Meet me, at midnight
August 29, 2022. Scrolling through our instagram feeds, we see what is unmistakably the cover of a new Taylor Swift album. “Meet me at midnight,” she says.
You might read that as instruction. “Meet me,” she says, appointment-making.
You’d be right, to the degree that millions of us lined up like obedient little rats for our sweet piper.
But that’s not what she meant.
“Meet me,” she says, an introduction. Here I am, and you will know me.
***
Even more than her contemporaries, Taylor Swift wears each album as a costume, approaching each new release as an opportunity to play dressup. This is the girl who left the outside-Philly small town and moved to Nashville to be a country star, before expatriating to New York to be a popstar. Everybody here was someone else before, and Swift becomes a new someone for almost every new album.
I first heard the word “era” used up against an album title to describe Swift. Shortly after the release of 1989, when my curly-haired friend referred to Swift’s “Red era,” as memorialized in the poster the 1980’s carpet on the wall of her stuffy dorm room.
“Era” seemed like such an ostentatious word for something so mundane. “Eras” were how we grouped the geologic ages and the Chinese dynasties, not the way a particular artist dressed for a few years.
But then, it doesn’t take an archeologist to see the seismic shifts in Swift’s cultural footprint.
We had country girl next door Taylor; hipster Taylor; pop Taylor; bad girl Taylor; indie Taylor; whatever the heck Lover was Taylor.
These transformations were, in their time, somewhat surprising if not unexpected. Eyebrows raised as she shed the “country” in “country-pop,” but honestly it’s more jarring to go back now and look at the old Taylors.
These personas are a key part of Swift’s album rollouts. In 2014, less than a year after Beyoncé’s surprise self-titled debut album created a new “less-is-more” paradigm in record marketing, Swift found her greatest success yet organizing a tour of intimate listening parties for 1989. For reputation, she cleared her entire instagram post history (a tragedy not quite so strong as to bear comparison to the Great Library’s fiery fate) and refilling the feed with a slowly unslithering snake. Swift’s songs are all little self-contained tension engines, building and releasing the pressure just right, so of course her rollouts would be the same.
(Incidentally, it was amidst one such rollout — for a remix of a single song, no less — that I discovered I, personally, was a Taylor Swift fan. I was waiting for a math class to start, scrolling through Instagram and eagerly awaiting the next “Bad Blood” movie poster to drop, revealing another celebrity cameo in the then-upcoming music video.)
A cynical observer would identify these “eras” as marketing. They undoubtedly are. But as popular culture becomes evermore commercialized, the line between marketing and art becomes at best a vestigial organ. Lately, we’ve ditched it all together. These eras are part of the marketing, but more these eras are the art. When cottagecore Taylor shows up in her knitted jacket-sweater to sing us “Cardigan,” we’d be fools to say “no no, the art stops here.”
So, when Swift says “Meet me at midnight,” we feel a familiar feeling. Ah, what Taylor will this era bring “Meet me at midnight,” she says, but we can’t wait. Who is Midnights Taylor? Why is she making her nigh-middle-aged fans stay up so late?
***
Swift’s eras were baked right into the intro pitch for Midnights, which promised a survey of all the key eras of her life in a series of lyrical vignettes (episongs?).
A careful eye will note that this image is dark. Really dark. Swift’s head is barely supported by her hand. Something’s on her mind.
***
The morning after Midnights, friends texted their impressions. No context or explanation that, yes this is about Taylor. Just things like “it’s good” or “Yeah, man, ‘Vigilante Shit,’” or “it sounds like reputation and Lover had a baby.” I’ve been hearing that last one a lot.
You can see why. reputation, a previous concept album, focused on a Kanye-esque embracing of the id. In public, she asked to be excluded from this narrative she’d never asked to be part of. In her music, she said “if you want me to be the villain, fine. I’ll be the villain.” Songs like “I did something bad” or “Look what you made me do” see her playing in the arsonist’s mask, burning the world and finding pleasure in the misbehavior. She didn’t want to do this, remember, this is what “you” made her do.
Shades of reputation loom in songs like “Anti-hero,” where she gives voice to the insecurities telling her it’s all her fault. But: for all reputation’s projected gleeful abandon, Swift was never able to stick the landing without flinching. Is she the type to do something bad? Sure, and it’ll be the most fun she’ll ever have — but it wasn’t her doing, love made her. “They’re burning witches even if you aren’t one” — are you a witch, or aren’t you, Taylor?
There are no such breaks in “Anti-hero.” Swift stays in character as the titular anti-hero. Despite what the lyrics claim, she seems to have learned to look in the mirror and stare down her insecurities.
What’s more, reputation’s Taylor the Snake was all kayfabe. It’s all right there in the title. Swift was never the villainess, that was just her reputation. On “Anti-hero,” she actually believes it.
Scrub off all that pop gloss, ignore the misdirection. It’s all right there in the title. “It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.” She doesn’t get what we see in her.
***
Instrumentally, Midnights is almost all sanded corners, pressure-washed canvas, and glossy finish. It gives the music what some would call “that shimmering pop glisten” or “the antonoff special,” the hyper-smooth definitionless surface like moonlight on a still lake. With notably few exceptions, the only sound with any texture to it is Swift’s own voice, which visible overtop the music as big Bob Ross brush strokes. It’s somewhat familiar terratory to anyone who’s listened to reputation, or the less-rememberable tracks from Lover.
For all its superficial similarities to those other albums, listening to Midnights recalls, more than anything else, listening to The Weeknd’s House of Balloons. Both inhabit a nocturnal soundscape curated to not disturb the circadian rhythm. Occasionally, as if by naked luck, we hear in passing a muted dance beat through the window of a car, disappearing just as quickly. It’s all mellow in the midnight moon.
House of Balloons was also introduction by way of nighttime journey, with a cover similarly designed by a student of scandinavian minimalism.
“You don’t know what’s in store,” Mr. Weeknd sings in his opener. “Trust me girl, you want to be high for this.”
Swift, of course, isn’t an evil gremlin of the night (or whatever The Weeknd actually is).
“All they keep asking me,” Swift sings in her opener, “is if I’m gonna be your bride.” If she has an answer, she’s buried it in the lavender haze.
Long gone are the “Blank Space” days. She still hears the talk, who could tune it out?, but she’s no longer bothering to serve up her half of the conversation she never asked to be part of. She’s still earnest as ever, seeming to mean everything she says, but she’s stopped saying everything she means. Midnights, you see, is a patient album.
***
Patience is an odd trait in a pop album. But then, is pop really her aim?
Nothing left to prove in the world of pop songcraft, Swift (mostly) doesn’t try to craft perfect pop songs this time around. Only one song actually assembles the right pieces in the right order — “Anti-hero,” of course — but even then, it feels like that was for our benefit.
More interesting by far is “You’re on Your Own, Kid,” which is the equivalent of your ex showing up in the outfit they know is your favorite, just to show you they’ve still got it and you can’t have any.
“You’re on Your Own, Kid,” takes the same three step process that paid for her Tribeca condo (1. two tinsey, aimless verses building tension and restlessness; 2. a flashing neon billboard of a prechorus, telling you you’re almost there; and 3. sweet release in the chorus), but instead of sticking the landing with a sing-along instrumental or a fat riff, it just kinda vibes. It’s basically “I Knew You Were Trouble (Taylor’s Version)” but with the techno filed off.
What is a pop song you can’t sing along to? What are you left with, when you strip away the heavensent chorus and leave only three minutes and fourteen seconds of building tension? Well, a forward-looking tension, for one. And for two, a lot of words. Gut-punching words like:
I gave my blood, sweat, and tears for this
I hosted parties and starved my body
Like I’d be saved by a perfect kiss
The jokes weren’t funny, I took the money
My friends from home don’t know what to say
I looked around in a blood-soaked gown
And I saw something they can’t take away
’Cause there were pages turned with the bridges burned
Everything you lose is a step you take
So, make the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it
You’ve got no reason to be afraid.
No cheap tricks here. Just raw, honest words over the kind of welling music savants like Swift use to tell you the good part’s right around the corner. Taylor doesn’t need the mind-controlling pattern endorphin rush of pattern recognition to get you onboard. Maybe she did have something left to prove.
***
In Persona 4, a Japanese roleplaying game, a rumor travels the countryside. If you look at your TV at midnight on a rainy night, they say, you’ll see your true love. Like most rumors, it’s not true, but it contains truth.
You play as a city-slicker highschool kid sent to live with family in a rural town. On one rainy April midnight, you investigate the screen of your TV. You find not your true love, but a journey that introduces you to the many hidden facets of yourself you’ve been repressing. You also uncover the inner truths of your new friends at school, and do some dangerous gumshoeing through their psyches. You try on new identities, you find the real you, and you find the real them.
The imagery isn’t subtle — it’s all personas and masks and literal battles with inner-demons. The imagery isn’t subtle, but then this is a JRPG and no one plays those for their subtleties. It is, however, effective. Even those who mash through the textboxes of anime nonsense can’t help but get it.
If there is such a thing as a true self, it certainly isn’t the thing we wear on the outside, isn’t the thing we show the world. No, the self is the bit of the familiar that pokes out around the edges and the eye-holes of the masks we wear.
It can be hard to pick out the pieces of the true self, if all you have seen is a single costume, a single persona. But with patience and good timing, collect enough of these personas, inspect all the vingettes, and something starts to come together.
That’s the magic of midnight — the liminal hour when we are no longer who we were yesterday and not yet who we’ll be tomorrow. A perfect time for self-reflection.
