GLORIFICATION

 

Since it still seems to be an unnecessarily slow walk for the U.S. Senate to pass the foreign aid bill, I have to fill the time somehow. So in response to that I’ll go ahead with the word for the day:

Glorification: the action of describing or representing something as admirable, especially unjustifiably.

In the political and business realm, there can surely be no one as into self-glorification as Donald Trump. Now what about in the celebrity realm? Now look, there are plenty of people to talk about in Trumpworld, like Majorie Taylor Greene and J.D. Vance. But in the celebrity world there is Taylor Swift—and Taylor Swift. The media follows her everywhere; she even upstaged the Super Bowl.

She’s also like the Benson character in Michael Crichton’s novel The Terminal Man, in that the media stimulation feeding her brain is allowing her to become “addicted” to it, causing “seizures” that in Swift’s case causes wild swings of emotional responses to outside “stimuli”--particularly from her "fans"--that are made worse by her own psychological contradictions.

Well, alright, we’re talking about “real life” and not a novel or a film? This is “real” life? For whom, except for someone who is living their own fantasy, for better or for worse. Money and fame can’t satisfy anyone this egotistical; there is that “poor little girl” deep inside whose "needs" require constant satisfaction.

One thing for sure, Swift is one greedy individual. She can never have enough; she demands, and the critics and fans oblige her. What’s her latest demand? Call her a poet. When the media calls, the “experts” oblige:

 

There has been some mild “controversy” whether William Shakespeare actually wrote the plays attributed to him, or if he existed at all, and was just a “pen name.” But somebody had to write those plays, and it makes things easier to use the name everyone knows. Swift supporters seem to be mystified by the fact that she doesn’t actually write her songs all by herself, but has an “army” to assist in turning her “poetic” efforts to explain why her personal life isn’t “normal” into some kind of coherent nonsense:

 

But at any rate, I can’t believe that literary “scholars” actually think that Swift occupies the same pedestal as Shakespeare—or any classical author—now or ever. I suppose that some musicians consider themselves “poets,” and a few justifiably so. Paul Simon had “poetical” pretensions, and he actually has a college degree in English. Music critic Robert Christgau compared his song “Peace Like River” from his first post-S&G album to modernist American poet William Carlos Williams:

Ah, peace like a river ran through the city
Long past the midnight curfew we sat starry-eyed
Ahoh, ahoh, we were satisfied
Ah, and I remember misinformation followed us
Like a plague
Nobody knew from time to time if the plans would change
Ahoh, ahoh, ahoh
If the plans would change
You can beat us with wires
You can beat us with chains
You can run out your rules
But you know you can't outrun the history train

Poetry or not, it speaks to a general audience, not the self-pitying self-obsessions of a narcissist who alienates half the audience that critics forget exist from the jump.

Did Bob Dylan deserve the 2016 Nobel Prize for the literature? There was plenty of “outrage” by those who considered themselves “real” writers. The website The Collector notes that

When it was announced on October 13th, 2016 that Bob Dylan would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature that year, many were outraged by the Swedish Academy’s decision to privilege a singer-songwriter and musician over a more conventional literary writer. Unsurprisingly perhaps, some of this outrage was expressed by writers, who took to Twitter to vent their displeasure…Despite being a self-confessed fan of Dylan’s work, Irvine Welsh did not mince his words, dismissing Dylan’s Nobel as “an ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.” And Hari Kunzru declared it “the lamest Nobel win since they gave it to Obama for not being Bush.

Others were supportive of course, like Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates and Salman Rushdie. The Swedish Academy even suggested that Dylan’s work was a natural outgrowth from the tradition of Homer and Sappho. Really? But then again, Dylan himself suggested that people needed to come to grips with changing tastes in “The Times They Are A-Changin”:

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'

 

But there are limits to what we should accept. Simon and Dylan were not egotistical enough to compare themselves to “real” poets; they might have considered some of their work influenced by poetry, but if someone thought it was, then they might be flattered, but they never kidded themselves that their “business” was music, and not “poetry.” Dylan received an honorary doctorate from Princeton University in 1970, but by then he had compiled a body of verbal artistry that few could muster in a lifetime.

In its most recent list of the 500 top albums of “all-time,” Rolling Stone picked Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On as the "best" of "all time." Is it a “great” album? Sure, it has contemporary commentary on sociopolitical and even environmental concerns (decidedly lacking in today's "music"), and being a fan of orchestration on pop songs, there’s plenty of that on this album. In fact this and Gaye’s belated follow-up Let’s Get It On both have the “feel” of a symphonic work beyond the lyrics themselves, with each song melding into the next to maintain a strictly sonic “mood.” But if you like some “variety” in an album, then these works are better off as background music.

The Rolling Stone top-500 is a bit of a joke anyways; The Rolling Stones took the biggest “hit” to make room for the likes of Kanye West, Beyonce and Swift, going from 10 albums in the top-500 in 2003, to "just" 5 in 2023; in fact West has more albums in the top-500 (6). Given that West's mental state has been questioned, maybe  those RS compilers should revisit what they think they are listening to.

I suspect that the only reason the Stones, the Beatles and Dylan even have any records in the top-500 is by reputation and history, not that current critics have any appreciation for the classics; they just have to “judge” based in relation to clearly inferior work that they in turn have to judge “merit” based on what’s out there now—and even that is dependent on current  social and gender politics. And no, I don’t think the three mentioned in the previous paragraph have anything that belongs in the top-500, but everything is “relative” and you have to roll with the “times”—or with the punches if you deign to disagree.

In the meantime, we have to deal with self-glorifiers like Swift, who probably has more in common with Trump than she thinks, although in this Instagram video she seems to need to defend herself against about saying anything at all bad about him, since her father suggests she needs an “armored car” to fend off angry Trump supporters:

 

Swift also defends her “leftist” politics by attacking Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who she claims is against all this and that about gender and gay rights. Frankly, Blackburn is all talk when it comes to gender culture war issues; what she really “runs” on that the self-obsessed Swift seems clueless about is this kind of thing, as noted by the Nashville Scene in 2018:

Election Day is a little more than a week away, and polls show the U.S. Senate race between Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn and Democrat Phil Bredesen could be a close one. So, naturally, Blackburn is stirring up anti-immigrant bigotry apparently in hopes that it will give her supporters an extra bit of motivation to get to the polls on Nov. 6. 

It's 2024 and nothing changes. 

In her review of The Tortured Poets Department in The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich tries to sneak in there somewhere between the lines that Swift’s arrogance, fed by media and fan desire to turn her into some kind of god, “feels nearly terrifying. Superstardom tends to turn normal people into cartoons, projections, gods, monsters. Swift has been inching toward some sort of tipping point for a while.” 

Is she even “human” anymore? How detached from “reality” is she? We are told she is “beholden to her fans” but that is her fault, because “She has encouraged and nurtured a parasocial affection (at times she nearly demanded it: inviting fans to her home, baking them cookies), and she now has to contend with their sense of ownership over her life.”

Swift has only herself to blame for making her "romantic" complaints public in the majority of her songs for this MeToo generation. She needs people to feel sorry for her that her "love life" is all screwed-up.  She is more the “judgmental creep” who never seems to have the time for self-examination. 

I also find it amusing how Petrusich talks about her lyrical “signature precision” even after noting that Swift’s lyrics are dependent on clean-up jobs by the likes of Jack Antonoff and  Aaron Dessner; it will be interesting when they feel “safe” to talk about their contributions to her “poetry.” 

Come on, now: This is someone who became a billionaire charging people $1000 or more to "brag" about simply "being there," feeding people sob-sisters stories--and she has anything to complain about? She is 34-years-old and still seems to have the maturity level of a child, as testified by that infamous "banana" episode. Is she ready for her own kid? Doubtful, since that would mean she would have to grow up first.

Petrusich admits that all this “suffering” wears a bit thin: “In the weeks before The Tortured Poets Department was released, it seemed as though a backlash was inevitable. Swift’s lyrics are often focused on her perseverance against all odds, but, these days, she is too omnipresent and powerful to make a very convincing underdog.” Swift is a walking commercial selling herself, a corporate brand. Her adoption of a “poet persona” is “cringe.” Swift is “cocky and self-loathing, tough and vulnerable, totally fine and completely destroyed. She is free, but trapped. Dominant, powerless. She wants this, but she doesn’t. Those sorts of contradictions can be dizzying, but, in the end, they’re also the last things keeping her human.”

No, these “contradictions” don’t keep a person “human.” It just means that people with these “contradictions” don’t accept reality, and in Swift’s case that means that deep down, she is a needy individual who must feel the victim which she blames on being female, and not accepting the truth that her success is in large part because of the gender glorification society we live in today--justifiable or not.