Cassandra

There are many things about Taylor Swift that make me question why I had to be born in this time, but nothing has yet insulted my intelligence more than her new song Cassandra. Taylor Swift thinks she’s Cassandra, of Greek myth notoriety.

Cassandra cliff’s notes: Cassandra was the daughter of the king and queen of Troy to whom the god Apollo, who had a thing for Cassandra, granted the power of prophecy but upon rejecting Apollo, he cursed her (of course); and thereafter nobody would believe anything Cassandra predicted with her prophetic abilities. Greeks, hey.

Now in the spirit of integrating my many, many past lives with this life here present, I will give you a shortened version of my previous iteration as The Taylor Swift Journalist. Years before Zionism, I was feared - FEARED - for my lack of fear when faced with the world’s most powerful perma-teenager with a guitar.

Long story short: I rejected Taylor Swift by being the one critic whose opinion she couldn’t win with the charm offensive, and she got real upset about it, and as a result of her reactions, I blew the whistle, and she attempted to curse me. I am the Swift whistleblower and I survived. You see, I didn’t start with Zionism. I have always blown the whistle because I have always had weird prophetic abilities. And when Taylor Swift came into my orbit, in true me style I decided to run and jump off a cliff the second I felt really great about my new life as a freelance writer in Los Angeles in 2015. When faced with writing a review of Swift’s biggest tour yet for 1989, I returned to a Vegas hotel room at 2am, with a 5am deadline, and a split second occurred where I thought, Maybe I should lie and say it was phenomenal. And then I remembered that she was dancing like she thought she was Beyonce, and I wrote that instead.

I wrote a mediocre review of the world’s most mediocre pop star, who was billing herself as a better performer than Michael Jackson. And I joked about what the worst was that could happen as a result of my journalistic integrity, and as bad things go, it got pretty bad so I began to put pieces together, and built a jigsaw over the course of six months. I saw something I thought was unjust (ie, my right to speak freely as a critic was being threatened by… a pop star) and I felt it my responsibility as a moral agent, and a bullshit inspector, and a predictor of far worse things to come, to expose this. So I exposed. And while I exposed, I met the true wrath of Hollywood, Icarus and the temperature of the sun that shines over the boulevard of broken dreams.

I am Cassandra, Taylor. Not you.

I’m sorry. I know this is probably the one place you come to get away from this shit, but please bear with me, because I promise you it’s all going to connect in time. So Swift, for all those who haven’t heard, has released her annual album (where is the lie?) titled THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT: THE ANTHOLOGY. (She capped that, not me). And of course every generation of girl and woman and gay man is unable to do anything but talk about it. It’s the women in their forties who I am most embarrassed for – apart from the ones who have managed to grow up. Way too many 40-something women stop the trajectory of their very normal lives the second that this Hollister WB Yeats returns, this time bearing 31 (yes, 31) new songs about love and heartbreak that all sound like lesser versions of the songs she’s been writing forever. This album is more than two hours long. You can tell that even Jack Antonoff, her producer, is bored. Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield has phoned-in his annual album review (it always “might be her best yet!” and he’s just switching out song titles by this point). And Swift herself is still going on about the Kanye/Kim Kardashian debacle, and if you really, really need me to explain to you what that controversy is/was about then this Substack post is not for you. Please move along.

Anyway, a friend of mine texted me these lyrics to Cassandra – which is allegedly about Kim and Kanye, who Swift insists she tried to warn us all about – to see what I thought. I’ll tell you what I think. I think a 30-something year-old woman should be blowing the whistle almost a decade after the fact on something much more important to the world.

[Pre Chorus]
When the first stone’s thrown, there's screamin'
In the streets, there's a raging riot
When it's "Burn the bitch,” they're shrieking
When the truth comes out, it’s quiet

[Chorus]
So, they killed Cassandra first ‘cos she feared the worst
And tried to tell the town
So they filled my cell with snakes, I regret to say
Do you believe me now?

I read these lyrics and all I can remember is a rooftop in Vegas in the spring of 2015. It was the night of the Billboard Music Awards. Ed Sheeran was throwing an afterparty at the top of the Nobu hotel. Swift was there with Scottish DJ Calvin Harris, who has the personality of a plastic spoon. She had tried to prevent me from coming to this party, so mad was she about the review I gave her the night before. But I was shadowing British upcoming pop brat Charli XCX, writing another story, and Charli had triple dared me to gatecrash the party, while sprinting up ahead of me. I succeeded, by telling the bouncer that I was with the fancy people. That works most of the time.

Charli was fully clothed and straddling me, while holding a toy sword (I think it was an accessory) and overlooking the Caesars Palace. (I’m just giving you the full picture in case you haven’t had a night like this.) Then a man tapped me on the shoulder, and told me he was from the Ellen DeGeneres show — he was the lead talent booker. “Listen,” he said. “You’re not really supposed to be up here.” Charli was laughing madly in my face. “We understand why you wrote what you did about Taylor’s show, but we’re all quite upset about it.” And that’s when the alarm bells went off in my head. We? Was Ellen’s talent booker on Swift’s payroll? What was going on? How many of the people at this party considered themselves a we with Taylor? How much of the wider entertainment industry was in a we partnership with her? My god.

After that night, piece by piece, things happened to me. I’m not going to divulge more than that. And I tried to tell the town. I wrote the investigation here. On the cover of The Sunday Times of London, a year after corroborating what I thought to be true. In private, I got DMs from other pop stars, music critics, and US media titles, but nobody would publicly stand with me, or syndicate the piece. The music press is still terrified of falling foul of her machine. Here’s a well-known title called Paste today:

As a critic, your job is to stand by your opinion. Taking a critic's name off a review to protect from blow-back is the height of cowardice. If they can't cope with death threats from fans, I wonder how they ever coped with feedback and rigorous, awful but necessary editing when they were on their way in. That's the kind of abusive shit you cut your teeth on as a rock critic. Try lasting a day at a real music magazine. OH WAIT, there aren't any left!

But this is where we’re at, culturally. So scared of rocking the boat or fanning the flames of pop fandoms that we’re putting up with, well, the kind of banal music that a generation of absolute pussies asked for by lapping it up for years.

Today my phone blew up with queries from all sorts of people who want to know - WHY. Why, my friends ask? Why do women in their forties like this high school rubbish? Why is it all anyone’s talking about? Why isn’t it very good? Why isn’t it any good at all? Why do I have to care about this cultural moment that feels cheap and shitty? Well friends, here’s why. We get the things we deserve. Swift is the lowest common denominator pop star. Her music is bland and without challenge. Your ears will barely even register that sound is happening. It’s not effortlessly good, because not enough effort was put into it. And it takes no effort to receive it. Swift considers herself in a category with Beyonce. She isn’t even in the same room as Miley Cyrus at this point. She’s so not special that she could be you, and that’s what she sells.

Her fans think they know this person who was never popular in high school and gets to be popular now, but only because she paid for it and bullied anyone who stood in her way, and then cried victim any time someone called her out. She has given a generation of women back the youth that they were denied with the speed at which we had to grow up and become “girlboss” overnight. Taylor Swift is girlboss: the musical. It’s everything that’s wrong with fake feminism. It’s a cult. It represents the deepest wounds of adults who have never grown up. And she makes billions off that solitary pain.

She can’t go away. She won’t. She’s as lonely as the people who listen to her. She’s a self-described narcissist who can’t help but sabotage the good, and cannot bear to imagine anyone usurping her. She has to constantly control her own story. As a rule of thumb I don’t compare women but if you put on Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter after attempting to get through even one-third of this Swift album, you will hear the value of evolution, of risk, of not behaving like a 13-year-old. It’s sort of gross to put them both in the same sentence but in 2015 I reviewed a Swift concert and said she was trying to dance like Beyonce and failing, and guess what? I was right.

I. Am. Cassandra. Do you believe me now?

With that said, let’s move on to one of Taylor’s best friend’s fathers…

Mohamed Hadid has been trolling Congressman Ritchie Torres by sending him racist, homophobic and bigoted direct messages on Twitter. The New York Post ran a piece on it today. He called him an “unusual Black and colourful mouth” for Israel, who was looking for a “pay day”, among many other offensive things.

The controversy blew up, and daddy Hadid was motivated to release an apology to Torres. Reader, this was the worst apology I have ever read. For a start, a man who has joint citizenship to Jordan and America, relies on his “refugee” status, of “76 years”. Mohamed hasn’t even been alive for 76 years. I wonder if Mr Hadid’s refugee status makes it harder for him to enjoy the branzino at Il Pastaio in Beverly Hills? He argues that Black and Brown people are being mistreated by America and Israel in the same breath as being a total racist to a Black man. Mohamed mate, get a grip.

I decided to read Hadid’s apology and dissect it for the first time in this video, as a request from a friend. Just a Cassandra, Cassandra-ing:

And if you want to look at it for yourself, here is the world’s worst apology:

I couldn’t help but notice the violent ongoing scenes at Columbia University’s campus this weekend as I was contemplating the fake grift of the Hadids and Swift’s endless pretense, and joining the dots. Why does everything feel so rabid, and so disingenuous? The cult behavior of fans is mirrored in the cult behavior of social justice warriors. Could it be possible that there’s an intersection going on between people who are really into certain aspects of pop culture and people who think they know about geopolitical issues? If so, that’s terrifying. If the same groups who don’t merely reward but worship fake in entertainment, are worshiping and promoting fake in the wider culture, then when does anyone get serious? Is this generation ever going to grow up, or break free from herd mentality? When hundreds of Ivy League students camp in tents on a campus for days on end, burn American flags, physically beat up visible Jews who attend the same schools as them, and claim to be doing it for social justice, you have to ask what they’re at college for? It doesn’t feel like they want to get a degree. Why do all the anti-capitalist Marxist kids go to the priciest universities in the country? How much does Yale cost a year and why are they walking around in a keffiyeh? Palestinians don’t benefit from this. And neither does the future of America.

For years, I have tried to warn the world about how stupid our society is becoming, and how without responding with bare fangs, our rights and freedoms are being eroded. Sometimes those freedoms merely extend to the right to say out loud that Taylor Swift isn’t all that. If we can’t even say that… The more I do it, the more public shame I incur, and the less people want to believe my predictions. And for that, the world has earned nothing more than an excessive amount of Taylor Swift. I hope she torments the masses with her $200 packaged vinyl and her $90,000 concert tickets for as long as it takes everyone to realize that just because TikTok says something’s right, doesn’t mean you should live by it.