Here She Comes Now E-Book

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 381

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Here She Comes Now brings together some of America's best music writers – such as Susan Choi, recipient of the inaugural PEN / W.G. Sebald award, Daniel Walters, whose credits include the screenplay for Heathers, and Alina Simon, whose novel Note to Self was described as 'hilarious' by Amanda Palmer - to explore incredible women in popular music.  Often wryly amusing – even occasionally heart-rending – and covering artists from Dolly Parton and Nina Simone to Bjork, Taylor Swift and Riot Grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna, this is a feisty celebration of the transformative power of musicians who have truly rocked our world.  The full list of artists covered is:  Dolly Parton, Taylor Swift, Sinéad O'Connor, Mary J. Blige, June Carter Cash, Björk, Ronnie Spector, Laurie Anderson, Judee Sill, Patti Smith, Nina Simone, Poly Styrene, Stevie Nicks, Kim Gordon, Kate Bush, P.J. Harvey, Loretta Lynn, Sandy Denny, Tina Turner, Kathleen Hanna, Liz Phair, Madonna and Miley Cyrus.

Leseprobe

Here She Comes now

Here She Comes now

WOMEN IN MUSIC WHO HAVE CHANGED OUR LIVES

EDITED BY JEFF GORDINIER AND MARC WEINGARTEN

This edition published in the UK in 2016 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

First published in the United States in 2015 by Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

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London WC1B 3DA or their agents

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ISBN: 978-178578-061-5

Text copyright © 2015 Jeff Gordinier and Marc Weingarten

The authors have asserted their moral rights

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Minion

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

CONTENTS

Live Through This : Jeff Gordinier

Diamond in a Rhinestone World : Allison Glock

Revenge of the Nerds : Taffy Brodesser-Akner

A Rock Star is a Teenager : Alina Simone

All That I Can Say : Charlotte Druckman

Pressing On : Jennifer Nix

Jesus Freaks, Woo Woo Girls, Faeries, and Björk : Margaret Wappler Why Do Fools

Fall In Love? : Kim Morgan

Strange Angel : Isabella Alimonti

The One : Marisa Silver

Not A Rock N Roll Nigger : Dael Orlandersmith

Nina, Goddam! : Katell Keineg

Better Than Clearasil: How X-ray Spex Allowed Me to See Past a Germ-filled Adolescence : Daniel Waters

Beautiful Child : Susan Choi

Sister : Elissa Schappell

Running Up That Hill : Lisa Catherine Harper

Not Rid of Me : Ian Daly

In That Dark Room: Aretha, Loretta, and a Microphone : Ada Limón

A Vision of a Daughter of Albion : Rosie Schaap

Soul Survivor : Kate Christensen

Punk Nerd Grrrl : Felicia Luna Lemus

Exile in Godville : Bart Blasengame

Wreckage : Phyllis Grant

About the Authors

Acknowledgments

Live Through This

Jeff Gordinier

“First I was afraid, I was petrified…”

There is a boy sitting in the audience at a television studio.

The year is 1978, and the boy’s family has just moved to Southern California from the East Coast. Back on Long Island, the boy tended to spend his days in a seventies version of a Wordsworthian reverie, wandering through the woods for hours in tie-dyed blue jeans and green high-top sneakers, adrift in his thoughts. But there are no forests here in the smoggy suburbs of Los Angeles, and it’s hard to make friends, and the kid feels alienated and lonely, as kids often do.

Back east, it would have been customary for the boy and his classmates to go on a field trip to, say, a modern art museum in Manhattan or the summer estate of Theodore Roosevelt, but this is Southern California in the seventies, and things are weird. Here the students go on field trips to watch the taping of TV shows. Which is why he finds himself in the studio audience of a program called Kids Are People Too.

Kids Are People Too resembles a late-night talk show, except that it airs in the afterschool hours, and its target audience is tweens. Among the celebrity guests on this strange afternoon are Ricardo Montalbán, the actor who plays a kind of cornball Prospero on Fantasy Island, a series that to this day rivals Twin Peaks in the category of Craziest Thing Ever to Appear in Prime Time; and F. Lee Bailey, a lawyer who will, years later, go onto dubious fame as a member of the legal team defending O. J. Simpson against accusations of murder.

To repeat: Yes, this was a school field trip.

I was that kid, and decades later I have no memory of what the attorney and the actor blathered about on Kids Are People Too.

All I remember is how an electric current of don’t-fuck-with-me disco empowerment—a surge of uncrushable, sacramental, stand-up-for-yourself symphonic boogie—whipped through the room when Gloria Gaynor took the stage to lip-synch her way through a hit song called “I Will Survive.”

How strong a song was “I Will Survive”? The word “anthem” gets thrown around way too profligately these days, but “I Will Survive” remains, to this day, strong enough not only to outlast and outclass its time-capsule associations with disco, but also to rise above the act of lip-synching. It didn’t matter that Gloria Gaynor wasn’t really singing on the set of Kids Are People Too. It didn’t matter that she didn’t have a band. It didn’t matter that “I Will Survive” was almost certainly not composed with suburban white boys like me in mind. The message of the song felt universal enough to relieve me, momentarily, of my preteen loneliness and insecurity. In that instant, on that ridiculous Burbank soundstage, “I Will Survive” raced through my adolescent system the way pilfered spoonfuls of vitamin-and-mineral-dense malt syrup raced through Billy Pilgrim’s veins in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: “A moment went by, and then every cell in Billy’s body shook him with ravenous gratitude and applause.”

Applause. For whatever reason, in the decades that followed, female performers and songwriters would often be the ones whose music buoyed up my spirits. I’m talking about a very wide range of talents here—Martha Argerich and Mitsuko Uchida, Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington, Heart and the Pretenders, Blondie and Nico, Dionne Warwick and Patti Smith, Emmylou Harris and Rosanne Cash, Donna Summer and Diana Ross, Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin, Exene Cervenka and Siouxsie Sioux, Natalie Merchant and Tracy Chapman, Fiona Apple and Cat Power, Lauryn Hill and Amy Winehouse, Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams, Katell Keineg and Feist, Neko Case and Roberta Flack. Sometimes I’ll pack up a bunch of CDs for a long road trip—yes, I’m a child of the seventies and eighties, and I still use CDs—and along the way I’ll reach into the stack and realize that almost every album I have chosen as a traveling companion has a woman at the center of it.

For years, the royal outlets of the rock press had a habit, now and then, of publishing special packages celebrating “women in rock.” As welcome as that recognition might have been, it also wound up looking pretty predictable. There seemed to be this compulsion, back then, to toast women who could “hold their own” with their cock-rocking compatriots in, say, Led Zeppelin. (Meanwhile, those of us who loved Heart’s “Barracuda” and the Pretenders’ “Precious” and Hole’s “Violet” never had the slightest doubt that the Wilson sisters and Chrissie Hynde and Courtney Love owned the department of ass kicking.) It seems crazy now, during a post-Madonna era in which the pop charts are dominated by Beyoncé and Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, but for a few decades loyal readers of certain magazines came away with the impression that female musicians were marginalized—viewed, strangely, as a separate camp.

Our goal with this book was to do something altogether different. Instead of striving to establish a canon, we wanted to pull together personal stories of how female singers and songwriters can, to put it bluntly, save our lives. I have no idea whether Gloria Gaynor ever saw her name carved into Italian marble as part of some Rolling Stone list, but I do know that she ranks high in my own private pantheon. So do Laurie Anderson’s Big Science, Cat Power’s The Greatest, the first Tracy Chapman album, the Fiona Apple album with the really long title—when a group of songs happens to pull you out of a pit of confusion and oblivion, you don’t worry too much about whether it measures up to Derek & the Dominos.

Our objective here was to honor the mysterious connection between voice and listener. So instead of compiling a checklist of artists who needed to make an appearance in these pages in order to qualify the book for Library of Congress-sanctioned approval, we opted for a more indirect route. We simply went to novelists, poets, bloggers, songwriters, and journalists (most of them women) whose work we admire, and we asked them to weigh in. It didn’t take long. Susan Choi on Stevie Nicks, Allison Glock on Dolly Parton, Rosie Schaap on Sandy Denny, Dael Orlandersmith on Patti Smith, Alina Simone on Sinead O’Connor, Katell Keineg on Nina Simone, Bart Blasengame on Liz Phair, Phyllis Grant on Madonna and Miley Cyrus, Ada Limón on Aretha Franklin and Loretta Lynn and the soul-cleansing art of karaoke—these provocative, engrossing testimonials poured forth with very little prompting.

We apologize in advance. The result that you hold in your hands is a book that never pays explicit tribute to Joni Mitchell—even though we agree with you that her genius is crucial and unquestionable—but does make room for Poly Styrene, the force at the front of X-ray Spex. Mary J. Blige and Kate Bush and Björk and Kathleen Hanna are here; Joan Jett and Dionne Warwick and Cat Power and Suzanne Vega and Etta James, alas, are not. Even though many of these omissions caused us wincing regret, Marc Weingarten and I sought to exert minimal influence and interference when it came to the choices. The driving force with each one, ultimately, had to be story: not hagiography, but real, raw stories about lives changed and charged up by the greatness of female artistry.

And story managed to intervene as we (slowly, slowly) put this book together. Marital crises, life-threatening illnesses, professional derailments—some of our contributors (and editors) found themselves caught up in the struggle of life at the very moment that they were trying to write about music that can soothe the pain and illuminate a safe way home. Heroically, most of them powered through. Some, in spite of equally heroic efforts, never made it to the finish line. (Hey, we’re saving Annie Lennox for the sequel.) All of us, we’d like to think, reconnected with the gospel that got beamed into my head back when I was a kid in Southern California watching Gloria Gaynor pantomime her way through her shining moment in the pop culture sun.

Survive. You will survive. Just fucking survive.

Diamond in a Rhinestone World

Allison Glock

It started with Nine to Five.

Certainly, I would have heard Dolly Parton before then. As a southerner, her voice would have been in the air around me, like cicadas, like chorus frogs. I would have noted her tremulous soprano sailing from a passing truck or my grandmother’s kitchen radio, and it would have lodged in my brain, so peculiar and particular a sound that were I ever to hear it again I would recognize and respond to it immediately, almost primally, a dinner bell for the soul. Which is likely what happened as I viewed Nine to Five, a winning, cheese puff of a film released in 1980, when I was twelve, and had yet to grasp the singularity of so many things.

As I watched Dolly sashay around, outfitted in goofy, coiled white wigs and layers of feathery eyelashes, shimmying, and squealing, and stealing every scene, I understood immediately that this was someone worth paying attention to. It was less a conscious decision than a reflex, as is inevitable in matters of the heart. Even though the movie was her acting debut (and she was costarring alongside seasoned greats Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda), Dolly stood out. Not simply because she was sexy. Which she was, edibly so. Or funny. Which she was, a modern Mae West without the disdain. But because she existed at all.

A cornpone confection of outsized everything that somehow managed to radiate dignity, Dolly was unlike anything I (or anyone) had seen before. She was the drag queen that could make you cry. The clown you wanted to sleep with. So clearly her own invention, so happily inhabiting the merry house she’d built, Dolly made it hopeless to resist her campy, cartoon charms.

Smitten, I saw Nine to Five at least a half-dozen times, my adolescent tomboy self fascinated by Dolly’s cultivation of overt, kitchen sink femininity. The abundant bosom. The ski-jump bum. The dresses cinched at the waist like sausage cording. There was a playful absurdity to Dolly that made sexuality seem less terrifying, like a gag all we gals could be in on. She was playing a character, of course. But inherent in that performance was palpable integrity. The same way Jack Nicholson was never not Jack, Dolly was never not Dolly. Some personalities arrive so fully formed, are such forces of nature, that there is no such thing as pretend. (And, as I would come to understand, it is Dolly’s genius that in her conspicuous fakery she is more genuine than any entertainer in the business.)

The best part was the theme song, which Dolly wrote and sang, and became a Platinum-selling, multiple Grammy winner. Dolly composed the number while on the set using her lengthy acrylic nails for percussion. It was a jaunty tune, folksy, inclusive. But with—like all things Dolly—a hidden depth that snuck up on you.

Tumble outta bed and I stumble to the kitchen Pour myself a cup of ambition…

It begins, a working woman’s blues, all sing-songy sweetness, until the next verse.

They let you dream, just to watch ’em shatter You’re just a step on the boss man’s ladder But you got dreams he’ll never take away…

When she sings the dream line, her voice breaks slightly, then recovers just as quickly to assert the finish.

He’ll never take away.

It is in that tiny moment that Dolly reveals how much she understands the world her listeners live in, and she with them, an intimacy you don’t expect or need in a blockbuster comedy theme song, but she inserts nonetheless, because she wants you to know that she sees you, that she feels your pain, shares your longing. Because, unlike most performers, Dolly never sings at you. She sings for you.

Dolly accomplishes this to much deeper effect in less frolicsome tunes. Her considerable canon—she’s penned more than 3,000 songs—includes iconic gut punchers like “Jolene” and “Coat of Many Colors,” which unpack hard realities about poverty, shame, fear, and loss. Still, it is her peerless gift to subvert something that, on the outside, appears slight, and fill it with an unexpected center of meaningful goodness. Her songs, in this way, much like her premeditated appearance, are so much more than meets the ear.

After Nine to Five, I became obsessed with Dolly. I say “obsessed,” but with Dolly, obsession is relative. Her fans are known for their unbridled fidelity, many building their lives around Dolly’s as one would a guru or church (For the Love of Dolly, a documentary filmed in 2006, attests to this phenomenon). Unlike garden-variety fandom, Dolly inspires devotion. Defensiveness, even. As if she were kin. As if someone were shit-talking your mama.

Her supporters are diverse. Gays. Bluehairs. Rednecks. Christians. Pageant girls. Feminists. Lesbians. Mountain folk. Fellow musicians. Old-timey country lovers. Hipsters. Tweens. All drawn by her extraordinary voice and her message of inclusion. When she is confronted by her more conservative base that can’t reconcile her faith with her liberal personal politics, Dolly punctures their bigotry with wit, explaining, “God and I have a great relationship, but we both see other people.”

Dolly understands life is serious business. Which is why she cracks wise so often. It is this squeaky joy—a Dolly signature—that allows many cynics to underestimate her, to dismiss her penetrating optimism as stupidity, an error she is generally happy to let stand.

“I don’t mind being called a dumb blonde,” she often quips, “because I know I’m not dumb and I know I’m not blonde.”

Dolly craved high heels before she knew she’d be short. She pined for blinding glamour from the dank shade of a holler. Hers was restless blood, looking for outlets. She found several, not the least of which was what she calls “looking ridiculous.” A deliberate choice that served the twin purposes of calling attention to herself and allowing her to hide; her enormous breasts disarming Trojan horses, obscuring multitudes.

In that way, Dolly is a litmus test. People who love her tend to understand that life is a huge, hot mess of contradictions and struggle, but that is no reason not to enjoy yourself while you’re here. People who don’t love her? Well, to bad-mouth Dolly is to reveal the worst about yourself. That you don’t get the joke. That you see only what’s in front of you. That you wouldn’t know seminal talent if it fell like a wrecking ball into your lap. Basically, if you hate Dolly, you’re probably an asshole.

***

IN 1946, DOLLY REBECCA Parton was born dirt-floor poor into a large Appalachian family. A dozen children in a one-room cabin nestled in the Great Smoky Mountains. Her father farmed tobacco. Her grandfather was a holy roller in the Pentecostal church, where like so many Southern greats, Dolly learned the value of song, and how faith and art are pretty much the same thing.

By the time she was nine, Dolly was already performing for audiences on The Cas Walker Show—a Knoxville, Tennessee radio and television program run by Walker, a hillbilly populist straight out of an O’Connor novel, who once buried a man alive in a parking lot for publicity. Walker cottoned to Dolly—saw her as kin by hardscrabble circumstance—and put her in his lineup alongside folks like The Everly Brothers (whom, in a fit of pique, he once kicked off the stage). By age thirteen, Dolly had left Walker and graduated to the Grand Ole Opry, where she met Johnny Cash, an encounter she later described, saying, “I was just a young girl from the Smokies, but I would gladly have given it up for Mr. Cash in the parking lot.”

Instead, he walked the line and told her to trust herself when it came to her music career. (This was no small thing. A decade later Dolly refused none other than Elvis Presley the rights to “I Will Always Love You,” against the advice of almost everyone in the business, a decision that ended up netting her millions after Whitney Houston used the tune for yet another blockbuster movie theme song, making Dolly the only artist to ever earn a number one record twice with the same song as a singer and three times as a writer.)

The day after her high school graduation in 1964, Dolly moved to Nashville. There she played guitar, mandolin, banjo, fiddle, auto harp, and harmonica, and penned songs for Kitty Wells, Hank Williams Jr., and Skeeter Davis. She also got married to a fella she met outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat her first day in town. (She and Carl Dean remain married today.) At twenty-one, Dolly became a featured act on Porter Wagoner’s weekly variety show. Their collaboration was a famously fruitful one, netting a six-year streak of top ten singles for the pair and high exposure for Dolly, who Wagoner routinely infantilized even as her talents began to outshine his own. Ten years later, eager to launch a bigger solo career, Dolly bid Wagoner adieu with “I Will Always Love You,” a ballad not of a failed romance, but of a codependent partnership that needed severing. It was a classy move, a gesture of fidelity and forgiveness. It was also one of the best love songs ever written, Dolly penning it in 1974, at only twenty-eight years old.

Wagoner had at times been critical of Dolly’s writing, insisting she would never get radio play with the lyrics she chose in songs like 1969’s “Down From Dover,” a mournful ballad about a pregnant teenager who is exiled by her family. Wagoner may have been right about the short term. But Dolly, legacy-minded and unabashed in her ambitions, understood that if she wrote from the belly of truth, audiences would respond forever, and songs like “Dover” would resonate and evolve into classics.

Which is exactly what happened. As the decades have passed, “Dover” (along with many of her other, darker numbers) has received its due critical props, largely because of the storytelling certain folks initially found objectionable.

“When I wrote [Dover]—Lord, so many years ago, the mid-sixties, I guess—I knew a lot of young girls getting pregnant, and usually in the mountains people would pretty much turn you out. You were trash and a whore and your daddy and mama wouldn’t let you come home,” Dolly explained in a 2008 interview. “I’m touched by everything, and that used to bother me…how awful that must be.”

Dolly said the song came to her “like a movie,” and the account is relentlessly tragic, its devastation resting not solely in the naive girl’s exclusion and humiliation, but in her clinging hope that the child’s father will “hurry down from Dover,” and return to her.

My mama said I was a fool and she did not believe it when I told her that everything would be alright ’cause soon he would be coming down from Dover.

The song continues, tracking the heartrending erosion of her convictions, and concludes with a stillborn birth, a fate the narrator believes she deserves.

It’s lonely in this place where I’m a lyin’

Our baby has been born but something’s wrong, it’s too still, I hear no cryin’

I guess in some strange way she knew she’d never have a father’s arms to hold her

So dying was her way of telling me he wasn’t coming down from Dover.

At root, “Dover” is less a chronicle of teen pregnancy than the universal story of the end of youth, of the excruciating transition we all go through when we are shown the consequences of belief, and the limitless cruelty of others. Dolly takes something painfully specific and delivers it in such a way that it blossoms in your head without you even knowing how, an emotional smart bomb. Everyone cries after listening to “Dover,” because everyone has felt regret, has played the fool, has suffered betrayal, has been the betrayer. Dolly writes often of “the beautiful lie,” the games we all play with ourselves, the ceaseless waltz between reality and what we wish were real. It is natural territory for her.

Though she is familiar with life’s dark passengers—“I prefer rocky road to vanilla”—Dolly doesn’t dwell in shadow. She focuses on connection. Every connection. Even after sixty years in the business, you’d be hard-pressed to find one person who has a bitchy Dolly Parton story. She works with the same crew. Travels with the same band. Talks to strangers like they’re family. If she appears in the tabloids, it’s because of her figure, not because she’s left a crappy tip. Dolly remains grounded, forever the farmer’s daughter.

It is this empathy that makes it impossible for her to write a frivolous song. Even her poppiest confections hold a line or turn of phrase that acts as a haiku of wisdom. This bedrock of knowledge Dolly attributes to her kinfolk and impecunious upbringing, where missing the signs or not knowing how the world works could get you killed.

“Most of my people were not that educated, but they had horse sense,” she explained to Barbara Walters in a 1977 sit down, after Walters condescendingly asked if Parton’s people would be considered “hillbillies.” In the same interview, Walters makes Dolly stand up and give a twirl, marveling at her clothing and her appearance while simultaneously telling her she “doesn’t need” to look the way she does. (Walters also wonders aloud how she managed to find common ground with someone so manifestly common.)

Dolly gamely rolls with every punch, “I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable,” she says cheekily, even showing Walters her collection of wigs and “machine washable” costumes; never betraying even a hint of annoyance, though she does tease Walters once, warning she might have to kick her in the shin if she did call the Parton clan hillbillies, a benevolent redirect Walters misses completely as she is: 1) not Southern, and 2) talking over her subject.

These were the years when Dolly was consciously making her transition from Nashville celebrity to household name, a goal she met in record time with minimal blowback. (The only grumbling came from a few country diehards who felt she was abandoning them for greener pastures, a gross misread of the light she would ultimately come to cast on the genre).

“I would like to be a superstar,” Dolly explained to Walters matter-of-factly. “In order to be a superstar, you have to appeal to a majority of people. And that’s what I’m trying to do.”

Ahead of her time, Dolly was one of the first crossover artists who ushered in the mainstreaming of country music. She was also one of the first women bold enough to chase goals previously permissible only to men.

“I’m not going to limit myself just because people won’t accept the fact that I can do something else,” she said. And she didn’t.

No other artist has been Ms. magazine’s Woman of the Year, a Kennedy Center Honoree, and the first person ever awarded the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. To date, Dolly boasts forty-five Grammy nominations (eight wins), one hundred million in record sales, and fistfuls of songs that are considered classics in any genre. She also built a theme park outside her hometown in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Dollywood is the area’s largest employer and a much-needed boon to the local economy. When you visit, you can see the Partons’ original Tennessee mountain home, as well as Dolly’s coat of many colors. The roller coasters aren’t too shabby, either.

Dolly is not one for half-assing. Unlike other music legends, she never got tangled up in drugs, booze, or no-good men. Instead, she worked harder than a lumberjack, kept her knickers on (turning down Playboy multiple times), and her hair high. She managed her own career with supreme success, believing quite rightly that, when it came to her business, she knew best.

“We are really like products whether we like it or not,” she discerned early in the game (decades before Madonna), and decided then and there that she alone would be in charge of quality control. This, too, was unnaturally forward thinking—recognizing that all her legitimate artistic merit would mean nothing if no one saw fit to buy. “Show biz is a money-making joke,” she surmised, wisely, “and I like to tell jokes.”

There is a clip on YouTube of Dolly’s 1993 appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. When she steps onstage, poured into a sequined black gown, hair feathered back like a Cherokee headdress, Letterman, the original arbiter of smug detachment, is conspicuously ruffled. Their pre-chat embrace lingers an uncomfortable length of time, our host rounded over and clinging to Dolly like a turtle shell. Eventually, they break apart to sit and talk, Letterman blushing and grinning throughout. Dolly pats and praises him, helps him along, but he is so taken he barely maintains, his torso rocking in and out, seduced stupid.

Later, she sings him a song—not one from the album she came to promote, but an older one, because she remembered that’s what he likes best.

And so it goes. Dolly cracking us all like eggs.

Now, at sixty-seven, she continues to tour. She continues to write. Her voice older, but hardly worn for the years, is as affecting as it was in her youth, still vibrating with emotion that rattles the cage, still reminding us of our essential fragility.

People sew their hearts to hers because it feels safe. She is, in her own words, a “leaning post of life.”

When she was just starting out, Dolly said she hoped when she was gone that people would remember her.

I can’t imagine anyone alive who could forget.

Revenge of the Nerds

Taffy Brodesser-Akner

“I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon,” Taylor Swift said with a straight face to an interviewer from Vanity Fair whilst the magazine was profiling her in 2013.

No, not Taylor Swift. Not the author of songs like “Forever and Always,” written in the wake of her relationship with former boyfriend Joe Jonas, the better-looking Jonas brother, and featuring this lyric: “Did I say something way too honest, made you run and hide like a scared little boy?” Not her, who wrote/sang about her relationship with the actor Jake Gyllenhaal, “Fighting with him was like trying to solve a crossword/and realizing there’s no right answer.”

Not Taylor, who leaves the impossible-to-crack clues in her liner notes for each song by capitalizing a variety of letters that spell out the subjects in a very essential way: “TAY” for a song about ex-boyfriend Taylor Lautner; “SAG” for the Gyllenhaal one (as in Swift And Gyllenhaal, or that they’re both Sagittarius. I don’t know).

For Taylor Swift to pretend that her entire music career is not a tool of passive aggression toward those who had wronged her is like me pretending I’m not carbon-based: too easy to disprove, laughable at its very suggestion.

Don’t get me wrong—I say all this with utter admiration. Taylor’s career is, in fact, the perfected realization of every writer’s narrowest dream: To get back at those who had wronged us, sharply and loudly, and then to be able to cry innocent that our intentions were anything other than poetic and pure. Most of us can only achieve this with small asides. Taylor not only publicly dates and publicly breaks up, but she then releases an achingly specific song about the relationship—and that song has an unforgettable hook—all the while swearing she won’t talk about relationships that are over. Yes, date Taylor Swift, and not only will she shit on you on her album, but the song will become a single, then a hit, and then you will hear yourself shat upon by an army of young women at Staples Center. And then she’ll deny that she was ever doing anything other than righteously manifesting her art. It’s diabolical, and for a lifelong passive-aggressive like me, it’s made her my hero.

***

LIKE A GOOD PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE, Taylor never owns up to this behavior. In that Vanity Fair profile, she repeats her vow to never kiss and tell, but then refers the journalist to an anonymous friend who does have permission to tell. And tell she does: About Taylor’s romance with Harry Styles from One Direction, about Jonas, about Lautner. Like a next-generation digital-age retaliator, Taylor has found a way to tell her story without telling it herself. First her friend tells Vanity Fair, now Vanity Fair tells us like it’s news. Now it’s not just rumor; it’s from an actual news source. Don’t look at me, she says. I didn’t say anything. And, well, she’s kind of not lying. Kind of.

“When I knew something was going on in someone’s personal life and they didn’t address it in their music, I was always very confused by that,” Taylor told The New York Times.1 “I owe it to people from letting them in from Day 1.”

The songs are, after all, her art! And art isn’t about anything specific. It’s about human experience, and it’s subject to interpretation. In fact, this song isn’t about me at all, she seems to say. It’s about you.

Consider the initial remark—“I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon”—itself a statement of roundabout, unimpeachable genius.

In fact, you can find everything you need to know about the multifaceted genius of Swift’s passive-aggression—her gift for words, her understanding of exactly what she was put on this earth to do—in that sentence. Never thinking about something is not the same as not having done it. And weapon, a literally loaded word, is something bad. She’s not being bad, or mean. She’s just letting it out. She’s just processing.

When The New York Times asked her about her relationship with Joe Jonas, the answer was: “He’s not in my life anymore, and I have absolutely nothing to say about or to him.” Except that song she wrote about him, of course. Oh, and her song “Better Than Revenge,” which was aimed at Camilla Belle, the actress who ostensibly “stole” Jonas away (sample lyric: “She’s an actress, whoa; She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress, whoa”). For his part, Jonas wrote his own song indicting Taylor that was heard by whomever listens to his music, but, well, lyrics just ain’t his thing: “Now I’m done with superstars and all the tears on her guitar”—“Teardrops on My Guitar” was an early hit of Taylor’s. This was the equivalent of the urban myth dance-off that may or may not (probably not, but let me dream!) have taken place between Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake following their breakup. It was a fan’s dream. A real brawl. Actual tween idol drama.

But still, Taylor would not own up to her song subjects. Either because she just loves getting off on a technicality, or she thinks we’re idiots. I believe it’s the former. Because between the liner notes and the timelines, there’s really no way to doubt it: if you just broke up with Taylor Swift, that there song is most certainly about you.

***

THE MASTERSTROKE OF ALL of this passive-aggression is, of course, “Dear John,” a single on her album Speak Now. It is the accumulation of her feints with little Disney boy Joe Jonas or Twilight hunk Taylor Lautner. This time, a man about twice her age came around, stole her heart, and then broke it. This is what she’d been preparing for her whole life.

Here are some of the lyrics to “Dear John,” printed without permission, in full detail, since no excerpt can adequately portray what a writhing takedown the song is:

Well, maybe it’s me and my blind optimism to blame

Or maybe it’s you and your sick need to give love then take it away

And you’ll add my name to your long list of traitors who don’t understand

And I’ll look back and regret how I ignored when they said run as fast as you can

Dear John, I see it all now that you’re gone

Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with?

The girl in the dress cried the whole way home

Dear John, I see it all now it was wrong

Don’t you think nineteen’s too young to be played by

Your dark twisted games when I loved you so

I should’ve known

You are an expert at sorry and keeping lines blurry

Never impressed by me acing your tests

All the girls that you’ve run dry have tired, lifeless eyes

’Cause you’ve burned them out

But I took your matches before fire could catch me

So don’t look now

I’m shining like fireworks over

Your sad, empty town

Taylor wrote this in the aftermath of her relationship with renowned rake John Mayer, a man who committed the sin of breaking the heart of a post-Pitt Jennifer Aniston, among others (Vanessa Carlton, Jessica Simpson, Miley Cyrus—and those are just the musical ones; by the time this is published, surely his near-engagement to Katy Perry, much spoken about on the radio now, will be a thing of the past). He is a man of little variety. His type is unsuspecting, pretty, petty, and also white.

Did John Mayer deserve this? He’s guilty of his own snide songwriting crimes: It was an open secret that he had written “Your Body is a Wonderland” to honor the fleshy coil of that other J. Lo., Jennifer Love Hewitt, whom he dated circa 2002. And he did write a pretty scorching post-breakup song about Taylor called “Paper Doll,” which is a basically a patronizing work of little art that sounds as loungey and un-new as his other music. The song talks about a girl who changes dresses a lot, which is not a crime as far as I know, and something about cutting cords—perhaps he felt like she was too young or too tied to the music industry trappings. Not like him. Nobody tells him what to wear or who to write soft-rock songs about!

However you feel about revenge songs, we can agree that Taylor’s “Dear John” is a master class in passive-aggression. First, consider Taylor’s use of the generic “Dear John” letter for this specific John—there’s that plausible deniability again!—as if to make it sound like a goodbye letter to anyone, when really it’s a goodbye letter to someone.

Then there’s the viciousness. “Dear John” lays bare all that we suspected of Mayer’s psyche that it’s actually uncomfortable to listen to. Not since Alanis Morissette wrote the scathing “You Oughta Know,” allegedly about former Full House star Dave Coulier (an unlikely lothario, true, but hey, Canada has its own rules), has a song about an ex been so cringe-worthy.

Of “Dear John,” Taylor said: “There are things that were little nuances of the relationship, little hints. Everyone will know, so I don’t really have to send out emails on this one.”

And just as she had wished for, John Mayer was humiliated, and he told Rolling Stone as much. Mayer also takes issue with “Dear John” as a musician. “I will say as a songwriter that I think it’s kind of cheap songwriting,” he said. “I know she’s the biggest thing in the world, and I’m not trying to sink anybody’s ship, but I think it’s abusing your talent to rub your hands together and go, ‘Wait till he gets a load of this!’ That’s bullshit.”

But Taylor maintains that she’s innocent, having told The Times, “I can say things I wouldn’t say in real life. I couldn’t put the sentence together the way I could put the song together.” It’s not that she didn’t want to say this to your face, John. It’s just that she couldn’t.

But John maintained she crossed some line that he didn’t cross when he wrote “Paper Doll,” or that Joni Mitchell didn’t cross when she wrote “Free Man in Paris” about David Geffen, or Neil Diamond when he wrote “Sweet Caroline” about Caroline Kennedy (though I’m still not one hundred percent sure that’s true). Using his name was not fair in love’s war, but really, the objection must be to spilling details of such intimate abuse. And that’s where Taylor excels.

See, Taylor was, according to lore, a chubby geek in middle school. She was abandoned by her peers in sixth grade, just when her songwriting powers were coming to fruition, and so just as her gift began to sprout, so did her ability to articulate them and, just a couple of years later, publicize them. The metabolism of this follows that of the digital age into which Taylor was born: Have a thought, post it. None of this rigorous checking with legal, followed by second thoughts, followed by self-doubt, followed by yielding to decency like a puppy dog. But more on that later.

It was a dream come true for a rejected-feeling girl who was coming into her own as a tall, dazzling blonde with a microphone and a following. Is there any one of us who kept a diary without wishing deep down that someone would find it and understand us fully, down to the ugliest detail? Is there anyone among us who didn’t hope that the world would learn from that diary exactly how the world had wronged us?

She was no match for a soft-rock singer who has been getting laid his whole life on the strength of his guitar and his pillowy lips.

***

THAT’S HOW TAYLOR SWIFT became the hero to of all of us losers, of anyone humiliated in middle school, the publicly dumped in high school, or anyone who ever realized during the car ride home the perfect comeback that would now go unsaid. We don’t all have the wherewithal to process what has happened to us and synthesize it into a pop song that will be broadcast to a bajillion fans. And we certainly, for the most part, lack the platform. Today’s teenager can craft the perfect Tweet or Facebook update, toy with it, post it, modify it, delete it. Taylor puts it out there, and out there it stays.

In a way, she was made for this. She was born with the face of an accusation. Her eyes, which see everything and narrow naturally; upturned, judgy nose to look down past; lips that tend toward pursing. Yet she was also born lovely, with a sweet, thin voice and an engaging smile. She’s smart and tall, and she’s thin now. Who would not love her? In fact, for those of us who were chubby youths, who had no friends, the invention of Taylor Swift is no less than the invention of a super-robot sent through time and space to lure the mean girls and mean boys into loving us, and then break their hearts and tell the world what scum they are. We couldn’t have dreamed it better.

Taylor’s denials are another layer of performance art. Because has there ever been a more passive-aggressive profession than writing? Writing is first born of a need to explain oneself, and it is comorbid with the desperate loneliness of an ostracized, chubby middle-schooler, like she was and, well, like I was. The popular kids can explain themselves to each other. Only the lonely are left to their writing. It’s through the tools of observation that we learn to hone an otherness…we begin to define ourselves from the way we are different. And slowly, slowly, we spend so much time pretending that someone is listening that we often don’t know how to change modes once people are.

Taylor became an ambassador swan to all us ducklings who never got the opportunity to rise above our social circumstances or have relationships with men like actual Kennedys or One Direction band members. Her songs are her report back to us from the land of fantasy: here’s what it’s like when one of us becomes one of them. Living as Taylor Swift in her songs becomes the closest thing you—I—ever came to cool.

Because I swear I’ve moved on from all the heartache and all the rejection. I swear the memories of eating lunch alone don’t hurt as much as they used to. I’m thirty-eight! I’m married! I have children! When I think of the phone pranks played on me, when I think of the names called out to me, when I think of the parties I wasn’t invited to, the moments I realized he was cheating, or when the group of girls looked at me like I was disgusting, it doesn’t sting me the way it did at the time. But something’s still there, and I know it because I’ve concocted the thing I should have said in my head in each of those situations.

Eventually, what happens is this: things you write get published and/or sung. And that’s when the people you’ve been writing about begin to hear what you’ve been thinking of them this whole time. If you’re a magazine writer like I am, you hedge your bets. You count on most people not being great readers, and then you hedge further by maybe not posting this particular essay on your Facebook page. You also build in some sort of plausible deniability: If it sounds like a particular person, make sure there’s an added detail—never untrue, remember I’m a journalist—that makes it so that this small story could actually apply to several people. I am always prepared with an “Oh! That’s not you! I can’t tell you who it is, but of course it’s not you.” Writing has taught me that you can retain friendships while still harboring a bunch of anger toward someone. Anger is not the same as not liking someone, and it’s certainly not incompatible with wanting to be liked.

Alas, I’ve actually never had to use it. Because 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 of circumstances surrounding the stories. However, if you mention them in a flattering way without naming them—say, talk about the time they gave you water in the desert—they will immediately assume you’re talking about them, even though they’ve never been to the desert or traveled with you.

(Taylor inherently knows about the Conundrum, and uses it to create her plausible deniability: Yeah? Prove it!)

The thing is, no matter how often I build the perfect retort into the memory of the thing that happened—and they would be “Dear John”-style retorts, designed for maximum, long-lasting psychic carnage—it never changes the fact that I never articulated things. I was walked upon and insulted, teased, and, worst, ignored. And so I chose a different kind of life, a smaller one where I could think before I spoke and then my words would be loud enough to last on a printed page. See, I do have a platform. I’m a writer. And there is so much revenge I’d like to get, so many scores to settle, but I’m older now and see so clearly the consequences of putting something in print.