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oneweekoneband · 3 years

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her Nebraska (1982)

In July I flew to Massachusetts with a plague on, and I felt that it was wrong, but my mother had begged and I’d been out of work for months. Mornings there I ran in long, uneven ovals on the same roads I’d memorized in high school. There’s no sidewalks, but the few feet of dirt between the craggy pavement and the open mouths of the fields serve all right for a single body in motion. When a truck comes up close from behind, the ground shakes, and I step away bouncingly from the street toward thigh-high yellow weeds and grass, and keep going. I was slowly picking my way back in that dirt, sweat-slick from only a plodding couple of miles in peak summer heat, and sucking the wet cotton of my mask in between my teeth on every inhale, when Taylor Swift announced she was releasing a surprise album produced by the guy from The National. Not the guy from The National, like, the voice, but the guy from The National whose photo was circulated on Twitter earlier this year as some kind of antifa super soldier, which isn’t the case, but would’ve been rad. First, I stopped dead to send some outraged, misspelled text messages, and then I ran home faster than I’d moved in years.

Tall, blonde, patrician pop star Taylor Swift is to me something like a cross-between a wife and a boogeyman. Bound we’ve been since we were really children. Time and its changes haven’t rid me of her, and what’s worse is I have never quite been able to wish they would, though I claim as much all the time. Countless hours of my one wild and precious life have been spent on endlessly analyzing the minutiae of Taylor Swift’s music, the mind that made it, the real world events which influenced it. And though all the while I have known she is only a person, and that people, while each strange and lovely in their own ways, are, in the end, mostly dull, needful in just the regular manner, the fantasy is better, the sick dream of a megalomaniac songstress, curious, thrilling, probably evil, and I choose that. I don’t know Taylor Alison Swift, born to this world in, I presume, the usual way. But my Taylor Swift? I’m a renowned expert. I’ve always eaten up stories—movies, music, celebrity news, the one my grandfather tells about falling off his bike once in Ireland as a boy and his face “cracking open like an egg”—like a starved dog. I’m obsessive about my interests, but not inclined to intense fandom, and certainly not fandom in the mode of the stan. For one, I’m too self-absorbed. But caring intensely for a famous person is falling in love with a ghost, and that’s all right—I mean, what the hell? We’re here together just dying... Let’s enjoy—but is an affair best undertaken with the knowledge that everyone alive has their own complex interiority, as unruly as your own, and that you, a stranger, are not in any real way connected to the lawless, blurry middle of that celebrity, and will never be. It’s freeing and fun to know this. I mean, these people are basically in your employ. Glamorous dollhouse dwellers. Acknowledging that uncrossable distance allows for a different, healthier closeness of pure imagination. My feelings, then, can comfortably be at once both fiercely intense and entirely silly. I am a foremost scholar in the art of the Taylor Swift who exists in my head. The real person raised in Pennsylvania I don’t know at all. I have some conjectures on the matter, and, as with all my conjectures, every hackneyed theory, each picky little opinion, I’m sure they’re perfect, brilliant, just absolutely right, but that’s still all they are. Taylor Swift, figure of the cultural imagination, is the Jodie Comer to my Sandra Oh in Killing Eve, annoying and pretty in frills, taunting me endlessly and holding us trapped together in a dance of most enchanting death. But the real Taylor Swift has favorite bed sheets and a social security number and a British boyfriend, none of which I have any desire to know about, and if I saw her at a restaurant I’d politely avert my eyes before, yes, dive-bombing the group text. There’s nobody on Earth I’d stand in line to speak to, but then I’ve been speaking to a certain figment of Taylor Swift for nearly half my life.

I went to a Taylor Swift concert the night before I moved into college in 2009. My father’s work friend, firefighter by day, near professional gambler by night, got comped tickets to the Fearless Tour stop taking place at the nearby casino, and he let me have them as a reward, mainly, for happening to be seventeen. Live in-person and performed acoustically, “Fifteen” made me cry. A few years after that, in the thick, sticky part of my first post-college summer, I wrote approximately twenty-three million words about her in these very pages. (”Pages”) At that point, Taylor’s most recent release was 2012’s Red, and the work I produced that long ago July about Taylor and her career, writing I was fairly pleased with at the time, feels now, besides just being extremely clearly written by a twenty-one year old, strange to me for the way it favors the sweet over the sour almost uniformly. There is a wholesome kind of ardor in that writing which maybe I’ve outgrown the ability to hold. Or maybe Taylor just proceeded to spend the next half a decade plus releasing one bad single after another, and it was taste—and trespasses against taste—and not some shift in my nature which altered the tenor of our bond. I have real love for my particular image, gleaned from public statements and published art, of smart, bizarre famous woman Taylor Swift, and I admire the bulk of her output very much. I’m just no longer so inclined to fawn. This is not to say I am here to offer a Taylor Swift hate screed. I couldn’t swing it, and, anyway, I’m not a pop feminist-for-hire circa 2010. But we’re older now. Things are different. At twenty-eight, twenty-nine this month—Taylor will, also this December, turn thirty-one—I regard Taylor Swift warily, like an ex with whom you have a tentative friendship, perpetually on the brink of falling one way or the other into hatred or delight, only to wobble back the opposite direction again at the slightest provocation, but still, despite best efforts, even, I regard her all the time.

folklore was released at midnight on July 24th 2020, but I was at a cabin in rural Vermont without Internet or cell service. I drank Bud Light seltzers with my mother while watching the eerie pandemic return of Major League Baseball, and when I got into a strange bed there I stewed, knowing there were people out in the world all over who were hearing Taylor Swift songs I never had, and that this was a fundamental wrong, a disruption in the balance of the universe. I listened to it the next morning in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot.

And folklore is great. That’s the terrible thing. Slightly less great, maybe, than some people have insisted, tricked, I think, by just the pronounced shift in sound. But it’s great. A little gift I asked for a thousand times and was still surprised to get, like a wife who didn’t expect her henpecked husband to ever follow through and buy the paraffin wax hand bath as-see-on-TV. For years, I’ve been halfheartedly insisting that Taylor had a great album in her. I’d say it even, perhaps especially, while she stubbornly fed me gruel. Or worse, gruel with the occasional whiff of something better. With a ripe, little raspberry dropped into the slop. The bright, villainous thrill of “Getaway Car” made me believe Taylor, my Taylor, was in there somewhere under the lacquer of sequins and synth, which, while not objectionable by default, seemed a costume, and an ill-fitting one. The lived-in world of “Cornelia Street” made those old scars sting. That gay “Delicate” video. When she did “Call It What You Want” on SNL and played guitar while wearing an ugly sweater. If the abominable “ME!”, lead single off Lover, was the stick, 1989’s “Clean” was the carrot. I was Charlie Brown, and Taylor my Lucy, yanking the football back again and again. Over drinks I still yelled that Taylor Swift’s next album would be, “her Nebraska”, referring to my favorite Bruce Springsteen record, and learned to live with that egg on my face for good. I suppose I even came to like it. There was something inherently funny in taking up, like, “blind faith in the as of yet untapped greater artistic potential of massively wealthy and popular singer Taylor Swift” as my totally inane personal cause du jour, and eventually it was a bit, a gag I performed to be obstinate and didactic, but way down somewhere awful near my kidneys I meant it the whole while. And then she did it. A pandemic befell the world and amid a sea of human suffering Taylor Swift remembered she can write. She wrote, and with a massive, crucial assist from Aaron Dessner, whose music on this record is sometimes so beautiful it actually angers me, as the last thing I needed in already perilous times was to be made to try and marry my uniquely perverse emotional responses to beloved divorced dad band The National and fucking Taylor Swift, she made an album which, if not her Nebraska, per se (I’ve come to realize that a major part of believing Taylor Swift will one day make an album I find as quietly devastating and gorgeous as Nebraska is knowing that no album will ever actually be Her Nebraska... That each will, rather, to me, be more and more evidence that it’s coming still, more proof that the limit is untouched, on and on ad infinitum, or at least until the seas take us into a place of salty peace.) is a shocking credit to all my hard-fought and deluded confidence. folklore is great. This fact has made me feel almost equally as disoriented from my understanding of the world as the time-melting COVID-19 lockdowns have, and it turned my Spotify year in review annual collective AI humiliation kink thing into a glaring indictment of my mental state, but still, I mean... It’s great.

In talking about folklore a bit this week, there are a number of specific topics I intend to cover—what a thrill it is to hear Taylor say “fuck”; Taylor’s terrifying birth chart; the astoundingly perfect bridge of “the last great american dynasty”; “because my ass is located at the back of my body”; the bit in last year’s “Lover” where deranged WASP Taylor Swift implies that to “leave the Christmas lights up til January” is some signifier of being a love-struck bohemian, when actually everyone who doesn’t employ domestic staff to take their lights down does this; how reputation is the best of the Taylor Swift records released in the latter half of the 2010s, actually, and the people who can��t see that are cowards—but intend mostly to let the muse move me where she will. Against the advice of my better angels, she—that tie-in marketing eldritch terror—always does.

#taylor swift #folklore

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russdoc · 7 years

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A collection of only a few logs of messages from Murdoc Faust Niccals to Russel Hobbs Jr between 2012 and 2014. Most of these are, er, left unanswered. Continue with caution. (also on ao3)

[LOG 1]

[08:14] Long time no see big drummer boy

> I know, I know. You miss me terribly. Spare the details.

>Have you checked your mail? You might see a little package sent from yours truly

>I can't exactly spell it out for you across the interwebs, babe, with all of these thousands of bots watching. I've been listening to these tech geeks and while their fashion sense is abhorrent they have raised a few good points about what I can and cannot let go uh. Leaking on here.

>What I'm trying to say is that once you've checked your daily mail UK I do expect to be...hearing back from you. In person, that is.

[15:47] And please don't feed me that “hurrr I don't no how t reed a mahp!” crap because if I remember correctly YOU were the one that got on MY case about getting lost in Vegas and somehow ~magically~ got us back in Miami.

>You were so proud of yourself it made me gag.

> Take the map and get your butt in gear, Hobbs. You get lost in the middle of the ocean I'm sure as hell not searching for you.

[23:22] I mean. The map behind the cocopuffs cereal I sent you! Very difficult. I always end up making the monkey drown. Hopefully you can take him to shore, Russ! Haha.

>You know what forget it that monkey deserves to fucking drown. I hate his stupid face.

[23:55] Fuck it.

>If you're not on my beach in a month, Hobbs, I'm making this album without you.

[LOG 2]

[17:33] I'm going to assume from your silence that you're right on your way then. Good choice.

>This album is gonna be fooking wild, Russ. La Soul is back, I got snoopy the dog on board and even Womack man himself! What a banger.

>I actually feel sorry for you, man.You're really missing out.

>See you x

[01:12] the x was a typo

[LOG 3]

[09:14] These cyberfreaks tell me the connection is “beyond excellent” here but clearly that's not true if I'm being ignored by you like this.

[LOG 4]

[12:55] Lisfen, Rus, I know you're big deal is being the shy, qieut one in the band but honestly tht shtick is starting to wear thin on me.

>answer me asshead

>you realy wnna play ths game huh

> Fine. Fcuk u 2.

[LOG 7]

[19:23] Christ I wish you were here.

> Not because I miss you

> These fucking dolts don't know the difference between their left and their right when it comes to music.

> If you were here you'd slap some sense into them

> With a fish

> Get it because we're on a beach

> Cmon that's hilarious

[LOG 13]

[16:03] I've already got a song that needs drums so you better move it drummer boy.

> you wouldn't want me use the drum machine again do you

> you know the fans fucking hate that thing

> everyone wants acoustic but I can't exactly deliver when you're not here

> it's not for me

> it's for the album

[LOG 16]

[07:13] you're lost. Admit it

> I get it. It must be hard doing anything without me

> the album is going great without you. Fantastic. Amazing.

> Splendid

> Groundbreaking

> Inspiring

[10:33] pls get here soon

[LOG 20]

[11:18] Russ if you don’t get here soon I’m gonna pull out all of my beautiful hair

>and it’ll be a tragedy for everyone

>do you wanna be responsible for that, hm? The loss of murdoc niccals’ gorgeous locks? The world would be in tears

[21:09] it’s not like I’d expect an egghead like you to understand

[LOG 24]

[14:49] wtf did you need all of these hats for

>you never wore them when we went out to the club

>a shame really. They make a fella feel real classy

>they smell like you too.

>like coconuts

>you’d think I’d be sick of the smell since I’m on this island

>but its you, russ

[17:22] I didn’t type that.

[LOG 30]

[13:55] this fooking island man

> I must say I'm very proud of myself

> I made it all pink. You'd like that yeah

> I didn't make it like that for you

[17:18] it fucking stinks tho

> like, its literally all trash

> I gotta get super extra drunk just to numb it lol

> luckily I got all these hats too lololool

[23:59] how do you delete messages that have sent

> FUCK WRONG TAB

[LOG 36]

[12:57] wanna know what 2d’s doing with that mask

>👋👺

>😏👌👈

> 👅🍆💦

>wanna know what I wanna be doing

>🛁🍆🍑🚿 >🔥👌👈😫💥💦 >🍴🍑👈

[15:47] cmon these are genius

[16:02] I want your 🐓

[16:18] the internet is a wonderful place

> I want you to 👏 my 🍑

[20:18] god I'm bored

> I hope you know you're responsible for this

> if you were here 💋 my 🐓 I wouldn't have to resort to this

[LOG 43]

[15:38] russsssss were r u

>I'm sso drunk right no lol

>2d got a waterlemon for a head snoops soo gud at party trix you'd lov him mmnrydk

>whops

>I hope ur safe on ur way here

>pls talk 2 m

>zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

>I'm sleeping

>zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

[LOG 45]

[00:00] god I'm such an asshole

[LOG 50]

[02:44] I'm sorry I didn't visit after noodle disappeared

> or called

> I thought you hated me

> which is understandable

> and I didn't want you not wanting to see me

> so I just avoided you

> which is shitty, I know that now

> you were hurting. We all were.

> and I left you like a coward

> but I'm sure

> I'm sure you're doing good for yourself

> I just wish we were um

> friends. like we used to be.

> I got in a bad crowd, Russ. Like I always do.

> but this time I'm not sure I'm gonna recover that easily

> and I ju

> I think what I'm trying to tell you is that I'm sorry

> I'm sorry

> if this island is still standing when you get here

> I hope you know that. At least

[LOG 67]

[18:07] D kept babbling to me about this dumbass dream he had

>where you showed up but with noodle

>he’s convinced it’s true. The fucking nerve of him

>can you believe I have to deal with this shit

>he’s the only other company I have around here since the collabs esc

>left

>I bet if you were here you would’ve shook some decency in him lol

>fuck its so boring here without you

>now that I think about it there’s really not that much about this place

>i mean

>you can get some plastic trees

>and me, of course

[20:02} oh wait that’d make a wicked lyric

>at least there’s one good thing from you ignoring me like this

>hurry up fatass

[LOG 88]

[07:23] I'm sure you know about her already

> cyborg noodle, that is

> pretty impressive, right?

> looks just like noodle.

> talks like her. plays like her

> honestly, she kinda weirds me out sometimes

> sometimes I think

> maybe she's the real noodle

> and she's gonna kill me. For what I did. At any moment

> and I think of shutting her down

> but then she looks at me and I sense this...Fear, maybe. Like she understands. And I feel bad. So I don't.

> like I feel sorry for her. Maybe because she looks like noodle helps too.

> or because she's the only other person or, well, thing I can talk to on this miserable beach

> I don't know why I'm telling you this

> maybe it's because you're the only other person I can talk to too

> not that you ever answer lately

> like a broken robot

> haha

> went full circle didn't it

[08:03] I'm so lonely

[LOG 102]

[00:17] I'm convinced that a shark ate your phone or something

> so I don't feel the least bit scared about sending you anything anymore

> I love you

> it hurts a lot not saying that

> so typing it is the best next thing

> I love you

> I hate this fucking island. I hate it more than 2D. But I'm waiting and I'm hoping that you'll come to me. And I'll play you this wicked album and maybe you'll love me again. I'm always so close to finally taking it too far with my drinking and throwing myself into that boogieman’s arms and ending it. But I just wanna see you one last time.

> I love you.

[06:18] for once I'm hoping you didn't read that

[LOG 119]

[22:12] I thought inviting de la soul onto the album would really spice things up

>instead we got some fucking jingle about jellyfeet or whatever

>ugh

>it wouldn't be that good if it was all just sad songs I suppose

>I guess I'm more angry that I can't come up with anything as poppy as that lately

[23:00] aw fuck it this song grew on me

> you ever tasted jellyfish? I'm kind of tempted now…

> we can have some when you get here

[LOG 155]

[05:17] Hey remember that one time Noodle got mad at us because we were mixing “our” cereal with “hers”

> so we went out and bought specific branded stuffs

> and then YOU got mad because you thought I ate yours

> but I didn't

> 2d did

> asshole admitted it to me last night.

> not that you would believe me anyway

[06:09] oh fuck

> that was like, 8 years ago, wasn't it?

> holy shit

> I feel so old

[06:15] I miss you

[LOG 176]

[03:55] 2D keeps looking at me with his wide white-out eyes and it makes me so angry because those are your eyes

>But I'm not looking at your face

>I didn't think it was possible for me to hate him even more but here I am

[LOG 177]

[13:33] who am I kidding

> everything reminds me of you

> I hate it so fucking much

> I think I'm losing my mind

> its been what? A year? A little over a year? And I'm still hanging on the hope that you'll appear out of nowhere

> and whisk me away

> I think I'm really hitting the lowest point, Russ

> It's finally caught up with me

> please

> giygcyuvyrsdhijkbijuygre

>auj

[LOG 205]

[11:27] I'm sorry for all of that. Jesus. I'm such a mess.

> I don't know what to do anymore

> I think

> I think if you've somehow.

> Somehow missed all of these messages. And stumble upon them now.

> I want you to know that um

> I want you to delete them.

[LOG 212]

[09:57] welp. These live shows are a fucking sham.

> I don't even know why I bother.

> you know what I'm just gonna fucking kill them.

> I hope those weirdos are reading these messages

> so they know I'm coming for them

> 2d is no help. Whimp can't even knock tin can over when she's asleep

> that's what I call cyborg noodle sometimes. She likes it

> if you were here you would've knocked albarn into another planet with one swing

> I think I swooned a little at the thought of that

[10:34] I know you're out there. Somewhere. Those tech geeks showed me on their drones

> I mean, you look forty times your size but they're speculating its just the camera

> sure

> hey, Russ, if you've turned into some kind of whale, could you visit 2ds window for me? I think he'll love it

[LOG 239]

[00:36] you know

> I slept with plenty of people since we separated

> but tonight was the first time

> I imagined it was you

> it made me sick. Not gonna lie

> I think you ruined sex for me

> that sounds way more sinister than i intended

> i guess what i’m saying is that i would sooner vomit on strangers than not be with you

> is that romantic enough

> answer me whale man

[14:22] my whale man

> i like that

> i mean i wouldnt ever use it again

> like ever

> but yknow

[LOG 240]

[23:44] i chnged my mind

>i crid on d2 shouulder toniet.

> that was my lwst pont

[LOG 254]

[19:27] (external image)

> (external image)

> shit second last was sent on accident

> please don't think my dick looks like snoop doggs manicured nails now

> though that would be epic

[LOG 260]

[22:19] not to sound gay or anything

> but the sunset today was fantastic

> the purple blue pink kind

> i hope you got to see it wherever you are

> i mean

> it would’ve been nice if you were HERE

> but yknow

[23:55] or maybe if I was there.

> shit

[LOG 277]

[17:29] I'm feeling a lot better lately

> I mean, I'm still drunk and hating everyone

> but ever since the album has been officially done

> I've been working on this radio show

> have you heard it? Its pretty good

> its mostly me talking to myself but yknow

> I've gotten quite good that

[LOG 283]

[18:59] that's it

> I'm dumping this laptop

> and this phone

> and you

> I'm not gonna wait around anymore, Russ

> when you show up, you'll show up

> but don't expect me on my knees grovelling for you like I have for the last pathetic two years of my life

> it was good while it lasted

> and if you miraciously happen to open your messages and see this then I hope you know there nothing you can do to stop me

> sayonara baby

[LOG 284]

[19:37] holy shit

>holy shit

> is it working??

> i think it is

> so um

> a lot just happened huh

> you’re alive

> and so is noodle

> we didnt have much of a warm reunion huh

> not at all what I imagined at least

> i’m so relieved you’re alive

> i havent cried in a long time but that

> im so glad i didnt die

[20:00] im gonna try and find you, ok?

> ive sat around for long enough

> see you soon

[LOG 299]

[12:56] haha

> guess who got himself in hot water

> that’s right

> im gonna be in the slammer for a long time

> a real long time

> and I just

> i know this is probably too much to ask

> but if you can

[13:00] wait for me

> i love you

[LOG 300]

(/RUSSEL HOBBS/ CONNECTED)

(08:15) i love you too

#russdoc #mussel #god this is so self indulgent im sorry #time to be a lame tool yet again on this blof #idk why i feel like i need to clarify this but #its ok to rb

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