đ 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 âMervyn May,â the month where we all read Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake. I say âwe allâ but really, this is optional for everyone though last yearâs 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 havenât totally put together the reading schedule but right now Iâm going to say that on the first Mervyn May Monday (#MervynMayMonday), you (and I) should have read up until a chapter titled âTitus Is Christenedâ which is on page 89 in my copy of the book. Thankfully, Titus Groan is not 800 pages like Middlemarch, but weâll 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 Swiftâs new album THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT (caps hers), itâs a near-perfect song, a dreamy mid-tempo banger replete with a charming Post Malone feature â she gives him the bridge! â and an otherwise fairly classico (complimentary) Taylor chorus. The start of the second verse is especially pretty great: âAll my mornings are Mondays / stuck in an endless Februaryâ â evocative â âI took the miracle move-on drug / the effects were temporary.â This is good! Itâs normal! Compared to, like, the new Dua (sorry), it feels borderline elevated.
Itâs puzzling she doesnât 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: âI was supposed to be sent away / but they forgot to come and get meâ sure! fine! but then: âI was a functioning alcoholic / till nobody mentioned my new aesthetic.â Girl what. Thereâs a slant rhyme thing1 happening as she attempts (poorly) to connect âawayâ with âmeâ (not really trying for it) and âalcoholicâ with âaesthetic.â Were I her editor â she has no editor, obviously â I might circle aesthetic and say, âdiff word here â maybe try copacetic?â but I take it thereâs no one in a position to do such a thing. Beyond that, the lyric doesnât even make sense, and not in the normal Taylor way. âI was a functioning alcoholicâ okay âuntil nobody noticedâ ? âmy new aestheticâ ??? Beyond that, âI was doing something until nobody noticedâ is like â I guess we have to believe you on that one. âNew aestheticâ is one of those phrases that hampers Swiftâs lyrics; itâs clear she scrolls TikTok and Reels (no one has ever been a more apparent TikTok and/or Reels scroller) but sheâs on private plane too much to understand a) what that phrase means and b) how itâs been reduced to nonsense.
I have always toed a weird line as a casual ânormal styleâ Swiftie in that I like Taylor Swiftâs music, even the stupid stuff, and I keep up with her âwhole dealâ 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 donât think I ever listened to all of evermore until, like, after Midnights came out? And Iâve probably only listened to all of Midnights twice. Thatâs 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 yearâs election.2 The second she announced the new album at the Grammys â which I didnât watch â I thought, âoh, brother,â which I think was the right attitude to have.
I am more inclined to like TTPD3 than a number of my peers. Iâve read a number of good reviews, namely in Stereogum and the failing NYT, as well as some great analysis from
the mustread and this Twitter thread. The sound of the album doesnât offend me; Iâd like to see her work with not-Jack Antonoff a bit more, but I am a sucker for his work/production generally. But it doesnât really actively interest me either. TTPD exists right at the intersection of the folklore/evermore sound (slow, sleepy, âadultâ) and the Midnights sound (synthy pop, Lover-esque but slightly less stupid â derogatory, if you can believe it). Itâs nothing I havenât 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, Whoâs 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 â but thatâs another where itâs like, okay, we know.One of the reasons Iâve been able to maintain some healthy distance from Swiftmania is that I got in late. This feels crucial, as I now think itâs more or less impossible to do. I got in with Red, her then-controversial pivot to pop music. I didnât 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 whoâd been a Swiftie from the jump and told me the good songs to seek out. Iâd had a passing disinterest in the pre-Red stuff, outside of the really relentless radio tracks6 â disinterested in âcountryâ 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; Iâve only really come to understand the hype around it in the past few years), came back full throttle for Lover7, and Iâve come and gone since then. folklore/evermore have one good album between them, but not something that compels me much though her âforay into fictionâ was giving âme vibesâ (in grad school for fiction; we probably have the same skill level when it comes to fabrication) and I was pretty bored by Midnights â though not unlike Reputation, Iâve 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. Thatâs not easy with something serialized, like television or book series, but itâs more feasible with film (in filmographies, etc.). With music, itâs almost my ideal mode of operation. I always think about Lady Bird in Lady Bird having all those greatest hits albums. Iâm not quite so fair weather, but I donât really want to have to slug it out through an artistâs lesser work. I respect it in the same way I have respect for my own bad work, but Iâm not going to pretend itâs something itâs not. When I think Swift musical contemporaries of varying levels of fame â Carly Rae Jepsen, Charli XCX, Dua Lipa, Miley Cyrus,8 etc. â I think about the ways in which Iâve opted in and out, picked albums or songs that really hit, and then Iâm content to turn away when they indulge in musical output that doesnât 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, Iâm like, âwell, good,â â 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 youâre also pissed off at all the people who care about that lore, well, who are you left with? I suppose, to roughly quote Bradley Cooperâs Maestro epigraph, itâs that in-between where the art lies. Okay, lol, but I think where something like TTPD feels most disappointing is that itâs alienating to people who wanna just vibe with the music. Sheâs making everyone do too much work here, and for what? These arenât really songs, mostly, and if they are, they arenât 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 1979âs Matty Healy than there are her six year relationship with The Souvenir Part IIâs Joe Alwyn. This is, more or less, what I do like about the album. I donât think sheâs snubbing Alwyn because of any kind of longterm disdain; I think sheâs snubbing Alwyn out of sadness and respect. Thereâs 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 â 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 â I would be too if I had an annoying boyfriend no one likes who said something stupid on a podcast â 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, âI have to start dating someone who is normal â stat.â
Iâd 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 doesnât lend itself to variable interpretations. Itâs all kind of just there on the page. To her credit, Swift isnât pretending sheâs reinventing the wheel. All of the promo stuff Iâve seen is basically her saying, âI had to get this out of my system.â As most writers I know would tell you, itâs the stuff you have to get out of your system thatâs usually the worst stuff you write, the ashes and snippets of bigger, better, more abstract and obscure and beautiful work to come.
Can one of the ACTUAL poets I know confirm or deny whether this is a slant rhyme.
Iâm kidding â kind of.
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
Stream Voicenotes, Charlie Puth (2017).
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 Welchâs voice but not the sound of any of that bandâs songs. Same goes here.
He Belongs With Me is the go-to example here but if I have to pick a favorite of these itâs almost certainly Fearless.
Miley is actually a great example of this â I go basically 50/50 on her output, always dip in and out at my leisure, and Iâm never punished for it.
Iâm not saying this is relatable to ME⌠just to, like, âpeopleââŚ
Voicenotes is an album I refer to as "six time album of the year winner"
My only spare thought on TTPD is that she has gotten poisoned by "the vault tracks are good" (some of them are good, many were cut for good reasons) and decided to release an entire double album of vault tracks.
If you Venmo Fran from Fran Magazine $35 I will clue you in on the details and evidence for the real Swift conspiracy: that she is a clone of Anton LaVeyâs daughter Xeena