Give Album Of The Year to Taylor Swift. It Would Be Really Funny
The world is trending towards absurdity. Let's lean in
The beginning of this year has been evil and ridiculous politically (which I don’t have to explain) as well as personally. Trump is back, and more insane than ever, though with much less fanfare or Twitter posturing; it seems most everyone is lying there and taking it this time around (Ross Barkan explains the decline of hyperpolitics and ‘resistance’ here). I saw a recent tweet saying that a new Trump soundbite makes him “racist, by definition.” Wait, he’s… racist? You’re telling me for the first time. Nothing is new, but everything is still scary.
Switching to another form of politics, where nothing totally bad happened, the Grammy nominations this year were unsurprising and acceptable. Ariana Grande and Dua Lipa fans lamented that their artists’ respective albums weren’t nominated for AOTY as if they deserved it, but thanks to the now-bloated eight nominees per the major four categories, it was a predictable and fine slot of picks. There was no fighting the Powerpuff Girls trio of Chappell Roan, Charli xcx, and Sabrina Carpenter dominating the entire year; each racked up a bunch.
The big story was Charli’s huge sweep — she was nominated seven times, her first nods since 2015’s “Fancy.” She had, arguably, the biggest year in terms of culture and impact for a musician (Kendrick Lamar might take second), certainly one for a pop star. “Von dutch” is in best dance-pop, “Guess” with Billie is in best duo (I might have swapped it for “Girl, so confusing” with Lorde), “Apple” is in best pop solo (entirely due to a dance), “360” is in best music video and ROTY, Brat is in Album of the Year. This is good, this makes sense.
For that reason, I present, for their GRAMMY consideration, Taylor Swift. What the hell, sure. I think it would be a very hilarious way to cap off a year that has been derailed by grief, apathy, and things going terribly wrong for unexplainable reasons. It is becoming endlessly hard to seriously care about what happens in music right now, and I’m probably not alone. The Grammys will happen in four days, right after the heels of the inauguration, a slew of executive orders, and a climate catastrophe the far-right is blaming on DEI and women. Things will get worse. Why not start by giving the least surprising person a win and ease towards the distorted and terrible path our planet is traveling on?
I’m not trying to be contrarian; I just want the world to skew towards humor and absurdity. As for the actual quality of the product, I found The Tortured Poets Department to be on the upswing from the dastardly boring Midnights, though public and critical opinion towards the record is pretty dismal. It’s an endlessly spiky and emotional album, her most complex since evermore, and though it landed with a thud with an audience who were already bored to death by Jack Antonoff’s synths, it happened to grow on me. She’s funny, too, even though people are still misinterpreting the (obviously winking) title, along with its corresponding satirical track. The whole thing is background music, but at least I know it is.
So many people roll their eyes at Taylor since she’s everywhere; the Eras Tour has finally finished, TTPD debuted with monstrous first-week sales of 2.6 million, and its total grows with each variant she releases, notwithstanding the 31 tracks available for streams. Every time it feels impossible for her to get bigger, it happens anyway. There’s a real sense of “Anyone But Taylor” everywhere, especially at the Grammys, which would make her fictional win so much more absurd and deviously hilarious. The rich get richer, but what can you do? Everything is beyond parody at this point.
After Midnights’ undeserved victory (earlier last year, incredibly), people are bracing for the worst. But according to GoldDerby, the top two contenders for the win are Beyoncé and Billie Eilish in a nail-biter (35.7% and 33.7%, respectively), who in my mind are completely counted out. Maybe it’s that their album cycles have been pretty minuscule (with the exception of Beyoncé Bowl), but neither feel like the year’s defining album. The two heavy-hitters that everyone has kept their eyes on, Brat and TTPD, have a measly 15.3% and 4.8%. But for some reason they feel like the definitive top two, David vs. Goliath in the battle of complacent mediocrity vs. grassroots, breakthrough stardom.
For the record, I think Brat should win. I would like to believe AOTY is a fair mix of music quality and public impact, and no one has had a year like Charli — the humble beginnings of “Von dutch,” the increasing tempo and anticipation of each remix song, how the album grew on itself moments after release, Kamala, CNN, the inescapable Good Vibes of Summer, etc. — it is an album literally everyone is talking about, and I could say many more good things about Brat than I could for any of Charli’s previous releases. An album era should have peaks, valleys, layers, build-up and release — Brat (Feb - October) was the most thrilling events in music since, like, 1989, maybe? (Or RENAISSANCE if we’re being generous). Everyone was anticipating what would come next, and it was always something no one saw coming. It was inescapable yet no one wanted it to be anything other than that.
But — and this must be said — Brat is a pop album. It’s a very good pop album, but it is just that. We’ve been subjected to the most asinine takes about Charli forever, when her avant-pop promised a new, experimental version of stardom; every glowing profile said that her hyperpop was the sound of the future. Charli’s fans — and she herself — tend to have a distorted version of her music, one that places her above anyone else, simply due to her profession of being different. She is delusional and narcissistic (my Psychology B.S.-backed diagnosis), which is why Brat worked so well. This era is try-hard main-girl energy, and though she achieved glimpses of it (Times Square, SNL, a hugely successful tour) its work as manifestation often was cringeworthy, even when people (mostly online) touted its over-achiever nature.
“Never in history will we see something like brat and charli xcx,” one person on Twitter wrote. Brat is a “climax of pop music that delineates the gathering of so many stray threads of alternative/internet culture into a confessional poem of loneliness in the throes of night life,” another said. Another user prone to proselytizing wrote of Taylor blocking Charli on the charts, “there is of course an irony that an album full of meditations on the push-pull relationship of the artist and their art to success was beaten to the #1 spot by an artist peddling the 304th edition of their album for another week atop the charts with no self awareness.”
Please imagine, if you will, how bat-shit insane people like this would go if Taylor won AOTY. She’s the evil capitalistic overlord punching down on a small artist stealing a trophy from a hardworking, steadily rising musician on the cusp of their breakthrough, unleashing more variants after checking her phone in the middle of an Eras Tour costume change to see that Brat is ahead of TTPD by several thousand units or so. Her win would bolster Big Taylor, the mediocre white girl who phones it in over Charli, the hardworking People’s Princess, auteur of authenticity. “Let’s do a Christmas version of ‘Fortnight’”, the woman-hating, not-a-girls-girl money-hungry glutton tells Tree Paine, “I’m worthless if I’m not the best.”
Maybe it’s naive to say that Taylor isn’t tuned into this kind of stuff, but I’d place good money that it’s entirely her team doing this. For what reason, I’m not sure, it’s not for any good one. It’s directly antithetical for Taylor’s recent strategy of dropping an album with one music video then pretending it doesn’t exist anymore. I wouldn’t be surprised if Taylor’s phone was without Twitter or Instagram, its only contacts being Travis Kelce and her mother. So much of her rhetoric around TTPD was, “This part of my life is over, I wrote about it, here you go, and now I’m done.”
To be honest, Taylor’s recent aversion to promotion makes me reminisce when she seemed genuinely tied to her recent album for a long period, creating music videos and the like to create a world around it. Maybe the megacorporation of the Eras Tour has sucked up all her time, but a Taylor album doesn’t feel the same as it used to, and her rampant release schedule certainly doesn’t help make each one feel special.
She released seven music videos since 2021, accounting for her most recent six albums, which is one more than she put out for 1989 alone. Fearless TV, the best of the re-recordings, didn’t even get one, and most albums are stuck with just one to revolve around, with Midnights being a notable exception (for some reason, its worst songs received the most promotion, all released strikingly close to the actual album). TTPD was promoted by everyone except the person who made it, making it feel clinical and vague, despite its diaristic and personal lyricism. It is certainly not the defining aesthetic of the year; gray is no match against lime green.
Truthfully, I think some of Charli’s biggest fans would prefer if Taylor won. It would slot right into the narrative of Charli the underdog, Charli the experimental artist whose music is too esoteric for the Recording Academy to ever understand. You just don’t get it, they’d say, you never will. Even Charli’s own reaction to Crash not being nominated exemplifies this: “me not being nominated for a grammy for crash is like mia goth not being nominated for an oscar for pearl and only further proves that people don’t wanna see hot evil girls thrive,” she wrote on Twitter. Her rejection is power. I never wanted to sit at the cool table anyway.
What would it mean if Brat won Album Of The Year — the must lucrative prize in music? Charli would be rewarded her biggest achievement on music’s biggest night, delivering a speech on a stage she imagined blasting to smithereens months prior. It would push her firmly in the mainstream, out of if-you-know-you know status. That, for some diehard fans, cannot happen, because if Charli goes global, they will no longer be special for listening to her. Everyone is doing the apple dance, everyone had their ‘brat summer.’ They’ll have been listening and touting the album pegged as the most important of the year, and will have no large entity to rail against, no rock under which the weirdest and creative music has been fermenting. Charli must be the victim in this endless game of chart positions and influential albums, or else she risks becoming what her fans have been afraid of for so long — commonplace.
I’m endlessly interested by this form of delusion that fans have around Charli’s image — it should be in the DSM-5. I was listening to an episode of Drop Your Buffs, my favorite Survivor podcast, when Evan Ross Katz mentions that everyone uses the Grammys for their personal gain anyway. Your favorite artist wasn’t nominated? It’s a sham, everyone knows they don’t matter. She got a nod this year? About damn time, see, everyone, I told you she’s great.
This is all pretty insular, anyway — most people shouldn’t think this hard about pop music, even if Charli’s lyrics actually invite it. I’m not under the impression that any of this is ‘correct,’ it’s just my narrow analysis of a broad event. Thinking about the future can lead you to dangerous places. Billie will probably win for the third time in a row and none of this will matter. But the legend of Charli is so alluring to me, and it has been for a while — this artist who clearly desires fame but is a poor actress in making us think otherwise. Every time I’ve tried to articulate my thoughts on her, I stumble, because she is fun and girlypop and makes good music. Last summer when my straight roommates were begging to put “360” on I knew something was awry. I’m genuinely so curious what happens next for her, and I’ll be watching at a reprieve, but still watching, anyway.
And don’t get me wrong, it’s fun as hell to be a delusional Swiftie that thinks the public perception is turning against this tortured artist just so she can get up on the stage and steal everyone’s moment to announce reputation (Taylor’s Version) or whatever. More records, more variants, more tours, let’s keep it going and make her the most recognized woman on earth; it would set her up nicely for the democratic nominee’s VP pick in 2028. Mostly I would like for her to win so I can spend the day on Twitter where we can all pretend this is the worst thing that has happened this year so far. It would be a nice distraction.
The world is ending and nothing is making sense. We are in a mirror world where everything is drenched in irony. What we really need right now in this period of community fear and danger is Taylor Swift getting another Grammy.