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Gregg said he hadn't heard anything about Harry Styles recently, was he over? No, I said, HE WAS BETWEEN CYCLES!
That's something you learn in elementary school, letting farmland lay fallow, otherwise you drain all the nutrients. Sometimes you have to go away for a while to sustain.
So on Friday, all Taylor Swift information was hosannas. Now, a handful of days later, negative feedback is slipping in. Did the album change? Not a lick!
Oh Bob, get over it. She wrote a song about you and you can't let it go. She's the biggest star in the world and you can't handle it.
But does that mean I can never comment about her again?
"Paste Magazine opted not to put a byline on its harsh review of Swift's album, citing safety concerns for the writer."
It's a RECORD! It's not Trump, it's not Gaza, but the writer of this review was afraid to attach his name.
"For some, the constant deluge that has peaked in the past year is starting to add up to a new (and previously unthinkable) feeling: Taylor Swift fatigue."
This is a business story. How do you manage a career in the 2020s?
"'It's almost like if you produce too much… too fast… in a brazen attempt to completely saturate and dominate a market rather than having something important or even halfway interesting to say… the art suffers!' Chris Murphy, a staff writer at Vanity Fair, posted on X."
"Some admonished Swift for selling so many versions of 'Poets' only to double its size after those orders were in, part of a cynically corporate rollout. (Care for the CD, vinyl or the Phantom Clear vinyl?)"
For twenty years we've heard that selling out is no longer an issue, that brand extensions are good, that you cannot oversaturate the fans. Is this true? That is the question.
What do we know about Michael Jackson? He peaked, was the biggest star in the world with "Thriller," and then he needed to stay at that level thereafter. Not only was no subsequent album as good, he labeled himself "The King of Pop" and became a caricature of himself, a punchline.
But that was in the last century.
So the hardest thing to get these days is attention. Which is why you must stay in the public eye 24/7, if you go away then you've got to make a comeback. That's been conventional wisdom. But what if you're a superstar, do the same rules apply?
Forget the music, this has been an endless sell, an incredible hype, ever since the announcement of the album on the Grammys. Could anything live up to this buildup?
Or is it just non-fans who are antagonized, who want Taylor Swift out of their feed...
Then you have Courtney Love:
"She added that Swift is 'is not important' and noted that she 'might be a safe space for girls, and she's probably the Madonna of now, but she's not interesting as an artist.'"
tinyurl.com/45x6dwfu
Can Love get away with this because she is seen as the last gasp of credibility, from an era when music still meant something, moved the culture, or is she just laughed off as a cartoon? All I know is the story is everywhere, you can't avoid it, whereas you had to dig, be a fan, to find minutiae like this in the last century.
And then you've got another Madonna lawsuit:
"Madonna Sued Again for Late Concerts: 'A Consumer's Worst Nightmare' - Plaintiffs also allege singer kept concert uncomfortably hot on purpose and that she lip-synced."
tinyurl.com/38h37ktf
How can we miss you if you never go away?
How do you manage a career in the twenty first century?
Let's be clear, Taylor Swift wrote a song about me because I believed her horrific, off-key performance at the Grammys would seriously damage her career. Turned out that I was wrong. That's what happened in the twentieth century, but not the twenty first, where we all live in separate silos and a fan forgives all faux pas.
But how about now?
People can tell if you need it. And at some point, with a certain level of success, you have to appear that you don't. The classic example being Neil Young, who peaked with "Harvest" and went on tour with a noisy rock band and played all new material. And I wish I could mention more names, but Young is just about the only one who's been willing to kill his career to save it, in order to have artistic freedom.
And is it art, or is it sales? The tech bros were beloved for most of this century, now they're loathed. Public sentiment shifts.
Furthermore, most people just don't care. They're not going to listen to Taylor Swift or so much of the hyped music of today. We no longer live in a monoculture, but we're told we do by media, and if you question this...be ready for feedback, NEGATIVE FEEDBACK!
I don't care if the Swifties love the new album, buy multiple copies of vinyl... Then again, I will ask why you need more than one copy of a record, if you even have a turntable.
I don't care if Swift sells out stadiums for eternity.
But is the penumbra, which is really the majority, just sick and tired of hearing about Swift, period. This isn't a judgment of her music, but you know how it is when you keep seeing the same ad online, it drives you crazy, are people just sick of being bombarded with info on Taylor Swift?
Many are. And it's not that they're haters. Hell, in the old days most people did not have a voice, there was no internet, never mind no social media. And if you express your opinion do you have to worry about your safety, online or in real life?
This is not about Swift the person, this is about marketing. We were told there were no limits, are there?
And the major labels can't break new stars so they keep pushing the old ones upon us.
And media is looking for universal stories.
Can there ever be too much?
I think about this each and every day. How many e-mails can I send to my list? More than one a day and I get sign-offs. Do I think about the audience and adjust to it or live by my own inner tuning fork? But if you're operating in a personal vacuum, you've got to accept the consequences. Sometimes I just want to say something, it's important to me, and I hit send knowing that some of the audience won't want to read it, others will be offended, others will tell me to stay in my lane and...
It's hard to be a saint in the city.
Then again, have you seen Bruce Springsteen's hype for his shows on TikTok? At first I thought it was brilliant. But now, he just looks like an old guy shilling. And X told me there were a lot of tickets available in Syracuse. Bruce sold out multiple stadiums back in the eighties, but that was almost forty years ago.
If you're in everybody's face all the time there's going to be fatigue.
Maybe you don't care because your fan base still supports you.
But these are all questions a manager should ask. Taylor Swift has just illustrated the issue. In a world where we've believed there can never be too much, can there be? At some point do you have to hold back?
Once again, if you have to make an artistic statement and you don't care about the consequences, that's one thing. But selling multiple versions of the same damn album on vinyl is not about art. And telling us every day you're setting records... Sometimes you just have to STFU!
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