Bad
Rick Moody emails with Scott Timberg, author of the new book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, about Bob Dylan’s new Sinatra covers album, the need for cultural gatekeepers, and the “slippery sub genre” of bad-on-purpose art.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Falling For The Femme Fatale
If power is going to shift toward equality, men have to see power less as an inherent right and more as something we can be incentivized to relinquish.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Leslie Jamison
In which we discuss Frozen, Taylor Swift, the limits of empathy, the problem of happiness, and why we listen to sad songs over and over.
...moreTaylor Swift’s White Noise
Nothing much more needs to be said: At the Atlantic, “the author of White Noise reviews Taylor Swift’s white noise.”
...moreSometimes It’s Okay to Read the Comments
It’s a truism among people who spend a lot of time online that you should never, under any circumstances, read the comments—especially not YouTube comments. But when writer Mark Slutsky broke that rule, he found unexpected flashes of genuine emotion hidden in the cesspool of racial slurs and semiliterate rantings—memories of a deceased friend under […]
...moreBefore the “Dumb Blonde” Joke
Literary blondes have always held a totemic power….Sex, politics, and power: fictional blondes had it all. For the Toast, Stassa Edwards looks back at centuries of literature and culture—Petrarch’s Laura, Middlemarch‘s Rosamond Vincy, Taylor Swift—to parse the semiotics of blondness. From redemptive purity to sexual danger, we’ve been reading all kinds of meaning into blond hair […]
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Swinging Modern Sounds #40: A Miscellany of Musical Thoughts That Will Not Otherwise Appear
From June through December of 2012, I kept a diary of musical impressions that didn’t develop into longer pieces.
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