LINK CITY:
Details about the first Famous and Beloved Book Club at the end of this post! You can buy the book at my affiliate link so that not only Emily Henry makes money off your purchase, but I make money, too. First discussion of Beach Read is going up on July 8.
There has been a lot of good writing produced by people I know, personally and “of,” lately. MMF wrote about two meals I was present for (and a tattoo on Lena Dunham’s upper ass). Ben wrote about Gardens of Stone, a Francis Ford Coppola movie I had absolutely never heard of, in the cadence in which he texts, which I always find beautiful. Matt completed an ambitious and themed (I love themes) series of recommendations. Max Read wrote about the internet in a way I can’t stop thinking about, BDM had the last word on “Dr. Luke,” and My Polish Kitchen dropped an insane recipe for dessert pierogies. Phil also wrote a sweeping review of the ABBA hologram show which I think is one of the best pieces of criticism about anything written in the last decade.
🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺When you’re sitting this close to one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, it’s hard not to get… a little flustered. 🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺
I have had as many boyfriends ask me, “what is it about Taylor Swift, anyway?” as I have added and removed from my AMC Stubs A-List Entourage. Each of these people, all wildly different in disposition and normalcy, were either stunned to learn that a woman who reads books or a woman who is a (unintentionally) provocative (intentional) freak is a dyed-in-the-wool Swiftie. My answer has always been the same: Taylor Swift makes the same lullaby that is fun to learn over and over, yet the formula is strangely hard for others to reproduce. The cadence of her lyrics are spell-like in their sonic specificity, which makes learning them a kind of communal ritual, but her performance is both totally predictable and entirely unique, which renders her celebrity a thing of utter curiosity. The answer, in other words, should be simple, but it’s not, which is the reason I like Taylor Swift.
For more clarity: the person Taylor Swift is the most like is Hannah Montana. She is mythologized to the point of being unreal, yet uncannily bucks expectations of what a doubly-manufactured pop star (Hannah Montana 2, Meet Miley Cyrus) should do (serve as a blueprint for internally misogynized wish-fulfillment) or look like (child with weird teeth). When I was 10, I genuinely clicked with Hannah’s music because of its measured understanding that children not only need music to listen to on their commutes to and from school and dance class, they need music that is distracting from reality in its cloying plea for you to memorize it: nursery rhymes for kids raised on microplastics.
My connection with Hannah Montana as an idea, however, was much more forced. To me, cool girls were Keira Knightley and Britney Spears (sexy adults), and funny TV was Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide (where I was introduced to Austin Butler). I had enjoyed the stylings of Raven and Hilary Duff, but because their respective Disney properties were real sitcoms à la Full House, whereas Hannah Montana ran entirely off the assumption that I wanted to be Hannah. As desperately as I wanted to be a pop star, I, as every child before me, did not want to be a child. Full House, Raven, Ned’s, and Lizzie McGuire contain sales pitches and protestant morals, but in milieu and jokes are constantly self-referential.1 Hannah Montana wasn’t a show with jokes so much as a company’s supply to the demand of children amidst the contemporaneous specificity of Raven and Lizzie’s successes. I remember thinking, they nailed the idea and music, but Miley Stewart looks like me.2 Where’s the fun in that?
Wish-fulfillment is a genre often misconstrued as “romance” or “YA.” It almost always appeals to young adults and absolutely always includes romance, but things can be classically romantic or “teeny-boppy” without being wish-fulfillment. Hannah Montana fell into the latter category, and, despite it striking me at just the right age, nothing except the tunes worked at first because Miley Cyrus’s look and talent level were too attainable: a central tenet of wish-fulfillment is that the wish is too sublime and fulfillment too satisfying. My fascination with Hannah Montana was therefore moreso a fascination with monoculture itself, because the whole thing seemed half-assed but sent everyone around me into orbit. The ritual of fitting in–communal activity of learning the music and lore–ensnared me in a kind of routine: liking Hannah Montana was just what you did. Liking Taylor Swift is just what you do.
The key difference between Taylor Swift and Hannah Montana is that the latter was a child and the former is one of the sloppiest living stars in terms of sex and substances: this is the secret ingredient that TS naysayers fail to understand. In her lack of talent as an entertainer and pedestrian appearance she has the attainability of Hannah Montana. But she is also utterly shameless about partying and constantly bragging that she can have sex with whoever she wants—the ultimate wish to be fulfilled—which is demonstrably inarguable. Despite dressing in the most elementary way possible, getting way too drunk and laughing way too loud, she is inevitably the coolest girl in every room. She shares in our fears but, to her, they aren’t even a little embarrassing. Everyone wants to be as successful as her, sure, but they more importantly want attention and repercussion-less fun.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Taylor Swift because I always do, but also because of Brat. “Rewind” is about how Charli xcx “used to never think about Billboard” but “now” wonders if she deserves “commercial success.” “Sympathy is a knife” is about how Taylor Swift’s sycophancy in light of Charli’s lack of commercial success makes Charli want to kill herself.3 In her 10 essentials video for GQ, Charli describes the album as “quite abrasive, very kind-of-in-your-face, very direct, both sonically and lyrically.” She says “some people might call it aggressive,” but she would call it “honest.” Brat is loud, if that’s what she means. Lyrically, though, “Should we do a little key?” is not nearly as hardcore as “I was a functioning alcoholic ‘til nobody noticed my new aesthetic,” and “But I finally met my baby / And a baby might be mine” is not nearly as cringe-inducingly-honest as “You talked me under the table / Talking rings and talking cradles … Are they second-hand embarrassed that I can’t get out of bed?”
It would be absolutely ridiculous to argue with “Von Dutch” or “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”, two of the best pop songs of the year, but neither Brat or The Tortured Poets Department are very good. They are repetitive to a grating degree, and extratextually position their authors as reinventing themselves in some way despite doing nothing novel, at all. But TTPD reads authentic: she was in love with Matty Healy and he embarrassed her, which is famously hard to do. She thought he was cooler than her, which challenged her entire business model. The most honest thing Charli has ever said is that opening for Taylor Swift felt like “waving to five-year-olds” (if you want to be mean… be mean!). Saying that Dasha is “New York City’s darling” is not earnestly cool but a performance of coolness for an audience fundamentally burdened by what has been (the year 2018).
I believe Taylor Swift makes Charli xcx want to kill herself because that’s Taylor Swift’s appeal. I do not believe that Charli xcx doesn’t know that, or thinks that “Mean girls” are still the epitome of cool. I think she knows Taylor Swift is the epitome of cool, albeit with a fundamentally different sensibility to that of Charli’s friends. She says so herself, over and over and over: Charli wants to be famous like Hannah Montana but to seem like a party girl, not like a hard-working industrial climber. Taylor Swift is the most committed climber of all time, but all we really witness is crushes and definite sobriety: her celebrity sustains itself on interest. That is unattainable to Charli, which should make Taylor Swift a sort of auratic fanfic character to her (à la Sabrina Carpenter). Instead, she can never fully indulge, mirroring and contributing to her own aura of fun-less-ness.
Famous and Beloved Book Club
I’m so late to talking about Brat because my gut reaction was to say it was made and consumed by aliens feigning an understanding of culture by signposting random nouns: cocaine, Julia Fox, cigarettes, girl, Lorde.4 That was kind of a meaningless observation, though, until I started reading Beach Read by Emily Henry, which is a different kind of alien performance of humanness also via jarring and random nouns: Target, espresso, bodega, Queens, gin, Taylor Swift. That Beach Read clarifies Brat’s aesthetic mode shouldn’t surprise me, though, because they are both popular impersonations, of coolness and fanfiction.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0317bea5-a4cc-495e-82df-7a77f0942280_2560x1440.webp)
Why I think revisiting Hannah Montana is important is because of what it tells us about having “it”: as, I think, made obvious by Miley Cyrus’s resultant, depressing, psyop of a career, Hannah Montana was nothing but a product.5 Products (Zero Sugar Creamy Coconut Dr. Pepper–YUM) are often thrilling to consume (Hannah Montana’s “If We Were a Movie”), if their reproduction of the real thing (menu item “Fall Creek Water” from the midwestern “sodie” chain “Twisters”: Britney Spears’ “Lucky”) is a legible impersonation. Emily Henry follows the formula, but is ultimately a weak facsimile of Anna Todd that reads as a book put through Google translate. Charli is that but of The Dare.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F54edece8-d39e-491f-acec-a0f3b7931eaf_2040x1360.jpeg)
While I do think fans who have blindly rushed to Charli’s feet need to be exposed to real music and cool people, this genuinely isn’t meant to be a diss of Brat. I just wrote 1600 words about it: when products are bad, they are fascinating. Beach Read is likewise awe-inspiring for similar and completely different reasons, which is why I feel compelled to write about it.
I will post 3 times about Beach Read, but ensure each post is legible to everyone, whether or not you have or are reading Beach Read. July 8 I’ll write about the first 100 pages, July 15 the second 100, and July 22 the rest of the book. If you are hesitant to engage: I have laughed out loud at almost every page and it is less than $10 at certain conglomerate retailers. But, as previously mentioned, you can also order the book at my Bookshop affiliate link so that I make money from it. Consider the source.
Raven is smart for a kid but is a dumb kid, Lizzie’s “ugh, this is so embarrassing!” schtick is funny because kids are so stupid, Ned’s is an absurdist comedy watered down for dumb kids, and Full House is one of the great American texts that happens to be child-friendly and about how adults act like children. Watching the former 3, I could relax because they didn’t reproduce my wishes to be fulfilled and were instead simply comedic. The third was and is both: Danny Tanner’s rockstar persona is called “Mildew” (I am laughing aloud remembering this—that house never stops being full to me), and I want to be Aunt Becky so bad.
I had an underbite and speech impediment.
“Should we have a little line?” reminds me of when Harry Styles says “Holland Tunnel for a nose, it’s always backed up” then snorts. Actually, “Kiwi” beats Brat to the punch in a lot of ways, as 23-year-old Harry Styles fights tooth and nail to seem like an adult who has sex and is comfortable in the presence of drugs: “She worked her way through a cheap pack of cigarettes / Hard liquor mixed with a bit of intellect / And all the boys, they were saying they were into it” : “With the razor-sharp tongue stuck to skinny cigarettes … You said she’s problematic and the way you say it, so fanatic / Think she already knows that you’re obsessed.”
"that house never stops being full to me" really made me BOL
kiwi by harry styles mentioned