Listening . . . so you don’t have to
The guest speaker at the annual retreat, having a level of ideological fervor, seemed determined to indoctrinate enlighten us with a very specific worldview that made the experience feel a bit like a marathon to me. Since this album was released while I was sequestered, I made sure picking it up was my first act of liberté the moment I hit the city limits:
See my previous Taylor Swift post → here.
It isn’t a matter of being out of touch. I’m still well aware of what’s current; I just no longer grant today’s music a front-row seat in my mind. Even so, I’ve been making an effort to track the supposedly “essential” new acts—a bit of cultural maintenance I perform but never exactly signed up for.
As a result, I also ended up buying Sabrina “Men-Are-a-Fun-Species-to-Watch” Carpenter’s entire discography:
There’s a very fine line between “offensive” and “absurdly comedic,” and Carpenter seems to be tightrope-walking right over the middle of it. Regardless of the controversy, the visual punchline here is hard to miss:
I’ve also been listening to Benson Boone:
And yet, no matter how much I try to keep an open mind, I simply cannot feel today’s music. It’s not just that something seems to be missing; there’s a deeper sense that something is fundamentally ugly, wrong, and spiritually sterile.
Which, of course, makes it all the more strange that I genuinely like Taylor Swift and actually enjoyed The Life of a Showgirl.