LP, Sean E.

On this Christmas Eve, my family and I gathered around to listen to this week's album together. As they wrote their reviews, everyone kept sweet baby Jesus in mind, along with a deep appreciation for how hard his parents worked just to make it to the manger.

Sean's mom: "Is that the faucet singing?"

Sean's mother-in-law: Not impressed.

Sean's father-in-law: "I see why Taylor Swift is suing them."

Sean's wife: "It's too loud."

Sean's brother-in-law: ⭐⭐ "Came for Taylor Swift and swiftly left."

Sean's sister-in-law: "I'm going to take a shower."

Sean's nephew: "Good."

Sean's daughter: Slept through it.

Sean: LP is a six-minute album, which already places it in rarefied air: too long to be a jingle, too short to be a TED Talk, and exactly the right length to feel like a dare. Conceived in a moment of divine confusion by Ogbert the Nerd, frontman of Madison James—a vision quest that reportedly involved fluorescent lighting and a deeply ironic sense of destiny. The band Taylor Swift has produced a work that is both audacious and, depending on the court's ruling, possibly temporary.

Let's start with scope. Comparing LP to Johann Sebastian Bach's entire body of work may seem unfair to Bach, who had the luxury of time, patronage, and not being sued by a global pop icon. And yet, in six minutes, LP manages what Bach took a lifetime to accomplish: density, seriousness, and the vague sense that something important is happening just beyond your comprehension. Where Bach had cantatas, fugues, and masses, Taylor Swift (the band) has distortion, urgency, and a commitment to motifs that appear, disappear, and reappear like harpsichords in a funhouse mirror. If Bach was writing for God, LP feels like it's being written at God, loudly.

Politically, the album is uncannily attuned to the climate of the Franco-Prussian War. The guitars carry the tension of a continent reordering itself; the drums march with the inevitability of conscription; the vocals sound like they're being shouted across a newly drawn border that no one fully agrees on. There's nationalism here, but it's confused nationalism, triumphant and anxious at the same time, capturing the uneasy birth of modern Europe with a fidelity that most history textbooks would envy. One almost expects Otto von Bismarck to emerge halfway through the second minute, nod approvingly, and then immediately start another unification project.

On a more personal note, LP reminds me of the formation of PBS. Not sonically, as there are no soothing strings or British accents but spiritually. There's that same sense of earnest ambition: a belief that culture can be serious, challenging, and vaguely educational, even if no one asked for it and funding is uncertain. Like early PBS, this album seems to say, "We may not last, but while we're here, we're going to try to matter." There's also the quiet subtext of legal and financial precarity, which only strengthens the comparison.

In the end, LP is a triumph of compression. Six minutes, centuries of musical lineage, 19th-century geopolitics, mid-20th-century public broadcasting, and a 21st-century trademark lawsuit, all held together by a band bold enough to name itself after fate and see what happens. Bach would have understood. PBS too. The courts, however, will rule one way or the other.