M 🦋

I'm not gonna articulate this well, but there's this phenomenon I keep seeing on the left that I'll call "bean soup rhetoric," wherein someone fails to understand that they are not the target audience for a particular message, or just can't conceptualize why a speaker would craft their message differently to resonate with a target audience that doesn't already completely agree with them.

"Meet people where they are" is Activism 101, and people seem to be allergic to seeing that this is exactly that.

“I kinda like being a narrator that’s not the person I relate to. So the narrator in Clara Bow is either a studio, like a Hollywood studio person, or a label executive who’s sitting in my mind, behind a desk, and meeting with a brand new starlet who has just come to town. The exec says ‘You look like Clara Bow in this light, it’s remarkable. You’re so special, you’re amazing, we’re going to make you just like her. In my mind, that girl was Stevie Nicks, right? So Stevie Nicks sits down, they tell her she looks like Clara Bow, she’s got those big moon eyes, and, ‘We’re gonna make you just like her. Don’t worry. We’re gonna put you through this machine, and you’ll be a god. The second verse says, ‘You look like Stevie Nicks in this light, the hair and lips.’ So in my mind, that was me that sat down opposite that desk, right? I sit down at a record label and they’re like, ‘You look like Stevie Nicks. We’ll make you the next Stevie Nicks.’ And basically you learn that like, you’re in a machine, and they’re trying to make you into a woman that they just idealized and then discarded. The entertainment industry love-bombs women, right? ‘We love you. We don’t know who you are, why are you even here?’ And so in the last verse, in my mind, it’s a new artist that sits down across from a record label desk, and they say, ‘You look like Taylor Swift in this light, we’re loving it. You’ve got edge, she never did, the future’s bright, dazzling.’ And cause that’s another thing you get when you’re a female in the music or entertainment industry, movies, whatever. It’s like, ‘Oh, you’re like this person that we—they name a big name,’ and they’re like, ‘But you’re gonna be so much better, no, no, no, you’re gonna be cooler. You’re gonna be so much better.’ Like, to offset the comparison.”

“On Red, there was a song that I wrote a line in a hotel room when I was 22 years old called Nothing New, where I’m, it sounds ridiculous, but at 22 years old, I felt completely washed up. I felt like maybe the only thing that made me special was that I was this like, teen phenom, whatever I was looked at as, so I wrote this song, and it includes lines like, ‘How can a person know everything at 18 and nothing at 22,’ cause when I was 18, I had the Fearless album come out, and I had my first international no 1s, and everybody was like, ‘Oh, this writing, it’s so true, it’s so honest. We feel like she deserves to be here.” And then there was this big upheaval of, ‘No, she doesn’t. No, she doesn’t. She sucks actually.’ And it was like, it really turned the tables on my perception of like, love can be so quickly handed to you and then taken away, and it’s this kind of strange thing with fame, and that was the first time I’d ever grappled with that. Somebody was like, ‘Oh, you’re 22 years old and you’re saying like, ‘Are you tired of me? If you’re not yet, are you going to get tired of me?’’ Because it’s usually something you’d sing about later in life, but the entertainment industry, I’ll tell ya, there’s 10 years for every year you’re in it! But it’s fun.”

that use of love-bombing brought yet another vital layer of ttpd. it also made me think of maroon for some reason. perhaps her reference to nothing new

like the speak now letter and the glowing headlines turning darker with the fans chiming in while she is getting love bombed not just by men but also by the experience of being on stage and then being alone afterwards. what a colossal mind-fuck. the multiple angles of love-bombing sharpening the beam on her from multiple sources

That interview has me thinking, she sees herself as an explorer of the human condition, and her hope is to present her findings and connect with people over them. She has really transcended pop songwriting.

“I got a publishing deal when I was 14. I was signed by a guy named Arthur Buenahora at Sony. And he just believed that I had a perspective that mattered. And I actually asked him if he could please hold my songs from being pitched to other artists. I was like, ‘Just give me some time to try to get a record deal. I’m going to try so hard.’ I could almost compare it to the Brill Building. They have these offices on Music Row, or at least they had a lot of them then that were like these small houses—these, like, cottages and bungalows. Now we have these really tall buildings. Basically, you’d go there, and there’d be three songwriters writing in this room, three songwriters in this room, four in this room, two in this room. And I would just go to school, then my mom would drive me downtown 30 minutes, and I’d go and I’d have a songwriting session with someone that I’d never met before. But I really didn’t want to come in unprepared, so I’d walk in with four to five nearly finished things, two half-finished things, 10 hooks, because I just never wanted people to be like, ‘Yeah, there’s this like, little kid that thinks she can swan her way into Music Row and just like, write songs with these hit songwriters.”