Her newest deluxe album, “The Dead Poets Department: The Anthology,” dropped last week to much applause from Curmie’s Swiftie friends and no little jabbering from those whose primary aspiration is apparently to claim victimhood.
At the center of what passes for controversy
is a lyric in the song “I Hate It Here”:
“My friends used to play a game where / We would pick a decade / We wished we
could live in instead of this / I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists /
And getting married off for the highest bid.”
Yes, Gentle Reader, the righteous dudgeon is thick on the ground
about that “1830s but without all the racists” business. Anyone with a modicum of skill at interpreting
text, of course, would realize that the line in question anticipates the revelation:
“Everyone would look down ‘cause it wasn’t fun now / Seems like it was never
even fun back then / Nostalgia is a mind’s trick / If I’d been there, I’d hate
it / It was freezing in the palace.”
The first thing to notice is the last line, suggesting that
a little girl’s fantasies involved being a princess. Stop the presses! But the narrator figure’s thinking has
evolved since childhood; she now recognizes that wishing for the 1830s without racism
and without arranged or forced marriages is rather like yearning for the NBA
without all the tall guys. Nostalgia,
especially for a period long before one’s own lifetime, is indeed a “mind’s
trick.”
To be fair, there’s not a lot in the 1830s to get excited
about. It is certainly passing strange
that a song referencing that decade would be included in an album with a title
invoking dead poets. There were some
significant composers (Wagner, Verdi, Berlioz, Chopin, et al.), and the
careers of novelists Charles Dickens and George Sand were beginning to take
off; Büchner and Gogol wrote plays that are still part of the canon. But poets?
Of the “big six” Romantic poets, however, only Wordsworth was still
alive in 1830, and whereas Poe undoubtedly wrote some of the poems for which he
is now famous in that decade, most weren’t published until the ‘40s. Walt Whitman was a tween in 1830; Emily Dickinson
wasn’t born until December of that year.
One might almost suspect that the 1830s was chosen as the decade
to reference in “I Hate It Here” more because it fit the scansion than for any
particular attribute. Stuff like that
happens sometimes, one might dare to presume.
Ah, but that would leave the Perpetually Aggrieved with
nothing to whine about, and we can’t have that, now, can we? So we read that Swift “draws backlash,” “faces controversy,” and so on. According to Snopes,
someone with the X handle @ghostijn, “garnered more than 6.3 million views and
25,000 likes, as of this writing,” which was four days ago. The post was apparently taken down and then
reposted: you can see it here if you really care to. It quotes the
lines in question with the commentary: “y’all..😭 there are so many wrong
things about this.”
Curmie, apparently being rather slow on the uptake, would
settle for one thing wrong; he can’t handle “so many things.” But all I can see is a lyricist setting up a
reversal to acknowledge that our fantasies about other times and places almost
invariably leave out the bad stuff: racism, marriage for sale, poverty, disease, etc. And we tend to place ourselves in privileged
positions—it’s unlikely that too many little girls of any race or nationality choose
to be scullery maids in their fantasy worlds.
A completely imagined universe, however, one with “a better
planet [where] only the gentle survived,” is another thing altogether. The “secret gardens,” where Swift holds the
only key to the entrance: those are controllable, and there can be no intrusion
of injustice or pestilence or sorrow. We
have all escaped to such a world as a break from quotidian reality; as long as
we don’t live there, the mental health benefits outweigh any downside.
In short, there is nothing in these lyrics to get upset
about. But you knew that, Gentle Reader.
Curmie repeats what he said in an earlier post,
that he is no Swiftie. He couldn’t hum
one of her tunes if his life depended on it.
And she’s certainly made some mistakes in her romantic life (unlike the
rest of us!). But she seems to be a genuinely
good person in a world in which “billionaire” and “narcissistic asshole” have
become virtual synonyms. Her songs strike
a chord especially but not exclusively with women of her generation, and she is
a worthy role model for younger girls.
She’ll be writing and singing hit songs long after her detractors’
proverbial 15 minutes of fame have passed into the ether.
And that’s a good thing.
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