I will start this review with my two main gripes-

Being earnest does not mean you are a good artist. Good art requires more than just self exposure.

&

A collection of Substack thoughts put to music does not equal an album. It gives the energy of that photo of Sasha Grey holding up a Sartre book.

Charli’s Angels see themselves as smarter than the average pop fan; they are more discerning with better taste. Everything she does is amazing and if it is bad it is because she wants it to be.

People often say Charli XCX is an interesting artist because she is aware of the contradictions of the pop star. She likes fame and partying but also rejects the mainstream you know? She wants to be a main pop girl but feels uncomfortability and in shame in admitting so. She is on the fringes of culture whilst making it.

Like her selling 10 different vinyl variants of the album. Or rather rather selling extra songs on the B side album that you can only get on iTunes and Tweeting “you can call me a hypocrite i don’t mind :).” XCX responds to criticism in such a self conscious way.

“Oh you’re just not smart enough to get it!” No I get it; I do not think it is half as intellectual or interesting as she thinks it is. I think Charli XCX is a very smart woman when she is not trying to be seen as in on the joke.

The cover art featuring Martin Scorsese, Marc Jacobs and John Cale- The faces of Music, Fashion and Film are all men but I will let it slide.

A generous reading of the album cover could be positioning them as the men deciding whether she can be a ‘girl on the screen at 34’ as she ‘sings’ on Camera. Like her pointing the camera lens at Vincent Cassel, a man who is still allowed to be sexy in his 50s.

Rock Music.

As the first glimpse into the new era I quite liked this song when it came out. Although the lyrics - “And sometimes we cry

We kiss each other, real incestuous vibes” are offensively bad even in layers of irony.

Its brash jarring chorus and its pending sound were intriguing. Its essence is stupid and kinda corny but it was fun. But also should we be praising bad music because the artists took a risk?

The music video imagery enhances the sonic palate. Yet, a recurring problem with a few songs on the album is their lack without visual accompaniment.

I am getting bored with perpetual smoking propaganda; smoking 20 cigarettes at once and wow a tower of cigarettes! I am the coolest girl in the world!

SS26.

I like this song in my ears but not in my head. The melody is pleasing while the lyrics leave something to be desired. Sparse and short the listener has to fill in the gaps of thought.

“Spring, Summer ‘26

When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it

Yeah, we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell

Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion, or film”

In a way these lyrics encapsulate my generation’s nihilism. But notice how she doesn’t say books? She has self proclaimed herself as someone who doesn’t read and at some critical points of the album this really shows.

“Think my politics could work as a press strategy

And my heritage could give me quite the USP.”

Here she tries to make some sort of statement of the fate of celebrity and identity politics but never follows through with it.

It reminds of the dread of Racheal Sennott saying “numb is in.” Irony is flawed as an endpoint; Cynicism as part of your being is only interesting to a point.

Unintegrated hot takes will not have a legacy.

Card declined.

When this song came on I will be honest I rolled my eyes and said ‘oh brother’ to my unassuming cat.

The song is jarring and rough to listen to, the execution is lacking, not necessarily in the production but its eternity as a thought.

Building the song around one thought, one lyric, one idea that is never fully fleshed out feels lazy.

The indolent repetition and deadpan vocals of the lyrics “Let’s go shopping

I’ll buy a handbag

I’ll buy some shoes

I’ll buy a smile

I’ll buy some jewelry

A personality

A whole backstory

Card declined”

Does not give the words more meaning or make it anymore interesting.

Yes culture perpetuates that buying items creates our taste and image to the world but leaves feeling hollow. Wow florals for spring, how groundbreaking. Buying material goods to find a new persona but your card declines because you are stuck with yourself. Okay?

Camera

Pop music is pretty and saturated with aesthetics, On the screen she feels she can be ugly and that is beautiful.

A woman in your mid-thirties you may as well be a cow sent out to pasture. She spoke about stopping getting botox for acting but if the rest of her acting career is like her performance in The Moment I worry.

But is it a good song?

2007.

“Pop star in my bedroom like it’s 2007”

I think a lot of us long for the Myspace days where popstars really could be born from their bedrooms. Video stores still existed and fame meant something before social media became a job prospect.

Again as the listener I had to do a lot of work to extract an interesting thought from the song as she merely repeats the same phrases. I am not saying art needs to be easy and digestible, rather it needs me to want to care what the artist is trying to say.

I’m Afraid

With a frenetic loud moaning dirge chorus and stream of consciousness verses there is something happening here. I enjoy the exploration of fear of marriage even when it is the right person. The tortured artist paradox stuck in the party girl trying to be deep.

“All this pain makes me believe i’m a better artist now” she says musing the age old question, do you have to be miserable to create great art? I think in this record case, sadness does not equate to good art.

Yeah.

This one I cannot take seriously, the production rocks though. The most deadpan ‘yeah’ you have ever heard in the history of music.

That is a thought not a song girl! Half baked, half-cooked, unfinished, however you want to say it. For the love of god please stop repeating the same thing over and over again and expand on a thought!

Wink wink

Absolutely gorgeous music video for the worst song on the record. The lyrics-

“I used to lick cream off strawberries in the summer

And maybe I fucked your dad

Just kidding, I’m only saying that for effect”

Is enough for my thoughts to be clear. Irony is not enough!

No One Lasts Forever featuring David Cronenberg.

Why is the album full of barely 2 minute songs and then you end with a long one? This is fake deep, try hard nonsense with some of the most wankerish lyrics on the whole album.

“Now I’m sitting on the floor of a Parisian apartment with a French girl talking about philosophy. ”

Even the cadence and the musicality of the lyrics is bad. Should we all just pick up the gun she’s always talking about and just shoot ourselves?

I am unmoved, untethered. No one lasts, everything dies and legacy is a myth in modernity, gee wizz!

You know when you go on a really bad Hinge date and the guy starts talking about Philosophy theories you read when you were 15?

The kind of guy that says “You know Carl Jung once said the human desire for self sabotage is an archetypal symbol that represents cosmic force that can’t be stopped” before he ghosts you.

Yeah it sounds like that.

Content warnings - eating disorders, graphic porn, restriction.

You wake up at 16, blink and then you’re 25. My eating disorder was about a lot of things, yet upon reflection I think it was mostly about trying to stay a little girl for a little while longer. My mother tolerated a little girl.

It wasn’t about appealing to men or their gaze, it was about running away from it for as long as I could.

I often fantasize about hacking off my breasts and sucking out the fat in my thighs with a suction vacuum cleaner. Life would be more tolerable if I was a hanger, a sample size, a blank slate.

Culture keeps telling us, if you haven’t had an ozempic allegation are you even hot?

It used to be a sign of wealth and decadence to be fat, it meant you could afford to eat. Now it is a luxury to not. The beauty ideal always becomes what the poor can not achieve.

Lip filler is now affordable to the masses so we go back to natural/ clean girl aesthetics. BBLs are more accessible so we revert back to hereon chic. The same clinics and surgeons who were performing buccal fat removal surgeries are now offering buccal fat restoration. When bodies become trends, violence is needed to stay on target.

Do you really think Demi Moore is doing her own dishes and her own laundry? She has the privilege to deal with the effects of restriction- muscle loss, chronic fatigue, compromised immunity, etc..

If society positions thinness as a moral achievement it is only coherent that its peak is at a time of high moralism and virtue signaling.

We criticize those who are using GLP1s to lose weight or staying quiet about using ozempic, still it is just another version of the same body policing that created the demand for such drugs in the first place.

Culture loves to act like Ariana Grande’s potential eating disorder is a moral failing but how will people react if she ever gains weight? I highly doubt it would be well.

In her seminal book ‘The Beauty Myth’ what Naomi Wolf gets wrong is the never ending feminist plight that the personal is political and the political personal. Lived experience is a trap.

As Caroline Callaway recently said after some public pushback from her essay about ozempic- ‘I’m not the first person to say that the patriarchy wants women thin.’

Her article acutely shows the new era we are entering- transparency about body modification. Women are starting to be honest.

In the social media age there is a mass demand for transparency and a pressure to engage in political discourse about the personal.

Is it better to put the plastic surgery industry back under the shrouds of mystery and shadows or keep it in the open, potentially then glamourizing it?

We can continue to have content like Kris Jenner going around the podcast circuit talking about her face lift or Kylie Jenner commenting on a fan’s Tiktok the exact boob job she had.

Logically this feels better than when they lie to the public in an attempt to sell products- push-up bras and anti-aging skin care, yet it still feels sinister.

Influencing diet and cosmetics procedures is entirely different to influencing a lipstick or a pair of shoes.

Influencer Liv Schmidt is a prime example of transparency in modernity being for the worst. Running a paid program called ‘Skinnisociate’ (no I am not bad at spelling this is what it is called). Like a Patreon or an Onlyfans, users can pay for a subscription where they are taught to be skinny!

The Instagram page is full of classic before and after photos; weight loss is positioned as the goal women need to achieve before anything else.

With an ugly AI image with a gremlin on her shoulder called ‘hungry’ she claims -‘hungry isn’t the problem, it’s the saboteur.’ ‘Hungry is always there, waiting for you to give in.’ She reiterates -‘Elegance is in portion control.’

When did not restricting become a radical act?

While aesthetic trends come from a male viewpoint- porn culture, Terry Richardson’s photography, American Apparel ads; women mold them to be shiny and desirable for other women.

This specific era of skinny and the ozempic epidemic I argue is more rooted in the female gaze. Whilst still being built by the grunt work of male opinions it is the most harmful we have ever seen.

There is something bleak about influencer Gabbriette undergoing a dramatic aesthetic transformation and posting food and cooking content. In times of economic crises food is aesthetic. It is not wrong to feel like we are in a dystopia.

The fetish, soft-core nature of American Apparel ad campaigns is something Gen Z long for. Social media is forever lamenting the Indie Sleaze era and I ask myself why?

Is it the raw sexual desire that no longer exists in advertising? A craving for lost aesthetics due to cancellation ( Terry Richardson)? Or is it simply nostalgia?

The ads feature women in prime fuckable positions for men to jerk off and women to buy clothes. However, in this era beauty was effortless, minimal make-up and beautiful figures.

While that poses its own moral drawbacks on aesthetics primarily relying on genetics, it was trying to sell you bodysuits and tennis skirts rather than weight loss needles. Selling an ideal through products rather than actualities to practice.

Something I often argue with radical feminists about is the idea that porn got dramatically more rough and violent in the dawn of internet porn. In mainstream this is not really the case.

Yes porn aesthetics were filtering into the mainstream through American Apparel and the fame of Sasha Grey. Porn culture is a reflection of what the public wants while informing what we are able to see.

In the early 2000s are widely considered the most extreme and violent era of porn -think the era of putting baseball bats up a woman’s anus and two girls one cup.

This early 2000s gonzo boom did coincide with the early internet and shock sites such as rotten.com. Extremity strains in times of economic crises- then and now.

Yet when the porn industry at large had accepted that tube sites were here to stay and DVDs were dying they had to adapt and try to make legitimate business on the internet; they had to appease credit card companies, therefore mellowing their content.

You might be asking how this relates to the current ozempic/skinny epidemic? In the extremity of what is done to women’s bodies, what women do to their own and how we view these degradation like watching animals in a zoo.

There are thousands of videos online right now dissecting Ariana Grande’s body like animals for sale. Close-ups on her protruding sternum, lingering camera shots on the bones on her back.

We as a culture are concerned about this skinny contagion and we text drive our anxieties on women in the spotlight rather than ourselves. By rehearsing moral panic on a woman we will never meet we allow ourselves to feel morally right.

Yet by analyzing this underweight body in watching people linger and obsess over it, the eating disorder mind absorbs the image as a goal.

Is it now counter-cultural to be a Swifie? How many times have we seen the Swifie to Gaylor to snarker pipeline in culture? Is Taylor Swift Olivia Rodrigo’s Kanye West? Are some questions I have been pondering lately.

To set the scene of this essay we will delve into a brief timeline between these two ladies before we dive into our analysis of this fascinating relationship, so let’s begin.

In January 2021 I first learnt of Olivia’s existence from Taylor posting “Drivers license” on her Instagram story. I think that was primarily because I was a bit old to be watching the High School Musical reboot she starred in.

At the start of her career, Rodrigo took every opportunity possible to gush about Swift, She referred to herself as a Swiftie, referred to Taylor as her idol, praising her songwriting abilities and business acumen.

“ I’ve really just looked up to her since I was very young. I think her writing every single one of her songs was a big inspiration for me.” - Olivia Rodrigo about Taylor Swift.

In April, Swift sent Rodrigo a package containing a gold ring replica of the ring that Taylor wrote while writing Red (remember this! Very important!)

The infamous “Deja Vu”/ “Cruel Summer” song credit debacle has been discussed to death. It would seem to be what sparked the frost between the mentor and mentee. From a sky view it makes Taylor appear power hungry and quite pathetic.

In a Rolling Stone interview Rodrigo said- “ I wanted the last bridge to go crazy. I love Cruel Summer. It’s one of my favourite songs ever. I love the yelly vocals in it. The harmonized yells that she does… I wanted to do something like that.”

In a fan live stream she said -“The best artist steals.. All of my songs I have written are inspired by another song. Wow, I’ve been listening to Lover by Taylor Swift a lot, I wanna write a pop love song.”

Whilst of course all artists steal and reference art that came before them I it was a little naive of Olivia to say this publicly but she was so young and full of hope.

In July 2021 Rodrigo and her team proactively granted retroactive song credits to Taylor Swift, Jack Anontoff and Saint Vincent, meaning giving up 50% of royalties of the song.

In August 2021 Haley Williams and Josh Farro of Paramore were officially added as co-writers of “Good For You.” The track is classified as an interpolation of “Misery Business”.

Rodrigo described it as a frustrating situation that unfortunately discredited her creativity, but ultimately served as “a lesson in business”.

Did Olivia and her team do this to stop any potential lawsuits in the future? Did Taylor demand credits? We will probably never know.

Without the politics between Taylor and Olivia this whole situation wouldn’t really be very interesting. In the music industry credits are often given and lawsuits frequently occur. Radiohead suing Lana Del Rey for “Get Free” for example. The public loves the narrative of the older women resenting the younger up and comer coming for her crown.

From late 2021 rumors of frost between the two began. Rodrigo did not attend the Eras tour which people found surprising as she was a avid public swifie.

Fans have often speculated that the lead single from GUTS “Vampire” is about Swift due to its lyrics “Bloodsucker, famefucker / Bleedin’ me dry, like a goddamn vampire” and “How’s the castle built off people you pretend to care about?” I have always felt this song was more directed at a man she was romantically involved with but again one can neither confirm or deny.

Swift stood up when Rodrigo performed this song at the Grammys and gave her a standing ovation. Did this mean there is no longer bad blood between them or was Swift just trying to show face.

The lyrics- “Ooh, your flower’s filled with vitriol. You built me up to watch me fall. You have everything and you still want more” from “The Grudge” have always felt more Taylor coded to me than “Vampire.”

With “Vampire”, Rodrigo has never explicitly denied this, though Rodrigo has publicly stated she was “very surprised” by the rumors. I would think is she was a fan she would have adamantly squashed this theory.

In 2025 they were spotted chatting after a Paul McCartney show surrounded by a lot of other famous people.

In her May 2026 appearance on the New York Times Podcast, Rodrigo addresses the lingering drama by stating she tries “not to let it get to me” and that there is simply “no use in harping on it”

*********

‘I know someday I’m gonna meet her, it’s a fever dream

The kind of radiance you only have at 17

She’ll know the way, and then she’ll say she got the map from me

I’ll say I’m happy for her, then I’ll cry myself to sleep.’

Without psychoanalyzing too much, we can surmise a ruminating anxiety in Swift’s writing about the next Ingénue that will replace her.

‘Nothing New’ written in 2012 alone in a hotel room when she was 22 is acutely aware that youth is a currency you can only trade in for so long. She describes at this time as feeling completely ‘washed-up’, worrying that the only thing that made her special was that she was a teenage phenom.

These musings of worry of only being good cause you are young are also expressed by Rodrigo in the closing track of her sophomore album GUTS “teenage dream.”

‘When am I gonna stop being wise beyond my years and just start being wise?

When am I gonna stop being a pretty young thing to guys?

When am I gonna stop being great for my age and just start being good?

When will it stop being cool to be quietly misunderstood?’

Also from 2012, ‘The Lucky One’, widely accepted as being about Joni Mitchell-

‘And they tell you that you’re lucky, but you’re so confused

‘Cause you don’t feel pretty, you just feel used

And all the young things line up to take your place.’

Swift seems to possess an almost paranoia about pretty young girls taking her place whilst she is still the pretty young thing writing this song at 21. At this point is it sad and not yet vengeful. It begs the question is this a byproduct of being part of the entertainment industry. Can women reject this system while actively engaging in it for their career?

You do not have to be a detective to surmise that album Red (2012) was an homage to Blue (1971). Around this time there were rumors swirling in the press that Swift was going to play Mitchell in a biopic. Mitchell responded to this buzz by saying ‘if she is going to sing, good luck!’ in her characteristic sarcastic tone. Taylor said “I really wish it was confirmed” and Joni went on to say she was the main reason the movie was not made

After this Swift stopped praising Joni in interviews and focused more on her other contemporaries she cites as influences- Stevie Knicks, The Chicks, Carole King etc.. Not unlike how Rodrigo stopped talking about Taylor and her influences in interviews.

This generational rejection is desolate and seems to only exist in the context of female artists.

The Red album and era and You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl so in Love are perfect comparisons as the artists are the same age when they are released and come at a similar point in their careers. Both albums are chronicles of love and heartbreak and the interiority of romantic dissolve.

The lyrics - “If you’d do anything for me, how come you never do” from Rodrigo’s bonus track ‘Never Do’ &

“And I hope you know that every time I don’t

I almost do” From Red’s ‘I Almost Do” are essentially the same lyrics. They both exist in the liminality between thought and action where love falls apart. Whilst the former is in reference to a lovers lack of actions and the later the chroniclers lack of reaching out.

Swift and Rodrigo are kindred spirits in their desperate desire for romantic love and their confessional songwriting accounting that. How love and heartbreak makes them feel is most important part of the work, not the men they are writing about

The lyrical emulation shows Rodrigo to be the only true Taydaughter. Red’s influence is all over You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl so in Love in overt ways and subtle ones that are slowly revealing themselves in my mind.

This lyrical comparison is not to show some sort of plagiarism, rather insist how intrinsically linked the two are in their writing. There is something so poetic about both of them dropping their first big Grammy wins and making the same face as it happened. It is so romantic that Olivia when writing a breakup album owned the ring worn at a time when another woman was writing a great break-up album that millions of the world will listen to. Their diaries are up for public consumption, yet Olivia cannot escape Taylor as part of her pages.

How can someone think that Olivia Rodrigo is infinitely better than Taylor Swift? To me, there is no logical throughline to that argument. Mostly the people saying this are men! You can like ones music more than the other but ultimately Swift is the blueprint and I am not sure Olivia would exist as artist without her.

I can not say for certain that Olivia would be taken seriously right now if it wasn’t for Taylor. She is essential in the unserious nature of a young girl writing songs about boys. This is not a slight on a Olivia, more a display of the misogyny of the music industry and music criticism.

********

“Beauty is a beast that roars

Down on all fours

Demanding “more”

Only when your girlish glow

Flickers just so

Do they let you know

It’s hell on earth to be heavenly

Them’s the breaks

They don’t come gently

“You look like Taylor Swift

In this light

We’re loving it.

You’ve got edge she never did

The future’s bright

... Dazzling.”

While on an intellectual level I am very annoyed at Taylor for her most recent album being a crock of shit plus a couple of good songs, the album immediately prior is her best work to date. The closing track to the standard edition of The Tortured Poets Department ‘Clara Bow’ is a fascinating song that I am forever pondering and mining.

When talking about this track to The New York Times she describes writing as ‘a narrator that is not the person i relate too’ - Hollywood studio executive or a record label owner.

From Clara Bow, to Stevie Nicks, to Taylor Swift to the best bright starlet, the listener knows she means Rodrigo. The song is critiquing the machine trying to make you into a woman they just ‘idealized and then discarded.’

A critic could point to these feelings and condemnation as only occurring because she is older, she is no longer the bright new thing culture is worshipping and she is resentful of that. I think it is a lot more complex and interesting than that.

Swift could do a Madonna and perform a “Cruel Summer”/ “Deja Vu” mashup on her next tour like Madonna did with Gaga’s “Born This Way” and her “Express Yourself” but she is a bit more subtle in her takedowns. From Madonna to Taylor I do see a resentment in a new artist being pushed as the next version of them when they are still out on the stage, not ready creep back into the shadows just yet.

2008’s Country Lolita: Taylor Swift

How the eighteen-year-old crossover success is reinventing teen stardom

By Gavin Edwards

This is the title of an article published by Rolling Stone magazine. While the title and voyeuristic gaze of this article are stomach churning, there are some fascinating nuggets to mine. -

“You smell great, What are you wearing?”

“Britney Spears Fantasy,” Swift says.

While the early 2000s were coming to a close as Swift was making it big in the industry the abuse that her contemporizes suffered was still lingering. Swift grew up in the era of Britney, how the media treated her and her very public meltdown and it haunts how she interacts with public life.

“I like being Number One” she also says in this article, signposting her drive for album sales and chart domination.

Rodrigo is babied in the mainstream media, on the other hand her career has taken off when social media is at its most vicious. It is a good thing that the limelight is better than it was for women before her (Britney Spears specifically). Yet Olivia is still coming up in a time very different from Taylor.

While I am trying to be as objective as I can be in this essay my Swiftieness might come out a little bit in this part.

Pitchfork refused to review any of Swift’s first 5 albums citing themselves as a publication that they favor indie rock and alternative genres, largely ignoring pop and country. That would be entirely valid until they decided her music was acceptable to write about when Ryan Adams covered the entirety of 1989. Men are the majority in gatekeeping what is good and bad taste.

Olivia Rodrigo is the recent cover star of Pitchfork and just did an interview with Swift hating Anthony Fantano. Her team is positioning herself as the anti Taylor Swift. She is cooler, she is edgier and she is in the scene with who she described as ‘girls girls’ Charli XCX. She is becoming what Swift predicted in “Clara Bow” , the edigier, cooler version of her.

There are some provocative optics at play here, stan wars and X antics aside. For Olivia to be a victim of the biggest artist in the world in the public eye is great for Olivia. She is gaining fans because they hate Taylor Swift. She got this this victim mentality playbook from her aggressor, Miss Swift.

I do not fault Olivia or judge her for tying herself to the boys club, especially after the “Deja Vu” credits Swift stole and the plagiarism accusations from Courtney Love.

Seeing a legitimacy in these spaces, she seeks to expand her audience from just teenage girls that I highly doubt are watching Fantanos Youtube videos .Is a right of passage for female artists and women in general.

On the other hand I do worry this male approval will not last and she will get a bite in the ass later; I truly hope I am wrong.

Eli was right about one thing “Swifties are Maga” and Swift is partly to blame for this; not Maga in the political sense but the extremity in how they go after anyone who dare defies their god. In an interview with BBC radio Swift said -“People don’t need to bubble wrap me in their minds as much as they do... I’m a pretty tough broad” and I think her fans really need to listen to that.

Where she lost me in her erratic Instagram stories was when she amplified that Swift fucked her way to the top of the industry or does nothing to help other artists. The comment calling her the ‘Jeff Bezos of the music industry’ is objectively funny and kind of true whilst also being slightly hyperbolic.

In this chronically online rant she says “how are you gonna degrade the integrity of songwriting and turn your back on a young up and coming woman in the industry because you are greedy and mentally crystalized at 12 years old on that Tennessee radio show where they told you you’ll never be good enough.” Eli has been invited to perform at Olivia’s Daisy festival.

Despite no evidence Taylor threatened to sue Olivia, does this prove that? Then fuck Taylor that was a bad move. On the other hand it seems as if it is a PR move to stir up some Taylor controversy when trying to promote your project.

The Evil billionaire stealing credits throughline is just not that interesting of an argument to me. Primarily because it is not used in good faith, rather to assert a moral dominance in the cultural domain. I never see it thrown at Rhianna or Beyonce who are also both Billionaires.

Is her chart antics self serving and a little cringe? Well yes! But I don’t really think they are evil, I don’t think having a number 1 album is a right of any artist. To argue that Swift is the apex predator of the music industry only works to a point, predator of the charts yes, The logic falls away in the likes of Dr Luke, Diddy, Ian Watkins, Chris Brown and the list goes on.

In late 2014 Swift pulled her entire catalogue off Spotify arguing that the platform undervalued artists and reduced paid album sales. This boycott lasted 3 years. This decision was met with much criticism as money hungry and selfish. She ultimately lost to the streaming era.

In 2018 when she signed her new record deal with UMG and its partner label Republic, whilst making sure she had full ownership of her master recordings she negotiated in the contract a clause that if UMG sells its equity stake in Spotify, the proceeds must be distributed to all its artists.

Swift’s infamous battle for her master recordings fundamentally shifted the music industry. In 2024 the Guardian posted an article titled ‘Taylor-made deals: how artists are following Swift’s rights example’, citing Olivia Rodrigo’s deal with Geffen records including owning her master recordings as a direct result of Swift. So yes Billionaire Barbie has actually helped create a template for younger artists to demand ownership of their music; it would amiss to ignore this.

Swift should not be a billionaire, no one should be and I hate her for it. Yet I do not fall for the prevailing narrative that Rodrigo is antithesis to capitalism in her positioning as anti-Taylor. It is impossible for a popstar to be; as much as they are artists they are a brand peddling product on a mass scale. The sooner we accept that, their transgressions will no longer feel like betrayals.

I love both of these artists and this essay is not trying to add to the insane stan wars and vitriol both women receive. Rather I seek to draw attention to larger cultural practices in pitting women against each other, how we engage with women in the public eye aging and how fickle the internet can be in deeming who is morally good.

What connects with girls and young women is the most important thing in music. The crowning treasure of culture, its power is hidden and diminished like prized jewels in the back of a museum archive.

Olivia Rodrigo’s third studio album ‘you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love’ is a mastery in dissection of the rot and pristine nature of falling in love and its ending.

Love is an illness, an affliction- butterfly stomach ache and chest pains like a heart attack; legs like jelly and head airy like the first hit of nicotine in the morning.

Her references have expanded, her sonic palette fresher and more layered than previous works. You hear sound scaping reminiscent of New Order and The Cure and exceptional lyrical growth from some juvenile attempts on previous albums.

You might be asking yourself, is there anything left to say about love? Hasn’t every possible heartbreak song already been written? My answer is that nothing is ever going to be entirely original ever again and love will forever be an artist’s favourite muse.

On the record, Rodrigo is examining the existential issues of love; Love as a condition with symptoms, a disorder that causes joy but also makes you sick.

Relationships are very different than they were 50 years ago, even 20. Social media changes how we interact with each other and our ways of viewing. Insecurity and doubt is amplified under a magnifying glass.

Manesphere and Instagram models - Men have only gotten worse and women have only gotten crazier!

While the album is split into two sides ‘so in love’ and ‘you seem pretty sad’ there is a threat of the end lingering throughout the entire record; and this ladies and gentlemen is what passive, dismissive men do to a girl!

Girl So in Love

Drop Dead

‘The most alive I’ve ever been.’

The first single off the album and the opening track is a euphoric song about a perfect first date. Playing with your own toes in your shoes under the table at the bar, you are impatient to know everything there is to know about a person. You want to kiss them, you want to take off their clothes and you want to know all their hopes and dreams.

When I first heard this song I sobbed; not because it is sad, it is not, moreover that I don’t know if I will ever feel the infatuation I felt with my first love when I was 18 ever again. Will anything ever measure up to the intensity of those feelings?

No one wants to devour anyone anymore, it’s all nonchalant and offhand platitudes. Maybe I am jaded, too many men have disappointed me. Or maybe that true bliss and hope in love can only be felt by the young.

Starting the album with the lyrics -‘You know all the words to “Just Like Heaven” to later have the lead singer of that song feature on your album is a flex I don’t think any other artist right now could pull off.

Stupid Song

‘They say that honest love is a cage that makes you feel free’ - is this what all the artsy boys say to their straight girlfriends cause they want an open relationship? I think that one might be me projecting but also maybe there is something there.

What’s your partner like when you are not around? What do they say about you behind closed doors? Olivia is obsessed with the idea of being loved in private as much as in the public sphere.

The song is vocally beautiful and the build up to the chorus is so satisfying in a way that many other artists strive for and fail.

‘And if there is a god, he’s the bond that’s between us two’ - when you are truly and properly in love the idea of god is a possibility even to the most devout atheist. You are selfish in the all consuming notion that no one has ever loved anyone more in the world than you love someone right now.

The ‘thread’ on the lover’s shirt comes undone, mirroring the motif of the thread in The Cure music video as she unravels. These threads are also ‘tied’ to her in Purple.

‘I want you more than any stupid song could ever say’, as a songwriter her whole methodology is putting her feelings into words, yet no silly song can capture the vastness of her desire. Notice how she says ‘wants’ not loves, this relationship is infecting her with a codependency masquerading as affection.

It would be impossible to ignore the lyrical parallel between Olivia’s

‘I’m a car speeding down the boulevard without a brake.’

&

‘Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead end street.’

She is the only true Taydaughter. I am sorry.

Honeybee

The sweet ballad is somewhat haunting. It sounds almost religious, while also reminding me of La La Land. What could be a simple love song breaks the fourth wall with the audience knowing how it all ends.

‘Everything I own feels like ours’ she sings, rendering her commitment to her love that she will only later recognize as insecure attachment . In an interview she speaks about how she went back to the ‘so in love’ songs and made them sadder after the breakup.

Pretty meandering piano, soft vocals and building strings in the bridge foreshadow a breakdown. The dynamics are so much more interesting than the ballads on GUTS or SOUR.

The nickname for her lover ‘honeybee’ is referenced throughout the album as the pet name goes from endearing to repellent.

Maggots for Brains

Speaking of repellent now we get into the next track! Imagine being so in love that when you are not around said lover you feel like you have maggots for brains. The track explores how first loves are easy to lose yourself in.

‘sometimes at a low point I think of tragedy’ - she is losing her identity fantasising about something really bad happening so they can be brought back together. This songs stacking vocal production adds to the anxious frenzy when you apart from your obsession. Honestly girl please get up this man is not good for you!

U+ Me = <3

This one is very The Cure but also Y2K rom com. Honestly the title is a little cringe to me but I’ll let the girl have it.

‘They say modern love is a cruel endeavor, and to that I say fuck it whatever’ -Olivia is modern, yet not chronically online which is the curse of the modern artist. She is holding onto girlish dreams of true love and men on wild horses of times long gone.

Even in a dreamy love song the creaks are getting bigger, she wants her relationship to stay the same and never change and we all know how that will end.

My Way

My Way on feminism off! In true Taydaughter fashion the love/breakup album needs a I hate women song like Better than revenge or Paramore’s Misery Business. Honestly not too much to say about this one. It is fun! I would say the album could do without it yet it does add to the narrative building. Olivia you do seem pretty petty for a girl so in love!

Purple

‘I had big dreams until I tied myself to you’ - for the last song on the ‘love’ side of the record she sure sounds pretty codependent. As a relationship can do, she is eroding and she is forgetting her dreams.

The colour motif is very Halsey Badlands tease but I like it!

Reverb on the vocal, songs that crescendo, these songs grip you from the start and never leave you bored or unsatiated.

‘Melt with you till it just feels sad’ - wow what a way to lead into the second half of the album. I love albums! I love when albums feel considered and flow like a story!

You Seem Pretty Sad

The Cure

‘I’m unraveled!’ - I love this song so much I can hardly find the words to write about it. I can’t really say anything intelligent about it to my friends without crying.

It feels kind of indie, one of the more stripped back productional moments but in no way simple.

Thinking you have found an antidote to all your doubts and insecurities in love and realizing it will never be enough. No matter how much they love you it will simply never fill the hole.

As women we are taught that true love is supposed to be this all encompassing cure that makes you happy and fulfilled, an endpoint to our immaterial journey.

Love cannot cure you or fix your ailments- an important lesson all young women learn at some point. Your mental health issues will only be further amplified when you are in a relationship. A vacancy will stick even with someone by your side. Tend to your wounds and desires with a thread, but truly only you can be the one with the needle.

Begged

‘They say it’s a virtue to not let good love slip away’ - Girls we need to stop accepting the bare minimum!

The soft guitar and Weyes Blood backing vocals are divine.

Flowers, dinners, showing up to your show are all meaningless when you have to beg for your partner to do it. When you have to ask and ask for something to receive it feels like an obligation rather than an act of love. You accept what you’re given because it feels too big and too special to throw it all away.

What’s Wrong With Me - with Robert Smith.

Okay actually this one is my favourite. She is ‘Searching up my symptoms’ and slowly realising that love can be bad for you, being in love can amplify the symptoms of your depression.

What if this isn’t what I want?

Less

This song sounds like the most devastating waltz in the world, a journal entry you were not meant to read. She meditates grieving the relationship while you are still in it.

The incredibly strange feeling of finding someone that feels like they were invented for you, only to realize the person is indifferent to your presence.

Expectations

In a full 180 from the previous tracks, the Campy 80s song is reminiscent of Oingo Boinngo’s Weird Science.

‘He wasn’t smart or funny, I convinced myself he was’ is probably the most relatable line on the whole album for me.

Drunk in a mini dress she pledges ‘I will not lose my faith’ in love. She is still heartbroken but is manifesting the party feeling and a future man. No longer accepting passive boys and knowing now that indecision is an unattractive quality is growth!

Cigarette Smoke

‘Five beers in the fridge.’ - I don’t want to smell like stale cigarettes and your beers that don’t make it into your endless stomach pit is something I have said to many ex-boyfriends.

Gosh this song is so beautiful and so devastating.

“Give me back my time and I will give you back your heart”- So many women feel this resentment of time wasted. I am only young and beautiful for a short period of time and I wasted it on you!

Loneliness is lonely but it is better to be single than to be holding hope to someone you are waiting to change. I don’t know how to end this essay other than to say never lose your faith in love but never let love consume you in a way where you lose your identity.

Fav tracks- Stupid Song, The Cure, What’s Wrong with Me, Expectations, Cigarette smoke.

In Euphoria or more interestingly in the discourses surrounding the show Cassie Howard is a character whose hypersexuality and male centeredness is depicted as a Shakespearian tragedy she was powerless to escape.

The metanarrative throughline between the actress Sydney Sweeney and the character she plays being hyper-sexualized is far more complex than Sam Levinson is able to write. Unlike Zendaya playing Rue for example the character of Cassie is intrinsically linked to Sweeney.

While there is some very valid criticism and justified dislike in her MAGA alliances and refusal to denounce white supremacy after the jeans ad debacle; I think it would be remiss to say that is the only reason for societies, particularly women’s hatred of Sydney Sweeny is this.

We hate Cassie for stealing her best friend’s boyfriend and we also kind of hate Sydney Sweeny for it. We hate Sydney Sweeny for just reasons and some unjust and somehow we end up hating the characters she plays with the same vitriol.

Even in season 1, where the writing and the character arcs are as good as they are ever going to get, Cassie was not a fan favorite character. Although Sweeney plays the character with such empathy she is still the stereotypical blonde big boobed whore. In one of the many conundrums of an actress, her breasts are a big part of her character but they are also a part of her as an actress.

Cassie is a flawed character, regularly engaging in acts of sexually driven self sabotage. Growing up with an alcoholic mother and a drug addicted dad who abandons the family.

“I bet you got all the boys wrapped around your fingers” an old man says to her when she is 14. From a young age Cassie learns that her appearance is what gave her value in society. Her handsome father also shapes her understanding that beauty affects how people treat you.

She falls in love hard and fast with whichever men show any amount of attention. She sees the potential for achieving love and devotion, a man who will never leave. By confusing love with men wanting to have sex with her she traps herself in a cycle; sex is both her power and her subjection.

To be fully perceived is a nightmare for her; she is reckless and lacks any impulse control. When she is embracing her sexuality she sees it as being chosen, thus temporarily safe.

I have never liked the trait that women are hypersexual because their fathers didn’t love them enough. I feel simplistic and reductive. Yet in season 1 Cassie is shown to be a talented former figure skater whose father pushed her towards the sport before he leaves the family. She loses this discipline and sense of self worth in something that is not just her looks when he leaves.

Cassie and Maddie embody the classic Madonna/ Whore complex. In season 1 Maddie knows to tell Nate that she is a virgin, she knows what men want. Whilst Cassie fumbles and flails letting boys film her and view her as a slut. Videos of her having sex go around the school and she is tainted, a girl men fuck and discard not make a girlfriend.

I remember feeling like a crazy person when season 2 was airing in 2022. Lexi, Cassie’s sister, put on a school play about her sister’s lowest moments for public entertainment. Her jealousy of her sister meant she got gratification from her pain and suffering. I could never quite grapple with this being seen as just or fair despite Cassie’s flaws. Levinson loves to parade women’s pain as a circus.

Maddie physically attacks Cassie during this play and chases her out of theatre, slamming her into a brick wall. ‘This is just the beginning’ Maddie says. There has been a prevailing internet theory that the revenge plot is Maddie sex trafficking Cassie. While I doubt this will eventuate, it perpetuates a damaging moral viewpoint. It flips the rape revenge tradition of rape then to revenge to rape as revenge.

There is a very real possibility that Nate was meant to cheat with Jules played by Hunter Schafer, yet tension between her and Jacob Elordi meant they went with Cassie instead. Another example of real life straining bleeding into the narrative.

Euphoria can not be viewed as a separate entity, as a piece of ‘art’ to engage with autonomously; it exists in the cultural context and as a reflection of the actors themselves.

Do I think fucking your best friends abuser is a moral thing to do? Well no! Yet why is Cassie always presented as the evil one and not Nate? The thing about abusers is that they are manipulative and cast their eye on vulnerable people, that never seems to be a discussion here. Through Sam Levinson’s gaze and the lens of the show Maddie is mad at Cassie for fucking her man not her abuser.

In season 3, Rue and Maddie make money off women in sex work, whilst either judging them or sexualizing them for their own benefit. Rue, the once beautifully written character is a hey momma lesbian objectifying women; Her dream is to practically be a pimp. ‘I’m not a hooker’ Maddie says with judgement about Jules being a sugarbaby. Sex work is presented as a quick and easy get rich quick scheme. Maddie is above this, seeking the American dream by working hard with immigrant parents.

There two readings people have had on season 3 Cassie-

1. That she is disgusting and shameless, not unlike Sweeney herself. She wanted to film these highly sexualized recreations of Onlyfans content.

2. That Sam Levinson is making fun of her and all these Onlyfans ‘whores’ exploiting themselves online for a quick buck.

I think Levinson is too stupid to have injected his viewpoint into his untethered storylines and scripts. & it is too simplistic to say he glamourizes sex work and stripping. Yet the show is still shot in a very voyeuristic way - Cassie montage, Angel pole dance etc..

I have seen multitudes of screencaps from the new season of Sweeney playing Cassie alongside commentary that the ‘republicianness’ is getting to her, that is why she is aging fast, her moral failings are the reason she is ugly now. Will we ever stop equating looks with moral goodness?

Whilst villainizing Onlyfans, every episode of season 3 depicts something not allowed on the platform- shit, asphyxiation, sex in front of a swastika, a woman sexualizing babies. The average Onlyfans creator is only making $150–$180 per month, with many earning less than $100 as they build a following.

Sam Levinson is what people think Sean Baker is. His inability to follow through with storylines, write realistic dialogue and master character fidelity most impacts our readings of the female characters of the show. Do I think Cassie is a good person? No. Is all misogynistic understandings of her character Sam Levinson’s fault? Yes.

What is the worst thing you have ever done? My answer would be in a jealous and insecure rage, I sent a girl my boyfriend left me for a screenshot of a text he sent me saying ‘she doesn’t turn me on like you do.’ It is a pretty horrific thing to do and spent years feeling guilty about it, but does it mean I am unworthy of love? That I am tainted as a bad person forever because I did a bad thing?

Kristoffer Borgli’s 2026 feature The Drama is a portrayal of the pitfalls of weaponizing virtue. It ruminates on high moralism as the moral panic of the 21st century. ‘Goodness’ and ‘virtue’ are weapons and are used for point scoring in the cultural and social landscape.

The film poses the questions- is there a limit to love? Can people really change? & who decides who deserves grace and forgiveness in society?

In a revival of the 90s rom com with a dark twist Robert Pattinson and Zendaya unconvincingly play a happily engaged couple as the pair share no believable couple in love chemistry. Yet the movie is sold by incredible performances by the supporting cast.

The film follows the couple in the upcoming weeks before tying the knot. Practicing their first dance, picking out the menu and finalizing the DJ. At a tasting the couple and their friends go around the table asking each other ‘what is the worst thing you have ever done?’

Here the ‘twist’ of the movie is expertly executed; where Zendaya’s character Emma confesses to planning and plotting a school shooting when she was in High School. Everyone is disgusted and appalled. The groom’s friends tell him to call off the wedding and what follows is as humorous as it is poignant.

A succinct hour forty five does not drag or hammer any points; it does not treat the audience as if they are stupid.

The marketing campaign for the film is the best in years. Finally a trailer that doesn’t show the whole film! The audience knows there is something big coming but can only guess what it is, thus building hype and tension online.

Although a TMZ article about a mother from the Columbine shooting finding the film offensive did leak to some. It also further cemented the notion that we as a society don’t like art that makes us uncomfortable anymore. We are too boring to be challenged.

While the film interestingly explores the aesthetics of gun violence in America. From Charlie finding an art book in his drawer of hot girls holding guns, or his intrusive thoughts of Emma sitting on a bed in lingerie holding a rifle.

A black woman fantasizing about shooting up her high school after some mild bullying and isolation is unrealistic and potentially undercuts the narrative as a whole.

Between 1982 and 2026, out of 153 reported mass shootings, only six were carried out by or involved a woman.

A more compelling follow though would be the aestheticization of school shootings, gun violence and the Columbine shooters. Emma could have been of the many teenage girls with a Tumblr pages dedicated to worshipping the Columbine shooters like they were Justin Bieber.

While this online community has links to Nazism and the alt-right, Emma’s race is never brought up or considered in the film.

So rather is it more an OCD intrusive thought? Obsessive compulsive disorder is not as simple as it is often portrayed in film and television- obsessively cleaning, turning a light switch on and off, etc.

Intrusive thoughts of harming yourself and others, wrongful ruminations that you are attracted to children or most apt to the film, being stuck with an extreme concern of being a good person.

Emma unloads a secret, a thought that she had as a child and it is met with anger, misunderstanding and judgement. Her worst fears are confirmed.

While all the other characters’ worst thing was something that actually occurred. Her husband cyberbullying someone so badly that they have to leave schools, Mike using his ex-girlfriend as a human shield and Rachel locking a disabled boy in a cupboard and running away.

Rachel, expertly played by Alana Heim, is a perfect representation of a person obsessed with the idea of looking virtuous. ‘You know I have a cousin in a wheelchair because of a school shooting’ she says, or something to that effect. Her husband and her friends have never heard of this cousin, instead she is later used as a pawn to display Rachel on the right side of history.

In a very racially motivated comment she says about her black husband that he ‘grew up around guns’ despite him saying the opposite. Instead she uses his tokenism as a way to prove she is right and Emma is wrong.

Zoe Winter’s as always is a star, portraying the overly smiley wedding photographer. While Hailey Gates is perfect as Misha, Charlie’s coworker.

The most succinct running bit in the film is the tender, whispered admission of love in the ear that won’t ever hear it, only for the confessor to later find out the violent circumstance in which the hearing was lost in the first place.

The idea of starting over is proposed three times in the film; the notion of clean slates in modernity is an appealing one as our past is shadowed in a digital footprint that follows us wherever we go. Charlie only accepts it twice when he messes up, proving himself to be mostly self serving. Maybe he is not really in love with Emma, but rather the idea of her.

They first met in a coffee shop where he flirts with her for a few minutes and thinks she is ignoring him. She notices him and tells him she cannot hear out of that ear and that he should ‘start over.’ Emma later proposes a fresh start after her admission, Charlie is unable to move on from this. In the final scene in the diner after it is revealed that Charlie cheated on her the wedding is a shitshow he accepts beginning again.

Is there such a thing as a bad thought? Or is it our actions that talk? In this surveillance culture and era of political correctness, believing you are inherently good might just make you bad. Moralism is a game of point scoring on a chessboard we are all playing differently. Maybe two intelligent people cannot fall in love, true love needs an idiot.

After my preview screening I wait at the tram stop; I hear a couple from my session discussing whether they would stay together.

“We would have to have a lot of therapy” he says.

“But she didn’t even do it!” she replies.

“Well I’m a cinephile” he concludes.

Chalomet has recently caused quite the controversy discussing the challenge of holding modern audiences’ attention.

“I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera where it’s like, ‘Hey! Keep this thing alive,’ even though no one cares about this anymore.” he says in an interview alongside Matthew McConaughey.

While people are outraged, when was the last time you went to the ballet of the opera?

Do you have something meaningful to add to Timothee’s comments or do just want to be really angry about something that isn’t war?

In a class sense I understand where he is coming from or rather what he is trying to put into words; the everyday person is not actively engaging in these artforms and when they are it is a decadence. Is he worried this elitism will affect the cinema industry as a whole or is he just concerned about bums on seats in his movies?

While he is right, the way he delivers this quote is so insufferable and insulting any merit in a conversation is disregarded. As Ballet and Opera companies cling to get any press from this viral moment, their performative outrage is helping them more than it is hindering them. I just don’t believe that little bitch boy dating a Kardashian adjacent is concerned about class struggle in the arts.

While he has a very valid point, there is also a pathetic irony in Chalomet being worried about cinema becoming an exclusive art form as his long-term girlfriend and ultimate nepotism baby Kylie Jenner is quoted in Vanity Fair saying she is being sent hundreds of movie scripts and considering taking up acting.

Real and talented actors are struggling to make it into audition rooms while Jenner is pursuing acting while she cannot move her face.

Just this morning I woke up to read that Billie Elish is reportedly set to star in Sarah Polley’s film adaptation of The Bell Jar and right there I did actually lose the last thread of hope I had left.

While I found his 2025 SAG award speech endearing, stating that he is “in pursuit of greatness.”

There is comic element where he is becoming a real life Nina in Black Swan or Andrew in Whiplash. Is it all part of one big meta performance? Where instead of death, he will face cancellation in order to be seen as one of the greats.

Working at a cinema, I see all kinds of cinema goers. The film bro who wants to see everything deemed good. The old women who want to be moved by a story. The old man who wants to relive their youth by lusting over young ladies.

The cinema is alive and thriving but only with those who have been going for years.

I think the most important customer to pay attention to in this conversation is the ones I served during Wuthering Heights . They said they hadn’t been to the cinema in years or maybe since Barbie.

Despite Sydney Sweeney refusing to denounce white supremacy The Housemaid made $391 million worldwide on a $35 million dollar budget. Sadly the average cinema goer does not care about the politics of those making the films.

As I have gotten older I have realised the majority of people are really dumb. They want to see movies that entertain them, not necessary move or challenge them.

In the cinema the world stops. The day invades the night and the night invades the day. Your phone is on silent (at least it should be) and for a couple of hours your worries fade away. The world you inhabit is not yours and that is a comfort.

Whether it be the theatre or the ballet or the cinema what I think we are losing is the collective experience of sitting together and not speaking; experiencing something as a collective yet not commenting on it instantly.

The most romantic thing in the world is sitting next to a lover in silence in a darkened room. Palm on leg and stolen glances cannot occur in the same sexy fashion in the privacy of a home.

Video killed the radio star and podcasts killed radio but I firmly believe streaming will not kill the cinema.

I have long been critical of Letterboxd culture and its commodification of film. What you feel and what you think are entirely different. Instant logging of films with a rating out 5 and a humorous quip is not meaningful engagement in the art form.

There are celebrities from other industries like Charli XCX jumping on the film bandwagon and its branding. From viral reviews to the criterion closet to asking celebrity their top 4 films of the red carpet. It all feels gimmicky to me, and a gimmick never lasts.

While I understand the average person does not have the time or inclination to to be writing essay long reviews, reviews like ‘Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis 177 years ago yet this is still the worst thing that has ever happened to her’ feel cringe and disingenuous. Rather than discussing Height’s shortcomings, it is more an another quest for virality and a ‘moment.’

My coworker at the cinema recently challenged my views on Letterboxd. While I see it as ruining cinema he says it is revitalizing it. I thought a lot about what he said and I think he is probably right. But maybe I just don’t want to admit that the beauty and purity of the cinema experience is dead. Maybe I will forever cherish a wine and a chat after a movie more than jumping onto to an app.

Burn me at the stake and take away my film and literature degree but I loved Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. I think a lot of you get off on being outraged; you’ll be so mad about Wuthering Heights but haven’t picked up a book since 8th grade?

This discourse has had me out defending Emerald Fennel, something I am not invested in doing. To critique Fennel’s filmography is not sexist. Yet the way some of you talk about it is unjustified. Oh, she’s so privileged is something I never seen thrown at male filmmakers. Y’all would never say such a thing about the Safdie brothers and you shouldn’t, it is such a boring critique of art.

Is Margot Robbie too old to be playing Catherine? Well yes. Should Jacob Elordi not be white? Well also yes. Is the movie sexy, beautiful and haunting, yes!

On the other hand, Charli XCX’s The Moment is as confused as it is a catch grab. Oh the party girl is sad, oh the party girl is putting on a performance, how innovative! The pop-star is becoming commodified when she gets popular? Wow fascinating.

Charli wants to be cool and she wants to be an edgy red scare girl, she wants to be in the right side of history, she wants to be mainstream and she wants to be innovative and she cannot commit to any of it.

The mockumentary is simply a critique of pop stars as money making machines while using BRAT as the backdrop. Yet all the brand deals in the film are real ones for sale.

My three main recommendations to see in the cinema right now are Sirat, It was Just an Accident and Pillion.

To finish ahead of the Oscars I will say Sinners being the most nominated film in Oscar history is a farce and no I am not racist for saying this. How can a film with the KKK and vampires feel like it has no stakes? As Harry Styles would say‘it felt like a movie’ and not in a good way; sets feel like sets, dialogue feels like badly written first drafts and extras feel like extras. It spends an hour introducing characters that are never explored or developed. There is nothing worse than a film treating its audience like idiots despite the audience often being so inclined.

Will win.

ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE

Michael B. Jordan - Sinners

Should win.

Timothée Chalamet- Marty Supreme

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

Will win.

Stellan Skarsgård- Sentimental Value

Should win.

Stellan Skarsgård- Sentimental Value

ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE

Will win.

Jessie Buckley- Hamnet

Should win.

Rose Byrne- If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Should really win if they were nominated.

Jennifer Lawrence- Die My Love

ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE

Will win.

Teyana Taylor- One Battle after Another

Should win.

Amy Madigan- Weapons

Should win if they were nominated

Mariam Afshari - It Was Just an Accident

DIRECTING

Will win.

One Battle after Another- Paul Thomas Anderson

Should win.

Sentimental Value- Joachim Trier

INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM

Will win.

Norway- Sentimental Value

Should win.

France- It Was Just an Accident

SOUND

Will win.

Sinners

Should win.

Sirāt

WRITING (ADAPTED SCREENPLAY)

Will win.

Hamnet

Should win.

Train Dreams

WRITING (ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY)

Will win.

Sinners

Should win.

It Was Just an Accident

SOUND

Will win

One Battle after Another

Should win

Sirāt

BEST PICTURE

Will Win.

One Battle after Another

Should win.

Sentimental Value

Should win if it was nominated

It was just an Accident.

[clipping: Unlike drugs, a child’s body can be sold over and over] - A little girl’s diary from the Epstein files.

I keep dreaming about the trapdoor going in the ocean at Little Saint James. In the nightmares it is not me watching the waves roar, taunting to jump in; I am a voyeur unable to move or speak.

The image is so haunting because it is like a question. Why is it there? How many victims have been thrown into the sea? How many last breaths were taken just below the house of horrors.

Quite frankly I don’t know how everyone is not thinking about the Epstein files all the time. It latches onto the darkest depths of our psyche because we still have more questions than answers.

Barbaric truths are hidden in conspiracy, hyperbole and unverified documents. Bombarded with so much information we don’t know where to start and what is true.

The most empathetic and intellectually engaged person is overwhelmed with outrage and despair, they want us to be numbed into apathy and boredom.

I am not here to cover the entirety of the Epstein files, doing that would be a novel length of the grotesque and unverified. Rather I wish to examine internet cultures’ fundamental misunderstanding and mishandling of the files.

When the first lot of files were released Instagram reels became a hellscape. Comments on endearing edits - ‘If we had the money, yes we would have done the same thing’ and ‘my innocent goat.’ The caption - ‘3 am vibe’ accompanying a photo of Epstein playing with a dog lying on a tiled floor. People on Twitter asking for AI to remove black redaction of victims faces.

This memefication of Epstein has worked to obscure the horrors of his crimes. He raped and trafficked women and children and escaped accountability for years due to his powerful network of polititian’s, royals, elites and co conspirators.

You know what is pissing me off those memes that go ‘would you rather be on Epstein’s Island or (insert stupid thing here’ or calling things you don’t like ‘spiritually Israeli.’ It further dilutes the real atrocities of sex trafficking and genocide.

People suddenly say ‘that’s toddler. I’m going to vomit’ further illuminates the image of ‘Jefferey Epstein’ across the internet zeitgeist. Jokes about the island and the Lolita Express have been circulating for years.

It only took a few days for the coquette eating disorder girls to start posting the photograph of a victim’s foot with a line from Lolita drawn onto it. #lanadelreyaesthetic #Lolitaaesthetic.

There would seem to be no bounds when it comes to aestheticizing misogynistic sexual abuse.

Friday 4/24/2009 3:36 PM. From Jeffrey Epstein

‘were are you? are you ok, I loved the torture video.’

Why did the DOJ redact the name of the receiver of the email, yet they cannot properly redact the names of victims. Don’t the public have a right to know? Who sent Epstein the torture video? Was the victim ever found?

If I see one more major publication write ‘sex with a 15 year old’ I will be taking a very long walk off a very short cliff. There is no such thing as a child prostitute. A child cannot not seduce a man. While we may be talking about the Lolita Express, Lolita or rather how the American zeitgeist interprets Lolita lied.

Who are the dentists who operated on the island? The doctors performing abortions on children? How can we live in a world where this many people allowed horrors to happen?

While I am glad the evil and vile Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison (far too nice of a one as far as I am concerned) it is unfathomable that the only person currently in jail for a sex trafficking operation is a woman.

I saw a Tweet that Maxwell was the logically end point of #girlboss feminism and I knew insanity was reached. Maxwell is man’s dream girl, the submissive dog to the man hunter. The spouse that helped and participated in rape. A woman that gave him even more charm, connections and access.

I have seen hundreds of TikTok - “they are eating babies why are they not more mad!’ What these people are referring to is unverified documents from ‘witnesses’ or simply random tips in the Epstein files.

Pizzagate conspiracy galore, the internet is obsessed with the notion that the elite eat and sacrifice children. I cannot say with good conscience that we have any proof of that being true. Is raping children not horrific enough?

Yes, let’s trust the Quanon, 4chan conspiracies that peaked in 2016. The FBI, DOJ and American governments failure to give information clearly and freely has helped these conspiracy theories grow. Again a question is more interesting than an answer.

A viral video of a naked woman lying on the grass tied up and tortured has been captioned as being from the Epstein files. Mass panic and outrage ensued all over the internet while it is simply a consenting adult woman from a BDSM porn video.

Another aggressively circulating image is one of a little girl with her arms duct taped to a table often captioned with an essence of ‘think of the children’ caption. The photo has been online for 9 years and has no substantiated link to Epstein’s abuse. The image has still been used by Fox News, Pizzagate conspiracies and online posts.

When something seems so horrific is there a desire to push it to the furthest extreme? Are people knowingly seeking these images to spread misinformation and fear?

TikTok influencers latched onto an unverified document where a witness claimed the elites were eating babies intestines and feces saying it tasted like cream cheese. Wow that sounds absolutely insane, I should title my video this, I can get so many views from this!

While religious nuts like to say this is the stuff of the devil we further lose grips with reality. If I don’t believe in God, how can I believe in a devil?

As Naomi Klein states in her book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World - ‘Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right.’ Yes there are evil men abusing children, this is not new information and yes we should be disgusted and outraged but we should feed into fear mongering and conspiracy.

The amount of people who cannot engage with the sexual abuse of girls by men without trying to sensationalize it for entertainment is disturbing. From satanism, to Christianity to political chess; empathy and denouncing patriarchy isn’t exciting enough or beneficial for them.

The videos of Epstein and the island, although full of luxury, feels as if you are watching crime scene footage. The women shown, their faces and often their bodies are obscured by black squares.

‘Look a little happier. Smile. Yeah, like that’ – Epstein is heard saying to a woman with her face shrouded. Is this all not horrific enough for you freaks?

Now when a news article or social media post says this person was ‘in the Epstein files’ to get clicks please remember it really means nothing I think that is important to distinguish.

Timothée Chalamet was technically in the Epstein files due to a correspondence between Epstein and Woody Allen’s ‘wife’ calling him a little prick.

Another example would be Lady Gaga also technically in the files but merely in emails where Epstein sought her correspondence and was met with no reply. There are also email chains showing an unsuccessful ploy for Epstein to meet Suki Waterhouse. I could go on.

I know I sound mad but it feels as if the media and social media influencers are relying on people’s stupidity and lack of media literacy to get clicks and likes.

Sex crimes are the most fundamentally black and white, good and evil. You may steal because you are starving, kill in self defense but is there no human need behind rape and sexual abuse.

Yet on the other hand its nuances are the most horrific. For example French woman Gisèle Pelicot whose then husband and 50 other men raped her refuses to believe her own daughter was also abused.

Please be kind and open when you speak about the Epstein victims, they owe you nothing. Dissociation is when the mind leaves because the body can’t.

The ‘list’ has turned into a political ploy, but this story is not really about the list at all; it is about young girls, powerful men and the system that let this happen for so long.

Conspiratorial paranoia is a psyop by the actual pedophiles and abusers of the world. It discredits real harm and distracts the people lacking basic media literacy. It’s not the devil, he is not real, it is simply the depravity of men and the women who help them.

Something has shifted and everything has changed. It is not just me that feels this way, I am sure of it.

I think the darkest thought I have ever had was that a part of me wanted to be one of the victims; Just so I could have seen it with my own two eyes. Rape and sexual abuse is not foreign to most women myself included.

For most women I speak to, the Epstein files are no great shock or scandal. A lot of men with Epstein’s power, money and influence would do the very same and a lot of men do the very same on a micro level everyday.

‘Aquamarine
Honey, dive into me
I’m not hiding anymore
I won’t hide

The world is my oyster
Baby, come touch the pearl
The world is my oyster
And I’m the only girl.’

Last week I swam in the ocean for the first time since 2018. Aquamarine by Addison Rae blaring on the drive over. My wings as rotted pearls. My toes like little swordfish. I forgot how beautiful bodies look underwater; shellac nails on fingers resemble doll hands and bums like Japanese pancakes. Freedom tasted like salt water and sandy cigarettes. In the mermaid pools at Aireys Inlet for just a moment I felt like the most special girl in the world. Not exceptional in a way where I was better than any of the other girls, rather that the ‘world is my oyster.’ Bright pink bikini and salt in my hair. I did not care about the masculine gaze because for once the feminine was sufficient.

Addison Rae is divine femininity. She is unapologetically girly and silly and fun whilst being smart and deliberate. Drawing inspiration from all the feminine parts of pop culture, music and art she is one of the most interesting artists right now; To be frank a lot of these New gen artists bore me to tears, while she moves me to them. Her debut record ‘Addison’ ruminates the discomforts of fame and the intrinsic desire to be seen. ‘So I still get dolled up’ - girlhood as a celebration rather than a mask.

From a TikTok star who quite frankly seemed pretty stupid to the coolest girl in pop, Addison Rae’s rebrand is remarkable. An album made by all female producers occupied a weird space in culture in 2025. While Anthony Fantano and a lot of ‘serious’ music people hate her, she is also allowed into ‘cool’ spaces. People on the internet make fun of her and she ‘only wants it more.’

She has a girl next door sweetness with a pragmatism and serious approach to the work itself. She challenges claims that she is disingenuous or trying too hard-
“Oh, she’s trying so hard… how about you try at all. We can tell you’re not” she says. Honestly that quote really stuck with me; time to abandon nonchalance and hammer away at your dreams!

“I’ve recognised how much choice and taste is kind of a luxury” - She appeals to the younger generation’s terror of being stuck in cringe and bad taste. We are so scared to be perceived as cringe we forgo earnestness and effort. We would rather do nothing at all than be perceived as lame. If she went from making 8 Tiktoks a day to performing at the Grammys, maybe just maybe anything is possible. I think this is part of her allure.

A lot of pop right now feels referential - from Pink Pantheress and her Y2K aesthetics to Tate McCray copying Britney Spears’s 1999 Rolling Stone cover. Sometimes the references feel more like a costume and grow tiresome. The nostalgia industrial complex is for sure a big factor as of late, when the world is falling apart we often look to times past. Just look at the recent 2016 trend.

There is something so disturbing about Kim Kardashian buying and storing away iconic pieces from the dead and sometimes buried. She wants items previously owned by women such as Princess Diana, Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy so she can feel like she has a piece of history while not contributing to her legacy. The most egregious example of this would be the $1,000,000 bra that Britney Spears wore during her Dream Within a Dream Tour. This iconic piece of pop culture history was initially sold during Britney’s conservatorship without her permission or knowledge.

While Addison is playing homage to the greats -Brittany, Madonna, Bjork, Lana Del Rae and Lady Gaga, it is more complex than a reference, rather a testimony to greatness. She does not want to own or even touch the past, rather glide through it. Borrowing from celebrations of femininity she attempts an originality. As the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch said -‘Nothing is ever original’, yet nostalgia can also be a weapon and Addison seems to be fully aware of this.

‘Have you ever dreamt of being seen?’ from ‘High Fashion’ served as a thesis statement for the record. Charles Horton Cooling coined the term ‘looking glass self’ in 1902. He posits that a person’s self concept/ identity is built though imagining how they appear to others. He suggests we ‘look’ into a social mirror to gauge our self worth based on how we think others perceive us.

In 2026 we voyeurs in our own lives, hyper aware of how others discern us; our actions don’t merely replicate what we want others to see but how they view us as a whole. This notion of the looking glass self is amplified through phone screens and surveillance culture.

“Not by someone, more like in magazine” - There is something radical about the album’s lyrical content. Unlike most pop lyrics she is not luring in men in by her beauty to be fucked, but simply wants to be perceived.

Yet, how do we live as women within some kind of idea of femininity and not have it wreck us? Femininity can be packaged and sold in service to men’s desire. Femininity is palatable in its juxtaposition to masculinity; here it is not in opposition, it is the only lens available to the listener.

Some people are born with an abnormal intensity. ‘I always wanted more’ on Fame is A Gun shows the naked actualities of hunger and desire in which she ‘points blind.’ The descent following the equilibrium between the energy and mastery is not often considered by the young, maybe that is why we look to them as the makers of culture.

Her ambitions are like moderate daydreams. She is not afraid to lose because nothing in the world belongs to her.

You do not have to be the best singer or dancer to be an interesting pop star. There are many great singers who bore me -Zara Larsson for example. This is what straight men cannot conceptualize and that is what they often hate about pop girls and pop music. Girls and gays understand the importance of vision, aesthetic and a specific viewpoint. Addison has mastered this.

Last year as I was leaving the Addison show at the Forum. My lipstick has smudged from lips to the corners of my face and I didn’t give a damn. Feet hurting from dancing in Tabis, my mind was still reeling from balloons falling from the ceiling and the lyrics - ‘Guess I gotta accept the pain.’

My creative practice has always been concerned with femininity, but more with its trauma than its joy. Addison is so important to me in that regard. My ideas are so strong it renders headaches, like a newborn , a deformed baby of wanting with no release. At what age did I start to feel guilty of my dreams? My youth has gone by like a daydream and I have made very little use of it.

There is a connective thread between Katseyes’s atrocious music and Elon Musk’s Grok being filled with sexualized pictures of women and minors. I know that might sound hyperbolic but hear me out.

It took 18 writers to write the fast food music lyrics -

‘Boba tea (gnarly), Tesla (gnarly)
Fried chicken (gnarly).’

A hotdog or McDonalds is palatable because you don’t see how the sausage is made. Kateseye had a whole documentary showing the audience the manufacturing process, yet people still take them seriously? I know some people will say the only job of a popstar is to entertain, but who are they really entertaining? Creepy men and internet brain rotted teenage girls? So Elon Musk’s dick is wet now?

You know who wrote ‘eat zucchini’, five men who thought wow I am so tapped into internet culture! These girls are literal puppets being handed things and told to do them. They are not allowed to speak or do press by themselves in fear they will find their own artistic identity and go solo. They have these girls lip-syncing chat GPT lyrics- ‘Like the emoji?’, making emoji faces on stage then going ‘eat zucchini’ and shaking their arses and I just find it all quite dystopian.

Remember that Black Mirror episode where they are all stuck on exercise bikes and the only way to get out is to become a singer or a pornstar? Yeah it feels like that. Mindless, soulless and hypersexualized.

Let’s create stupid noise and make everyone hate it but at least it will go viral! I think they are the first true example of rage baiting in the pop scene. They have no principle or sound. None of their ‘art’ means anything at all; What was their most viral moment? An ad campaign for the clothing line Gap.

If we follow the thread that ‘eat zucchini’ ‘emoji’ means suck my dick, why is there a child’s voice in it? Or better yet let’s sample a moan from a porno and have a minor sing in it like they did in ‘Gnarly.’

The band was built in a boardroom, there is quite literally a Netflix documentary saying as much. Stop pedaling girlhood when it’s a group of men defining what a girl group should be, that is actually regressive. It’s 2025, how are people not finding this deeply depressing!

One of the members, Manon, was scouted for the show not because of her talents but simply because she was very pretty. She didn’t show up for most of the rehearsals and was not at all punished like other girls in the program would have been. It seemed she had no interest in becoming a better dancer or singer, she just wanted to be famous. Following the K-Pop structure the group needs a vocal, dance, leader, all-rounder and a visual (yes this simply means they are nice to look at). Manon is undeniably beautiful but does she have any real talent?

In 2025, around the same time Sydney Sweeny was pedaling soap ‘filled’ with her bathwater, Kateseye was gearing up for a new collaboration with 5GUM. This partnership, with a different gum for each member is supposed to appeal to the most devoted of fans . Excuse my ignorance but I thought 5GUM was a dead brand that peaked in the early 2000s into the 2010s. At its peak the brand’s marketing clung to the notion of the ‘five senses’, yes I think there is a sexual connotation there. I will never forget my mum finding a 5GUM wrapper in my sister’s wardrobe and thinking it was a condom one.

There are individualized kiss marks on the wrapper for when you have finished chewing. Yoonchae was a minor at the time of this collaboration. The room spray ‘infused with the breath of every Katseye member’ sold out instantly. Now this is not classic merchandise of a picture of the artist on a t-shirt or a hoodie. Marketing like this attracts a certain kind of fan. In Popstar Academy The Making of Kateseye, a staff member tells the girls that the fans feel like ‘you belong to them.’ Hybe and Geffen are encouraging this.

The implication is unfettered access to your body. Now please don’t start with the words ‘agency’ and ‘consent’; if we have learnt anything since the dawn of user based AI image generation is that these words hold no weight or meaning. Objectifying women for profit is so commonplace that to critique it you will be met with accusations of ‘pearl clutching.’ You are too feminist, yet also anti-feminist in the analysis of a system being viewed as a slight against an individual woman.

Is this what Hybe wanted to do with other female K-Pop groups but couldn’t in Korea alone? The combination of the parasocialism of K-Pop and the over sexualization of Western pop is their wet dream under the guise of diversity and multiculturalism. Now on diversity, if the group was really a celebration of different cultures and racial backgrounds, why has at least 5 for out of the 6 members had either a nose job or eyelid surgery? So they want diversity without ethnic features, right?

I am not critiquing the girls as individuals; the entertainment industry is brutal and the nitpicking of aesthetics is never ending. Yet I will not celebrate or fall for heterogeneousness as a money maker. People are always calling out late stage Capitalism but what is this later stage enmeshed with identity politics called?

Sam Altman the CEO of Open AI (Chatgpt) said ‘you know AI will probably like, most likely sort of lead to the end of the world but in the meantime there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.’

If AI does lead to the end of the world, what are the steps to get there? Obviously environmental degradation but before that we will see a loss of art and authenticity. We will continue to see things being sold wearing the costume of accessibility and inclusivity. The endless amounts of porn on the internet already will not be enough and porn brained losers will still defile those who have not chosen the lifestyle. Why stop at simply sexualizing women when you can generate any image of a child you want. Thanks Elon Musk!

There will be more child exploitation material than ever ( I refuse to call it child porn) (Listen to the podcast Mindhunter if curious). Chat GPT will send more vulnerable people into psychosis and send more people into religious psychosis trying to find salvation in the hell that is modernity. We will live in a world where imagination is lost, where visuals can be created so quickly that we forget to dream them.

I think of the white weatherboards I grew up in. Wisteria crawled up the side gate and the archway into the back garden. The front garden was filled with rose bushes without sticks and a dying tree. The back was beautiful with hanging baskets and berries. There were gravestones for the pets buried at the back of the garden, next to the compost bin.

When I was five or six the house was renovated. There was so much going on that time that my childmind couldn’t understand; I think she changed then. She lost her sister and her house was changing. I was merely a symptom. I remember living up the road for a while behind the fish and chip shop; I left one of my favourite dolls there and never saw her again. I was so needy at that age, desperate for attention which I understood to be love.

When I got older there was still the same fighting, the loose ties on the clothing line. Sometimes from the top of the long-curved driveway I could hear the yelling through the security door. I would walk back to the park behind my school to make out with a boy or try to smoke one of his cigarettes. I was so obsessed with the idea of someone loving me, but with boys from my school it never felt more foreign. A lot of the time they wanted to hit or choke me and a lot of the time I welcomed it, violence was less peculiar than tenderness.

In Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value the house is a character, it is a set, a stage, a living organism. The opening shot- a long pan of trees against city buildings sets into motion the notion that modernity is at odds with human connection. The shot holds on the red laced house and the window reflection shows the same trees rather than the furniture inside. Through the non-diegetic voice over we learn that the family’s grandfather died in the same bed a child was born. What the house dislikes more than noise is silence.

In a love letter to film and filmmaking, the film rejects the streaming era and the modern press tour. Modernity is at odds with cinematic practice; the age of constant communication does not bode well with complex family dynamics.

Nora is a stage actress; her father wants her to do screen. “You deserve something more personal than century old plays.” – The film implores the classic writing tip, write what you know. It is deeply concerned with art reflecting reality as a way to process trauma. The only play her father has ever seen in her was the first act of Medea and he doesn’t like the shows she is in. ‘Why wait for some old fart to let you play Ophelia’ he says. There are always permits around making art, whether it be budgets or connections. Can he only see his daughter through the lens of his own experience?

The first script of the film is written and carried around in two plastic bags, like groceries or a birth certificate being taken to the post office, it is not fully put together yet. Use of one long shot with no cuts and context hidden melds the real with the moving picture. Scenes you think are real turn into a play or a scene from a film, Perceptive changes when the shot enlarges. The ‘TikTok troll’ and the Netflix press junket for a film that is not yet made erode at the sentimentality.

In a humorous scene in the film, his grandfather gives the 9-year-old boy copies of The Piano Teacher and Irreversible. ‘This film will make you understand women and maternal relationships’ – he says showing the boy the cover of The Piano Teacher. The family doesn’t have a DVD player and his mother doesn’t really watch movies anymore. A callback to the beginning of the film where Nora asks a man to ‘hit me. Just slap me’, before she goes on stage; sometimes I think women want to be slapped in a sexual fashion just to feel something.

More than weddings, often funerals and wakes are the only times we see some of our family. We only text our ex-lover when we are drunk; call our family to tell them we love them after a few too many glasses. We want connection but are unable to communicate. When Nora is bed with a lover after sex, she says that they are getting too ‘close and cuddly’ – sadly our family dynamics and lack of intimacy there leaks into our romantic encounters.

When he first meets the actress played by Elle Fanning, she describes to him that she is getting ‘good enough parts but they don’t have anything to do with me’; while this line foreshadows later tensions to come it also signposts to the audience the films investment in arts familiarity with one’s life experience. Sleeping on the beach and waking up in a drunken haze. The sky is melding into the ocean. The young actress and older director connect through their desire to make meaningful art.

I strangely relate to Elle Fanning’s character and not because of how good her ass looks in jeans. When I was acting, I was often the surrogate, a tool for older men to tell stories about the women in their life. She performs the monologue written for his daughter; he watches with a hollowness in eyes. An older man watching you perform the words he has written. There is little to no direction, just stories from his life. You can tell it’s not what he wants but he won’t explain what you lack, or how to harness the talent he saw in you in the first place.

‘This isn’t about my mother’ he says. Agnus goes to the library of historical records. Thousands of dry historical records, the modes of torture her grandmother endured. I have never really understood the obsession with family history. Why do you feel the need to learn about and connect with people who are dead. If you can’t speak to those who are in the next room, it is easier to look for answers from your past instead of looking in the present.

I always say that it isn’t the right time to kill myself. I can’t take the time off work or it isn’t poetic enough, ironic huh? I think I would like my favourite flowers on the bedside table and someone to come and choke me out but not in a sexual way. ‘Her sadness is such an overwhelming part of her’ is a line in the movie and seemingly my year. God is irrelevant in this house and all the characters want is a home. The house is turned sterile and lifeless, memories cannot hold on plain white walls. I look out my window now and the suction things on the cat bed make it look like a face. I can only see the trees and the power lines. My skin is burning and I love you. Sometimes I don’t know if I am alive or dead but then I remember I can cry.

In 2015 Camille Paglia called Taylor Swift a ‘Nazi Barbie’ and that she reminds her of the ‘fascist blondes’ from her youth. Now playing the Hitler card usually destroys all credibility of argument but here we are in the 2025 with Swift being accused of selling Nazi merchandise and peddling right-wing propaganda.

From a Postmodern perspective, Swift has become like Madonna or Brittany Spears. She is so famous and her image has been used and commercialised so many times in so many different ways that she is a palimpsest. The authorship of what she does belongs to everyone. She is a screen in which people project their ideas and interpretations of what she is, they reflect their own cultural values onto her. I am not sure I can name another current public figure who is simultaneously a closeted lesbian and a tradwife conservative. It doesn’t really matter what Taylor means anymore, it’s what she means to other people.

As I previously wrote in “Capitalist Barbie & Bitchy Bratz” people are not normal about Swift. She is insanely popular and it’s cool to hate her. The reflex to hate anything she does and escalates into trying to find evil motives in it. While capitalism surrounding albums can be critiqued, can we be normal about the art itself?

For full transparency I am a Swiftie and have been one since 2008; yet I honestly believe if this was about any celebrity I would defend them fervently. This isn’t about Swift, it’s a symptom of a wider disease, and its spreading.

I scraped my The Life of A Showgirl essay because there wasn’t really much to say. It was a very mid album and probably her worst one. With some great songs- Father Figure, Elizabeth Taylor, Ruin the Friendship and some really really bad ones - Eldest Daughter, Wood and Cancelled!.

The song Actually Romantic was a funny little moment that caused some drama on the internet. Charli XCX got more streams and we were taken back to a fun time on pop star mess! At the crux of the conflict between the two popstars is the desire to be cool and the desire to be popular. Swift is a lot more endearing when you remember she was one of Lena Dunham’s inspirations for Marnie from Girls. She will never be the cool and edgy girl but that will never stop her from trying. Charli XCX is the epitome of cool and that unsettles her. On the other hand Charli has a desperate drive to become an A list popstar , a level of popularity she will unlikely reach. Being Pitchforks darling and the holy grail for girls and gays on Twitter does not equal sold out stadiums.

Now let’s get into why the word Nazi is appearing alongside Swift once again.

The lyrics -

‘I just want you, uh
Have a couple kids, got the whole block lookin’ like you
We tell the world to leave us the fuck alone.’

From the albeit cringe and out of touch song Wi$h Li$t are apparently Aryan propaganda.

Now while I have no desire to have kids of my own, I do not think wanting your children to look like your partner is an inherently bad thing, if anything it is quite sweet. People have been arguing that these lyrics are very white supremesisit coded, that they heavily imply that she is saving Travis from having non-white babies and express the fantasy of a homogenous white neighbourhood.

Why is the culture so obsessed with Taylor Swift being racist despite no evidence of such? Integrating lyrics and looking for evidence; desperation translates into every language. The authoritarian left is only helping the right. What I have learnt from years of primary analysis, if you want to see something it will appear, you are applying the lens not the author. I remember being forced to write about Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mushrooms’ from a Marxist lens and man there was nothing to mine there but I still wrote a 2500 word essay.

I am not saying this to save Swift from being labeled a racist, rather in a rallying cry for critical thinking.

Now the lyrics from Opalite-

‘You were dancing through the lightning strikes
Sleepless in the onyx night
But now the sky is opalite
Oh oh oh oh, oh my Lord’

Would you read this as a racial microaggression? Yes the concept of black being evil and white being good has racial undertones in the culture, think Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Yet, I think it is vitally important to practise discernment and take a step back and reflect on context. While impact may be harmful with intent, I really don’t think that is the case here.

Unlike a diamond and Opalite is a manmade substance, she explained the song as being about making your own happiness; Getting out of the darkness and into the sunshine. Dancing through the chaos and focusing on the good found her the man she is now marrying. Whether that is a good concept or not is neither is not there but is it racist?

Now the infamous ‘Opalite’ necklace with matching earring sold on her website. The Internet was enraged claiming it was referencing Nazi symbolism. First they said there were 8 lighting bolts in the necklace , there are actually twelve, presumably referencing her twelve albums. They said they were not regular lighting bolts but ‘SS’ ones and invoking Nazi ideology. If we are getting real technical here nazis don’t call them ‘lighting’, they call them ‘bolts’ or ‘chops’ and there would have to be two directly next to each other but I guess for rage baiting Tiktokers, research is not their strong suit. If following this logic, does that mean the band KISS are Nazi sympathisers? Does that mean every jewelry company selling lighting bolt pendants or earrings has a sinister subliminal message? The pendant at the bottom was also called an Iron cross, I don’t know, does it look like a star to me? With her fiance’s birthstone and name of the song in the middle. It’s not a racist dog whistle, if anything it’s a lazy creative choice for using a basic ass lighting bolt.

I didn’t buy the necklace cause its ugly and cheap jewellery is a waste of money but not part of me wishes I did. I would give Billionaire Barbie even more of my money if it helped stop this stupidity. You can’t create a situation to call out just because you don’t like someone.

Now the worst song (Eldest Daughter) on the album not even I can defend, but it is MAGA coded? The horribly written and contentious lyrics- ‘But I’m not a bad bitch And this isn’t savage’ have come under fire for being a diss to black women. While that is highly offensive, the lyrics simply highlight how out of touch Swift is. In a lot of her promotional interviews she has been going on about how off the Internet she is and I really do not think she is lying. She is forever stuck in a millennial cringe. Can we not just critique bad writing without trying to make her a racist?

The blatant unawareness of ‘Canceled!!’ exposes a flaw and a skill in Swift’s writing talent, she can only write about herself. Her perceptive and experiences are the only ones she knows. It is what makes her confessional song writing so good and her attempts at political songs so bad. A song about women being unfairly scrutinized in the public eye is not a bad one on its own, but in the current political climate it is vapid and out of touch. The cringe lyric “girlbossed to close to the sun” is what i perceive to be a reference to Candence Owen’s comments about Blake Lively in relation to her lawsuit with Justin Baldoni. No she is not saying she loves all her MAGA girls, rather badly defending longtime friend Lively and referencing her 2017 cancellation.

Oh there’s also some guy with gross feet on a reddit page who bought all four variants of the Midnights album to place them in a specific order and turn them around to create a sort of swastika! Or is it just a white border on a boring album design! I feel as if I am going insane!

If there was any damning evidence that Swift was a Nazi it would be a photo of her posing for a photograph with a man wearing a t-shirt with a drawn on Swastika at Katy Perry’s paint party in 2009. At 19 with her first big hit of ‘Love Story’, Swift was desperate for success and stardom. Her publicist stated that due to the room being so dark and so many asking for her picture she simply didn’t notice the guy’s shirt, if she had she would not have taken the picture with him. Whether that was the case or she was simply on autopilot meeting people or you don’t believe her at all, that is the only evidence we have. If she intentionally did that, why are we wasting our time talking about a necklace? Falsehoods can create false realities and they can also distract from real horrors.

Remember in January this year when people were digging up a photo of Swift from 2014 putting her hand out to the crowd and calling it a Nazi salute? Remember when Elon Musk posted a picture of it after doing an actual Fascist salute at Trump’s inauguration speech? Why would the right be so enraged by her if she was one of them?

In 2018 when Swift endorsed the Democrats in the upcoming election president Trump said- “Let’s just say I like Taylor’s music about 25% less now, okay?” In 2020 she promised Trump that the American people “will vote you out in November” after the then-president — whom she described as “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism” — condemned the Black Lives Matter protests over George Floyd’s death. In May 2025 Trump said -“Has anyone noticed that, since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?’ so yeah she’s a big MAGA supporter.

On the 29th of July 2024 a man murdered three girls under 10 at a Taylor Swift themed school holiday event. In August 2024 there was a planned terrorist plot at the Eras tour stop in Austria. The shows were canceled. “The reason for the cancellations filled me with a new sense of fear, and a tremendous amount of guilt because so many had planned on coming to those shows” said Swift.

Somehow she received hate for this, from both the public and her fans. This is when I realised people are not normal about Taylor Swift. I believe these events changed her brand and how she interacts publicly and politically forever. I do not think some people realise just how big Swift is. Her publicist said- “Her team has to be hyper vigilant because she has been stalked so many times and recently discovered she has been targeted by Groyper [alt-right] groups on social media.” So yes that sounds exactly like a woman dog whistling to right wing extremists…

Are these Nazi allegations just rage bait from creators who want some clicks from using Swift’s name? Or are they something more sinister? As AI gets smarter and mass information spreads faster we have to be more vigilant. Maybe we are being distracted from focusing on actual Nazis and dangerous rhetoric of right wing extremists. Why do we on the left look for meaning in nothing? It makes us look stupid.

When you start to call everyone a Nazi and everyone a Fascist and everyone MAGA, no one is. Words only have power when used correctly. What is the logical end point? I would argue the end of critical thinking itself. Anti-intellectualism will be the death of society and community.

The trees that smell like cum are out. They are everywhere and their scent is potent. Everything is sexy and nothing is erotic. Sex is sterilised, packaged and sold. We are all talking about sex and selling sex but is our generation really having it?

Adéla Jergová, known mononymously as Adéla is revving up to be the next big thing. From a small town in Slovakia she is a student of pop culture. Watching Hannah Montana at 5 she understood at a very young age that America was the epicentre of Western mass culture. She taught herself English, studied the effortless charisma of Brittany Spears, the grind and professionalism of Beyonce and the revelling in the ugly in the name of art from Lady Gaga.

Without sounding too pretentious I trust my taste and my initiation. I was right about Charli and right about Chappell so trust me on this girl. I look at pop at the moment and I ask myself, where is the hunger and the rage? It’s all wrapped up in Adéla.

Adéla’s work ruminates on raw eroticism in the pop machine and the price of stardom. White lashes, white eyebrows and pink hair Adéla is as gorgeous as she is gritty and gross. She is happy to be polarising and wants to provoke something from you. A self-described ‘master schemer’ , her art is a structured chaos.

From a professionally trained Ballerina to a K-pop training camp Adéla is no stranger to rigid structure and hard work. When asked if she was scared to enter the training camp she said ‘ I was raised by communist old women telling me and my friends that we were fat and that we should smoke instead of eat when we were 14. This was not gonna break me.’ I don’t want to spend too much time on The Debut: Dream Academy but it provides some much needed context. The show is a Netflix reality show about a K-pop training camp combining forces with an American label looking to find the next big global girl group. Picking out girls from all around the globe, the goal was to take the traditions of K-pop global and capture the Western market.

The show begins documenting 2 years of intensive training camp where the young girls and young women are ranked on their vocal ability, dance, visual and attitude. Unknown to those participating it turns into a competition show. The show was at best ethically questionable and at its worst outright abusive. Yet instead of giving up after unfair treatment, Adéla came out of that experience prioritizing artistic freedom and her independence, something she would never have had in a constructed and machine made girl group.

As a scholar of the pop machine Adéla wrote out her intentions- what was her brand, what did she want to say. She asked herself what about this song or this video, did she like it, what didn’t she like and most importantly, why didn’t she like it. Why was the culture responding to this artist’s work and not this one? Criticism is essential in the creation of great art. Yet this does mean that her ep The Provocateur is manufactured or contrived, rather a controlled chaos. Let’s unpack the songs.

Superscar

Her first release as an independent artist and a 19 year old girl. Superscar written by her and one collaborator with a self funded music video is impressive in of itself. It also happens to be one of the best pop songs of the past few years. The song describes being a woman in the K-pop machine, how it feels to be controlled and manipulated. She has spoken about the ‘visual’ classes, where they were taught on how to move your face on camera , pull a certain face on this beat,don’t be too sexy but don’t be ugly, be both sexy and cute. She critiques the need in the K-pop machine to uphold a very specific beauty standard. ‘Sell your sex and soul to me’ she sings in the million dollar sounding chorus. Voting K-Pop fans did not like her expressive face and found her ‘off-putting.’ While the music industry is a lot about how you look, is it fair to hold these girls to what you told them to be then send them out for public critique?

From the lyrics -‘all these dirty hands they wanna touch me’ , to ‘You found your monetary fantasy’ the song is a scathing indictment of what it means to be a woman in the industry.

Sex on the Beat.

Selling sexuality as a step by step, but when we sell it , is it really ours? The video opens with tight close-up shots of her mouth moaning with a pleasing hum. It’s pornographic, it’s brash and in your face. She opens her legs to the camera as the song begins. Behind a collage of photos of pop stars and cultural icons with the words Sex = Pop over it. She looks around as the lyrics ‘give me cage I give sex on the beat’ play. The song stops and we see her watching Christina Aguilera’s ‘Definitive guide to achieving stardom on your own terms.’ ‘Master your body. Harness your sexuality and become pop royalty in 8 weeks’ the video says.

After watching the video she gyrates at the laptop, humping the floor. A wide shot reveals a man in the corner with an eye patch on one of his eyes. It’s not sexy, it’s sterile. He is not an active participant, merely a voyeur having things done to him. In another scene there is a pale room reminiscent of a church or an alcoholic’s anonymous meeting. A group of men and women of all ages sit on stools watching her dance. They are as disgusted as they are invested. My favourite line of the song plays- ‘serve it on a silver platter baby, make you think the choice is mine.’ With a catholic cross thong over her white bodysuit, she is not Mary or Madonna.

In the final shot of the video the camera lingered on her face. She’s panting, worn out from the dance. She stares into the camera, attempting to smile and bat her eyelids. She is like a pornstar you can tell really doesn’t like fucking, despondent and performing.

MachineGirl.

In a time of hyper-wokeness, virtue signalling and social justice warriors it would seem everybody wants a diva in the music video but nobody wants to see someone behave like one.What in the context of the show seemed like such a small moment, where Adéla speaking for other girls in the program called out a double standard among the girls led to a plethora of online bullying and harassment, She felt it unfair that particular people could not attend classes for weeks on end, while others away from their friends and family were never given a day off. Yet she is going against the system, not the person. The system that they were told values hard work and scores switched up the rules.

‘Mean girl, mean girl
Make-you-wanna-scream girl
Why you comin’ at me, baby?
Yell at the machine, girl.’

The minor chord brooding verses are juxtaposed with a bubble gum pop chorus. Like a monkey in a cartoon saying ‘meee me a ma me’, the send up is obvious but not on the nose. In an interview with one of my favorite creators, the Swiftologist, she describes how- ‘humans, particularly women, get demonised and put into these combative positions for everybody’s entertainment.’ You would think in this day and age people would be more critical of reality television and the narratives it presents to their audience. We understand the role of the producer and the power of editing. Yet it is easier to cast blame on individuals rather than the systems and hierarchies that created this happenstance.

Go

‘This is the dead land’ - T.S. Elliot.

Go makes you wanna stick your head out the window of a fast moving car . The song makes you wanna jump up and down and yell on an apartment balcony. To me this song is very LA, but LA as T.S Elliots the Wasteland, a place past its prime. Decaying landscape and shattered dreams, everyone wants to be something but no one wants to consume the art others are making. With influencers partying and wealth reliant on public spectacle, Adéla navigates the frustration of just wanting to ‘go’, to get creating and make her dreams happen. Everyone partying and calling it networking, talking about the art they want to make but not putting in the hours actually making it. As Elliot muses -’This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.’ Just like there are too many Djs and not enough people wanting to dance, I guess you can also say, there are too many writers and not enough people wanting to read. The chorus is brash, abrasive and in your face- ‘Maybe, I’ll just chase forever’ she sings.

DeathbyDevotion

A post-mortem of the all-consuming delusion needed for greatness. In her most diaristic song on the EP she contemplates the toxic relationship one can have with one’s art. As she describes in an interview no one is born great at Ballet; You can be born with the right body type of preternatural talent but you still have to work. It is unnatural, man made but at its crux looks effortless.

’My own self-deprivation
On and on, on rotation (Rotation-tation)
Suffocate my emotion
Call it death by devotion.’

Much like the rigidity of K-pop, ballet is another art form where visceral sexuality is repressed. She is restricted by the things she loves or things that will be her success. Devotion is as rotted as it is loving. I think one of the most interesting running themes on the ep is being a sexual woman but having anxiety around commodifying it. When is it no longer yours ? As the great philosopher Sasha Grey once described, we are happy to use sex to sell anything from a burger to an album but god forbid a woman talk about her own vagina. The video is a characterisation of a broken doll. A rotten rage dancing around the Ballet studio with precision and beauty. You see the blisters and the bruises as you see the perfect pirouettes.

FinallyApologizing

This song is again addressing the pile on death threats she received from the Netflix documentary. In a time of groupthink and bandwagoning, the toxicity of reddit and online forums is glaring. ‘You only get to know me parasocially’ she sings, calling out the vitriol thrown at her from people who only saw a small moment of her humanity. On KATSEYE, the group created by the documentary, despite their talent and beauty I don’t think we should be taking art featuring ‘Boba tea (gnarly), Tesla (gnarly) Fried chicken (gnarly)’ too seriously, or honestly paying any attention to it at all. But as Adéla would say ‘I’m just a girl, what do you want from me?’

It is 5 in the afternoon and I am on the bus home from work. Is 5 the evening or the afternoon? I think it really depends when your day starts and when it ends. Today feels like the end of something. I mark days by my morning coffee and my evening tea, I mark months by the colours of my nails, years by the poems I have written. I mark this year by the dust around the skirting boards in my bedroom and by the fading burn on my arm. I see the moon in the darkening blue sky; I don’t know if I have ever seen that before, or rather I have noticed it. As I my birthday approaches, I feel the smartest I have ever felt. I am unsure if it is my frontal lobe developing or years of study but I feel like I know a thing or two.

Those close to me know I always get hyper emotional when my birthday comes around & as birthdays do it tends to happen every year. I get sad about getting older but do not fear aging. When I was 17 I started a tradition where I wrote a letter to myself on my birthday to open on the next. Instead of New Years I used it as a time to reflect and sit with myself and my feelings, Say what I want to change and what I am proud of. I think in this turning around the moon I most notably stayed kind.

Turning 25 has been I think the strangest birthday. Half the people around me are getting engaged, married and having babies and the other half are snorting more ketamine than the horses. I sit somewhere strangely in the middle. I am not as focused on romantic love as I was when I was 18. I crave affection and connection I do not have with my mother but I am no longer defined by a deep longing for a man to fill that void. My friends are my family and I unbiasedly think I have the best one in the world.

I may not know much but certainly know much more than when I was 18, or even yesterday so enjoy my list!

10. Only drink when you are happy or celebrating.

Never really having that teenage drinking phase alcohol was a venture I entered into as an adult. I remember when I was freshly 18 and I went to the Astor cinema to watch a Salo or 120 Days of Sodom. I was very sad that day and I don’t think my choice of film helped. Everyone I knew was running late so I sat in the stalls surrounded by a myriad of creepy old men holding a gaze not dissimilar to the fascists in the film. I stupidly thought ordering a double feature (this is like 3 standards in one glass) red wine was a wise idea. I sipped and I sipped, anxious alone. I ended up vomiting my guts out next to the bins. I felt like a loser, wearing a coat of adulthood that did not quite fit.

Through a string of unfilling relationships, my early 20s were spent waiting around for a text or a call. I would watch hours and hours of Sex & the City or the Real Housewives on my laptop. Now I could have easily hooked it up to the TV but something about sitting upright in a chair and watching made me feel a little less guilty. Through these binge watching sessions I would drink wine like juice not quite realising how drunk I was until I had to stand up to pee. When the cancellation or disappointing message would arrive I wasn’t just sad I was blind drunk. While a drunk crying session can be theaptic, Do not use drugs or alcohol to make yourself feel better; it never works.

9. Just because they are older, doesn’t mean they are wiser.

I was blindly optimistic when I started first year university; getting out of my suburban High School bubble I thought my whole life was about to change. To an extent it did, I met lifelong friends and was reading and writing more than ever before. Yet, I was excited to meet people who were older, wiser and could guide me. I soon learnt I was sorely mistaken. Youth may be prized for its untainted light but it is taken advantage of in its hope. Be careful of people using your dreams to make themselves money. Be wary of those who take credit for your ideas because they have a name in your industry. Don't listen to the advice of just one person and make sure all contracts are in writing. It's a lovely idea to believe the best in people but ultimately misguided. Trust your gut and never let go of your instinct.

8. There is an intimacy in never talking again.

Closure is a myth; Leave the past in the past. Sleeping with them one last time will not help you get over them. Having that drink with someone that wronged you will only hurt you more. If they never listened to you when they were in your life, chances are that will not change. I ran into an ex boyfriend on the tram the day Taylor Swift got engaged. My writer's brain thought there was some mystic connection there. This was followed by an ex friend following me on Instagram.‘Something is shifting’ I said to my friend. Nothing was shifting and there was no interconnection between any of these events, I am unsure how I feel about the idea of fate and destiny but it is something I am fascinated by. I think the most beautiful love is loving someone from a far, words complicate the purity.

7. Sleeping with him will not make him fall in love with you. / Do not get back together with your High School boyfriend.

My dalliances with men could fill a novel but as Miss Swift would day ‘because it’s the worst men that I write best.’ This lesson is a simple one- situationships are not real, if the person wanted to be with you they would. Don’t listen to the ‘i’m not ready for a relationship’, ‘I am not in the right headspace’, ‘you can do so much better than me’ nonsense. They do not love you and probably never will; leave before your heart gets too broken. On that, you will not change their mind because of how good in the sack you are or how much you are a chill girl about the whole situation. Love should not be something you beg for. I am not sure if this is a me specific curse but do not go back to lovers from your youth because you are afraid you will never feel those butterflies again. Young love and first loves are sacred and best kept in the past.

6. Starving yourself is not worth it.

Battling an eating disorder for as long I acknowledged I lived in a body has eroded my quality of life. I get mad at myself for all the time wasted and the events I didn’t attend. I am learning to let go of that anger at myself. Eat well, eat good and eat enough! Focus on eating lots of vegetables (it does actually make you feel better), eat bread, eat fish and enjoy making memories around eating with your friends. Exercise should not be a punishment, rather a celebration of what your body can do.

5. Materialize the immaterial.

I do not mean this in the consumerist sense, rather I mean make malleable the love and nostalgia. Handwrite birthday cards for your friends and keep the ones you given. Take photos, print them, write the date on the back and frame them. Write down poems, love letters and angry notes. Write on the blank front page of the book you are giving away to a loved one. Keep your movie tickets and dinner receipts.

4. Loving is more important than being loved.

To be adored is merely a reflection on what people perceive they can get from you. Focus less on how others see you and more on how you see yourself. Not in a narcissistic way, in a way where you can go to sleep knowing you are a good person. Did you stand up for your friend? Were you kind to the old lady in Coles? Did someone tell you something and you actively stopped yourself from judging? Friendship isn't always even but it shouldn't be transactional. Show up in small ways by cooking meals when someone is sick and in big ways by doing things without being asked. Tell your friends you love them whenever you can and tell them when they hurt you.

3. The idea of God is not a comfort, rather a disturbing dream.

In times of great loss and uncertainty try to avoid cult-like state of affairs. Whether something as simple as organised fitness, or well meaning as a political club, to religion. To me religion and how other people use religion as a means of control has never tempered my loneliness. I was a distinctly annoying child in church. The youth leaders would tell us to raise money for the 'starving kids in Africa' ( I am aware this colonial way of thinking is deeply problematic but it was the rhetoric at the time.) I asked why did God not feed them? How did God decide that I get a roof over my head while other kids did not. I tell this story not to show how amazing of a critical thinker child I was (she really was) but to warn against the dangers of black and white thinking. Ask questions, avoid groupthink and make your own educated opinions!

2. Know when to leave the party before it leaves you.

In the literal sense I would recommend not going to that second afterparty at some random house. I would advise against blacking out in unsafe environments. In a metaphorical sense I would say learn when to let go. Don’t linger in a romantic relationship that makes you feel bad about yourself. Leave that job that has consumed your life.

1. Put everything you have into what you love.

I know it's cheesy and I know it's lame but I believe earnestness to be one of the most powerful things in a time of irony. As one of my favourite writers Ocean Vuong says- ‘vulnerability ironically is the strongest thing. It can never be destroyed’. People often ask me how I write so honestly but to me there is no other option. Build something that no one can take away, your inner musings. I romanticise my long bus journeys with wired headphones. I find great joy in the simple act of buying groceries and being able to afford a little treat.

Do you ever look at your instagram feed through the lens of a casual observer? Wondering how they would perceive you, would they think you are cool? Do you ever catch yourself walking down the street and having an out of body moment where you go to yourself- ‘I am me, I am walking, I am a thing to be observed in the world. ’ Do you hyper fixate on others' gaze? Do their glimpses and glances paint you in a good light? Do they think you are pretty? Newcomer to pop, singer Audrey Hoberts debut record ‘Who’s the Clown’ is not performing for anyone's gaze but her own.

Hobert, daughter of a screenwriter and best friends with Nepo baby Gracie Abrams would be an easy girl not root for. Rich and well connected she had the privilege of fucking around and learning how to write good songs without worrying about rent and where their next meal is coming from. There’s no embarrassing demos on Soundcloud, no Tiktok’s begging for people to stream their song on Spotify. With a budget behind the work and lots of industry support, failure seems impossible. Yet all these factors do not make the art any less good.

Hobert is the star of her own show even if no one is watching. Learning to use the tools she had in her shed she found that specificity is her power. She is a Gen Z artist pushing back on what it means to be Gen Z and I would argue the most important voice in pop right now. In a conversational tone, the album feels like listening to someone's inner monologue in a time of curation and aesthetic trends. We are more insecure than ever, more paranoid about image than we have ever been. On social media the notion that if you are the most beautiful you can possibly be you have succeeded and nothing bad will ever happen to you is being pushed. Pushing out the nonsense, Hobert is a breath of fresh air, with an expressive face in the time of filler and faces that don’t move. She poses the notion that there is more to life than being desired, there is more to life than hooking up with men who don’t even like you. The price of authenticity is rejection and right now that is a radical act.

I like to touch people

By opening the album with ‘I had a thought’ she situates the listener into the workings of her mind. The formless song lacking a classic pop chorus is an odd little number. The song sounds like a song in the ending credits of an early 2000s romcom. Although humorous, the song ruminates the real craving of touch, intimacy and something real.

Sue Me

Simply put Sue Me is a song about fucking your ex who you are not really that into anymore but you want to feel seen and be seen as attractive -‘sue me I want to be wanted’ as she says in the catchy ear worm chorus. Initially going viral on TikTok it was polarising. Most of the comments were not the contents of the song or how the song sounded but rather about her appearance in - ‘stewed tomatoes’, ‘40 year old pop star’ ,‘she’s off putting’, ‘ew’, ‘she gives me the ick’ and ‘I can’t believe she is in her twenties.’ Later songs seem to ruminate this public reaction in a very depressing display of the internet. When did art become the playground for only hot people?

Drive

Now this song is the best song for walking down the street, noise cancelling headphones and 5 messages you have left on delivered. It is extremely visceral how Hobert positions herself as both the narrator and the action. She is the person in the corner of a party alone smoking a cigarette hoping someone will come up and speak to them. No one does so she calls an Uber disappointed and a little sad. She is a conflicted voyeur; a part of her wants to be a part of the action, the other just likes to observe. ‘I don’t even want to see it in a nice light’ she sings, cementing her boredom in social settings, she can't even romanticise the mundane anymore. Previously released singles Wet hair and Bowling alley blend into each other.

Thirst Trap

Now this is one of my drunk walk home songs. I haven't had the chance to actually do that yet but I can’t wait for the day that I do. The song laments how being into someone takes over your life. You become a crazy person when you are a woman in the dating world. All you can think about is does he like me? Does he think I'm cool? Does he think I'm pretty? Am I worthy of love? ‘I used to kick back watching movies and the news but now I'm lame it’s such a shame I used to be super cool’ she says. This crush is not pure, rather a hyper fixation.

‘ I listen to my playlist and pretend I'm you, look at what I've posted and pretend I'm you.’ Now you hasn’t looked at their Instagram story from another account and pretended they were the person who it was intended for. If your answer is no you are lying. Who hasn’t made a playlist or posted a song for a specific person. She perfectly captures the Gen Z dating experience. She is a peeping tom looking in on herself. On TikTok there was a whole discourse about her not being pretty enough to be a Pop-star, I am sure she saw this and even if she hasn’t other people will. In the 1975 esqui outro she says- ‘I think I look bad, but it doesn’t matter. I read that some people’s beauty can’t be captured’ and you know what I think is very beautiful and profound. We simply spend too much time looking at ourselves through our phone.

Château

Hobert has had a very unique experience watching other people get famous and having their moment and waiting for her turn but not being sure when it will come. Yet in its specificity it reads universal. She zooms into a specific moment, you are seeing this party from her eyes. She is again being a little freak watching people- A couple arguing, people in a circle acting like they are cool. Her body is placed in the situation but her mind is looking from the outside asking her what the fuck she is doing here. People don’t particularly like the whole ‘I am smarter than everyone in this room and I don’t belong here’ stick, especially coming from someone already in with the A-list. Yet her self-deprecation makes it tolerable, even endearing. She is not into all the cool A list people but not in a pick me way just in a truthful one, she simply doesn’t fit in. She changes the melody and word vomits, it's frantic and in a way sad.

Sex and the city

‘This isn’t sex in the City, nobody’s watching me write in my room’ she opens the song with and girl I feel called out. Yet, in a sort of metanarrative they are watching when she puts the songs out in the world. The thesis statement of the album in the lyric- ‘What’s it like to be admired? Hot and desired? feels like a loving attack. Hoberts otherness is her superpower. Sometimes there isn't something specific you can say her songs are about, it's a moment, a specific feeling that you just know. The ‘rating you 5 stars’ about her Uber driver is so funny and so real. The guy she is hooking up with forgetting to give her food cause ‘he’s off his meds and he’s an artist’ needs to be said; there are so many love songs about the one but what about all the dropkicks you have to date trying to find him. Wanting something, not someone, To feel loved but not caring much about loving. ‘If this is it , what is it all for?’ she asks.

Shooting star

In a sort of New Order vibe Hobert whispers- ‘One two three bitch.’ She laments making life into little stories with an arch, a start and an ending. It is satisfying that way, easier to justify ones choices to themselves. She doesn’t paint herself in a particularly positive light here - ‘I like it the best when I'm losing baby’ she’s almost obsessed with being the weird girl.

Don’t go back to his ass

I have never quite heard a song that articulates the feeling of counselling a friend and saying your boyfriend hates you! In a stream of consciousness she lists all the hard truths the straight girls need here. ‘Oh remember when he made you feel like he wouldn’t fidget if you were dead in the ditches’ for one. In the bridge she switches from speaking to her friend to the guy who is breaking her heart. She asks him to leave her alone, saying -’i’ve got her locked in a cell, I'm screaming in her face.’ Although one of the weaker tracks on the album it proves that simplistic writing does not mean it’s lacking depth.

Phoebe

This one is my favourite on the album and yes I do almost cry every time I listen to it. It is what Olivia Rodrigo’s Pretty is Pretty wishes it was. Sorry I really hate that song and think it is really oversimple and superficial. Hobert knows in her gut she is gonna be something great, yet something as small as a guy can undo all that self confidence - ‘I guess I don’t have it after all’ she says to herself.

The lonely girl alone in her room binge watching TV with a great deal of extensional dread. ‘Cause why else would you want me? I think I’ve got a fucked up face and that thought used to haunt me til it felt in its sweet embrace.’ The song posits a resolution in a non cheesy way, which is very hard to do. ‘ Who cares if I'm pretty I feel like a whole lot she almost asks the listener. Now Imagine what the girls of today could achieve if their main concern wasn't were they fuckable. In a room of one's own, it's time to find a gaze of ones.

“Did you break-up with him because he didn’t drive ?” My friend asks.
“ I wouldn’t judge you if he did” he adds.

That was the least of his problems I think,
“ no” I reply,
“But the next guy I date will have too. ”

I have had a lot of people ask me to write about Celine Song’s second feature The Materialists (Song, 2025), from personal friends to online readers people seemed to think there was something here worthwhile for me to write about. To be quite honest to y’all I am not sure there is. The film reads as a classical rom-com that thinks it's a lot more intellectual than it actually is. I think this may be more my problem than Songs as I am not a millennial; I have never been concerned with men's height and I am not attractive enough to be considered a prize in the dating market.

The film follows Lucy, an up market matchmaker in New York City ( I do really love that the film was actually filmed in New York). Her job seems to consist of interviewing rich white people on their ideal weight, height, income, age, social values and upbringing then setting them up on a date. When attending a wedding of a former client she is hit on by a ‘unicorn’ ( a single rich man above a certain height) In the same evening she runs into her ex boyfriend whom we later find out the relationship ended due to arguments about money. The supposed love triangle between Lucy, the Pedro Pascal character and the Chris Evans character lacks stakes and chemistry. Like most things in this film the meaning is obvious and the outcome predictable. Yes the girl is going to realise that match-making is stupid and pick the poor man she has history with!

While with all rom-coms we must suspend some disbelief that a 10/10 woman earns 80k a year in New York and lives in a gorgeous spacious apartment and wears designer clothes. I am still unconvinced Dakota Johnson can act; every time she says a line it is like she is hunger-over at a script reading. I don’t believe her to be the people she portrays on screen, she is simply Dakota saying a line. I have always been of the belief that nepotism-baby actors piss me off more than nepo-baby musicians. For musicians while they definitely get a foot in the door, access to great people to work with ect but they cannot maintain success as a touring artist unless people actually connect With their music. Johnson just seems to be shoved in our faces in film after film despite her lack of talent. She is seemingly more charming on press tours promoting a project than she is in the films themselves.

To avoid the awkward after date conversion on whether there will be another Lucy meets with her clients to check in and nicely tells the others they are not interested. With 9 successful marriages under her belt, Lucy navigates unrealistic expectations, overly picky clients and straigh-up arseholes. There is a comedic scene where Lucy is getting coffee with a client who is ready to start dating ‘older women'.’ He has become sick of the early twenties women, claiming they are ‘immature’ and can’t keep up with his interests and intellect. Lucy offers a gorgeous and smart 30 something. He looks at her disgusted, ‘ I was more thinking 27’ he offers. While an indictment of men never wanting to marry women their own age, I also feel a reference to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The famous quote from Charlotte Lucas- ‘I’m 27 years old. I’ve no money and no prospects. I’m already a burden to my parents. And I’m frightened. So don’t judge me, Lizzie. Don’t you dare judge me’ seems to be still relevant today. If there is a silver lining in the Coldplay concert cheating scandal it is that CEOS can still have affairs with women not in their twenties.

A main anchor of the narrative is the discourse around mens heights. Women only want above a certain number, questioning Lucy if they are actually the height it says on paper, apparently a couple of inches can make all the difference. Now I might be living in a bubble of incredible ladies but are women really that hung up on mens height? My friend said that is a main focus with women in the 30s and 40s so maybe I am just missing this. I have often said that the three things women look for in a man aesthetically are things that cannot be changed - penis size, height, and hair and felt bad for that fact. Yet apparently you can do all three! Hair transplants have seen a significant rise, with the market projected to reach $42.5 billion by 2033. Whilst leg lengthening surgery numbers have doubled in recent years. Now it seems penis enlargement surgery is still rudimentary and only able to increase girth not length for those wondering. Now are things becoming more even between men and women when it comes to impossible beauty standards, or is simply just impossible for everyone? There is money to be made in beauty standards, let's not put money into falling in love.

I think there is a major problem in the dating scene with the idea of icks and not giving people a chance cause they held their bag weirdly or ordered a fruity cocktail in a bar. I think there needs to be discomfort momentarily when getting to know someone. You’re not shopping for qualities, picking and choosing ideal weight, height, income ect; Dating needs to be fun again! I feel like when dating I am constantly asking myself, do they like me ? I think this is the year of asking if I like them. Do they make me feel good because they are actively trying to, or rather what I project onto them. Now I don’t know what the film has to say about all that but that’s what got me thinking about it.

You know I don’t think there is anything wrong with a woman wanting a nice meal for their 5 year anniversary and I don’t think that’s materialistic. The supposed deadbeat Chris Evans character is presented as both a loser and of high moral standing. Yes the man lives in a sharehouse with used condoms on the floor and works for a catering business but that does not mean he is a dud. Working hard in whatever job and having bigger dreams is an attractive quality. Lucy goes to his shitty play and he drops everything for her when she's upset, if that's not love i don't know what is.

In a dramatic tone shift Lucy learns that a woman was sexually assaulted on a date she set up. This inclusion of a sexual assault storyline felt so jarring and not in a good way; I asked myself was this necessary? Is this the byproduct of post Metoo cinema? If so, I do not like it. The woman is introduced earlier in the film as desperate for love. Described as fat and old (she is neither of those) she is presented as wanting to date above her means. Lucy's boss at the match-making agency says this is a regular occurrence and that it is not Lucy's fault. Wow you know that for women dating is not just shopping around but rather putting oneself into dangerous scenarios on the off chance of love. While it is not her fault, only the fault of the man who raped her it feels strange to include this in a film that was marketed as a rom-com. As someone who works at a cinema I get a first-hand glimpse into audience reactions to a film and well.. this one was hated. Yes it contributes to Lucy's arch of realising the flawed nature of the matching-making service but to me it seemed to be saying that you don’t date above your number or you put yourself in a risky situation.

I think what a lot of straight men in the modern world do not understand is that to be seen is to be understood. To be in love is not by looking at a prize you won, rather the woman you kept. As long as you can pay your own rent and take your girlfriend for dinner every now and then we are happy. Little simple things such as bringing her a coffee in the morning , buying her flowers on a random Tuesday and remembering her favourite movie go a long way. I think the film simplifies love as well as overcomplicates it. When you know you know and anything else is superfluous.

Thursday night, I had just worked a short shift with a long ride home. Blessed with an expensive bottle of champagne left over from an event I am giddy to sink my teeth into Virgin, the new album by Lorde. House to myself I pace around the kitchen, forgetting how quickly bubbles go to my head. My good headphones have recently broken so I am stuck with my cheap Sony ones, that’s okay though, new albums by my favourite artists always make me feel lavish. Shaking ass to crying on the tiled floor, Lorde’s albums always come at exactly the right time, perfectly mirroring my life.

With such a visceral first reaction to record I wanted to write about it as soon as I could but later decided to sit with it, digesting the soundscape. From the grotesque to the sublime, Virgin delves into the plight of being a grown-up but still feeling your teenage angst.

Hammer

The album's opener is, as Lorde describes, ‘an ode to horniness’, revelling in the sanctuary of the unknown. The sparse and industrial production is sparse but by no means lacking. The lyrics ask the important femme question in a moment of lust, are they hot or am I just ovulating? ‘I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers’ she exclaims, a foreign concept for Lorde. She tends to go away for years and live her life and then come back with an album and a self pronounced new way to live her life and tell her audience about it. While it felt disingenuous on Solar Power, Virgin thrives in the rumination of the uncharted.

In her Rolling Stone cover story, she talks about combating her stage fright though Shrooms and MDMA therapy , this not particularly relatable to the average person and veers into cooky artist mode. She has marked her albums by the substance she was using at the time of making the record- Pure Heroine shaped by alcohol, Melodrama, MDMA, Solar Power, weed, and for Virgin, ovulation? ‘I mighta been born again’ she says on this opener; although she only has four albums in her discography, it begs the questions - how many times can you be re-birthed? How many times can you start over? Lorde seems to seek revelations whilst haunted by her past self.

Shapeshifter

From throwing her ‘cellar device into the ocean’ on her last album to ‘all the metal’ that she’s messaged, ‘all the people’ that she’s slept with, Lorde ruminates the mimicry in her relationships and in her identity. She speaks of trying on gendered archetypes in straight relationships - ‘the ball and chain’, ‘the prize’, ‘the flame’ and the ‘fruit that leaves a stain.’ By playing these roles in sexual and romantic relationships, Lorde’s identity persists as unfixed. Through the vocal delivery and repetition of ‘not affected’ it alludes to the opposite effect, that for her shapeshifting is as tiring as it is natural. She is wanting to be reckless like a man but tied down by the weight of performed and innate femininity.

By ‘giving nothing personal’ she melds and moulds with hands all over her body, this is deeply resonant. I can always make myself the dream girl the man I am dating wants. It’s less about his validation and more about the triumph I feel when I have mastered the part; the actress in the leading role in his life. The cigarette smoking girl who loves The Strokes, the kinky e-girl, the unassuming intellectual, the blonde poet who sees you as a muse, the skinny red scare girl who will laugh at your offensive jokes and the girl that takes the punch and the broken dresser. Is that real love? Is sex with only one party orgasming count on your body count?

Favourite Daughter

This song embodies the overly ambitious and deeply misunderstood daughter, the perfectionist daughter who is never allowed to look at the scale. Lorde speaks to her father, stating that she breaks her back ‘just to so that you’ll say i’m a star.’ Through the gasping vocal she interrogates different versions of herself together. In every family home is there a room we can't go into? When we grow up too soon, do we revert back to adolescence with fervent hands? I was never the smart daughter or the favourite daughter, rather a stain on the family. I think once you are no longer a teenage girl where validation can come from academic success you just want your parents to think you’re good, that you’re learnt what they have told you and gone out into the world. Without ever being told I am loved or encouraged, it is very hard to even conceptualise my parents being proud.

Current Affairs

I love love love this song, a perfect song for the girls who are weird with intimacy. ‘Girl your pussy so good, it grips me good’ is on repeat in my house! She can cringe but you cannot make fun of her because she is earnest, a rarity in this day and age. The metallic sounding track pulls you in instantly. The line - ‘You tasted my underwear’ is as jarring as it is soft. There is an a lot of invoking her mother when she is talking about sex, particularly in the yearning sense. Why does she think of her parents when she thinks of sex? Is it simply a want for understanding, an understanding on whether her mother felt things as intensely as she does?

Before the album's release, quite frankly Lorde was pissing me off. I think she is one of those artists where we should let the art do the talking and take away the mic when the nonsense starts. The discussion of the Pamela Anderson sex tape in the Rolling Stone interview was when she was really losing me. ‘I found it so beautiful. And maybe that’s fucked up that I watched it, but I saw two people who were in love with each other and there was this purity.’ She references that in this and I just feel like what was one of the first instances of revenge porn which Anderson herself as a ‘violation’ is not the best example of sexual yearning but maybe it reflective of the messiness of human sexuality.

Clear blue

The title, a brand name for a pregnancy test is almost an interlude but more a spoken word poem. Through use of a vocoder she seems to be talking about a sense of freedom that comes from unprotected sex; I don’t know about all that. Maybe more what she means is the freeing from what she views as restraints on raw pleasure, that the possibility of getting pregnant makes her feel like she is living on the edge. ‘There’s broken blood in, it passed through my mother, from her mother, down to me’ , again there is a lot of invoking her mother on songs about sex! Maybe not all mothers impart a sense of shame onto their daughters.

Again in the Rolling Stone piece she says ‘I felt like stopping taking my birth control, I had cut some sort of cord between myself and regulated femininity’ , while I understand what she is saying it ventures eerily to close to the right-wing rhetoric around birth control- that is disconnects you from you real self, your inner goddess. Now talking not really about Lorde, this generation tends to spend a lot of time talking about sex, intellectualising it and politicizing it rather than having it, I am definitely guilty of this.

GRWN

The title meaning grown woman not get ready with me, for me is the weakest track on the record. I fear it is too on the nose nature and simplistic in its ideas. The line in the chorus- ‘Grown woman in a baby tee’ is a little cringe and quite reductive. The talk of wide hips and her mothers trauma doesn’t really land on anything other than reiterating the point that she is now a woman not a teenager! Yet I am invested in the idea that the same body that was precocious and fearless when you were a child is the same body you are in today.

Man of the year

At first I wasn't officially sure what it was about but I was certain it wasn't the TikTok edits showing loser boyfriends. When questioned about her gender identity Lorde said- ‘she wants to talk about it more but not today’ exemplifying half thoughts of the album roll out. Like many pop stars do she is trying on the aesthetics of fluidity, yet still using masculinity and femininity in defining absolutes. I don’t know if putting duct tape on your chest and wearing baggy jeans is revolutionary ; gender is not just an artistic vibe. Transgender and non-binary people face deep discrimination, just look at what is happening in America, what just happened in Scotland a couple of months ago. Is this androgynous ( i will not say non-binary) as she has not announced this) nature a privilege for the skinny and flat chested?

‘Broken Glass’

In a previous essay I stated that ‘Lorde understands that a big part of Brat summer is about trying not to be anorexic anymore’ so I guess I kind of predicted this song. While I never would speculate, I was concerned with how she was talking about ed in the Rolling Stone article. ‘i’m looking at pictures afterwards and feeling deep loathing at the sight of my beautiful, tiny tummy’ she says and I felt it to be still romanticising. To be truly free of the shackles one must make the ritual un-romantic

Yet on Broken Glass, she proved me wrong, as she laments ‘a summer getting lost in math.’ On this song, the probably most conventional pop song on the album, Lorde does what so few will admit, she gives voice to how good eating disorders can feel; The rush, the ritual, the superstitions, the rules, the sense of control. A secret you keep but is spoken back to you in deficiency. The title mirrors the old wives tale of bad luck when you break a mirror, like opening an umbrella inside. The song perfectly captures the way it monopolizes your life. She sings ‘I hate to admit’ just how much of her time and energy, that ‘cried herself to sleep about that’, ‘cheated’ and ‘rotted teeth’, she competed with others, lost sex drive.

Recently I have seen a lot of people making eating disorders political and while there are some political undercurrents in the rise of eating disorders, singular experience is just that, single and of self. When I was at my most unwell in late High School and early University, my mother would say what I was doing was ‘un-feminist.’ She would adamantly critique the supposed male gaze I was trying to strive validation for. She didn’t seem to understand that although there was a competitive undercurrent with other women, for once in my life, male validation was the last thing on my mind.

David

From ‘ I should’ve know when your favourite record was the same was the same as my fathers’ on Solar Power to ‘I made you god cause it was all I know how to do’ , well damn. That is what dating older men can do I am afraid. Lorde met her long term boyfriend when she was signed to his label and he was 17 years her senior. I am not here to critique or interrogate her private life but wow this song hits like a tonne of bricks. Potentially referencing the Michelangelo quote - ‘I removed everything that was not David’, Lorde removes everything that she does not feel is her true self. The way the line- ‘I don't belong to anyone’ is delivered makes me want to cry every time I hear it. Through an album of half finished points, the line feels like an assent-ion, a freeing revelation, a floating up into the abyss.

Now from this it might seem like a being overly critical, I am not. I LOVE this album and I love Lorde and it is the best art that starts conversations and discourses and sometimes, disagreements.

Well well well… waking up on a sunny yet icy morning to another Sabrina Carpenter discourse. Yawn! Women all over the internet were shocked at the ‘degrading’ album cover, claiming Carpenter is setting women back 50 years. Maybe FKA Twigs wasn’t just being annoying when she asked ‘Where are the thinkers?’ Are people too dumb to engage with irony anymore? Or is it just simply easier to jump on a bandwagon than to think critically, particularly when it comes to women.

I have seen people comparing Carpenter to Bonnie Blue, submitting to misogyny and male violence; yet the only thing these two ladies have in common are incredible blowouts. Sabrina unabashedly and consensually submits to the male gaze. Unsettling the post-#Metoo visual culture instead of submitting to the new age of prudishness and queer baiting. Think the 2009 Rolling Stone photoshoot of Blake Lively and Leighton Meester seductively licking ice cream, or the 2003 Gucci powerhouse advertisement where the female model lies across a man's lap ready for a spanking. It's horny, it's in your face and most importantly its staring conversations. The album cover image straight out of a 1950s marketing campaign is purposeful and direct. Is it a little degrading? Well yes! but that doesn't make it any less good.

In a time of hyper-conservatisim and hyper-sexualisation Carpenter and her team are expertly utilising the divisive nature of the internet and the positives of virality to generate hype and streams. She knows she cannot win the culture war (nor should be on one woman to do so) but she can make some big bucks. Just last week she was criticised for ‘man-bashing’ during mens mental health week for comparing men to pigs in a music video. This week she is making feminists angry. She is simultaneously critiqued for being too man hating while also vilified for appealing too much to the male gaze. While I stand by my previous argument that the female gaze does not exist. Sabrina seems to be cooking up something really interesting here. A mediation on objectification as a means, not a means to an end. At 25 she knows one of life’s most important lessons for a young woman- male validation is more powerful than love.

Carpenter’s newly announced new album titled ‘Mans Best Friend’ is as hilarious as it is clever. With her mainstream success after smash hit ‘Expresso’ and gorgeous pinup look, her palatability is at an all time high. Just like the pig comparison in the ‘Manchild’ video, she is acutely aware that men are dogs and they treat us like bitches. The satire of the man's best friend denotes the tendency for men to see women as ever adoring pets and possessions rather than a fully actualised person. Men want a docile dog that relies on them. Yet they will just as easily call you a ‘bitch’ as they will say ‘I love you.’

Can you make a statement about objectification without being objectified in the process? Well no. Most men seeing these images will not be thinking about the underlying cultural discourse critiquing their gaze, they will simply go -‘she’s hot’ or ‘she’s fuckable.’ There is an interesting debate to be had between intention vs effect. You may intend for your work to be perceived with the message you put into it but that is just not always the case, especially when it comes to mainstream pop and the packaging of a female singer.

As for the women critiquing Miss Sabrina and her declaration of her slavish devotion to men or comparing it to a humiliation ritual I think it’s time to re-read Lana Del Rey’s Question For Culture. Rey’s iconic and controversial instagram post becomes more and more relevant each year. As a woman tapped in and a part of the cultural zeitgeist she acutely understands the revenant critique thrown at female artists. She writes- ‘I think it's pathetic that my minor lyrical exploration detailing my sometimes submissive or passive roles in my relationships has often made people say I've set women back hundreds of years.’ The same slight thrown back at Sabrina exposes that the culture is still too scared of complex women. By simply putting women in boxes of slut and whore or prudish and virginal or too feminist or not feminist enough we undermine the complexities of the dynamics between men and women.

Everything in the music video for the lead single ‘Manchild’ seems to be a bait and switch. Sabrina is known for her flirty tongue in cheek humour, most notably on her song ‘15 minutes’ where she uses a double entendre of quick pleasure and her fifteen minutes of fame. She has proved herself as acutely self aware about how people perceive her. Here, it seems to be even more conspicuous to the viewer. The images in the video blatantly contradict the lyrics of what she is singing.

The music video is like a trailer for an indie movie we will never see. From the very first shot it establishes Sabrina's relationships with men. The flightful bird (Sabrina) sits on top of the turtle (men) and is enviably slowed down as a result. She must attach herself to these men to get anywhere, even if it is at a snail pace. The very next shot is Sabrina hitchhiking in very short denim shorts and a white shirt tied up to show her midriff. She is using her sexuality to use men to get where she wants to go. -“I swear they chose me I’m not choosing them” the song goes, yet in the video she is choosing the men, picking them up like stray dogs and ditching them when a cuter one comes along.

After one fails she starts the cycle all over. Whilst singing “ why you always come running to me” she runs after these men, smoking a cigarette with a fork. The video ends with her getting out of one car only to get into another. She has fallen victim but she is not a victim. Why do we hate women more for romanising abuse than the men that abuse them? As Lana would say, maybe women can be glamorous people who just live a glamorous life in every facet.

Just following the Sydney Sweeney soap debacle it’s time to start making fun of these men that objectify us. If men are going to keep calling us bitches let’s start asking like one!

Laying wool blankets over wool blankets. Winter teased us before a fleeting summer reprise. The chill is here; yet Autumn is still haunting my street. Yellow leaves hang on by a thread on the trees outside my window. Crunch crunch, crunchy leaves underneath my feet on my way to the bus stop. I want to chop off all my hair. I want to go auburn. I want to grow it out until it reaches my butt. I want hair like Jane Birkin. Blonde feels like a past life. Dictating stages not through ages but through image. The way I present my art is making me obsessed with images. We create an image through taste and consumer products. Art is becoming a test of morality and parties are a test to see how you can still show your breasts without freezing half to death.

I hate how I look and it seems to affect everything in my own little world. I don't go to parties because I don't want to be perceived, not just yet; not until my image is curated into something I feel represents me. I want to feel like a participant in my own life. I feel like I am floating between two states of stasis, one where I look in the mirror and I go ‘oh’ that’s me, I am a person. A person who can brush their hair, get up, go to work and talk to people. People register my existence and form opinions of me, I might even mean something to some. That’s me. I exist. It's not all just in my head. I am not just a merging of images and tastes and interests. My actions need to feel more meaningful than my image. The other is when the fatigue wraps around me like a wool blanket on a chilly night; yet not in the warm and fuzzy kind of way but in the way where my head is floating in a cloud of fog. Where attempts at articulating thoughts are like the children’s book ‘The Dog that ate the Alphabet Soup’ and miscellaneous letters drift above head.

We fall in love on a random Tuesday in the Summer while trimming our toenails together and fall out of love on an Autumn Friday at a house party. We go to parties to chain smoke and talk about the projects we are doing to seem successful and cool. We go to art openings to drink $5 wine and talk about the Melbourne arts scene. We go to an expensive wine bar to take photos and we go to house parties to talk to the same people we always do. Nobody is falling in love anymore because there are no house parties. No one is having house parties because we are too tired and burdened by economic stressors. No one is falling in love anymore because we are so concerned with image.

I once met a lover at a lesbian nun themed house party and sadly they were a man. I came alone from work with a big box of popcorn, a bottle of cheap red and an expensive red lipstick on my lips. Searching around the kitchen of this foreign house I was unable to locate a glass. He asked me for a cigarette. I didn’t have any so my friend gave him one. He asked for a lighter and pulled one with a naked lady on it out of my pocket. I watched him. He didn’t inhale the smoke and tried to stifle a cough. I think he just wanted an excuse to talk to me; later my suspicions were found out to be correct. I think you should be smoking a cigarette cause you are addicted to nicotine not because it will be a cool photo on your instagram.

I saw a Tiktok critiquing my problematic fave Lena Dunham. The woman in the video critiques Dunham, stating that she is only writes from her own perspective. I think when it comes to making art it is the time to be inherently selfish and come from our own experience. We cannot predict what people take from the work, how they perceive us nor should we. While we cannot create art in a vacuum, art is inherently self serving. Once one becomes caught up in the notion of having the correct image, one loses their authenticity.

I do not want to live a toothless life. A life where I lose my teeth but never really bite into anything. I brush my teeth religiously, three times at least. My mum always told me how important teeth are, how expensive they are to fix and how much they reflect your overall health. An ex of mine recounted that this is a form of OCD, ‘I just want something I can control’ I replied, fully aware of the irony here. For the record I do not have OCD but I am obsessive. I am what I would describe as domestically obsessive. I cannot sleep unless all the dishes are done and the kitchen is clean. I like my food separated on my plate and I like my morning coffee in my clear orange mug. This week I have decided to stop rotting around in my brick house, obsessing about the sink and the bathroom mirror. I am going to be happy! Even if that means dying trying. Gosh sorry that sounds dramatic but you get the idea.

I have been unable to write an essay for about a month now. Already breaking my essay a week New Years resolution it would seem my recent academic disappointment has affected my self esteem more than I initially thought. I am angry with myself. Why do I spend so much time writing into the void? I thought this year I would write a thesis and find a sense of purpose in the world of academia. Instead I am only partially employed and unable to find a second job. I should be using my free time to write and try and fulfil my dream of having a published poetry collection but instead I am writing essays? No one wants another cultural critique. I deep clean my house and apply for jobs I never hear from. I am a loser losing the race that I set for myself. I need to find my love for writing again.

In primary school we were instructed to write short stories. I have a vague memory of writing about Autumn leaves and their colour changing coinciding with the feelings of two female friends. As their friendship fell apart and winter came, rotted autumn leaves were their only reminder of brighter times. My favourite teacher was a little concerned with the story, citing its ‘maturity’, My child self was confused, thinking this should have been a good thing. Despite her initial reservation she ended up reading the story to the class. I was embarrassed. I never thought of myself as particularly bright and was scared that the other kids would think my story was stupid. Honestly I don’t actually remember the reaction to the story, I doubt there was probably any. It made me realise that I had something powerful, that I could write for my own satisfaction. I was too young to realise that to actually make money you needed an audience but it was wholesome, pure. While I enjoyed writing stories I never felt like I had anything interesting enough to say. Even as a child I knew my life was mundane. I do not mean that in a derogatory sense, but I was your typical middle class girl who loved Taylor Swift and Barbie dolls. I soon learnt that my skill was small fragments of description and image so poetry was the logical next step.

A poem from when I was 8 or 9. I apparently could not spell or draw very well. However I could always spell beautiful and raspberry as my mum lost them in a spelling bee when she was young so she drilled them into me.

At the the end of this post you will find poems. The first two I wrote over the past two weeks as I have returned to my main art practise. Following you will find other poems I have written. I want my substack to reflect who I am as a writer so now you can get to know me as a poet first, and everything else second.

CBF xx

You shaved your head in a non-white supremacist way!

I let 6am come,

I have living to do.

I let 12am leave,

I have sleeping to do.

Falling asleep in a bed of nettle -

First thing I do in the morning is turn on the kettle.

I am adding veggies into random meals & making conversations with strangers.

I am turning into my mother,

It’s nice.

The great thing about watching old movies over and over again

Is that the actors never age!

Characters never evolve past the credits & bad decisions are submerged in beautiful lighting.

Apologies are useless when they are behind the times.

I feel like my bones are burning,

My legs are turning into antlers.

Dragging out these endings -

We only get one chance to properly say goodbye.

I cry to Oscar speeches/ perfectly cut peaches

Foggy mirrors & faded memories-

I am stranded in the what ifs.

February rain, cherries off from December.

Do I dance in your head ?

I listened to Red when I was 12 and I learnt more than I did in school.

I have never seen the last episode of Sex and the City or Succession or Hannibal or really any of my other favourite TV shows. I don’t like endings. They overwhelm me. It's not just that they make me sad, it is like they eat me whole. My head feels heavy yet airy. I feel like running as much as I feel like rolling up into a ball, whispering to myself that everything will stay the same.

I think what I actually find upsetting is the idea that things could happen and then then don’t; mourning the question and never getting the answer. Roads not taken, mistaken stumblings down different paths. I hate this idea but I am obsessed with it.

The Way I Played with Barbies.


 My Barbies had a wooden house my mother found at a church fate. The rooms & the doorways were too small for dolls

So, I had to imagine them there. 

They had handmade clothes,

Made with notes of endearment. My mother & were attached to those dresses,

I fear in my dolls closet was the closest we will ever be. 

Yes, they would kiss,

Yes, they would scissor

but they had a safe homeIt was quiet and impartial.

My mother called me a harlot for wanting to be blonde. Why would she do that?She let me play with Barbie dolls.

The Nail Salon. 

I am at the nail salon and the woman asks

'what colour?'

I am at the nail salon and woman asks

'shorter?'

I am at the nail salon and the woman

shaves away past hues.

I am at the nail salon thinking about

Ted Hughes.

I am leaving the nail salon dreaming

about you.

I am leaving the nail salon attempting

to not feel blue.

I am leaving the nail salon admiring the view.

The sun is shining and my hair looks golden.

The sun is shining and I spot an ex lover's holden.

The sun is shining and will take my bones out with

somebody new.

Every few weeks I am back at the nail salon.

Cataloging colours with lovers,

Looking at my hands and thinking about my mother.

Today feels like yesterday & tomorrow feels like today.

It is what it is until it isn’t

Until it isn’t anything at all.

The dust on the windowpanes doesn’t bother me anymore,

It pains me to say I am too tired to open the front door.

Where there once was a home -

Is now just echoes & long sighs

Stretching across dry grass.

A modern

American Gothic

Under yesterday’s sun.

The bare treetops melt into the dwindling blue-

Left over grass &

Week old bras.

Swedish Crochet on Important Holidays.

caresses

blessing

blissing

missing.

Everything is so subtle yet so bold.

I sit in the kitchen & I feel so old.

No more coming of age, I am of age -

The age where I can longer blame ancestors.

I am quite alright again...

I am going to start crocheting fig trees.

The autumn leaves

They are wet & black.

I crave to get myself back.

Is it real? Is it fake? Is it fiction?

I guess I don’t care, as long as I fit in.

Mother Dearest.

Mother!

What do you dream about when the sky goes dark?

Do you dream of larks delivering better versions of me?

Do you have nightmares about the deep blue sea?

Mother!

You are the superior ghost.

Not one of staircases & hallways

But one that haunts me always!

In

My

Head

&

In

My

Heart.

Mother!

I must tell what I see, when I roll up like a bean & dream.

I dream of the stars going out,

Falling into my hands like diamonds.

I dream of the end of all things -

The seams on the pale body ripping into a million little pieces for the world to see.

I feel haunted by the dead women on my family tree,

Their roots burrowed so far down my throat -

Gone too soon I am not allowed to choke.

They flourish twice a year, birthdays & death days -

Flowers picked from the garden & placed in vases.

It's all so morbid,

There is no forward in the foliage.

I wish there were more photographs, more stories -

We are so poor at nostalgic lament.

I love to wear lockets to feel close to you,

I love to wear turtlenecks to feel close to you

I bathe in the blue to feel close to you

I suck up the blackness to feel close to you.

Back in a Swedish apartment, the bathtub is filled to the brim.

Memories are no blessing but an etching to your name.

These afflictions!

I balance these thrills by writing fiction.

Sick as I am,

I am God,

My worshippers, my flesh wounds.

On this night -

Wake in fright!

The moon is greater than the stars.

A hopeless dawn -

A poet’s farewell.

There is no heaven, just pieces of it.