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Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore

History as Metaphor

In her October Rolling Stone interview with Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift said, “when I was making folklore, I went lyrically in a total direction of escapism and romanticism. And I…

Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore

Some New Shit

evermore is Taylor Swift’s most explicit album to date.1 To use my favorite euphemism for profanity, there is a lot of language: six out of the fifteen tracks display the “explicit”…

Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore

Slow, Swift Grief

I seek the company of women through my year of magical thinking.1 Friends who walk, friends who swim, friends who sip coffee outside in any weather. Swift takes her “insurmountable…

Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore

When She Was Seven

In the 2020 documentary, Miss Americana, Taylor Swift says that “[I was] frozen at the age I became famous.” Signed as a songwriter at fourteen, and achieving her first Billboard…

Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore

Taylor’s Sweet Escapes

2020 is the year Taylor Swift decided to take on William Wordsworth. She does so on the standout bonus track to folklore, “the lakes.”1 In a documentary about the album,…

Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore

Bad Songs about Bad Things

At some point in the early 2010s, a gif of Taylor Swift was making its way around on Tumblr. In a sequence of images, Taylor Swift wears a wry yet…

Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore

Growing Sideways, Gazing Back

The Taylor Swift of evermore is our pop Heraclitus: nothing here happens for the first time, everything’s a return to something, a rewrite, a re-take, a retraction, a chance to…

Contemporaries Essays, Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore

Introduction: from folklore to evermore

Taylor Swift has a reputation for many things. Dropping surprise albums is not one of them, at least not before this year. If folklore is inspired by William Wordsworth, evermore…

Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 1, Peer Reviewed Articles

Beyond Desire: Blackness and Form

Twenty-eight fat televisions are stacked into a pyramid of sorts in the corner. In the darkened room, each screen plays the same short excerpt of Nina Simone’s 1964 performance of…

Issue 5: Formalism Unbound, Part 1, Peer Reviewed Articles

The Sight of Life

1. Look It’s unreasonably hot for an English summer. Moving through the humid chambers of the Victoria and Albert Museum feels like trudging through a steamed treacle pudding, an Edwardian…