Fran Magazine: Issue #103

Down Fran crying at the gym

📝 Thanks for reading Fran Magazine, a biweekly blog by Fran Hoepfner (me). The way this works is that Wednesday (regular) issues are free for all and Sunday (dispatch) and reread diary issues are for paid subscribers only. Consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription for access to more Fran Magazine, and feel free to follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd.

Mervyn May update

The month of May starts next week and it will officially be “Mervyn May,” the month where we all read Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake. I say “we all” but really, this is optional for everyone though last year’s Middlemarch May was a lot of fun. The Mervyn May discussion posts will run on the following days:

• May 6

• May 13

• May 20

• May 27

I haven’t totally put together the reading schedule but right now I’m going to say that on the first Mervyn May Monday (#MervynMayMonday), you (and I) should have read up until a chapter titled ‘Titus Is Christened’ which is on page 89 in my copy of the book. Thankfully, Titus Groan is not 800 pages like Middlemarch, but we’ll still be moving relatively quickly at a rate of about 90 pages a week. Questions? Concerns? Curiosities? Mervyn May begins SOON!

I can fix her (no really I Fran)

If you skip the first twenty seconds of the opening track entitled Fortnight of Taylor Swift’s new album THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT (caps hers), it’s a near-perfect song, a dreamy mid-tempo banger replete with a charming Post Malone feature — she gives him the bridge! — and an otherwise fairly classico (complimentary) Taylor chorus. The start of the second verse is especially pretty great: “All my mornings are Mondays / stuck in an endless February” — evocative — “I took the miracle move-on drug / the effects were temporary.” This is good! It’s normal! Compared to, like, the new Dua (sorry), it feels borderline elevated.

swift pictured with aforementioned “move-on drug” and/or a probiotic <3

It’s puzzling she doesn’t start with this second verse, opting instead for two lines that have come to embody what has become the calling card for this album: awkward overwritten metaphor-less lyricism: “I was supposed to be sent away / but they forgot to come and get me” sure! fine! but then: “I was a functioning alcoholic / till nobody mentioned my new aesthetic.” Girl what. There’s a slant rhyme thing¹ happening as she attempts (poorly) to connect “away” with “me” (not really trying for it) and “alcoholic” with “aesthetic.” Were I her editor — she has no editor, obviously — I might circle aesthetic and say, “diff word here — maybe try copacetic?” but I take it there’s no one in a position to do such a thing. Beyond that, the lyric doesn’t even make sense, and not in the normal Taylor way. “I was a functioning alcoholic” okay “until nobody noticed” ? “my new aesthetic” ??? Beyond that, “I was doing something until nobody noticed” is like — I guess we have to believe you on that one. “New aesthetic” is one of those phrases that hampers Swift’s lyrics; it’s clear she scrolls TikTok and Reels (no one has ever been a more apparent TikTok and/or Reels scroller) but she’s on private plane too much to understand a) what that phrase means and b) how it’s been reduced to nonsense.

I have always toed a weird line as a casual “normal style” Swiftie in that I like Taylor Swift’s music, even the stupid stuff, and I keep up with her “whole deal” though I am not by any sense indulging any of the major conspiracies or plotting except this one. She has made herself quite obviously impossible to ignore, which is hard for someone who has previously identified as a casual fan. I don’t think I ever listened to all of evermore until, like, after Midnights came out? And I’ve probably only listened to all of Midnights twice. That’s how generally out of step I am. This new album comes at the heels of her most over-saturated year ever and a relationship I find at best tolerable and at worst hedging on the results of this year’s election.² The second she announced the new album at the Grammys — which I didn’t watch — I thought, “oh, brother,” which I think was the right attitude to have.

I am more inclined to like TTPD³ than a number of my peers. I’ve read a number of good reviews, namely in Stereogum and the failing NYT, as well as some great analysis from

BDM

the mustread and this Twitter thread. The sound of the album doesn’t offend me; I’d like to see her work with not-Jack Antonoff a bit more, but I am a sucker for his work/production generally. But it doesn’t really actively interest me either. TTPD exists right at the intersection of the folklore/evermore sound (slow, sleepy, “adult”) and the Midnights sound (synthy pop, Lover-esque but slightly less stupid — derogatory, if you can believe it). It’s nothing I haven’t heard before in a combination of factors that are not really doing it for me overall. What feels interesting is that there are songs with lyrics I like (the titular album track,⁴ So Long, London, Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?, I Can Do It With a Broken Heart, Clara Bow) with pretty uninspired actual music, and then there are songs where I like the sound of them (Down Bad, mostly) with awful lyrics. Is there any good lyric-music combo?⁵ Fortnight, I guess, if you cut those first twenty seconds. Maybe But Daddy I Love Him — but that’s another where it’s like, okay, we know.

One of the reasons I’ve been able to maintain some healthy distance from Swiftmania is that I got in late. This feels crucial, as I now think it’s more or less impossible to do. I got in with Red, her then-controversial pivot to pop music. I didn’t even get into Red the year it came out; I got into Red eighteen months later, when I was driving and commuting regularly, with a friend who’d been a Swiftie from the jump and told me the good songs to seek out. I’d had a passing disinterest in the pre-Red stuff, outside of the really relentless radio tracks⁶ — disinterested in “country” or whatever fake country thing she was feigning at the time. From Red I stuck around through 1989 (my favorite and the undeniable best of her work), wavered a bit during Reputation (I recall no one around me liking it very much at the time of release; I’ve only really come to understand the hype around it in the past few years), came back full throttle for Lover⁷, and I’ve come and gone since then. folklore/evermore have one good album between them, but not something that compels me much though her “foray into fiction” was giving “me vibes” (in grad school for fiction; we probably have the same skill level when it comes to fabrication) and I was pretty bored by Midnights — though not unlike Reputation, I’ve since come around on it.

When I wrote about True Detective a few months ago, I thought a lot about the notion of getting into something late, about being able to pick up wherever and jump in. That’s not easy with something serialized, like television or book series, but it’s more feasible with film (in filmographies, etc.). With music, it’s almost my ideal mode of operation. I always think about Lady Bird in Lady Bird having all those greatest hits albums. I’m not quite so fair weather, but I don’t really want to have to slug it out through an artist’s lesser work. I respect it in the same way I have respect for my own bad work, but I’m not going to pretend it’s something it’s not. When I think Swift musical contemporaries of varying levels of fame — Carly Rae Jepsen, Charli XCX, Dua Lipa, Miley Cyrus,⁸ etc. — I think about the ways in which I’ve opted in and out, picked albums or songs that really hit, and then I’m content to turn away when they indulge in musical output that doesn’t interest me.

One of the things identified in a number of the most recent Swift reviews is that she seems to harbor some degree of disdain for her fans, their over-involvement and faux concern for her. On one hand, I’m like, “well, good,” — she has one of the worst fanbases of all time. On the other hand, when you put out an album like TTPD, which is so wordy and so lore-centric but you’re also pissed off at all the people who care about that lore, well, who are you left with? I suppose, to roughly quote Bradley Cooper’s Maestro epigraph, it’s that in-between where the art lies. Okay, lol, but I think where something like TTPD feels most disappointing is that it’s alienating to people who wanna just vibe with the music. She’s making everyone do too much work here, and for what? These aren’t really songs, mostly, and if they are, they aren’t new ones.

The most interesting aspect of the album does have to do with the general lore (which has maybe not been the case since Reputation, if that was interesting to you, otherwise, once again, it goes back to Red), which is that there are far more songs (seemingly) about her situationship with The 1979’s Matty Healy than there are her six year relationship with The Souvenir Part II’s Joe Alwyn. This is, more or less, what I do like about the album. I don’t think she’s snubbing Alwyn because of any kind of longterm disdain; I think she’s snubbing Alwyn out of sadness and respect. There’s actual grief there, or at least gestures towards it. Healy, on the other hand, gets the full treatment of nonsense lyrics and anger. I was really rooting for Swift and Healy last spring — not because I like him, I actually just straight up do not like him, or because I like them together, but I thought that for all of her pretending to be normal despite having one billion dollars, the most relatable average thing she could do as a woman in her early 30s was have an annoying boyfriend no one likes who said something stupid on a podcast.⁹ That is a true millennial experience! She seems really mad at him — I would be too if I had an annoying boyfriend no one likes who said something stupid on a podcast — but is also mad at herself for liking him. This is basically the position I was in at the time of Lover, an album that did not justify my rage so much as make me think, “I have to start dating someone who is normal — stat.”

I’d like to think that this is the type of album that I initially bristle at but reveals itself in time, but the dense word salad of the work doesn’t lend itself to variable interpretations. It’s all kind of just there on the page. To her credit, Swift isn’t pretending she’s reinventing the wheel. All of the promo stuff I’ve seen is basically her saying, “I had to get this out of my system.” As most writers I know would tell you, it’s the stuff you have to get out of your system that’s usually the worst stuff you write, the ashes and snippets of bigger, better, more abstract and obscure and beautiful work to come.

1. Can one of the ACTUAL poets I know confirm or deny whether this is a slant rhyme.

2. I’m kidding — kind of.

3. Possibly the most damning thing about the new work is that the actual title is bad, the formatting is bad, and the acronym is bad

4. Stream Voicenotes, Charlie Puth (2017).

5. Just to get this out of the way here: I like the idea of Swift having Florence Welch as a featured artist but I hate how that song sounds. My issue with Florence + the Machine in general is that I love Florence Welch’s voice but not the sound of any of that band’s songs. Same goes here.

6. He Belongs With Me is the go-to example here but if I have to pick a favorite of these it’s almost certainly Fearless.

7.

8. Miley is actually a great example of this — I go basically 50/50 on her output, always dip in and out at my leisure, and I’m never punished for it.

9. I’m not saying this is relatable to ME… just to, like, “people”…