Not a month before quarantine started, 
my Taylor Swift™ snake ring snapped in half. 
After anxiously twisting it on and off my finger 
for nearly two years, the silvery metal fittingly 
relented in therapy. Bulky, obnoxious and glit-
tery green — I had come to think of it as a secret 
signal (“I knew you were a Swiftie!”) and a con-
versation starter. “Oh,” I began when anyone 
asked me about it, “I’m a really big Taylor Swift 
fan.”
So it’s hard to overstate the unconscionable 
joy and sheer terror I felt Thursday morning 
when I saw that Taylor’s eighth album, folklore, 
was going to be released in less than 24 hours. 
Pre-album release rituals out the window (lis-
ten to all previous albums in consecutive order, 
wear all possible Taylor merch during release 
week, etc., etc.), all I could do was take a few 
selfies with the sepia-toned folklore™ filter on 
Instagram — and wait. 
To anyone well-versed in Taylor’s meticu-
lous release routine, folklore is an interruption. 
Her lead singles are expected to roll out three 
to four months in advance of each new album, 
which are released every two years in autumn, 
and followed by a year-and-a-half long tour. 
Right on schedule, if it wasn’t for COVID-19, I 
would have been preparing to attend LoverFest 
this week, the accompanying festival to Taylor’s 
2019 effort. 
But more explicitly, folklore is an interrup-
tion full stop. The pastel palette of Lover has 
been washed over with a melancholy gray. Sug-
ary anthemic pop replaced with atmospheric 
strings, piano and acoustic guitar. Taylor has 
always been a poet, but with a subdued back-
drop her lyrics have room to shine. While I’m 
not sure that one of the biggest pop stars in 
the world can, by definition, create something 
“alternative” or “indie,” folklore is certainly the 
closest Taylor’s ever come. With the help of The 
National member, songwriter and producer 

Aaron Dessner, and longtime collaborator Jack 
Antonoff, every song on folklore sounds like it 
could be made into a movie. The drama of love 
and loss is Taylor’s wheelhouse, but she’s never 
addressed these same themes with this kind of 
weight or maturity. 
Take “my tears ricochet” for example. Any 
Swiftie worth their salt knows the significance 
that its placement as “track five” holds — the 
fifth track of any Taylor album is its emotional 
compass. From her self-titled debut to 1989, 
they were the Big Heartbreak Songs. reputation 
broke the mold with the hopeful “Delicate,” 
clueing fans in on the fact that she and her cur-
rent boyfriend were in it for the long-haul. And 
on Lover, “The Archer” gives insight to Taylor’s 
struggle with loving herself. This time around, 
track five invites the listener to a funeral. Poten-
tially Taylor’s. 
“I didn’t have it in myself to go with grace” 
she admits, backed by ghoulish “oohs” and a 
gloomy keyboard, “‘cause when I’d fight you 
used to tell me I was brave.” If this doesn’t 
sound like your typical break-up song, it isn’t. 
When Taylor’s 15-year relationship with her 
former record label executive Scott Borchetta 
fell through last summer, she was crystal clear 
about her feelings toward him and the person 
who now owns her masters, or “stolen lulla-
bies,” Scooter Braun. In a back-and-forth made 
public online, Taylor claimed that Borchetta 
hadn’t allowed her to buy back the rights to 
her original recordings before he sold them to 
Braun, one of her career-long bullies. “my tears 
ricochet” tells the story from a ghost’s perspec-
tive. “If I’m dead to you, why are you at the 
wake?” she wonders while watching her tor-
mentor attend her burial. This kind of creativity 
is threaded throughout folklore, demonstrating 
Taylor’s talent to seamlessly weave fact and fic-
tion.

6

Thursday, July 30, 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

TV NOTEBOOK
TV NOTEBOOK

Ordinary histories

Thirteen years ago, the first episode of 
“Mad Men” aired on AMC. The show’s televi-
sion success was something of a marvel given 
its noticeably slow-paced, character-driven 
story. The legacy of the show’s accurate his-
torical aura has only increased year by year 
as audiences reflect on Don Draper’s (Jon 
Hamm) existential searching. Re-watching 
the seven-season long masterpiece in 2020 
makes us question the proportions by which 
1960s WASP culture dramatically reshaped 
notions of capital-driven success and the 
American Dream. Equally, a second look 
at “Mad Men” during the COVID-19 pan-
demic gives us pause to reflect on how liv-
ing through history can often come across as 
mundane.
“Mad Men” is one of the most delicately 
thought out historical dramas to ever grace 
television. In the twilight years of Mad 
Men’s commercial appeal, numerous copy-
cat productions sought to capitalize on the 
popularity of the 1960s aesthetic. Shows like 
“Pan-Am” and “The Playboy Club” attempted 
to glamorize the Madison Avenue lifestyle by 
replicating the ever-present misogyny that 
had been illustrated by “Mad Men” creator 
Matthew Weiner. What these shows ulti-
mately got wrong was that Mad Men’s enter-
tainment success never rested entirely on 
its nostalgic portrayals of male-dominated 
workplaces. While other producers latched 
onto surface-level images of vintage sexism, 
“Mad Men” slowly unraveled how the per-
vasive cultural ideals of the 1960s were any-
thing but fulfilling. What greatly appealed 
to audiences was the accuracy by which 
“Mad Men” showed regular Americans living 
through extraordinary historical moments in 
ordinary ways.
Throughout “Mad Men” you can often 
trace singular episodes down to a specific 
historical date from on-screen news broad-
casts or newspaper clippings. The story 
arc acts like a time machine - but not in the 
ways you’d expect. The cultural upheaval of 
the 1960s moves slowly from season to sea-
son, just as culture changes in real life. Fur-
niture styles evolve, characters grow long 
hair and mustaches, and end-credit music 
slowly makes its way from Bobby Helms to 
The Beatles. Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss, 
“Handmaid’s Tale”) eventually ditches her 
schoolgirl bangs for a fashionable bob. None 
of these changes are ever mentioned out-
right, rather, we see the passage of time and 
mindsets from a forward lens. Rarely do we 
stop to consider how consequential the 1960s 
was for American politics, art, technology 
and life as a whole.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a rare instance 
of universal historical recognition. Most of us 
can safely assume that in the future, political 
dialogues around the pandemic will take the 

shape of similar, recent historical events of 
great magnitude such as Hurricane Katrina 
or 9/11. What we won’t know, just as the 
characters in “Mad Men” don’t, is how asi-
nine our most level-headed reactions might 
seem. 
In season three’s episode “The Grown 
Ups”, John F. Kennedy is assassinated on 
the same day of Roger Sterling’s (John Slat-
tery, “Modern Love”) daughter’s wedding. 
Instead of calling off the reception, the entire 
event still occurs in full formality - albeit 
with many noticeably empty dinner tables. 
Compare this situation to the present day: 
There are those of us who are trying to re-
establish a sense of normalcy by baking bread 
from scratch or writing quarantine diaries at 
home. Others of us choose to go out to bars 
whilst bearing full knowledge of the current 
health risks and death tolls. Is it really that 
hard to believe that not every American was 
in tears on November 22, 1963? Later in the 
episode, following the death of Lee Harvey 
Oswald, Don’s wife, Betty (January Jones, 
“The Last Man on Earth”), says she wants a 
divorce. 
In the Season 7 episode “Waterloo”, the 
nation is gripped in awe by the broadcast of 
Apollo 11’s moon landing. The next day, Don 
receives word of his longtime partner and 
boss’s passing. He has a vision of his boss, 
Bert Cooper (Robert Morse, Broadway’s 
“How to Succeed”) singing “The Best Things 
In Life Are Free”, which leaves Don visibly 
emotional. After this mid-season shake-up, 
the conclusion of Don’s story leads him on a 
rocky journey that ends with him reckoning 
with his past, finally becoming fulfilled and 
possibly creating a timeless advertisement 
for Coca-Cola.
“Mad Men”’s writers suggest that it’s not 
until times of absolute historical importance 
and clarity — the “we will be talking about 
this for decades” moments — that people 
will decide to make sweeping changes in 
their lives. The moments where character 
conflicts, both internal and external, remain 
constant are where the importance of time is 
not as recognizable. Throughout the series, 
the passing of history such as the Civil Rights 
Movement or the Vietnam War is often unno-
ticeable.
The show handles prejudice of the time 
period with a similar degree of historical 
accuracy. Weiner and his writers purpose-
fully didn’t try to make their characters 
exude white saviorship, which is the pitfall 
of so many period pieces. Don Draper and 
other ad men have open dialogues regard-
ing the escalating conflict in Vietnam, and 
openly discuss their criticisms of the Civil 
Rights movement in the office, although not 
for very long.

MAXWELL BARNES 
Daily Arts Writer

The ‘lore’ of Taylor 
Swift’s new album

Read more at michigandaily.com

KATIE BEEKMAN
Daily Arts Writer

Read more at michigandaily.com

MUSIC REVIEW
MUSIC REVIEW

