Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 175: Joe

Prompt: "A song that you would gift to someone else in Song Challenge if you picked their name for the Song Challenge Secret Santa"

Joe is Secret Santa for:

Bridget

"The Downtown Lights"

The Blue Nile

Hats, 1989

I've been thinking a lot about what Bridget said on Day 171 under the banner of the Charli XCX banger "Club classics." She said: "And that's the fun part about music is that everyone is allowed to have different takes in regards to what everyone likes and doesn't."

This is so true! That really is what makes this fun. Puke on Your Birthday wouldn't exist if we all thought the same thing about all music. That would be boring as fuck, and I wouldn't devote so much of my free time to writing about music if it was all in service of jerking off the thousands of readers who all agree with every word that I say. Disagreeing about music is fun, because it's not actually important. Bridget being completely wrong about "Club classics" does nothing to diminish my friendship with Bridget. It's just a fun little thing to discuss, sometimes using hyperbole for laughs.

However. I also think that this only works if both parties in that discussion remain open-minded. If not, then the music discussions and arguments become a waste of time. Why bother attempting to make a case for a song's or album's or artist's value if that case is falling on deaf ears? Why would I bother writing a passionate comment under Bridget's absolutely TERRIBLE argument about "Club classics" if I didn't think she was going to read it or give a fuck what I thought? It wouldn't make sense.

(Let us ignore the fact that Bridget has made it extremely clear that she does not read anything I write on this blog because it's "too long," and doesn't seem to like Song Challenge all that much anyway. Both fair takes! I am glad that I pulled her name because this means she will finally be FORCED to read THOUSANDS of words that I write on Puke on Your Birthday whether she likes it or not!!! Maybe one day I will turn our blog posts into an audiobook so that Bridget will finally be able to "read" them while completing day-to-day tasks.)

I'm not the best at this, I'll admit it. No one is! It's hard to be open-minded. It's hard to listen to someone else's point-of-view when it clashes so directly with your own. Again, music isn't that important. This happens with important things too, the unwillingness to listen, and it's the reason that a bunch of people voted for a fascist and now he's going to be our president again. Music isn't changing the world, but it can change our own individual worlds, and so it's important to allow opposing opinions into your world, to truly consider them, if not out of respect for the person presenting that alt-POV, then at least out of respect for the music itself. I'm still working on it!

I wanted to gift Bridget something via a blog post in this way. I wanted to gift her my attention and my support and my willingness to listen to her POV. I loved reading everything that Bridget wrote this year, and I am so eternally proud and so very thankful that she participated in YSC all year; I also think that, out of the nine Song Challengers left standing at the end of the year, I disagreed with her *musical* opinions the most. And I'm not the best at listening to opinions like that. So that's the gift. I'm going to be open-minded and I'm going to listen to Bridget.

I'm going to finally listen to The Tortured Poets Department. I'm going to listen to it over and over until I like it. I'm going to write a positive review of it.

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The Official Puke on Your Birthday Review of Taylor Swift's The Tortured Poets Department

A Record Club Follow-Up Series

written by Joe K***

(This review does not refer to the album's bonus tracks)

What I once thought of as a flaw, I now see as a strength. There's an argument to be made about Taylor Swift being corny, and sure, some of the lesser-minded among us may have made such an argument in the past, in public, on this blog. But I think the truth of the matter is that it's a good thing that Swift leans into pretty much everything she does. You can't call it cringe if she's this sincere about it.

Could it be considered weird that she is basically singing about a brief fling from a year ago over the course of an hour-long pop album? It could, but I wouldn't slog through such a crass opinion. I instead would say that it's brave as fuck to lean into the subject matter, really wade through the muck and mire here, really getting her hands dirty. I'm sure many of the details scattered throughout the album are based in real life. I have no doubt in my mind, for instance, that scuzzy-ass Matty Healy owned a typewriter and tried to impress his bedfellows by lugging it around. The evidence is all here.

But that's not really the point. The point is what it always is: heartbreak, love, loss. These subjects are evergreen, especially as young women start to grow up and experience these feelings for themselves. They look toward the vanguards of pop music for assistance with these new emotions. "Is it normal to feel this bad?" Why yes, it is, and here's the proof—Taylor Swift, the most popular woman in the world, feels bad sometimes too. Maybe I'm not in the intended audience, but I can certainly see a reflection of what I'm feeling in this music too, if I go looking. Pain and longing, confusion and regret, a love so full that your heart is gonna burst, these are all universal emotions. You can find 'em here, if you want.

The music is intriguing. This is another way Taylor Swift really leans into it. She's not making bangers anymore, which is fine. She doesn't need to! But the key here is that, with her newer, chillier sound, she really leans into it. It's not like there are nine Aaron Dessner soundscapes and three "Look What You Made Me Do" pop affairs. Nope, we're very consistent on this one. Steady tempo, steady pulse, not too many moments of ecstasy, mostly just cold and piercing and, yeah, sure, still pretty catchy. Would I rather listen to "Mean" or "22" again? I think so. But I can't knock the evolution. She's growing, evolving, and has landed on a new sound that is obviously still resonating. I appreciate that effort. Not everyone has it in 'em.

Lots of great musical moments scattered around this thing! Who needs the bangers?! Not when you have the vitriol of "fuck it if I can't have him" on "Down Bad," or the big booming '80s drums of the title track that lead into the opening twinkling synth thing, or those huge hits after the great line of "my friends all smell like weed or babies" on "Florida!!!", or the juxtaposition of cold verses and crashing, rising choruses on "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?", or the Dessnarian piano loop of "loml," or pretty much everything in the pointed, Black Mirror-esque "Clara Bow," or a thousand other moments that make me think that maybe this Swift chick knows what she's doing, at least more often than not.

The thing I love about The Tortured Poets Department is the subject matter, though. I get the sense while listening to this thing—and I'm not the only one—that Swift is pissed at her fans for being so uncool about her wanting to fuck the 1975 guy. As I mentioned earlier, she is the most popular artist on the planet, and yet she spends an hour basically saying that she is the victim. If we're taking her at her word, and she really is the victim, degraded by having all her teeth removed ("Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?") and forced to listen to "sanctimonious soliloquies" ("But Daddy I Love Him"), then who is the perpetrator here? Sure seems like she's talking about the Swifties.

But she could never say it out loud, and that's what makes this album's drama really fucking sing, baby. She's pissed and she's horny and she's creatively and emotionally and sexually unfulfilled by some fucking jock she's "dating," and she lashes out, snaps at everyone who makes her life more difficult, and yet also she build her entire fucking brand on being #Nice to #Women and she'd lose everything is she admitted that she just wanted to do a little Netflix and chill with the smelly tattooed guy and she doesn't care what racist tweets he sent in 2009 or whatever. So she's reduced to playacting, and she plays the part so goddamn well. She's performing from a cage! Sing, Taylor, sing!!!

Here's what I said in August: "I'd rather be waterboarded than ever listen to Taylor Swift's new album any more than I have through this Song Challenge." I take it back. I'm glad I listened to this. It was an easy listen, and went down well. It's catchy but never overwhelmingly so, i.e. it earns its catchiness. It's nice music for a rainy Tuesday morning walk to the train. Pretty fascinating that Swift, with all her power, is moving pop in this grayscale downcast direction. Even more fascinating to peel that back and see the rotting core that Swift does just barely enough to cover up. I like this album a lot.

Thanks for the recommendation, Bridget!

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5

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And now, the second part of the Secret Santa gift!

One of the best parts about music—beyond or adjacent to the discussions and the arguments—is the way that you can treat music like a journey. You discover something, and you grow to love it, and then find that you can branch off from there in almost endless directions. Mainly, toward all the music that influenced the tunes that you love, and all the music that those tunes influenced. An album like The Tortured Poets Department is not only a singular work of art, but it's also one single piece of an endless story about Music. It's just a small piece of the puzzle, a puzzle whose solution will provide you with all the answers you need about history, the world, yourself, everything. The only thing you gotta do is keep searching for more pieces, and keep attempting to fit them together.

It's easy to branch off from The Tortured Poets Department. The answer is in the song "Guilty as Sin?" In it, a mysterious man sends Taylor a recommendation. It's "The Downtown Lights" by the Blue Nile (she doesn't miss the opportunity to make the band's name into a double entendre either, that's our girl). And the mystery man is, of course, Matt Healy, who has previously expressed love and admiration for Hats, and is no doubt as shameless with forcing women to listen to the music he likes as he is with forcing them to carry his typewriter up four flights of stairs.

Forget about the Matty Healy of it all for a second, though. Listen to the song. You have arrived here because Swift mentioned the song in one of her own songs. But now move backwards. Pretty clear that the sound of The Tortured Poets Department was inspired by the Blue Nile, no? Taylor provides a modern take on the synthy sophisti-pop that the Blue Nile were lusciously churning out in the late-'80s. That's pretty cool! It's cool how we can connect Taylor Swift and the Blue Nile and see in our minds the bridge that is connecting them, both implicitly and explicitly.

Even cooler is that this is just one of a trillion possibilities here. You can listen to The Tortured Poets Department a thousand times in one year and choose dozens of songs from it for a song challenge that you're doing with your friends because you are a sadistic torturer, but eventually, the flame flickers, and you need to try something different but connected. That's great! That's what's beautiful about music! You can check out the Blue Nile, and then check out anyone who influenced the Blue Nile, or anyone else who was influenced by the Blue Nile. You can read that Geordie Greep also loves Hats, one of his favorite albums of all time, and then check out some his other favorites (Meddle to Swift in only three steps!), and then imagine the preposterous alternate universe in which Taylor Swift decides to spend her fuckboi rumspringa having casual sex with the Greepster himself, and what insane jazz-prog bullshit woulda ended up on The Tortured Poet Society then.

Or, you could simply picture Matty Healy playing "The Downtown Lights" yet again for his bandmate George Daniel, who rolls his eyes, and escapes the dressing room, headed to his fiancée Charli XCX's house, where they sit down and co-write something that sounds like the opposite of the Blue Nile, on purpose, finally coming up with "Club classics." Then maybe you start wondering whether it's "Club classics," and not "Sympathy is a knife," that acted like the true voodoo doll for the suddenly vulnerable Taylor Swift in 2024.

But if you don't like "Club classics," then I think you're gonna like "The Downtown Lights." So this one is for you. Merry Christmas, Bridget! Thanks for being here, friend!