I'm A Mirrorball When I'm Bumping That
Reflections on folklore and my last hurrah of Swiftie-ism, 5 years later
Walk with me down a terrifying yet weirdly comforting memory lane: it’s late July, 2020. Like everyone’s, my life has been turned upside down. I’m about to be a senior in a BFA Musical Theatre program (right…) during a global pandemic that has wiped out the industry I’m going to enter within a year (riiiiight…). My headphones have had Future Nostalgia, Chromatica, and SAWAYAMA on repeat for months. I’ve seen the same group of 4 friends in my college town all summer while we’re locked down and trying to stay safe. I’m sleeping soundly on a Thursday morning (read: unemployed) in a queen sized bed, completely unaware of the major news Pop Crave has just posted about. I’m awoken from my beauty rest by a FaceTime from a friend, which is when I hear the news: “Taylor Swift is releasing a surprise album tonight.”
Now that I’ve set the scene, let’s zoom out real quick. I, like many of my fellow pop fans, have had an up-and-down relationship with the music and celebrity of one Ms. Taylor Swift. The TLDR of my current stance on her is that I’m glad she’s taken a step away from the spotlight so far this year, and despite rumors of a release potentially coming this fall, I hope for all of our sakes that she goes this full calendar year without releasing an album (if this happened, 2025 would mark the first year without an album release from her since 2018, which is insane). I have found her to be oversaturated in the culture for the last couple of years, especially given that I think the quality of the music has gone downhill over the most recent albums. I also work with kids for a living, who are largely all obsessed with her, and I accidentally went viral last summer for dancing fiercely to “Shake it Off” with a bunch of children, which only exacerbated how much I was hearing her kid-friendly music. Due to all of this, I generally have needed a break from consuming her product in my free time. But one thing about me? I don’t fuck around about folklore.
An informative thing to know when it comes to this topic is that I absolutely live for last-minute or surprise releases. I remember scrolling Twitter in awe late into the night on a Friday in December of my freshman year of high school when Beyoncé released her self-titled album. I remember the texture of the bench I was sitting on at the restaurant I was at on the Saturday night when “thank u, next” came out in November 2018. I became a really big fan of Charli’s in the early days of the pandemic by watching her write and release how i’m feeling now in just 5 weeks (which is kind of the first folklore if you think about it, but that’s a separate conversation). The eventizing of a major pop release gives me butterflies of excitement to just think about, so when Taylor posted the album cover of folklore on her Instagram the morning before releasing it, I about fell out of that aforementioned queen-sized bed. I pored over the details of the Instagram post; the caption, the photos, what it all meant for the vibe and sound of the album, like, I could not control myself. As an avid lover of “Safe & Sound” from The Hunger Games soundtrack in my tween years, I was locked in on this album from the black-and-white photos of her in the woods alone.
If you don’t mind, I’m gonna wax poetic about this album for one second. On top of being a gorgeous, world-building collection of songs that, for me, feels like taking a deep breath in and out, folklore was a major turning point for Taylor’s career. Following the release of Lover in 2019, an album full of very solid B-sides (and also the worst song I’ve ever heard and obnoxious gay-pandering), it seemed like she was destined for a spot in the canon of millennial pop nostalgia, along with a Vegas residency, a judge spot on a reality singing competition show, and a few flop eras (sound familiar?). When folklore dropped, things changed. Taylor moved away from the bubblegum pop sounds she had just tried out on Lover, and instead embraced a softer, indie-pop sound as a balm for the chaos of the world, and damn, did it work. Not only did the album meet the moment, it has also aged so well, which I can’t necessarily say about all of the pop releases from 2020 (more so from the lens of “I hate remembering this time of life” rather than the longevity of the music itself). I still regularly listen to quite a few of these songs, especially during the spring and summer when I walk through Prospect Park after smoking a joint1. There are two reasons that the album has aged well for me, both of which center around the trajectory Taylor’s celebrity has taken over the last 5 years since this album dropped.
For one, the songs on folklore exist (for the most part) out of time. Despite being made during the pandemic, the songs do not have a timestamp on them since the ethos of the album is about telling stories that aren’t necessarily hers and are not all based on the lore of her life, which we have seen her do a lot, both before and after folklore. Even for the songs that are lyrically based on her life (i.e. “invisible string” about her and her now ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn or “the last great american dynasty” about the woman who owned her Rhode Island home before her), you don’t have to know the broad metanarrative of her life in order to understand the songs on a deeper level, as we see in songs like “Vigilante Shit” or “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”; also, at the end of the day, the lore-inspired songs on folklore are just better, and I would be happy to never hear the lyric “draw the cat eye sharp enough to kill a man” again in my life. This is not to say that I haven’t enjoyed music of hers in the past that I could connect to her broader narrative — reputation is my favorite album of hers after folklore! — but it was more about the fact that she was everywhere the last couple of years, and I didn’t want to be listening to music that reminded me of this fact. Because of this, folklore exists as kind of an anomaly in her discography to me, and I was able to still listen to it during the Taylormania Era (circa fall 2021-end of 2024) and not associate it with her celebrity or brand, which are the things that I have found to be too oversaturated for my personal cultural intake. Without that lyrical connection to some broader point in time in Taylor’s larger narrative, I have been able disconnect the musically rich, lyrically interesting art from the billionaire, predating-on-fans-via-consumerism artist, if you will.
Another reason this album has aged so well to me is because folklore feels like it was her last album that was about the music first and foremost. folklore (and its sister album evermore, which I also love) came out before the (Taylor’s Version)s, before the Eras Tour, and before Taylor, in her likeness, became the most profitable product in the world. In my eyes, folklore marks the end of Taylor as a musician first and a brand second. Everything since has seemed to be the opposite, which has caused her to be in somewhat of a musical rut; because of this, folklore is the last time we’ve seen her make strides in true musical innovation. Part of what built her legacy as a pop star in the 2010s was her capacity for sonic reinvention, and that seems to have stalled once she tapped into whatever helped her make folklore. It feels like since then, she seems afraid to step out of her comfort zone again since she received such widespread critical acclaim from her transition into Adult Singer-Songwriter on folklore and she doesn’t want to lose that. This album stamped a maturity on her that added to her credibility in the music industry; the critical response to folklore reminds me of when people finally took Lady Gaga seriously as a vocalist after she devoured “The Sound of Music” at the 2015 Oscars. This maturity has turned out to be a double-edged sword for Taylor, though, because as she transitioned back into a more traditional pop soundscape on Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department, she hasn’t shaken off the poetic, I-need-to-use-fancy-vocab-to-sound-mature lyricism, which creates a dissonance in the music that I find hard to listen to. Like, sorry, but what is the phrase “long suffering propriety” doing in a song as good and catchy as “Guilty as Sin?”? This is pop music, not Honors English!
So what is the legacy of folklore? To me, it stands at a crucial point in Taylor’s legacy. Similar to how albums like Ray of Light, The Velvet Rope, and BEYONCÉ completely changed the trajectory of Madonna, Janet Jackson, and Beyoncé’s respective careers through them reinventing themselves in ways that many of their contemporaries did not, folklore permanently changed how pop culture history and the music industry would remember and regard Taylor. At the same time, it marks the end of something; after having such sweeping success with folklore, she seems to have lost the songwriting spark that led her to that place to begin with, at the sacrifice of becoming the world’s Most Famous Person. I am genuinely very curious to see what she’ll do next (but again, please give us one calendar year off, I beg) and will be tuning in regardless, but I fear that my Swiftie cap I hung up years ago is going to continue gathering dust for the foreseeable future. That being said, I will once again end my summer by streaming “august” on repeat.
Other Recent Releases I’m Gagging Over
Tyla - “IS IT”
All hail the heir apparent to the Fenty throne! Everything this woman does absolutely oozes cunt, and both new releases from her this year (this song and “BLISS”) have been it. So sexy, so perfect for summertime, I really can’t get enough of it. I need the people to get on board again and get a hit song for this woman! The success of “Water” (a Grammy Award-winning song, need I remind you!) two years ago really set her up to do big things, so I need everyone to do their job and make her as famous as I want her to be. She has the Rihanna quality of hitmaking, she has a lethal face card, her waist is on fuck blue lives2…what more could you want? She has a new mixtape coming out this Friday, so let’s all do our civic duty and give this gorgeous young woman our streams.
Justin Bieber - “DAISIES”
HEAR ME OUT! WAIT! DO NOT UNSUBSCRIBE YET!!!! Now listen…am I listening to an album called SWAG in the year of our Lord(e) 2025? Absolutely not. But I did listen to this song and it is indeed quite good. Like, this man makes a mid-tempo R&B-leaning jam and you expect me to not love it? This song is such a vibe and I (unfortunately) have been listening to it on repeat the last week. It reminds me of some of my favorites by Ryan Beatty, who is the king of White Boy Does R&B music to me. I want nothing to do with this man or the un-clocked business that he’s standing on, but he ate that one thing!3
Song of the Week
NewJeans - “Super Shy”
I heard a DJ play this song not once, but twice, at the opening party I went to for a new gay bar in Brooklyn last weekend, and I haven’t been able to stop listening to it since! I’m having a big year of re-exploring K-pop (stay tuned for next week’s newsletter….) and this song has fit right into that; it’s literally a perfect summer song. It’s K-pop by way of PinkPantheress-sounding production, and I can’t think of something more fitting for the tempo (and temperature) of the city in the middle of July. NewJeans had such a moment with this song in 2023, and I would love for them to pop off again soon. Until then, this song stays on the summer playlist (along with “ETA”, another equally infectious bop of theirs).
That’s all this week! If you’ve gotten all the way to this point, thank you for reading this post. Subscribe to this newsletter if you care about that sort of thing, follow me on Twitter or Instagram if you care about that sort of thing, and I’ll see you again next week for more gay debauchery. Ciao!
If you listen to the song “peace” while stoned and looking at a body of water of some kind, your third eye will be opened. TRUST.
This is, of course, a reference to this sacred text:
I also love the song “YUKON” from the album, so technically he ate those two things, but I digress
it's like ur in my brain mr Kyle