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Welcome to Swift Notes: your weekly guide to the ever-expanding Taylor Swift multiverse
Join me in teasing apart Swift’s record-breaking, norm-shifting, joyously deranging and sometimes infuriating cultural influence in this new weekly newsletter
And while I find her project to re-record her first six albums to regain ownership over them bonkers in a great way, I think the multiple physical editions – each made attractive by the inclusion of one supposedly “exclusive” song that then inevitably becomes widely available later on – exploit her loyal fans (and the Taylor’s Versions seldom hold a torch to the originals). Photograph: Hiro Komae/AP Taylor Swift made Grammy history – and one big mistake(Slate, 5 February) The great Canadian critic Carl Wilson on Swift’s surprise mishandling of the Grammy awards: appearing to shun Céline Dion – in a rare public appearance after her diagnosis with stiff-person syndrome (also the subject of Wilson’s phenomenal book on “bad” taste) – when she collected the award for album of the year; and announcing her new album in another acceptance speech as if “she was at a shareholders’ meeting to announce her second-quarter profit projections”. Photograph: Ebru Yildiz Mdou Moctar – Funeral for Justice From a new album addressing colonial violence against Niger and the Tuareg people, the Nigerien guitarist and his band issue a rallying cry for African leaders to “retake control of your countries, rich in resources / Build them and quit sleeping” that seems to frenetically dismantle the past and tessellate a new future.
Or read this on The Guardian
