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cslupus · 5 years

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Hello! It's Lupus. Here to put the chronic into the Chronicles. I don't own anything by C.S. Lewis but I believe he would smile on fanfiction and that he fully intended the reader to finish his world. I don't own anything by Tech N9ne. The italics are lyrics from his song "Einstein".

Christmas day. Topeka, KS. 2414 Se Colorado Street. Dale's house

"So, fucking Egypt, right? Yknow, I was there and damn it, I wanted to try some of that local hashish." John said this while gesturing with the hose of the hookah in his hand, half remembering to finally take a hit. He blew the next words in clouds, "It was back in late 2011 to early 2012 and they had that revolution, right? Well..." John paused to take a drink from his tall natty light and coughed. Scarlette sat inconspicuously at the end of the couch, a worn and gorilla taped hookah hose in hand as everyone listened to the man sitting cross-legged on the floor. She'd been at job Corp for a year and a half and was finally free to smoke. She was lit as fuck and did her best to follow along. He continued, "So I found some guys who put me in contact with a dealer. And this wasn't something like here in the states where you go to the place, take it home and, yknow. No, this dude led me and about 3 other guys to this fucking warehouse. There was literally this big ol' switch breaker, like 'Egor, flip the switch' style thing that they pull down to turn on this one bare bulb hanging over this circle of chairs. At this point I'm thinking, yknow. 'Yeah, I might die, but fuck it. Yolo. Let's see where this goes.' and besides, they already had my money. So we go and sit in these chairs and they break it out and we're passing it around when one of the guys there starts to speak. He said," John paused. The look in his eye had shifted to a sadder gaze. "He said he was with the Egyptian guard or military or whatever. I don't remember his rank, just that he gave orders. He told us his rank and he told us his job during the revolution. Keep in mind that this shit just happened, like, within a year of him telling this story. His job was to tell the armed soldiers guarding some building what to do. The protests were crazy and a few times, yknow, his men got nervous, and he got nervous. He finally ordered the men to fire into the air to scare the crowd back, and so they did and the crowd dispersed. Just a couple days later they were back, and after a bit he had his men fire in the air again and the crowd dispersed and backed up, but slower this time. And sure enough, a day and a half later, they're back. So he has them fire into the air again. But the crowd isn't dispersing. He's telling us about fucking hundreds of people calling his bluff and his superiors were putting pressure on him and then, for whatever reason, he looked ME in the eye, dead in the eye, and said 'So I ordered my men to fire into the crowd.' and the only thing I could think right then in that moment was 'I am so fucking high right now.'"

The room was quiet. This quiet was comically broken with the sound of someone sucking the last icy bit of fountain drink through a straw, and everyone suppressed their laughter until finally Scarlette let hers go. The rest of the room followed suit. The tension broke and Dale, the host, slid over to Scarlette and asked her to pass the Playstation controller. She handed it over and he proceeded to put on some YouTube. Music filled the spaces left by people trickling towards the kitchen where the liquor was.

If you got scratch nigga, get the fuck up Throw your hands up, if you hella fucked up Einstein, tech n9ne, two triple zip Crack a jaw, whip 'em all, if they wanna trip Ladies with the bar codes, meet me after this

Maybe you can show me, the meaning of abyss Everybody on the wall momma is a bzzz Had her at the budgetel stroking on my dzzz This ones for the psychos gang bangers and sluts Bumbs holding the pipe those college graduate fucks

Scarlette stepped out onto the front porch to smoke a cigarette.

As she untangled her ear buds, a second person came outside and lit a clove cigar.

"Sup, Eddie." Scarlette said. She looked at him and noticed his clean cut appearance and his absence of cornrows. "You look nice. Your hair is really short, though. Beard looks good."

"Thanks, clove?" he offered the little black pack over and she saw a lighter and a chillum in it with 3 black wrapped cigars and three little nugs of weed in the cellophane of a cigarette pack burned shut.

"Everything's coming in threes. Nah. I don't want one after that hash."

"Threes?"

"Three cloves. Three nugs. Three days."

"So it's true. You're going to London to live with your dad." replied Eddie.

"Yeah, got the ticket with my Job Corp. money."

"You went for culinary, right? Are you sure they'll take your certification in the U.K.?"

"There's plenty of places that pay under the table. Skill is skill and I have it. I'll start there." she said a little defensively. She didn't like to talk about her reasons for moving, but the truth was, she felt called. London was calling and she was going to answer. She just was.

"I wish you'd reconsider." Eddie said sadly. "Do you at least have some money left after the ticket? Probably just a couple hundred dollars. What if things don't go your way and you end up homeless?"

"I'm sorry, Eddie, but I'm..." she was cut off by a series of gunshots from a few blocks over. "No, seriously! Who the fuck gangbangs on Christmas?"

"Keep it classy, Topeka." Eddie replied. The put out their half smoked deathsticks with reluctance and headed back inside.

Kc mo roll Kc mo roll What do we say to haters off top Haters got beef they thinking we got We gon' get postal if it don't stop You can get ghost or you can get shot

Scarlet sat down on the sofa and looked at her novelty yo-yo/mp3 player she was given as a fare well gift from her Job Corp. friend, Sylvester.

"I wanted to, just, curate and give you the best techno and trap and dubstep playlist ever, but a bunch of shit went down at my house I had to deal with, so I ended up not having time and I was just going to give you the yoyo and let you put on whatever juggalo shit you wanted, but then my buddy gave me acid. While I was peaking, I suddenly decided to work on this list, so I'm just ripping songs off of YouTube based on how they made me trip and, if they didn't make me trip right, it was like there was this lion, this fucking golden ass lion, looking in at me through a door in my chest and it'd growl. I'd feel it growl. It was insane. But I did fill it for you. So, it's all techno. Pretty random. Glitch Mob, Timmy Trumpet, some Diplo. Give it a chance before you delete it all."

She didn't say anything but she'd been seeing a huge lion in her dreams climbing the rocks on top of Echo Cliffs as the sun's rays slanted beneath a great, black stormcloud. Then it would look at her and she'd realize something so shocking it would wake her up but she could never remember what shocked her awake. She rolled her ear buds around the yo-yo and put it back in her bag. She headed into the kitchen to find Eddie.

"No dude," Eddie said, red cup in hand "you should not learn how to crip walk. You shouldn't even say crip walk. Say C-walk. And don't do it."

"Man, I do not, for the life of me, understand why a dance should be off limits. I just don't." said Tommie. "Man, I don't give a fuck, I'm graduated! Oh damn, sup Scarlette!"

"Sup. Shit, I'm graduated, too." she said as she grabbed a cup.

"From Job Corp. Not the same. Come back when you been to college, then law school." Tommy said as he leaned forward and smiled arrogantly.

"Man, chill out you cocky motherfucker. You ain't passed the bar yet. You are not a lawyer yet. You're a juris doctorate having motherfucker. Let Scarlette have hers, man. It takes nothing from you." said Eddie.

Scarlette glared at Tommie and poured herself some soda. She didn't really feel like drinking tonight, not after her mom's drunken bullshit earlier. She was thinking about being home as little as possible until her flight. She had lots of people to visit and say goodbye to, so it felt doable.

London, U.K.

Tears flowed down her face as she picked through what was left of her belongings on the terrace outside her father's flat. Her father's girlfriend, Debra, didn't like Scarlette and exactly one week after Scarlette started her hotel job, Debra planted a chequebook in Scarlette's trunk and claimed it had been stolen. So, without a word, Loren took his daughters belongings and put them outside while she was at work. He'd never been a brave man.

Scarlette made her way down the water-stained concrete stairs, out through the courtyard, and on into the streets. She walked aimlessly, hungry but too cautious to spend anything. She thought of all the groceries she joyously bought for herself just days before. They'd all be eaten up by that treacherous bitch and her lapdog boyfriend. More tears came. She sat on a swing and cried as hard as she'd ever cried.

When she finally stopped, the world stopped with her. It was dead silent. No horns, no machines, no people. She heard herself breathing hard so she knew she wasn't deaf. Suddenly, a great shadow crawled slowly over her from behind. She looked up and saw the buildings, streets, everything, peeled up in a big wave and curling over her. She didn't understand. She didn't think. She ran.

She ducked between pedestrians, having to take great care to avoid them so they'd stop knocking her down. It was like they couldn't see her. She eventually found an alleyway and ran down it. She leaned against the wall to catch her breath. To her left she saw a window, with a man staring out at her, though it wasn't a man exactly. He had sharp features, a pointed beard and ears, and two small horns coming from his forehead. She began running again.

This happened over an over. She'd see something utterly impossible, run away, stop to rest, and see something else. A half man half horse, a dancing tree, a squirrel the size of a medium sized dog holding quill and parchment. She couldn't run anymore, but she pushed herself down a narrow corridor back to the street where she saw a boarding bus. She barely made it, almost payed the fare til she realized she still couldn't be seen, found a seat and hoped to not get sat on.

After sneaking onto busses for a while, she found herself near the center of the city. She realized how tired she was. Thoughts of food again tormented her, til she finally got off the bus to track down some fish and chips to steal. She walked with purpose and rounded a corner to come face to foot with a giant. She whimpered as she began running again.

She ran across a vacant lot and saw a tree sprout, grow big and robust, fill with apples, the split in two and decay right in her path. She tried to go around and felt her foot snared by an ancient prehensile root. She struggled as she found herself falling down a sinkhole. She felt dirt in her mouth as the Earth swallowed her and her screams. Roots scratched her face and arms. Soon she felt light through her eyelids and felt leaves along with branches. She was still falling. No matter how she tried, she couldn't keep hold of any branches. It was all she could do to cushion each collision with each ever larger branch. All too soon, she ran out of branches. She fell a whole story and a half and landed on a small boulder jutting from the flowing roots that gripped the ground with her shin taking all of her weight. She both felt and heard her bone snap and, with a wet pop, rip through the skin. She was on hands and knees. She didn't feel anything until she foolishly tried to stand. That's when the world spun out of control. She stumbled to the ground; the pain in her leg was so intense she could almost hear it. She vomited and collapsed into unconsciousness.

Not far from her, in the brush, waited a watching satyr. He nimbly negotiated through the tangled roots of the great old tree and picked up Scarlette's bag. He looked around where he saw objects from her bag fall with her and gathered what he hoped was everything. He briefly examined the contents. He picked up her phone, thinking it was a very dark mirror for scrying, and he almost let out a yelp when the screen lit up. He put it back and donned her purse with the strap across his chest, leaned down, and lifted Scarlette up in a dead man's carry. He was a simple satyr who only did simple magic, but he knew great magic when he saw it, and he knew the High King at Cair Paravel would want to make this his business.

If you wish to read more, cash me on Fanfiction.net and wattpad

#chroniclesofnarnia #narnia #fanfic #fanfiction #susanpevensie #edmundpevensie #susan pevensie #edmund pevensie #mr. tumnus #cannabis #oc #job corps #sapphic #romance #lesbianism #fiction #fan fic

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makistar2018 · 5 years

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All 125 Taylor Swift Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best

By NATE JONES April 30, 2019

In this business, there are two subjects that will boost your page views like nothing else: Game of Thrones and Taylor Swift. One of them is a massive, multi-million-dollar enterprise filled with violence and betrayal, and the other airs on HBO. I find it hard to explain why exactly, and I’m sure Swift would, too: Somehow, this one 27-year-old woman from Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, keeps finding herself at the center of our national conversations about race, gender, celebrity, victimhood, even the economics of the tech industry. And, outside the legions of fans who eat up everything she puts out, no take on her ever stays solid for long. She was a precocious teenager, and the ultimate embodiment of white privilege. She’s been feminism’s worst nightmare, and an advocate for victims of sexual assault. Some people say she’s a goddess of the alt-right. Other people say she’s Jewish.

And yet, unlike Madonna or Bowie, Swift got through the first 11 years of her career without any major reinventions. (For 1989, she embraced feminism and threw away the last vestiges of her Nashville sound, but those were basically just aesthetic changes.) If the word on her has shifted since her debut, it’s because we’ve changed, not her. Swift — or at least the version of Swift on her albums — has remained largely the same person since her debut: a thin-skinned, bighearted obsessive, with a penchant for huge romantic moments. People don’t slowly ease into a relationship in her songs; they show up at each other’s doors late at night and they kiss in the rain. An unworthy suitor won’t just say something thoughtless; he’ll skip a birthday party or leave a teenage girl crying alone in a hotel room. Listen to her songs and you’ll ache at the resemblance to the most dramatic moments in your own private history. Listen to too many and you might ache again at the nagging feeling that those stories of yours have all been a bit uneventful and drab by comparison. What sort of real life can stand up against fantasies like these?

So, uh, I don’t recommend you listen to this list top to bottom.

But I do recommend sampling as many of these songs as you see fit. Even with the widespread critical embrace of poptimism — a development I suspect has as much to do with the economics of online media as it does with the shifting winds of taste — there are still those who see Swift as just another industry widget, a Miley or Katy with the tuner set to “girl with a guitar.” If this list does anything, I hope it convinces you that, underneath all the thinkpieces, exes, and feuds, she is one of our era’s great singer-songwriters. She may not have the raw vocal power of some of her competitors, but what she lacks in Mariah-level range she makes up for in versatility and personality. (A carpetbagger from the Pennsylvania suburbs, she became an expert code-switcher early in her career and never looked back.) And when it comes to writing instantly memorable pop songs, her only peers are a few anonymous Swedish guys, none of whom perform their own stuff. I count at least ten stone-cold classics in her discography. Others might see more. No matter how high your defenses, I guarantee you’ll find at least one that breaks them down.

Some ground rules: We’re ranking every Taylor Swift song that’s ever been released with her name on it — which means we must sadly leave out the unreleased 9/11 song “Didn’t They” as well as Nils Sjöberg’s “This Is What You Came For” — excluding tracks where Swift is merely “featured” (no one’s reading this list for B.o.B.’s “Both of Us”) but including a few duets where she gets an “and” credit. Songwriting is an important part of Swift’s spellbook, so covers are treated more harshly than originals. Because Swift’s career began so young, we’re left in the awkward position of judging work done by a literal high-schooler, which can feel at times like punching down. I’ll try to make slight allowances for age, reserving the harshest criticism for the songs written when Swift was an adult millionaire.

125. “Look What You Made Me Do,” Reputation (2017): “There’s a mistake that I see artists make when they’re on their fourth or fifth record, and they think innovation is more important than solid songwriting,” Swift told New York back in 2013. “The most terrible letdown as a listener for me is when I’m listening to a song and I see what they were trying to do.” To Swift’s credit, it took her six records to get to this point. On a conceptual level, the mission here is clear: After the Kim-Kanye feud made her the thinking person’s least-favorite pop star, this comeback single would be her grand heel turn. But the villain costume sits uneasily on Swift’s shoulders, and even worse, the songwriting just isn’t there. The verses are vacuous, the insults have no teeth, and just when the whole thing seems to be leading up to a gigantic redemptive chorus, suddenly pop! The air goes out of it and we’re left with a taunting Right Said Fred reference — the musical equivalent of pulling a Looney Tunes gag on the listener. Other Swift songs have clunkier rhymes, or worse production values, but none of them have such a gaping hole at the center. (I do dig the gleeful “Cuz she’s dead!” though.)

124. “Umbrella,” iTunes Live From Soho (2008): Swift has recorded plenty of covers in her career, and none are less essential than this 90-second rendition of the Rihanna hit recorded at the peak of the song’s popularity. It’s pure college-campus coffeehouse.

123. “Christmas Must Mean Something More,” The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (2007): One of two originals on Swift’s early-career Christmas album, “Something More” is a plea to put the Christ back in Christmas. Or as she puts it: “What if happiness came in a cardboard box? / Then I think there is something we all forgot.” In the future, Swift would get better at holding onto some empathy when she was casting a critical eye at the silly things people care about; here, the vibe is judgmental in a way that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever reread their teenage diary.

122. “Better Than Revenge,” Speak Now (2010): A nasty little song that has not aged well. Whether a straightforward imitation of Avril Lavigne’s style or an early attempt at “Blank Space”–style self-satirization, the barbs never go beyond bratty. (As in “Look What You Made Me Do,” the revenge turns out to be the song itself, which feels hollow.) Best known now for the line about “the things she does on the mattress,” which I suspect has been cited in blog posts more times than the song itself has been listened to lately.

121. “American Girl,” Non-album digital single (2009): Why would you cover this song and make it slower?

120. “I Want You Back,” Speak Now World Tour – Live (2011): Another 90-second cover of a pop song that does not particularly benefit from a stripped-down arrangement.

119. “Santa Baby,” The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (2007): Before Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me,” there was only one holiday song about falling in love with Santa, and for some reason, we spent decades making all our young female singers cover it. Swift’s version leans out of the awkwardness by leaning into the materialism; she puts most of her vocal emphasis on the nice presents she hopes Santa will bring her. (The relationship seems to be fairly quid pro quo: She’ll believe in him if he gives her good gifts — even at this early stage, Swift possessed a savvy business sense.) Otherwise, this is a by-the-numbers holiday cover, complete with sleigh bells in the mix.

118. “Sweet Escape,” Speak Now World Tour – Live; Target edition DVD (2011): Swift’s sedate cover of the 2006 Gwen Stefani hit — those “ooh-ooh”s are pitched way down from Akon’s falsetto in the original — invests the song with a bittersweet vibe, though like anyone who’s ever tried the song at karaoke, she stumbles on the rapid-fire triplets in the first verse.

117. “Silent Night,” The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (2007): Swift’s cover of the Christmas classic veers significantly away from Franz Xaver Gruber’s original melody, and even gives it a Big Taylor Swift Finale. Points for ambition, but sometimes you just want to hear the old standards the way you remember them.

116. “The Last Time,” Red (2012): Red is Swift’s strongest album, but it suffers a bit from pacing issues: The back half is full of interminable ballads that you’ve got to slog through to get to the end. Worst of all is this duet with po-faced Ulsterman Gary Lightbody, which feels about ten minutes long.

115. “Invisible,” Taylor Swift: Special Edition (2006): A bonus track from the debut that plays like a proto–”You Belong With Me.” The “show you” / “know you” rhymes mark this as an early effort.

114. “…Ready for It?,” Reputation (2017): The second straight misfire off the Reputation rollout, this one sees Swift try her hand at rapping, with some ill-advised bars about Elizabeth Taylor and a flow she borrowed from Jay-Z. (Try to rap “Younger than my exes” without spilling into “rest in peace, Bob Marley.”) Bumped up a spot or two for the chorus, a big Swift hook that sounds just like her best work — in this case, because it bites heavily from “Wildest Dreams.”

113. “I Heart ?,” Beautiful Eyes EP (2008): Swift code-switches like a champ on this charmingly shallow country song, which comes from the Walmart-exclusive EP she released between her first two albums. Her vocals get pretty rough in the chorus, but at least we’re left with the delightful line, “Wake up and smell the breakup.”

112. “Bad Blood,” 1989 (2014): When Swift teamed up with Max Martin and Shellback, the marriage of their dark eldritch songcraft nearly broke the pop charts. But when they misfire, the results can be brutal. The lyric here indulges the worst habits of late-period Swift — an eagerness to play the victim, a slight lack of resemblance to anything approaching real life — attached to a schoolyard-chant melody that will never leave your head, even when you may want it to. The remix hollows out the production and replaces Swift’s verses with two from Kendrick Lamar; it’s less embarrassing than the original, which does not make it more memorable.

111. “White Christmas,” The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (2007):The most bluegrass of Swift’s Christmas tunes, this gentle rendition sees Swift’s vocals cede center stage to the mandolin and fiddle.

110. “Crazier,” Hannah Montana: The Movie soundtrack (2009): When approached by the filmmakers about contributing a song to the Hannah Montana movie, Swift sent in this track, seemingly a holdover from the Fearless sessions. In an admirable bit of dedication, she also showed up to play it in the film’s climax. It’s kind of a snooze on its own, but compared to the other songs on the soundtrack, even Swift’s leftovers shine.

109. “I’d Lie,” Taylor Swift (2006): A bonus track only available to people who bought Swift’s debut at Best Buy. It’s as cute as a study-hall MASH game, and just as easily disposable.

108. “Highway Don’t Care,” Tim McGraw’s Two Lanes of Freedom(2013): After joining Big Machine, McGraw gave Swift an “and” credit here as a professional courtesy. Though her backing vocals are very pleasant, this is 100 percent a Tim McGraw song.

107. “Superman,” Speak Now: Deluxe Edition (2010): A bonus track that’s not gonna make anyone forget Five for Fighting any time soon.

106. “Change,” Fearless (2008): A bit of paint-by-numbers inspiration that apparently did its job of spurring the 2008 U.S. Olympic team to greatness. They won 36 gold medals!

105. “End Game,” Reputation (2017): Swift tries out her blaccent alongside Future and Ed Sheeran, on a track that sounds unmistakably like a Rihanna reject. The only silver lining? She’s better at rapping here than on “…Ready for It?”

104. “The Lucky One,” Red (2012): A plight-of-fame ballad from the back half of Red, with details that never rise above cliché and a melody that borrows from the one Swift cooked up for “Untouchable.”

103. “A Place in This World,” Taylor Swift (2006): Swift’s version of “Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” this one feels like it missed its chance to be the theme tune for an ABC Family show.

102. “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever,” Fifty Shades Darker soundtrack (2017): In Fifty Shades Darker, this wan duet soundtracks a scene where Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele go for a sunny boat ride while wearing fabulous sweaters. On brand!

101. “Last Christmas,” The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (2007): Swift does George Michael proud with this reverent cover of the Wham! classic.

100. “Breathless,” Hope for Haiti Now (2010): Swift covered this Better Than Ezra deep cut for the Hope for Haiti telethon. With only one take to get it right, she did not let the people of Haiti down.

99. “Bette Davis Eyes,” Speak Now World Tour – Live (2012): “There’s some unbelievable music that has come out of artists who are from L.A., did you know that?” Swift asks the audience at the beginning of this live track. The crowd, not being idiots, responds with an enthusiastic yes. This cover loses the two most famous parts of Kim Carnes’s original — the synths and Carnes’s throaty delivery — but the acoustic arrangement and Swift’s intimate vocals bring out the best qualities of the tune.

98. “Eyes Open,” The Hunger Games: Songs From District 12 and Beyond (2012): One of two songs Swift contributed to the first Hunger Games soundtrack. With guitars seemingly ripped straight out of 1998 alt-rock radio, this one’s most interesting now as a preview of Swift’s Red sound.

97. “Beautiful Eyes,” Beautiful Eyes EP (2008): The title track of Swift’s early-career EP finds the young songwriter getting a lot of mileage out of one single vowel sound: Besides the eyes of the title, we’ve got I, why, fly, cry, lullaby, even sometimes. A spirited vocal performance in the outro saves the song from feeling like homework.

96. “The Outside,” Taylor Swift (2006): If you thought you felt weird judging songs by a high-schooler, here’s one by an actual sixth-grader. “The Outside” was the second song Swift ever wrote, and though the lyrics edge into self-pity at times, this is still probably the best song written by a 12-year-old since Mozart’s “Symphony No. 7 in D Major.”

95. “SuperStar,” Fearless: Platinum Edition (2008): This bonus track is a relic of an unfamiliar time when Swift could conceivably be the less-famous person in a relationship.

94. “Starlight,” Red (2012): Never forget that one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 2012 contains a piece of Ethel Kennedy fanfiction. The real story of Bobby and Ethel has more rough spots than you’ll find in this resolutely rose-colored track, but that’s what happens when you spend a summer hanging in Hyannis Port.

93. “Sad Beautiful Tragic,” Red (2012): Another glacially paced song from the back half of Red that somehow pulls off rhyming “magic” with “tragic.”

92. “Innocent,” Speak Now (2010): The disparate reactions to Kanye West stage-crashing Swift at the 2009 VMAs speaks to the Rorschachian nature of Swift’s star image. Was Swift a teenage girl whose moment was ruined by an older man who couldn’t control himself? Or was she a white woman playing the victim to demonize an outspoken black man? Both are correct, which is why everyone’s spent so much time arguing about it. Unfortunately, Swift did herself no favors when she premiered “Innocent” at the next year’s VMAs, opening with footage of the incident, which couldn’t help but feel like she was milking it. (Fairly or not, the comparison to West’s own artistic response hardly earns any points in the song’s favor.) Stripped of all this context, “Innocent” is fine: Swift turns in a tender vocal performance, though the lyrics could stand to be less patronizing.

91. “Girl at Home,” Red: Deluxe Edition (2012): This Red bonus track offers a foreshadowing of Swift’s interest in sparkly ’80s-style production. A singsongy melody accompanies a largely forgettable lyric, except for one hilariously blunt line: “It would be a fine proposition … if I was a stupid girl.”

90. “A Perfectly Good Heart,” Taylor Swift: Special Edition (2006): A pleading breakup song with one killer turn of phrase and not much else.

89. “Mary’s Song (Oh My Oh My),” Taylor Swift (2006): This early track was inspired by Swift’s elderly neighbors. Like “Starlight,” it’s a young person’s vision of lifelong love, skipping straight from proposal to old age.

88. “Come in With the Rain,” Fearless: Platinum Edition (2008): An ode to a long-lost lover that follows the Swift template a tad too slavishly.

87. “Dancing With Our Hands Tied,” Reputation (2017): Reputation sags a bit in the middle, never more than on this forgettable ’80s-inspired track.

86. “Welcome to New York,” 1989 (2014): In retrospect, there could not have been a song more perfectly designed to tick off the authenticity police — didn’t Swift know that real New Yorkers stayed up till 3 a.m. doing drugs with Fabrizio Moretti in the bathroom of Mars Bar? I hope you’re sitting down when I tell you this, but it’s possible the initial response to a Taylor Swift song might have been a little reactionary. When it’s not taken as a mission statement, “Welcome to New York” is totally tolerable, a glimmering confetti throwaway with lovely synths.

85. “Tied Together With a Smile,” Taylor Swift (2006): When she was just a teenager with a development deal, Swift hooked up with veteran Nashville songwriter Liz Rose. The two would collaborate on much of Swift’s first two albums. “We wrote and figured out that it really worked. She figured out she could write Taylor Swift songs, and I wouldn’t get in the way,” Rose said later. “She’d say a line and I’d say, ‘What if we say it like this?’ It’s kind of like editing.” This early ballad about a friend with bulimia sees Swift and Rose experimenting with metaphor. Most of them work.

84. “King of My Heart,” Reputation (2017): Swift is fond of saying that “songs are what you think of on the drive home — you know, the Great Afterthought.” (She says it’s a Joni Mitchell quote, but I haven’t been able to find it.) Anyway, I think that’s why some of the love songs on Reputationdon’t quite land: Swift is writing about a relationship from inside of it, instead of with hindsight. It’s a different skill, which could explain why the boyfriend character here is less vividly sketched than some of her other ones.

83. “Come Back … Be Here,” Red: Deluxe Edition (2012): A vulnerable track about long-distance love, with simple sentiments overwhelmed by extravagant production.

82. “Breathe,” Fearless (2008): A Colbie Caillat collaboration that’s remarkable mostly for being a rare Swift song about a friend breakup. It’s like if “Bad Blood” contained actual human emotions.

81. “Stay Beautiful,” Taylor Swift (2006): Nathan Chapman was a Nashville session guitarist before he started working with Swift. He produced her early demos, and she fought for him to sit behind the controls on her debut; the two would work together on every Swift album until 1989, when his role was largely taken over by Max Martin and Shellback. Here, he brings a sprightly arrangement to Swift’s ode to an achingly good-looking man.

80. “Nashville,” Speak Now World Tour – Live; Target edition DVD (2011): Swift gives some shine to singer-songwriter David Mead with a cover of his 2004 ballad. (Listen to the screams during the chorus and try to guess where this one was recorded.) She treats it with a delicate respect, like she’s handling her grandmother’s china.

79. “So It Goes,” Reputation (2017): Unfortunately not a Nick Lowe cover, this one comes and goes without making much of an impact, but if you don’t love that whispered “1-2-3,” I don’t know what to tell you.

78. “You’re Not Sorry,” Fearless (2008): An unflinching kiss-off song that got a gothic remix for Swift’s appearance as an ill-fated teen on CSI. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

77. “Drops of Jupiter,” Speak Now World Tour – Live (2012): The best of the covers on the live album sees Swift commit to the Train hit like she’d written it herself. If you had forgotten that this song came out in 2001, she keeps the line about Tae Bo.

76. “The Other Side of the Door,” Fearless: Platinum Edition (2008): A bonus track saved from mediocrity by a gutsy outro that hints that Swift, like any good millennial, was a big fan of “Semi-Charmed Life.”

75. “Gorgeous,” Reputation (2017): In the misbegotten rollout for Reputation, “Gorgeous” righted the ship by not being completely terrible. Max Martin and Shellback pack the track with all sorts of amusing audio doodads, but the melody is a little too horizontal to stick, and the lyrics have a touch of first draft about them. (You’d be forgiven for preferring the actual first draft, which is slightly more open and real.)

74. “I Wish You Would,” 1989 (2014): Like “You Are in Love,” this one originated as a Jack Antonoff instrumental track, and the finished version retains his fingerprints. Perhaps too much — you get the sense it might work better as a Bleachers song.

73. “Cold As You,” Taylor Swift (2006): A dead-serious breakup song that proved the teenage Swift (with help from Rose, who’s got a co-writing credit) could produce barbs sharper than most adults: “You come away with a great little story / Of a mess of a dreamer with the nerve to adore you.” Jesus.

72. “Haunted,” Speak Now (2010): In which Swift tries her hand at Evanescence-style goth-rock. She almost pulls it off, but at this point in Swift’s career her voice wasn’t quite strong enough to give the unrestrained performance the song calls for.

71. “This Love,” 1989 (2014): Began life as a poem before evolving into an atmospheric 1989 deep cut. Like an imperfectly poached egg, it’s shapeless but still quite appetizing.

70. “Untouchable,” Fearless: Platinum Edition (2008): Technically a Luna Halo cover (don’t worry about it), though Swift discards everything but the bones of the original. Her subsequent renovation job is worthy of HGTV: It’s nearly impossible to believe this was ever not a Taylor Swift song.

69. “Wonderland,” 1989: Deluxe Edition (2014): A deranged bonus track that sees Swift doing the absolute most. This song has everything: Alice in Wonderland metaphors, Rihanna chants, a zigzag bridge that recalls “I Knew You Were Trouble,” screams. As she puts it, “It’s all fun and games ’til somebody loses their MIND!”

68. “Sweeter Than Fiction,” One Chance soundtrack (2013): Swift’s first collaboration with Jack Antonoff is appropriately ’80s-inspired, and so sugary that a well-placed key change in the chorus is the only thing that staves off a toothache.

67. “I’m Only Me When I’m With You,” Taylor Swift: Special Edition(2006): A rollicking pop-rock tune that recalls early Kelly Clarkson. As if to reassure nervous country fans, the fiddle goes absolutely nuts.

66. “Tell Me Why,” Fearless (2008): A bog-standard tale of an annoyingly clueless guy, but it’s paired with one of Swift and Rose’s most winning melodies.

65. “If This Was a Movie,” Speak Now: Deluxe Edition (2010): The mirror image of “White Horse,” which makes it feel oddly superfluous.

64. “How You Get the Girl,” 1989 (2014): The breeziest and least complicated of Swift’s guy-standing-on-a-doorstep songs, which contributed to the feeling that 1989 was something of an emotional regression. You probably shouldn’t take it as an instruction manual unless you’re Harry Styles.

63. “Don’t Blame Me,” Reputation (2017): A woozy if slightly anonymous love song that comes off as a sexier “Take Me to Church.” [A dozen Hozier fans storm out of the room.]

62. “The Way I Loved You,” Fearless (2008): Written in collaboration with Big and Rich’s John Rich, which may explain how stately and mid-tempo this one is. (There’s even a martial drumbeat.) Here, she’s faced with a choice between a too-perfect guy — he’s close to her mother and talks business with her father — and a tempestuous relationship full of “screaming and fighting and kissing in the rain,” and if you don’t know which one she prefers I suggest you listen to more Taylor Swift songs. Swift often plays guessing games about which parts of her songs are autobiographical, but this one is explicitly a fantasy.

61. “New Romantics,” 1989: Deluxe Edition (2014): Like “22,” an attempt at writing a big generational anthem. That it was left off the album proper suggests Swift didn’t think it quite got there, though it did its job of extending the singles cycle of 1989 a few more months. Despite what anyone says about “Welcome to New York,” the line here about waiting for “trains that just aren’t coming” indicates its writer has had at least one authentic New York experience.

60. “Sparks Fly,” Speak Now (2010): This one dates back to Swift’s high-school days, and was destined for obscurity until fans fell in love with the live version. After what seems like a lot of tinkering, it finally got a proper studio release on Swift’s third album. It’s like “True Love Waits,” but with more kissing in the rain.

59. “Me!,” Untitled Seventh Album (2019): Well, what did we expect? The run-up to “Me!” was preceded by a weeks-long guessing game about what precisely would be the nature of Swift’s April 26 announcement. Would she come out? Would she come out and reveal she had once dated Karlie Kloss? Cut to the fateful day, and the news was … Swift, who is a pop singer, was releasing a new pop song. After the Sturm und Drang of the Reputation era, “Me!” is a return to anodyne sweetness, a mission statement that says, “I’m through making mission statements.” The result is blandly inoffensive, emphasis on the bland.

58. “All You Had to Do Was Stay,” 1989 (2014): Just like the melody to “Yesterday” and the “Satisfaction” riff, the high-pitched “Stay!” here came to its writer in a dream. Inspiration works in mysterious ways.

57. “Delicate, Reputation (2017): With multitracked, breathy vocals, this is Swift at her most tentative. Would any other album’s Taylor be asking, “Is it cool that I said all that?”

56. “Stay Stay Stay,” Red (2012): Swift broke out her southern accent one last time for this attempt at homespun folk, which is marred by production that’s so clean it’s practically antiseptic. In an alternate universe where a less-ambitious Swift took a 9-to-5 job writing ad jingles, this one soundtracked a TV spot for the new AT&T family plan.

55. “Call It What You Want,” Reputation (2017): Many of the Reputationsingles aim at sexy; this airy slow jam about losing yourself in love after a scandal is the only one that gets there, though the saltiness in the verses (“all the liars are calling me one”) occasionally betrays the sentiment.

54. “Ours,” Speak Now: Deluxe Edition (2010): It’s not this song’s fault that the extended version of Speak Now has songs called both “Mine” and “Ours,” and while “Ours” is good … well, it’s no “Mine.” Still, even if this song never rises above cuteness, it is incredibly cute. I think Dad’ll get over the tattoos.

53. “The Best Day,” Fearless (2008): Swift’s parents moved the family to Tennessee so she could follow her musical dreams, and she paid them back with this tender tribute. Mom gets the verses while Dad is relegated to the middle eight — even in song, the Mother’s Day–Father’s Day disparity holds up.

52. “Everything Has Changed,” Red (2012): “We good to go?” For many American listeners, this was the first introduction to a redheaded crooner named Ed Sheeran. It’s a sweet duet and Sheeran’s got a roughness that goes well with Swift’s cleaner vocals, but the harmonies are a bit bland.

51. “Today Was a Fairytale,” Valentine’s Day soundtrack (2010): How much of a roll was Swift on during the Fearless era? This song didn’t make the album, and sat in the vault for a year until Swift signed on for a small role in a Garry Marshall rom-com and offered it up for the soundtrack. Despite the extravagant title, the date described here is charmingly low-key: The dude wears a T-shirt, and his grand gestures are showing up on time and being nice.

50. “Last Kiss,” Speak Now (2010): A good-bye waltz with an understated arrangement that suits the starkness of the lyrics.

49. “You Are in Love,” 1989: Deluxe Edition (2014): The best of Swift’s songs idealizing someone else’s love story (see “Starlight” and “Mary’s Song”), this bonus track sketches Jack Antonoff and Lena Dunham’s relationship in flashes of moments. The production and vocals are appropriately restrained — sometimes, simplicity works.

48. “The Story of Us,” Speak Now (2010): The deluxe edition of Speak Now features both U.S. and international versions of some of the singles, which gives you a sense of how fine-tuned Swift’s operation was by this point. My ears can’t quite hear the difference between the two versions of this exuberant breakup jam, but I suspect the U.S. mix contains some sort of ultrasonic frequencies designed to … sorry, I’ve already said too much.

47. “Clean,” 1989 (2014): Co-written with Imogen Heap, who contributes backup vocals. This is 1989’s big end-of-album-catharsis song, and the water imagery of the lyrics goes well with the drip-drip-drip production. I’d be curious to hear a version where Heap sings lead; the minimalist sound might be better suited for her voice, which has a little more texture.

46. “Getaway Car,” Reputation (2017): Another very Antonoff-y track, but I’m not mad at it. We start with a vocoder she must have stolen from Imogen Heap and end with one of Swift’s most rocking outros, and in between we even get a rare key change.

45. “I Almost Do,” Red (2012): The kind of plaintive breakup song Swift could write in her sleep at this point in her career, with standout guitar work and impressive vulnerability in both lyrics and performance.

44. “Long Live (We Will Be Remembered),” Speak Now (2010):Ostensibly written about Swift’s experiences touring with her band, but universal enough that it’s been taken as a graduation song by pretty much everyone else. Turns out, adolescent self-mythologizing is the same no matter where you are — no surprise that Swift could pull it off despite leaving school after sophomore year.

43. “The Moment I Knew,” Red: Deluxe Edition (2012): An epic account of being stood up that makes a terrible birthday party seem like something approximating the Fall of Troy. If you’re the type of person who stays up at night remembering every inconsiderate thing you’ve ever done, the level of excruciating detail here is like a needle to the heart.

42. “Jump Then Fall,” Fearless: Platinum Edition (2006): An effervescent banjo-driven love song. I get a silly kick out of the gag in the chorus, when Swift’s voice leaps to the top of her register every time she says “jump.”

41. “Never Grow Up,” Speak Now (2010): Swift’s songs where she’s romanticizing childhood come off better than the ones where she’s romanticizing old age. (Possibly because she’s been a child before.) This one is so well-observed and wistful about the idea of children aging that you’d swear she was secretly a 39-year-old mom.

40. “Should’ve Said No,” Taylor Swift (2006): Written in a rush of emotion near the end of recording for the debut, what this early single lacks in nuance it makes up for in backbone. I appreciate the way the end of each verse holds out hope for the cheating ex — “given ooonnne chaaance, it was a moment of weeaaknesssss” — before the chorus slams the door in the dumb lunk’s face.

39. “Back to December,” Speak Now (2010): At the time, this one was billed as a big step for Swift: the first song where she’s the bad guy! Now that the novelty has worn off “Back to December” doesn’t feel so groundbreaking, but it does show her evolving sensitivity. The key to a good apology has always been sincerity, and whatever faults Swift may have, a lack of sincerity has never been one of them.

38. “Holy Ground,” Red (2012): This chugging rocker nails the feeling of reconnecting with an ex and romanticizing the times you shared, and it livens up the back half of Red a bit. Probably ranked too high, but this is my list and I’ll do what I want.

37. “Enchanted,” Speak Now (2010): Originally the title track for Swift’s third album until her label told her, more or less, to cut it with the fairy-tale stuff. It’s a glittery ode to a meet-cute that probably didn’t need to be six minutes long, but at least the extended length gives us extra time to soak up the heavenly coda, with its multi-tracked “Please don’t be in love in with someone else.”

36. “I Know Places,” 1989 (2014): No attempts of universality here — this trip-hop song about trying to find a place to make out when you’re a massive celebrity is only relatable to a couple dozen people. No matter. As a slice of gothic pop-star paranoia, it gives a much-needed bit of edge to 1989. Bumped up a couple of spots for the line about vultures, which I can only assume is a shout-out.

35. “Treacherous,” Red (2012): Swift has rarely been so tactile as on this intimate ballad, seemingly constructed entirely out of sighs.

34. “Dress,” Reputation (2017): An appropriately slinky track that gives us an unexpected payoff for years of lyrics about party dresses: “I only bought this dress so you could take it off,” she says in the chorus. The way the whole song starts and stops is an obvious trick, but I like it.

33. “Speak Now,” Speak Now (2010): The rest of the band plays it so straight that it might take a second listen to realize that this song is, frankly, bonkers. First, Swift sneaks into a wedding to find a bridezilla, “wearing a gown shaped like a pastry,” snarling at the bridesmaids. Then it turns out she’s been uninvited — oops — so she decides to hide in the curtains. Finally, at a pivotal moment she stands up in front of everyone and protests the impending union. Luckily the guy is cool with it, so we get a happy ending! All this nonsense undercuts the admittedly charming chorus, but it’s hard not to smile at the unabashed silliness.

32. “22,” Red (2012): Another collaboration with Martin and Shellback, another absurdly catchy single. Still, there’s enough personality in the machine for this to still feel like a Taylor song, for better (“breakfast at midnight” being the epitome of adult freedom) and for worse (the obsession with “cool kids”). Mostly for better.

31. “Christmases When You Were Mine,” The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (2007): The clear standout of Swift’s Christmas album, with an endearingly winsome riff and lyrics that paint a poignant picture of yuletide heartbreak. If you’ve ever been alone on Christmas, this is your song.

30. “White Horse,” Fearless (2008): You’d never call Swift a genre deconstructionist, but her best work digs deeper into romantic tropes than she gets credit for. In just her second album, she and Rose gave us this clear-eyed look at the emptiness of symbolic gestures, allegedly finished in a mere 45 minutes. Almost left off the album, but saved thanks to Shonda Rhimes.

29. “I Knew You Were Trouble,” Red (2012): The guiding principle on much of Red seems to have been to throw absolutely every idea a person could think of into a song and see what worked. Here, we go from Kelly Clarkson verses to a roller-coaster chorus to a dubstep breakdown that dates the song as surely as radiocarbon — then back again. It shouldn’t hang together, but the gutsy vocals and vivid lyrics keep the track from going off the rails.

28. “Teardrops on My Guitar,” Taylor Swift (2006): An evocative portrait of high-school heartbreak, equal parts mundane — no adult songwriter would have named the crush “Drew” — and melodramatic. It’s also the best example of Swift and Rose’s early songwriting cheat code, when they switch the words of the chorus around at the end of the song. “It just makes the listener feel like the writer and the artist care about the song,” Rose told Billboard. “That they’re like, “Okay, you’ve heard it, but wait a minute — ’cause I want you know that this really affected me, I’m gonna dig the knife in just a little bit deeper.’” (In a fitting twist, “Teardrops” ended up inspiring a moment that could have come straight out of a Taylor Swift song, when the real Drew showed up outside her house one night. “I hadn’t talked to him in two-and-a-half years,” she told the Washington Post. “He was like: ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ And I’m like: ‘Wow, you’re late? Good to see you?’”)

27. “Begin Again,” Red (2012): Swift’s sequencing genius strikes again: After the emotional roller coaster of Red, this gentle ballad plays like a cleansing shower. (It works so well she’d repeat the trick on 1989, slightly more obviously.) Of all Swift’s date songs, this one feels the most true to life; anyone who’s ever been on a good first date can recall the precise moment their nervousness melted into relief.

26. “New Year’s Day,” Reputation (2017): Like a prestige cable drama, Swift likes to use her final track as a kind of quiet summing-up of all that’s come before. Here, she saves the album’s most convincing love song for last: “I want your midnights / but I’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year’s Day” is a great way to describe a healthy relationship. The lovely back-and-forth vocals in the outro help break the tie with “Begin Again.”

25. “Shake It Off,” 1989 (2014): Swift’s second No. 1 was greeted with widespread critical sighs: After the heights of Red, why was she serving up cotton-candy fluff about dancing your way past the haters? (Never mind that Red had its own sugary singles.) Now that we’ve all gotten some distance, the purpose of “Shake It Off” is clear: This is a wedding song, empty-headed fun designed to get both Grandma and Lil Jayden on the dance floor. Docked ten or so spots for the spoken-word bridge and cheerleader breakdown, which might be the worst 24 seconds of the entire album.

24. “Safe and Sound,” The Hunger Games: Songs From District 12 and Beyond (2012): Swift’s collaboration with folk duo the Civil Wars is her best soundtrack cut by a country mile. Freed from the constraints of her usual mode, her vocals paint in corners you didn’t think she could reach, especially when she tries out a high-pitched vibrato that blends beautifully with Joy Williams and John Paul White’s hushed harmonies. Swift has worked in a variety of emotional palettes in her career, but this is the only time she’s ever been spooky.

23. “Picture to Burn,” Taylor Swift (2006): Swift’s breakup songs rarely get more acidic than they do in this country hit. By the time she’s twanging a line about dating all her ex’s friends, things have gotten downright rowdy. The original lyrics — “Go and tell your friends that I’m obsessive and crazy / That’s fine, I’ll tell mine you’re gay” — show how far standards for acceptable speech in nice young people have shifted in the past decade.

22. “Fearless,” Fearless (2008): The title track from Swift’s second album has more of her favorite images — in one memorable twofer, she’s dancing in the rain while wearing her best dress — but she invests them with so much emotion that you’d swear she was using them for the first time. The exuberance of the lyrics is matched in the way she tumbles from line to line into the chorus.

21. “Tim McGraw,” Taylor Swift (2006): If you by chance ever happen to meet Taylor Swift, there is one thing you should know: Do not, under any circumstances, call her “calculating.” “Am I shooting from the hip?” she once asked GQ when confronted with the word. “Would any of this have happened if I was? … You can be accidentally successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take hard work.” However, since the title of her first single apparently came from label head Scott Borchetta — “I told Taylor, ‘They won’t immediately remember your name, they’ll say who’s this young girl with this song about Tim McGraw?’” — I think we’re allowed to break out the c-word: Calling it “Tim McGraw” was the first genius calculation in a career that would turn out to be full of them. Still, there would have been no getting anywhere with it if the song weren’t good. Even as a teenager, Swift was savvy enough to know that country fans love nothing more than listening to songs about listening to country music. And the very first line marks her as more of a skeptic than you might expect: “He said the way my blue eyes shined put those Georgia pines to shame that night / I said, ‘That’s a lie.’”

20. “Dear John,” Speak Now (2010): “I’ve never named names,” Swift once told GQ. “The fact that I’ve never confirmed who those songs are about makes me feel like there is still one card I’m holding.” That may technically be true, but she came pretty dang close with this seven-minute epic. (John Mayer said he felt “humiliated” by the song, after which Swift told Glamour it was “presumptuous” of him to think that the song his ex wrote, that used his first name, was about him.) She sings the hell out of it, but when it comes to songs where Swift systematically outlines all the ways in which an older male celebrity is an inadequate partner, I think I prefer “All Too Well,” which is less wallow-y. I’ve seen it speculated that the guitar noodling on this track is meant as a parody of Mayer’s own late-’00s output, which if true would be deliciously petty.

19. “Red,” Red (2012): Re-eh-eh-ed, re-eh-eh-ed. Red’s title track sees the album’s maximalist style in full effect — who in their right mind would put Auto-Tune and banjos on the same track? But somehow, the overstuffing works here; it’s the audio equivalent of the lyrics’ synesthesia.

18. “I Did Something Bad,” Reputation (2017): It’s too bad Rihanna already has an album called Unapologetic, because that would have been a perfect title for Reputation, or maybe just this jubilant “Blank Space” sequel. Why the hell she didn’t release this one instead of “Look What You Made Me Do,” I’ll never know — not only does “Something Bad” sell the lack of remorse much better, it bangs harder than any other song on pop radio this summer except “Bodak Yellow.” Is that a raga chant? Are those fucking gunshots? Docked a spot or two for “They’re burning all the witches even if you aren’t one,” which doth protest too much, but bumped up just as much for Swift’s first on-the-record “shit.”

17. “Forever & Always,” Fearless (2008): This blistering breakup song was the one that solidified Swift’s image as the pop star you dump at your own peril. (The boys in the debut were just Nashville randos; this one was about a Jonas Brother, back when that really meant something.) Obligatory fiddles aside, the original version is just about a perfect piece of pop-rock — dig how the guitars drop out at a pivotal moment — though the extended edition of Fearless also contains a piano version if you feel like having your guts ripped out. I have no idea what the lines about “rain in your bedroom” mean, but like the best lyrics, they make sense on an instinctual level. And to top it off, the track marks the introduction of Swift’s colloquial style — “Where is this GOoO-ING?” — that would serve her so well in the years to come.

16. “Mean,” Speak Now (2010): It takes some chutzpah to put a song complaining about mean people on the same album as “Better Than Revenge,” but lack of chutzpah has never been Swift’s problem. Get past that and you’ll find one of Swift’s most naturally appealing melodies and the joyful catharsis that comes with giving a bully what’s coming to them. (Some listeners have interpreted the “big enough so you can’t hit me” line to mean the song’s about abuse, but I’ve always read it as a figure of speech, as in “hit piece.”)

15. “Wildest Dreams,” 1989 (2014): Swift is in full control of her instrument here, with so much yearning in her voice that you’d swear every breath was about to be her last. For a singer often slammed as being sexless, those sighs in the chorus tell us everything we need to know. Bumped up a few spots for the invigorating double-time bridge, the best on 1989.

14. “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” Reputation (2017): Put aside the title, which can’t help but remind me of the time Hillary Clinton tweeted “delete your account.” The same way “I Did Something Bad” is the best possible version of “Look What You Made Me Do,” this is a much better rewrite of “Bad Blood.” Swift brings back the school-yard voice in the chorus, but also so much more: She does exaggerated politeness in the bridge, she spins the “Runaway” toast, she says the words “Therein lies the issue” like she’s been listening to Hamilton. The high point comes when she contemplates forgiving a hater, then bursts into an incredulous guffaw. Reader, I laughed out loud.

13. “Style,” 1989 (2014): The much-ballyhooed ’80s sound on 1989 often turned out to just mean Swift was using more synths than usual, but she nailed the vibe on this slinky single, which could have soundtracked a particularly romantic episode of Miami Vice. Despite the dress-up games in the chorus, this is one of the rare Swift love songs to feel truly adult: Both she and the guy have been down this road too many times to bullshit anymore. That road imagery is haunted by the prospect of death lurking around every hairpin turn — what’s sex without a little danger?

12. “Hey Stephen,” Fearless (2008): Who knew so many words rhymed with Stephen? They all come so naturally here. Swift is in the zone as a writer, performer, and producer on this winning deep cut, which gives us some wonderful sideways rhymes (“look like an angel” goes with “kiss you in the rain, so”), a trusty Hammond organ in the background, and a bunch of endearing little ad-libs, to say nothing of the kicker: “All those other girls, well they’re beautiful / But would they write a song for you?” For once, the mid-song laugh is entirely appropriate.

11. “Out of the Woods,” 1989 (2014): Like Max Martin, Antonoff’s influence as a collaborator has not been wholly positive: His penchant for big anthemic sounds can drown out the subtlety of Swift, and he’s been at the controls for some of her biggest misfires. But boy, does his Jack Antonoff thing work here, bringing a whole forest of drums to support Swift’s rapid-fire string of memories. The song’s bridge was apparently inspired by a snowmobile accident Swift was in with Harry Styles, an incident that never made the tabloids despite what seemed like round-the-clock coverage of the couple — a subtler reminder of the limits of media narratives than anything on Reputation.

10. “Love Story,” Fearless (2008): Full disclosure: This was the first Taylor Swift song I ever heard. (It was a freezing day in early 2009; I was buying shoes; basically, the situation was the total antithesis of anything that’s ever happened in a Taylor Swift song.) I didn’t like it at first. Who’s this girl singing about Romeo and Juliet, and doesn’t she know they die in the end?What I would soon learn was: not here they don’t, as Swift employs a key change so powerful it literally rewrites Shakespeare. The jury’s still out on the question of if she’s ever read the play, but she definitely hasn’t read The Scarlet Letter.

9. “State of Grace,” Red (2012): Swift’s songs are always full of interesting little nuggets you don’t notice until your 11th listen or so — a lyrical twist, maybe, or an unconventional drum fill — but most of them are fundamentally meant to be heard on the radio, which demands a certain type of songwriting and a certain type of sound. What a surprise it was, then, that Red opened with this big, expansive rock track, which sent dozens of Joshua Tree fans searching for their nearest pair of headphones. Another surprise: that she never tried to sound like this again. Having proven she could nail it on her first try, Swift set out to find other giants to slay.

8. “Ronan,” non-album digital single (2012): A collage of lines pulled from the blog of Maya Thompson, whose 3-year-old son had died of cancer, this charity single sees Swift turn herself into an effective conduit for the other woman’s grief. (Thompson gets a co-writing credit.) One of the most empathetic songs in Swift’s catalogue, as well as her most reliable tearjerker.

7. “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” Red (2012): Flash back to 2012. Carly Rae Jepsen had a No. 1 hit. Freaking Gotye had a No. 1 hit. LMFAO had two. And yet Swift, arguably the biggest pop star in the country, had never had a No. 1 hit. (“You Belong With Me” and “Today Was a Fairytale” had both peaked at No. 2.) And so she called up Swedish pop cyborg Max Martin, the man who makes hits as regularly as you and I forget our car keys. The first song they wrote together is still their masterpiece, though it feels wrong to say that “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” was written; better to say that it was designed, as Swift and Martin turn almost every single second of the song’s 3:12 run time into a hook. Think of that guitar loop, the snippets of millennial-speak in the margins (“cuz like”), those spiraling “ooh”s, the spoken-word bit that could have been overheard at any brunch in America, and towering over it all, that gigantic “we.” Like all hyper-efficient products it feels like a visitor from some cold algorithmic future: The sense of joy here is so perfectly engineered that you get the sense it did not come entirely from human hands.

6. “Our Song,” Taylor Swift (2006): Swift wrote this one for her ninth-grade talent show, and I have a lovely time imagining all the other competitors getting the disappointment of their lives once they realized what they were up against. (“But nice job with that Green Day cover, Andy.”) Even at this early stage Swift had a knack for matching her biggest melodic hooks to sentences that would make them soar; that “’cause it’s late and your mama don’t know” is absolutely ecstatic. She’s said she heard the entire production in her head while writing, and on the record Nathan Chapman brings out all the tricks in the Nashville handbook, and even some that aren’t, like the compressed hip-hop drums in the final refrain.

5. “Mine,” Speak Now (2010): As catchy as her Max Martin songs, but with more of a soul, “Mine” wins a narrow victory over “Our Song” on account of having a better bridge. This one’s another fantasy, and you can kind of tell, but who cares — Paul McCartney didn’t really fall in love with a meter maid, either. Swift packs in so many captivating turns of phrase here, and she does it so naturally: It’s hard to believe no one else got to “you are the best thing that’s ever been mine” before her, and the line about “a careless man’s careful daughter” is so perfect that you instantly know everything about the guy. Let’s give a special shout-out to Nathan Chapman again: His backup vocals are the secret weapon of Speak Now, and they’re at their very best here.

4. “Blank Space,” 1989 (2014): You know how almost every other song that’s even a little bit like “Blank Space” ranks very low on this list? Yeah, that’s how hard a trick Swift pulls off on this 1989 single, which manages to satirize her man-eater image while also demonstrating exactly what makes that image so appealing. The gag takes a perfectly tuned barometer for tone: “Look What You Made Me Do” collapsed under the weight of its own self-obsession; “Better Than Revenge” didn’t quite get the right amount of humor in. But Swift’s long history of code-switching works wonders for her here, as she gives each line just the right spin — enough irony for us to get the jokes, enough sincerity that we’ll all sing along anyway. Martin and Shellback bring their usual bells and whistles, but they leave enough empty space in the mix for the words to ring out. Who wouldn’t want to write their name?

3. “Fifteen,” Fearless (2008): For many young people, the real experience of romance is the thinking about it, not the actual doing it. (For an increasing number, the thinking about it is all they’re doing.) Swift gets this almost instinctively, and never more than on this early ballad about her freshman year of high school, which plays like a gentle memoir. Listen to how the emotional high point of the second verse is not something that happens, but her reaction to it: “He’s got a car and you feel like flyyying.” She knows that the real thing is awkward, occasionally unpleasant, and almost guaranteed to disappoint you — the first sentence she wrote for this one was “Abigail gave everything she had to a boy who changed his mind / We both cried,” a line that became exhibit B in the case of Taylor Swift v. Feminism — and she knows how fantasies can sustain you when nothing else will. “In your life you’ll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team / but I didn’t know it at 15,” she sings, even though she’s only 18 herself. That there are plenty of people who spent their teenage years making out, smoking cigarettes, and reading Anaïs Nin doesn’t negate the fact that, for a lot of us squares, even the prospect of holding someone else’s hand could get us through an entire semester. Virgins need love songs, too.

2. “All Too Well,” Red (2012): It’s no wonder that music writers love this one: This is Swift at her most literary, with a string of impeccably observed details that could have come out of a New Yorker short story. “All Too Well” was the first song Swift wrote for Red; she hadn’t worked with Liz Rose since Fearless, but she called up her old collaborator to help her make sense of her jumble of memories from a relationship recently exploded. “She had a story and she wanted to say something specific. She had a lot of information,” Rose told Rolling Stone later. “I just let her go.” The original version featured something like eight verses; together the two women edited it down to a more manageable three, while still retaining its propulsive momentum. The finished song is a kaleidoscopic swirl of images — baby pictures at his parents’ house, “nights where you made me your own,” a scarf left in a drawer — always coming back to the insistence that these things happened, and they mattered: “I was there, I remember it all too well.” The words are so strong that the band mostly plays support; they don’t need anything flashier than a 4/4 thump and a big crescendo for each chorus. There are few moments on Red better than the one where Swift jumps into her upper register to deliver the knockout blow in the bridge. Just like the scarf, you can’t get rid of this song.

1. “You Belong With Me,” Fearless (2008): Swift was hanging out with a male friend one day when he took a call from his girlfriend. “He was completely on the defensive saying, ‘No, baby … I had to get off the phone really quickly … I tried to call you right back … Of course I love you. More than anything! Baby, I’m so sorry,’” she recalled. “She was just yelling at him! I felt so bad for him at that moment.” Out of that feeling, a classic was born. Swift had written great songs drawn from life before, but here she gave us a story of high school at its most archetypal: A sensitive underdog facing off with some prissy hot chick, in a battle to see which one of them really got a cute boy’s jokes. (Swift would play both women in the video; she had enough self-awareness to know that most outcasts are not tall, willowy blonde girls.) Rose says the song “just flowed out of” Swift, and you can feel that rush of inspiration in the way the lines bleed into each other, but there’s some subtle songcraft at work, too: Besides the lyrical switcheroos about who wears what, we also only get half the chorus the first go-round, just to save one more wallop for later. The line about short skirts and T-shirts will likely be mentioned in Swift’s obituary one day, and I think it’s key to the song’s, and by extension Swift’s, appeal: In my high school, even the most popular kids wore T-shirts.

Vulture

#taylor swift #rankings #reputation #music

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spicynbachili1 · 5 years

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An ode to the cyberpunk David Bowie of Omikron: The Nomad Soul

We’ve been hacked! In addition to a pretend pageant of on-line retail extra, Cyber Monday is now a celebration of hacker video games and every little thing ‘cyber’.

Omikron: The Nomad Soul was one of many first video games I keep in mind correctly taking part in. This implies it’s inevitably one I keep in mind fondly; it’s the purpose I maintain out hope, each time, that Quantic Dream’s subsequent sport gained’t be a properly realised however completely full catastrophe. By the way, you will get it within the present Steam sale for like a quid. I replayed it to get screenshots for this piece, and naturally realised that truly it may be an entire catastrophe as properly.

The controls are an abomination, mixed with a Cagian, I-am-an-auteur fashion digital camera that snaps to a special approach each time you enter a room, often in a high nook (the higher to evoke fixed CCTV monitoring by a dystopian deep state). There’s a scene the place you’ll be able to have intercourse with a girl while within the physique of her husband, and she or he doesn’t know you’re not him. Come on, mate. That’s not on. However there’s one factor of plain high quality that Omikron does have, and that’s David Bowie.

I’m an enormous fan of Bowie as a result of my older brother was, and musical tastes obtained handed down in the identical method that previous books and the nicest bed room did. Omikron was his first and solely online game position. Bowie not solely wrote numerous the music for Omikron (the opening credit are a movie-style zoom over bits of the grimey megacity set to New Angels of Promise — a bunch of the songs he wrote for Omikron ended up on his album Hours), however is in it as a type of messianic revolutionary chief known as Boz. His likeness was additionally used for the unrelated lead singer of an in-game band known as The Dreamers. Typically you stroll right into a bar and are primarily get together to a 5 minute lengthy Bowie live performance that you simply weren’t anticipating.

Omikron’s framing is that Kay’l (pronounced Kyle), a police officer from one other universe, has managed to interrupt by way of to ours by way of, er, your pc. He needs to swap locations together with your soul as a way to keep on his investigation and save the world and so forth. Provided that he’s caretaking your physique whilst you’re off taking part in Omikron, one hopes that he’s extra respectful than you, the sneakfuck spouse shagger. If Kyle’s physique is killed, your soul migrates into a brand new host within the sport, which is a sort of literal transhumanism — to not point out the truth that you’re canonically experiencing this as a result of your soul was capable of migrate by way of a pc.

It’s Bowie’s character Boz that’s the purest expression of cyberpunk shenanigans within the sport, although. Omikron is dominated over by a hyper-intelligent AI known as Ix. The world of Omikron is actually a post-apocalypse and cyberpunk setting multi functional; following a famine and a civil battle, Ix was put in cost because it was determined human chief wouldn’t be capable of make the proper choices to avert additional catastrophe. Ix watches over every little thing utilizing safety cameras and even assigns you your relationship. Boz was a hacker, adept at hiding his id and escaping the clutches of Ix — till in the future, a few of the demons from the sport’s A plot tracked him down. On the final second, Boz was capable of switch his very soul into the Omikron community.

In the meantime, in what I consider the youngsters name meatspace, there are spirited arguments for Bowie himself repping as a transhumanist cyberpunk. Bowie was already the king of transformation, having already migrated by way of being Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Skinny White Duke, and the pop hits of Let’s Dance. Within the 90s he was diversifying with stuff like touring with 9 Inch Nails; Omikron got here out in 1999, the identical 12 months as peak 90s hacker vibe film The Matrix. The Ashes to Ashes album Scary Monsters got here out almost 40 years in the past now, and here’s a very convincing essay classifying it as “David Bowie as a cyberpunk”, the place the Spaceman is “coming to grips with a darker, extra unpredictable future than he might have probably imagined.”

Boz’s complete display time within the sport quantities to about 5 minutes — you’ll be able to watch all of them in a single compilation video — however they’re undoubtedly one of the best 5 minutes of the sport. Bowie is so effortlessly good, and so convincingly a transhumanist digital insurgent by simply being David Bowie, that he makes David Cage’s dialogue about demons and historic legendary wars convincing.

Within the sport, Boz existed on the community as a purely digital lifeform. With no bodily kind, he was capable of transport himself immediately wherever the wires went. Any data saved on the community was at his metaphorical fingertips. Whenever you see him in sport, he manifests as a blue and gold code ghost, sort of an attractive Gustav Klimt portray. Time and area meant nothing! He had develop into a very transcended being in what’s in the end fairly an unusual sport that has aged terribly. It was most likely Bowie’s stardust I used to be remembering all alongside.

from SpicyNBAChili.com http://spicymoviechili.spicynbachili.com/an-ode-to-the-cyberpunk-david-bowie-of-omikron-the-nomad-soul/

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deadcactuswalking · 6 years

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REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 8th July 2018

All right, I really don’t want to talk about Drake. Let me elaborate: Drake has made a lot of music I love ever since he started rapping, but honestly, after a few years, he just got too popular and lost my interest because, like anyone at their peak, kind of got the mindset of “I can do whatever the hell I want and still get money” – which is, in fact, true. His laziest, mediocre, most boring and cheap songs seem to be his most successful, and that kind of aggravates me, when he’s capable of much better and puts it out, only for it to pale popularity-wise in comparison to the trash that he can spit out. Hence, I am glad UK chart regulations have shortened my Drake-load to only three songs, while America has 27 Drake songs in the Hot 100. Let’s stop rambling and get on into the top 10.

Top 10

Surprisingly, Drake just couldn’t knock George Ezra’s “Shotgun” off of its top spot, now at its second week there. That would be Drake’s third number-one debut this week if not for this track’s somewhat odd amount of strength as a hit. Huh.

Oh, yeah, speaking of Drake, we have “Don’t Matter to Me” from his latest album Scorpion, featuring posthumous vocals from Michael Jackson and uncredited vocals from Paul Anka, debuting at the runner-up spot.

“Solo” by Clean Bandit featuring Demi Lovato is down one spot to number-three, somehow still toppling two Drake songs.

The highest of those two being “Nonstop”, debuting at number-four.

Drake also takes up the number-five spot with “Emotionless”, and just like that, he takes up three spots in the top five of both the US and UK charts. Delightful, it’s like the charts are his house that he rents every Summer.

Due to Drake, we have some decent fallers in the top 10, including number-six, “2002” by Anne-Marie, down three spots to number-six.

Also down by three positions is “I’ll be There” by Jess Glynne, now at number-seven.

“I Like It” by Cardi B featuring Bad Bunny and J Balvin stays at number-eight from last week.

“If You’re Over Me” by Years & Years is also down three spaces to number-nine, but that will definitely rebound with their new album and all next week.

Finally, “Girls Like You” by Maroon 5 featuring Cardi B creeps into the top ten at #10 due to a three-spot increase.

Climbers

Yeah, not much increased this week at all. Mostly debuts from last week had smaller gains, but those aren’t really notable. There are seven-space jumps for “Taste” by Tyga featuring Offset up to #27 and “Nevermind” by Dennis Lloyd up to #32, but other than those and “Oh My” by Dappy featuring Ay Em going up five spots to #26, there’s nothing to go and talk to home about here.

Fallers

There are a LOT of small fallers this week, especially for trap-rap and hip-hop since Drake took over that demographic, so I’ll only mention the bigger ones for pop and go rapid-fire for hip-hop. “One Kiss” by Calvin Harris and Dua Lipa is down six to #16, as is “Familiar” by Liam Payne and J Balvin down to #20, as well as “no tears left to cry” by Ariana Grande now at #29. “Flames” by David Guetta and Sia took an eight-spot hit to #34, and “Girls” by Rita Ora featuring Cardi B, Bebe Rexha and Charli XCX didn’t fare well either, down eleven spots to #38, joining Cheat Codes and Little Mix at the bottom of the top 40 as their track “Only You” is down eight spaces to #40 after its debut last week.

Now, for hip-hop: XXXTENTACION – for obvious reasons – didn’t have a good week, with “SAD!” down nine to #14, “Moonlight” down 14 to #31, and “changes” down 15 to #37. Post Malone’s “Better Now” is also down eight to #15, taking an identical drop to “German” by EO, now at #23. And rapid-fire for the lesser falls: “Praise the Lord (Da Shine)” by A$AP Rocky and Skepta hit #21, alongside “Butterflies” by AJ Tracey and Not3s at #22. Women in hip-hop suffered too, as “Man Down” by Shakka and AlunaGeorge hit #30 and “Bed” by Nicki Minaj and Ariana Grande had a five-spot injury down to #35.

Dropouts

Drake dropped out the charts. Somehow, “Nice for What” featuring uncredited vocals from Big Freedia and 5thward Weebie is out of the charts from #25, despite the album release and it hitting #1 in the US. That’s really odd, actually.

Other than that, “Love Lies” by Khalid and Normani is out from #33, “Answerphone” by Banx & Ranx and Ella Eyre featuring Yxng Bane is out from #37 and “Family Tree” by Ramz is out from #38, with most of the songs being pretty much at the end of their run, although “Answerphone” is fading away much quicker than I expected it to.

Returning Entries

There is one returning entry this week due to the World Cup and it’s an interesting case. Let’s talk about it.

#24 – “Three Lions” – Baddiel, Skinner and the Lightning Seeds

“Three Lions” is a Britpop song written by rock band Lightning Seeds, as well as comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner, known for hosting the show Fantasy Football League together. It originally hit #1 in 1996 because it was made to celebrate England hosting the European championships, however it has since been recontextualised for World Cup events. In 1998, it was re-recorded and hit #1 once again, but that version never really stuck. Instead, every four years (and sometimes in between due to the European Championships), the original 1996 track kept on returning to the top 40 or top 100, peaking differently each time – in 2002 it was #16, while it was #9 in 2006, #10 in 2010 (alongside a second re-recording that peaked at #21, released with Robbie Williams and Russell Brand under the name THE SQUAD), #77 in 2012, #27 in 2014, #84 in 2016, and finally, #24 in 2018. It has a strong legacy and will go down as an official anthem for English sport, but is it actually any good?

Well, I’ve never been too much of a fan of music that’s too rowdy or ladsy (for lack of a better word), including a lot of Britpop, but this is too safe for even that. The hook is so weakly delivered with not really much of a passion at all, and I’m not sure if any of these guys can actually sing – don’t get me wrong, it’s catchy and I appreciate all the references to other notable English football moments, as well as some being sampled in an instrumental break that includes a nice guitar/synth refrain that slowly grows in intensity but then it all drops off at that anti-climactic, weaksauce chorus! Skinner’s vocoded, for God’s sake. Put some passion into the main vocals as much as you do with all the backing and left-ear-exclusive vocalising. Yeah, I’m not too much of a fan, but hey, I’ll chip in and have some hope for my own country. Come on, England! It’s coming home!

Wait, sorry, no, it’s not, we just lost against Croatia. God, it’s going to be depressingly ironic when this hits #1 next week – and it probably will.

DRAKE (new arrivals)

#5 – “Emotionless” – Drake featuring Mariah Carey

This is technically a solo Drake song that samples Mariah Carey, but I want to credit her as a feature here because I find it odd (and kind of awesome) how she’s done nothing of note this year and yet she’s still had two top 10 hits in the US since December simply by convenience, the first being “All I Want for Christmas is You”, the second being this new track from Scorpion, and, yeah, you know this is a No I.D. beat as soon as you hear Mariah Carey’s powerful vocals over the simple piano chords and a choir being pummelled by this bass and the skittering hi-hats, very similarly to “The Story of O.J.” by JAY-Z, which he produced last year, especially with how the sampled vocals are chopped-up at times, setting the stage for Drake to body this track with his rhymes about... condemning females using social media and modern technology to enjoy their time in foreign places, specifically Rome, and how he wasn’t hiding his kid from the world, he was hiding the world from his kid (that basically means the exact same thing, Drake, you can’t switch that!). He takes some shots at Kanye and mentions how the wise man once said nothing at all, which apparently, Drake cannot do throughout this year as he’s dissing Pusha T and Kanye throughout the album subtly, and then there’s an awkward fade-out to a nice funky, jazzy piano section that just seems kind of out of place and unnecessary? It doesn’t even lead up to the next song on the album (that’s “God’s Plan”), it’s just kind of there. Okay, but the beat is fantastic, so check this out anyway.

#4 – “Nonstop” – Drake

This nearly debuted at #1 in the US. I’m sorry, but what does anyone see in this?! This is boring. This is trash. This is Drake and his producers just not trying. Drake half-mumbles his verses for the most-part, with some pretty cringeworthy lines about how he’s light-skinned but still a dark man mentally, and how he’s a wig-splitter or whatever the hell. This beat is literally just a bass and some cheap trap percussion I could probably download from Loopmasters right now. This hook is literally just a sample from a Mack Daddy Ju song repeating with static effects and distortion, to the point where it’s unrecognisable and a massive waste of sample clearance money. I can’t believe Wheelchair Jimmy could make a Lil Xan song, but here we are: a sleep-inducing, probably drug-addled sleepwalk through Drake’s mind with more ad-libs than bars, which is probably how I’d describe his album – just replace ad-libs with pointless samples, for which “In My Feelings” is probably the worst case. I’m glad that one didn’t debut. Oh, yeah, and there’s the opening part, which is supposed to be cool and all but all he says is he flipped a switch and has some dumb “flip, flip” ad-lib afterwards, like, what are you trying to do, Drake? No matter what you’re trying to do, you’re failing immensely.

#2 – “Don’t Matter to Me” – Drake featuring Michael Jackson and Paul Anka

So, combining his enthusiasm for both lazy sampling and grave-robbery, Drake decided to buy some unreleased material from Michael Jackson that he wrote with Paul Anka, who provides additional vocals on the song, in 1983, recorded in the same session that lead to “Love Never Felt So Good”, another posthumous single Jackson released with Justin Timberlake in 2014. Surprisingly, Drake sloppily rap-singing over deceased R&B singers has proven to be a working formula, as he does the same stunt with Static Major on the best song on the album, “After Dark”. It’s vaguely tropical in its production, with some nice, warm synths and handclaps as well as some accentuated 808s that set the stage once again for Drake, who has a charm in his badly-sung verses. Michael Jackson’s pre-chorus is okay, and the King of Pop’s chorus is somewhat lowkey, which is a shockingly calm, subtle vocal hook for MJ but possibly an overly dramatic performance for self-certified wig-splitter Drake. Also, I know the audio was from the 1980s, but this could really have been mixed better, especially in the kind of excruciating pre-chorus and bridge (which is just all over the place with unnecessary reverb and echo). Come on, Drake, the mixing throughout this album is way too amateur for someone of your status. JAY-Z’s verse on “Talk Up” might as well have not been there before you made it louder when you pulled a Kanye and changed your own album, cluttering “In My Feelings” even more in the process and not changing this track and “March 14”, which need better mixing, or “Final Fantasy”, which really should have had the unnecessary bridge that samples the Maury skit cut, or “Emotionless”, which could do with you leaving the profanities intact on the explicit version of the album (how do you mess that up, honestly?), or even “Blue Tint”, by giving Future the verse he rightly deserves, instead of just sticking him onto the chorus as an uncredited hook-singer. Maybe you could have put songs on the right side of the album? Side A was darker hip-hop and trap, why is “God’s Plan” on there? Side B was smoother, funkier alternative R&B, why are “Blue Tint” and “Nice for What” on there? Thankfully, this will probably and hopefully be the last time I review a Drake song until my end-of-year lists – in which knowing Drake, he’ll probably make both worst AND best – so I can say I’ve slain this dragon for now (if Pusha T hadn’t done it already).

Conclusion

I mean, what do you think? I can’t give anything to the returning entries, so I have to give Drake something or other. “Nonstop” easily takes Worst of the Week – that is a dreadfully boring song – while I think I’ll give Best of the Week to “Emotionless”, and Honourable Mention to “Don’t Matter to Me” with Michael Jackson and Paul Anka for at least... trying. See you next week.

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endenogatai · 6 years

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Not just another decentralized web whitepaper?

Given all the hype and noise swirling around crypto and decentralized network projects, which runs the full gamut from scams and stupidity, to very clever and inspired ideas, the release of yet another whitepaper does not immediately set off an attention klaxon.

But this whitepaper — which details a new protocol for achieving consensus within a decentralized network — is worth paying more attention to than most.

MaidSafe, the team behind it, are also the literal opposite of fly-by-night crypto opportunists. They’ve been working on decentralized networking since long before the space became the hot, hyped thing it is now.

Their overarching mission is to engineer an entirely decentralized Internet which bakes in privacy, security and freedom of expression by design — the ‘Safe’ in their planned ‘Safe Network’ stands for ‘Secure access for everyone’ — meaning it’s encrypted, autonomous, self-organizing, self-healing. And the new consensus protocol is just another piece towards fulfilling that grand vision.

What’s consensus in decentralized networking terms? “Within decentralized networks you must have a way of the network agreeing on a state — such as can somebody access a file or confirming a coin transaction, for example — and the reason you need this is because you don’t have a central server to confirm all this to you,” explains MaidSafe’s COO Nick Lambert, discussing what the protocol is intended to achieve.

“So you need all these decentralized nodes all reaching agreement somehow on a state within the network. Consensus occurs by each of these nodes on the network voting and letting the network as a whole know what it thinks of a transaction.

“It’s almost like consensus could be considered the heart of the networks. It’s required for almost every event in the network.”

We wrote about MaidSafe’s alternative, server-less Internet in 2014. But they actually began work on the project in stealth all the way back in 2006. So they’re over a decade into the R&D at this point.

The network is p2p because it’s being designed so that data is locally encrypted, broken up into pieces and then stored distributed and replicated across the network, relying on the users’ own compute resources to stand in and take the strain. No servers necessary.

The prototype Safe Network is currently in an alpha testing stage (they opened for alpha in 2016). Several more alpha test stages are planned, with a beta release still a distant, undated prospect at this stage. But rearchitecting the entire Internet was clearly never going to be a day’s work.

MaidSafe also ran a multimillion dollar crowdsale in 2014 — for a proxy token of the coin that will eventually be baked into the network — and did so long before ICOs became a crypto-related bandwagon that all sorts of entities were jumping onto. The SafeCoin cryptocurrency is intended to operate as the inventive mechanism for developers to build apps for the Safe Network and users to contribute compute resource and thus bring MaidSafe’s distributed dream alive.

Their timing on the token sale front, coupled with prudent hodling of some of the Bitcoins they’ve raised, means they’re essentially in a position of not having to worry about raising more funds to build the network, according to Lambert.

A rough, back-of-an-envelope calculation on MaidSafe’s original crowdsale suggests, given they raised $2M in Bitcoin in April 2014 when the price for 1BTC was up to around $500, the Bitcoins they obtained then could be worth between ~$30M-$40M by today’s Bitcoin prices — though that would be assuming they held on to most of them. Bitcoin’s price also peaked far higher last year too.

As well as the token sale they also did an equity raise in 2016, via the fintech investment platform bnktothefuture, pulling in around $1.7M from that — in a mixture of cash and “some Bitcoin”.

“It’s gone both ways,” says Lambert, discussing the team’s luck with Bitcoin. “The crowdsale we were on the losing end of Bitcoin price decreasing. We did a raise from bnktothefuture in autumn of 2016… and fortunately we held on to quite a lot of the Bitcoin. So we rode the Bitcoin price up. So I feel like the universe paid us back a little bit for that. So it feels like we’re level now.”

“Fundraising is exceedingly time consuming right through the organization, and it does take a lot of time away from what you wants to be focusing on, and so to be in a position where you’re not desperate for funding is a really nice one to be in,” he adds. “It allows us to focus on the technology and releasing the network.”

The team’s headcount is now up to around 33, with founding members based at the HQ in Ayr, Scotland, and other engineers working remotely or distributed (including in a new dev office they opened in India at the start of this year), even though MaidSafe is still not taking in any revenue.

This April they also made the decision to switch from a dual licensing approach for their software — previously offering both an open source license and a commercial license (which let people close source their code for a fee) — to going only open source, to encourage more developer engagement and contributions to the project, as Lambert tells it.

“We always see the SafeNetwork a bit like a public utility,” he says. “In terms of once we’ve got this thing up and launched we don’t want to control it or own it because if we do nobody will want to use it — it needs to be seen as everyone contributing. So we felt it’s a much more encouraging sign for developers who want to contribute if they see everything is fully open sourced and cannot be closed source.”

MaidSafe’s story so far is reason enough to take note of their whitepaper.

But the consensus issue the paper addresses is also a key challenge for decentralized networks so any proposed solution is potentially a big deal — if indeed it pans out as promised.

Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus

MaidSafe reckons they’ve come up with a way of achieving consensus on decentralized networks that’s scalable, robust and efficient. Hence the name of the protocol — ‘Parsec’ — being short for: ‘Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus’.

They will be open sourcing the protocol under a GPL v3 license — with a rough timeframe of “months” for that release, according to Lambert.

He says they’ve been working on Parsec for the last 18 months to two years — but also drawing on earlier research the team carried out into areas such as conflict-free replicated data types, synchronous and asynchronous consensus, and topics such as threshold signatures and common coin.

More specifically, the research underpinning Parsec is based on the following five papers: 1. Baird L. The Swirlds Hashgraph Consensus Algorithm: Fair, Fast, Byzantine Fault Tolerance, Swirlds Tech Report SWIRLDS-TR-2016-01 (2016); 2. Mostefaoui A., Hamouna M., Raynal M. Signature-Free Asynchronous Byzantine Consensus with t <n/3 and O(n 2 ) Messages, ACM PODC (2014); 3. Micali S. Byzantine Agreement, Made Trivial, (2018); 4. Miller A., Xia Y., Croman K., Shi E., Song D. The Honey Badger of BFT Protocols, CCS (2016); 5. Team Rocket Snowflake to Avalanche: A Novel Metastable Consensus Protocol Family for Cryptocurrencies, (2018).

One tweet responding to the protocol’s unveiling just over a week ago wonders whether it’s too good to be true. Time will tell — but the potential is certainly enticing.

Bitcoin’s use of a drastically energy-inefficient ‘proof of work’ method to achieve consensus and write each transaction to its blockchain very clearly doesn’t scale. It’s slow, cumbersome and wasteful. And how to get blockchain-based networks to support the billions of transactions per second that might be needed to sustain the various envisaged applications remains an essential work in progress — with projects investigating various ideas and approaches to try to overcome the limitation.

MaidSafe’s network is not blockchain-based. It’s engineered to function with asynchronous voting of nodes, rather than synchronous voting, which should avoid the bottleneck problems associated with blockchain. But it’s still decentralized. So it needs a consensus mechanism to enable operations and transactions to be carried out autonomously and robustly. That’s where Parsec is intended to slot in.

The protocol does not use proof of work. And is able, so the whitepaper claims, to achieve consensus even if a third of the network is comprised of malicious nodes — i.e. nodes which are attempting to disrupt network operations or otherwise attack the network.

Another claimed advantage is that decisions made via the protocol are both mathematically guaranteed and irreversible.

“What Parsec does is it can reach consensus even with malicious nodes. And up to a third of the nodes being malicious is what the maths proofs suggest,” says Lambert. “This ability to provide mathematical guarantees that all parts of the network will come to the same agreement at a point in time, even with some fault in the network or bad actors — that’s what Byzantine Fault Tolerance is.”

In theory a blockchain using proof of work could be hacked if any one entity controlled 51% of the nodes on the network (although in reality it’s likely that such a large amount of energy would be required it’s pretty much impractical).

So on the surface MaidSafe’s decentralized network — which ‘only’ needs 33% of its nodes to be compromised for its consensus decisions to be attacked — sounds rather less robust. But Lambert says it’s more nuanced than the numbers suggest. And in fact the malicious third would also need to be nodes that have the authority to vote. “So it is a third but it’s a third of well reputed nodes,” as he puts it.

So there’s an element of proof of stake involved too, bound up with additional planned characteristics of the Safe Network — related to dynamic membership and sharding (Lambert says MaidSafe has additional whitepapers on both those elements coming soon).

“Those two papers, particularly the one around dynamic membership, will explain why having a third of malicious nodes is actually harder than just having 33% of malicious nodes. Because the nodes that can vote have to have a reputation as well. So it’s not just purely you can flood the Safe Network with lots and lots of malicious nodes and override it only using a third of the nodes. What we’re saying is the nodes that can vote and actually have a say must have a good reputation in the network,” he says.

“The other thing is proof of stake… Everyone is desperate to move away from proof of work because of its environmental impact. So proof of stake — I liken it to the Scottish landowners, where people with a lot of power have more say. In the cryptocurrency field, proof of stake might be if you have, let’s say, 10 coins and I have one coin your vote might be worth 10x as much authority as what my one coin would be. So any of these mechanisms that they come up with it has that weighting to it… So the people with the most vested interests in the network are also given the more votes.”

Sharding refers to closed groups that allow for consensus votes to be reached by a subset of nodes on a decentralized network. By splitting the network into small sections for consensus voting purposes the idea is you avoid the inefficiencies of having to poll all the nodes on the network — yet can still retain robustness, at least so long as subgroups are carefully structured and secured.

“If you do that correctly you can make it more secure and you can make things much more efficient and faster,” says Lambert. “Because rather than polling, let’s say 6,000 nodes, you might be polling eight nodes. So you can get that information back quickly.

“Obviously you need to be careful about how you do that because with much less nodes you can potentially game the network so you need to be careful how you secure those smaller closed groups or shards. So that will be quite a big thing because pretty much every crypto project is looking at sharding to make, certainly, blockchains more efficient. And so the fact that we’ll have something coming out in that, after we have the dynamic membership stuff coming out, is going to be quite exciting to see the reaction to that as well.”

Voting authority on the Safe Network might be based on a node’s longevity, quality and historical activity — so a sort of ‘reputation’ score (or ledger) that can yield voting rights over time.

“If you’re like that then you will have a vote in these closed groups. And so a third of those votes — and that then becomes quite hard to game because somebody who’s then trying to be malicious would need to have their nodes act as good corporate citizens for a time period. And then all of a sudden become malicious, by which time they’ve probably got a vested stake in the network. So it wouldn’t be possible for someone to just come and flood the network with new nodes and then be malicious because it would not impact upon the network,” Lambert suggests.

The computing power that would be required to attack the Safe Network once it’s public and at scale would also be “really, really significant”, he adds. “Once it gets to scale it would be really hard to co-ordinate anything against it because you’re always having to be several hundred percent bigger than the network and then have a co-ordinated attack on it itself. And all of that work might get you to impact the decision within one closed group. So it’s not even network wide… And that decision could be on who accesses one piece of encrypted shard of data for example… Even the thing you might be able to steal is only an encrypted shard of something — it’s not even the whole thing.”

Other distributed ledger projects are similarly working on Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (AFBT) consensus models, including those using directed acrylic graphs (DAGs) — another nascent decentralization technology that’s been suggested as an alternative to blockchain.

And indeed AFBT techniques predate Bitcoin, though MaidSafe says these kind of models have only more recently become viable thanks to research and the relative maturing of decentralized computing and data types, itself as a consequence of increased interest and investment in the space.

However in the case of Hashgraph — the DAG project which has probably attracted the most attention so far — it’s closed source, not open. So that’s one major difference with MaidSafe’s approach.

Another difference that Lambert points to is that Parsec has been built to work in a dynamic, permissionless network environment (essential for the intended use-case, as the Safe Network is intended as a public network). Whereas he claims Hashgraph has only demonstrated its algorithms working on a permissioned (and therefore private) network “where all the nodes are known”.

He also suggests there’s a question mark over whether Hashgraph’s algorithm can achieve consensus when there are malicious nodes operating on the network. Which — if true — would limit what it can be used for.

“The Hashgraph algorithm is only proven to reach agreement if there’s no adversaries within the network,” Lambert claims. “So if everything’s running well then happy days, but if there’s any maliciousness or any failure within that network then — certainly on the basis of what’s been published — it would suggest that that algorithm was not going to hold up to that.”

“I think being able to do all of these things asynchronously with all of the mathematical guarantees is very difficult,” he continues, returning to the core consensus challenge. “So at the moment we see that we have come out with something that is unique, that covers a lot of these bases, and is a very good use for our use-case. And I think will be useful for others — so I think we like to think that we’ve made a paradigm shift or a vast improvement over the state of the art.”

Paradigm shift vs marginal innovation

Despite the team’s conviction that, with Parsec, they’ve come up with something very notable, early feedback includes some very vocal Twitter doubters.

For example there’s a lengthy back-and-forth between several MaidSafe engineers and Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir — who dubs the Parsec protocol “overhyped” and a “marginal innovation if that”… so, er, ouch.

Well, I don't think asynchronous consensus on an order of events can be described as "never been done before" or "a paradigm shift". And it's not asynchronous, but "very asynchronous" or "randomly synchronous" [sic], and this synchrony assumption isn't very clearly documented

— Vlad ''not giving away ETH'' Zamfir (@VladZamfir) May 31, 2018

Lambert is, if not entirely sanguine, then solidly phlegmatic in the face of a bit of initial Twitter blowback — saying he reckons it will take more time for more detailed responses to come, i.e. allowing for people to properly digest the whitepaper.

“In the world of async BFT algorithms, any advance is huge,” MaidSafe CEO David Irvine also tells us when we ask for a response to Zamfir’s critique. “How huge is subjective, but any advance has to be great for the world. We hope others will advance Parsec like we have built on others (as we clearly state and thank them for their work). So even if it was a marginal development (which it certainly is not) then I would take that.”

“All in all, though, nothing was said that took away from the fact Parsec moves the industry forward,” he adds. “I felt the comments were a bit juvenile at times and a bit defensive (probably due to us not agreeing with POS in our Medium post) but in terms of the only part commented on (the coin flip) we as a team feel that part could be much more concrete in terms of defining exactly how small such random (finite) delays could be. We know they do not stop the network and a delaying node would be killed, but for completeness, it would be nice to be that detailed.”

A developer source of our own in the crypto/blockchain space — who’s not connected to the MaidSafe or Ethereum projects — also points out that Parsec “getting objective review will take some time given that so many potential reviewers have vested interest in their own project/coin”.

It’s certainly fair to say the space excels at public spats and disagreements. Researchers pouring effort into one project can be less than kind to rivals’ efforts. (And, well, given all the crypto Lambos at stake it’s not hard to see why there can be no love lost — and, ironically, zero trust — between competing champions of trustless tech.)

Another fundamental truth of these projects is they’re all busily experimenting right now, with lots of ideas in play to try and fix core issues like scalability, efficiency and robustness — often having different ideas over implementation even if rival projects are circling and/or converging on similar approaches and techniques.

“Certainly other projects are looking at sharding,” says Lambert. “So I know that Ethereum are looking at sharding. And I think Bitcoin are looking at that as well, but I think everyone probably has quite different ideas about how to implement it. And of course we’re not using a blockchain which makes that another different use-case where Ethereum and Bitcoin obviously are. But everyone has — as with anything — these different approaches and different ideas.”

“Every network will have its own different ways of doing [consensus],” he adds when asked whether he believes Parsec could be adopted by other projects wrestling with the consensus challenge. “So it’s not like some could lift [Parsec] out and just put it in. Ethereum is blockchain-based — I think they’re looking at something around proof of stake, but maybe they could take some ideas or concepts from the work that we’re open sourcing for their specific case.

“If you get other blockchain-less networks like IOTA, Byteball, I think POA is another one as well. These other projects it might be easier for them to implement something like Parsec with them because they’re not using blockchain. So maybe less of that adaption required.”

Whether other projects will deem Parsec worthy of their attention remains to be seen at this point with so much still to play for. Some may prefer to expend effort trying to rubbish a rival approach, whose open source tech could, if it stands up to scrutiny and operational performance, reduce the commercial value of proprietary and patented mechanisms also intended to grease the wheels of decentralized networks — for a fee.

And of course MaidSafe’s developed-in-stealth consensus protocol may also turn out to be a relatively minor development. But finding a non-vested expert to give an impartial assessment of complex network routing algorithms conjoined to such a self-interested and, frankly, anarchical industry is another characteristic challenge of the space.

Irvine’s view is that DAG based projects which are using a centralized component will have to move on or adopt what he dubs “state of art” asynchronous consensus algorithms — as MaidSafe believes Parsec is — aka, algorithms which are “more widely accepted and proven”.

“So these projects should contribute to the research, but more importantly, they will have to adopt better algorithms than they use,” he suggests. “So they can play an important part, upgrades! How to upgrade a running DAG based network? How to had fork a graph? etc. We know how to hard fork blockchains, but upgrading DAG based networks may not be so simple when they are used as ledgers.

“Projects like Hashgraph, Algorand etc will probably use an ABFT algorithm like this as their whole network with a little work for a currency; IOTA, NANO, Bytball etc should. That is entirely possible with advances like Parsec. However adding dynamic membership, sharding, a data layer then a currency is a much larger proposition, which is why Parsec has been in stealth mode while it is being developed.

“We hope that by being open about the algorithm, and making the code open source when complete, we will help all the other projects working on similar problems.”

Of course MaidSafe’s team might be misguided in terms of the breakthrough they think they’ve made with Parsec. But it’s pretty hard to stand up the idea they’re being intentionally misleading.

Because, well, what would be the point of that? While the exact depth of MaidSafe’s funding reserves isn’t clear, Lambert doesn’t sound like a startup guy with money worries. And the team’s staying power cannot be in doubt — over a decade into the R&D needed to underpin their alt network.

It’s true that being around for so long does have some downsides, though. Especially, perhaps, given how hyped the decentralized space has now become. “Because we’ve been working on it for so long, and it’s been such a big project, you can see some negative feedback about that,” as Lambert admits.

And with such intense attention now on the space, injecting energy which in turn accelerates ideas and activity, there’s perhaps extra pressure on a veteran player like MaidSafe to be seen making a meaningful contribution — ergo, it might be tempting for the team to believe the consensus protocol they’ve engineered really is a big deal.

To stand up and be counted amid all the noise, as it were. And to draw attention to their own project — which needs lots of external developers to buy into the vision if it’s to succeed, yet, here in 2018, it’s just one decentralization project among so many.

The Safe Network roadmap

Consensus aside, MaidSafe’s biggest challenge is still turning the sizable amount of funding and resources the team’s ideas have attracted to date into a bona fide alternative network that anyone really can use. And there’s a very long road to travel still on that front, clearly.

The Safe Network is in alpha 2 testing incarnation (which has been up and running since September last year) — consisting of around a hundred nodes that MaidSafe is maintaining itself.

The core decentralization proposition of anyone being able to supply storage resource to the network via lending their own spare capacity is not yet live — and won’t come fully until alpha 4.

“People are starting to create different apps against that network. So we’ve seen Jams — a decentralized music player… There are a couple of storage style apps… There is encrypted email running as well, and also that is running on Android,” says Lambert. “And we have a forked version of the Beaker browser — that’s the browser that we use right now. So if you can create websites on the Safe Network, which has its own protocol, and if you want to go and view those sites you need a Safe browser to do that, so we’ve also been working on our own browser from scratch that we’ll be releasing later this year… So there’s a number of apps that are running against that alpha 2 network.

“What alpha 3 will bring is it will run in parallel with alpha 2 but it will effectively be a decentralized routing network. What that means is it will be one for more technical people to run, and it will enable data to be passed around a network where anyone can contribute their resources to it but it will not facilitate data storage. So it’ll be a command line app, which is probably why it’ll suit technical people more because there’ll be no user interface for it, and they will contribute their resources to enable messages to be passed around the network. So secure messaging would be a use-case for that.

“And then alpha 4 is effectively bringing together alpha 2 and alpha 3. So it adds a storage layer on top of the alpha 3 network — and at that point it gives you the fully decentralized network where users are contributing their resources from home and they will be able to store data, send messages and things of that nature. Potentially during alpha 4, or a later alpha, we’ll introduce test SafeCoin. Which is the final piece of the initial puzzle to provide incentives for users to provide resources and for developers to make apps. So that’s probably what the immediate roadmap looks like.”

On the timeline front Lambert won’t be coaxed into fixing any deadlines to all these planned alphas. They’ve long ago learnt not to try and predict the pace of progress, he says with a laugh. Though he does not question that progress is being made.

“These big infrastructure projects are typically only government funded because the payback is too slow for venture capitalists,” he adds. “So in the past you had things like Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet — that was obviously a US government funded project — and so we’ve taken on a project which has, not grown arms and legs, but certainly there’s more to it than what was initially thought about.

“So we are almost privately funding this infrastructure. Which is quite a big scope, and I will say why it’s taking a bit of time. But we definitely do seem to be making lots of progress.”

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1nebest · 6 years

Text

Not just another decentralized web whitepaper?

But this whitepaper — which details a new protocol for achieving consensus within a decentralized network — is worth paying more attention to than most.

“It’s almost like consensus could be considered the heart of the networks. It’s required for almost every event in the network.”

As well as the token sale they also did an equity raise in 2016, via the fintech investment platform bnktothefuture, pulling in around $1.7M from that — in a mixture of cash and “some Bitcoin”.

MaidSafe’s story so far is reason enough to take note of their whitepaper.

But the consensus issue the paper addresses is also a key challenge for decentralized networks so any proposed solution is potentially a big deal — if indeed it pans out as promised.

Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus

MaidSafe reckons they��ve come up with a way of achieving consensus on decentralized networks that’s scalable, robust and efficient. Hence the name of the protocol — ‘Parsec’ — being short for: ‘Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus’.

They will be open sourcing the protocol under a GPL v3 license — with a rough timeframe of “months” for that release, according to Lambert.

One tweet responding to the protocol’s unveiling just over a week ago wonders whether it’s too good to be true. Time will tell — but the potential is certainly enticing.

Another claimed advantage is that decisions made via the protocol are both mathematically guaranteed and irreversible.

Paradigm shift vs marginal innovation

Despite the team’s conviction that, with Parsec, they’ve come up with something very notable, early feedback includes some very vocal Twitter doubters.

— Vlad ''not giving away ETH'' Zamfir (@VladZamfir) May 31, 2018

“We hope that by being open about the algorithm, and making the code open source when complete, we will help all the other projects working on similar problems.”

The Safe Network roadmap

The Safe Network is in alpha 2 testing incarnation (which has been up and running since September last year) — consisting of around a hundred nodes that MaidSafe is maintaining itself.

The core decentralization proposition of anyone being able to supply storage resource to the network via lending their own spare capacity is not yet live — and won’t come fully until alpha 4.

“So we are almost privately funding this infrastructure. Which is quite a big scope, and I will say why it’s taking a bit of time. But we definitely do seem to be making lots of progress.”

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theinvinciblenoob · 6 years