Short one this week because I’m strapped, sowwy.
I’m not ever going to shut up about Tracy Chapman and her glittery sleeves performing at the Grammys with a clearly awestruck Luke Combs. W. Kamau Bell has a great essay on it here. “Fast Car” is one of the best songs ever written but it’s honestly not even my favorite Tracy Chapman song; that would be “The Promise.”
The track list for The Tortured Poets Department is either awful or brilliant, I can’t decide. Swifties know that track 5 tends to be the emotional annihilator of her albums (“All Too Well,” “Dear John”) and this one has “So Long, London” and I’m pretty sure it’s going to leave some bodies in its wake. I am of two minds about the Swift takeover. One, I feel like she hasn’t really done anything to deserve so much ire. On the other hand, she’s actively blowing carbon into the air with her private jet and she could be so much more politically vocal than she is. But at the same time, would we want her to be those things? Is that her position in this world? And if she said anything, would it make her haters hate her any less? It is impossible to be a woman, as Barbie reminds us. Also I’m typing this as ESPN is running a thinkpiece on the Taylor Swift effect on football. At this point, we will all, eventually, bend the knee.
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