#or was an attempt at shorthand for his emotional state to emphasize his threat AS an antagonist

[fellhellion]

hey Tunes, do you know whats happening in the Miguel tag? I'm too afraid to check it out myself so thought I'll ask you.

essentially the atsv screenplay was released two or so days ago, which you can read in its entirety here, and there has been valid crirtique regarding the language utilised to describe Miguel within said screenplay, including allusions to bloodlust and the screenplay describing him as an animal twice I believe.

[bananaofswifts]

Your guide to the singer-songwriter’s surprise follow-up to Folklore.

By

CARL WILSON

When everything’s clicking for Taylor Swift, the risk is that she’s going to push it too far and overtax the public appetite. On “Mirrorball” from Folklore, she sings, with admirable self-knowledge, “I’ve never been a natural/ All I do is try, try, try.” So when I woke up yesterday to the news that at midnight she was going to repeat the trick she pulled off with Folklore in July—surprise-releasing an album of moody pop-folk songs remote-recorded in quarantine with Aaron Dessner of the National as well as her longtime producer Jack Antonoff—I was apprehensive. Would she trip back into the pattern of overexposure and backlash that happened between 1989 and Reputation?

Listening to the new Evermore, though, that doesn’t feel like such a threat. A better parallel might be to the “Side B” albums that Carly Rae Jepsen put out after both Emotion and Dedicated, springing simply out of the artist’s and her fans’ mutual enthusiasm. Or, closer to Swift’s own impulses here, publishing an author’s book of short stories soon after a successful novel. Lockdown has been a huge challenge for musicians in general, but it liberated Swift from the near-perpetual touring and publicity grind she’s been on since she was a teen, and from her sense of obligation to turn out music that revs up stadium crowds and radio programmers. Swift has always seemed most herself as the precociously talented songwriter; the pop-star side is where her try-hard, A-student awkwardness surfaces most. Quarantine came as a stretch of time to focus mainly on her maturing craft (she turns 31 on Sunday), to workshop and to woodshed. When Evermore was announced, she said that she and her collaborators—clearly mostly Dessner, who co-writes and/or co-produces all but one of these 15 songs—simply didn’t want to stop writing after Folklore.

This record further emphasizes her leap away from autobiography into songs that are either pure fictions or else lyrically symbolic in ways that don’t act as romans à clef. On Folklore, that came with the thrill of a breakthrough. Here, she fine-tunes the approach, with the result that Evermore feels like an anthology, with less of an integrated emotional throughline. But that it doesn’t feel as significant as Folklore is also its virtue. Lowered stakes offer permission to play around, to joke, to give fewer fucks—and this album definitely has the best swearing in Swift’s entire oeuvre.

Because it’s nearly all Dessner overseeing production and arrangements, there isn’t the stylistic variety that Antonoff’s greater presence brought to Folklore. However, Swift and Dessner seem to have realized that the maximalist-minimalism that dominated Folklore, with layers upon layers of restrained instrumental lines for the sake of atmosphere, was too much of a good thing. There are more breaks in the ambience on Evermore, the way there was with Folklore’s “Betty,” the countryish song that was among many listener’s favorites. But there are still moments that hazard misty lugubriousness, and perhaps with reduced reward.

Overall, people who loved Folklore will at least like Evermore too, and the minority of Swift appreciators who disapproved may even warm up to more of the sounds here. I considered doing a track-by-track comparison between the two albums, but that seemed a smidgen pathological. Instead, here is a blatantly premature Day 1 rundown of the new songs as I hear them.

A pleasant yet forgettable starting place, “Willow” has mild “tropical house” accents that recall Ed Sheeran songs of yesteryear, as well as the prolix mixed metaphors Swift can be prone to when she’s not telling a linear story. But not too severely. I like the invitation to a prospective lover to “wreck my plans.” I’m less sure why “I come back stronger than a ’90s trend” belongs in this particular song, though it’s witty. “Willow” is more fun as a video (a direct sequel to Folklore’s “Cardigan” video) than as a lead track, but I’m not mad at it here either.

Written with “William Bowery”—the pseudonym of Swift’s boyfriend Joe Alwyn, as she’s recently confirmed—this is the first of the full story songs on Evermore, in this case a woman describing having walked away from her partner on the night he planned to propose. The music is a little floaty and non-propulsive, but the tale is well painted, with Swift’s protagonist willingly taking the blame for her beau’s heartbreak and shrugging off the fury of his family and friends—“she would have made such a lovely bride/ too bad she’s fucked in the head.” Swift sticks to her most habitual vocal cadences, but not much here goes to waste. Except, that is, for the title phrase, which doesn’t feel like it adds anything substantial. (Unless the protagonist was drunk?) I do love the little throwaway piano filigree Dessner plays as a tag on the end.

This is the sole track Antonoff co-wrote and produced, and it’s where a subdued take on the spirit of 1989-style pop resurges with necessary energy. Swift is singing about having a crush on someone who’s too attractive, too in-demand, and relishing the fantasy but also enjoying passing it up. It includes some prime Swiftian details, like, “With my Eagles t-shirt hanging from your door,” or, “At dinner parties I call you out on your contrarian shit.” The line about this thirst trap’s “hair falling into place like dominos” I find much harder to picture.

This is where I really snapped to attention. After a few earlier attempts, Swift has finally written her great Christmas song, one to stand alongside “New Year’s Day” in her holiday canon. And it’s especially a great one for 2020, full of things none of us ought to do this year—go home to visit our parents, hook up with an ex, spend the weekend in their bedroom and their truck, then break their hearts again when we leave. But it’s done with sincere yuletide affection to “the only soul who can tell which smiles I’m faking,” and “the warmest bed I’ve ever known.” All the better, we get to revisit these characters later on the album.

On first listen, I found this one of the draggiest Dressner compositions on the record. Swift locates a specific emotional state recognizably and poignantly in this song about a woman trapped (or, she wonders, maybe not trapped?) in a relationship with an emotionally withholding, unappreciative man. But the static keyboard chord patterns and the wandering melody that might be meant to evoke a sense of disappointment and numbness risk yielding numbing and disappointing music. Still, it’s growing on me.

Featuring two members of Haim—and featuring a character named after one of them, Este—“No Body, No Crime” is a straight-up contemporary country song, specifically a twist on and tribute to the wronged-woman vengeance songs that were so popular more than a decade ago, and even more specifically “Before He Cheats,” the 2006 smash by Carrie Underwood, of which it’s a near musical clone, just downshifted a few gears. Swift’s intricate variation on the model is that the singer of the song isn’t wreaking revenge on her own husband, but on her best friend’s husband, and framing the husband’s mistress for the murder. It’s delicious, except that Swift commits the capital offence of underusing the Haim sisters purely as background singers, aside from one spoken interjection from Danielle.

This one has some of the same issues as “Tolerate It,” in that it lags too much for too long, but I did find more to focus on musically here. Lyrically and vocally, it gets the mixed emotions of a relatively amicable divorce awfully damned right, if I may speak from painfully direct experience.

This is the song sung from the POV of the small-town lover that the ambitious L.A. actress from “Tis the Damn Season”—Dorothea, it turns out—has left behind in, it turns out, Tupelo. Probably some years past that Xmas tryst, when the old flame finally has made it. “A tiny screen’s the only place I see you now,” he sings, but adds that she’s welcome back anytime: “If you’re ever tired of being known/ For who you know/ You know that you’ll always know me.” It’s produced and arranged with a welcome lack of fuss. Swift hauls out her old high-school-romance-songs vocal tone to reminisce about “skipping the prom/ just to piss off your mom,” very much in the vein of Folklore’s teen-love-triangle trilogy.

A duet with Dessner’s baritone-voiced bandmate in the National, Matt Berninger, “Coney Island” suffers from the most convoluted lyrics on Evermore (which, I wonder unkindly, might be what brought Berninger to mind?). The refrain “I’m on a beach on Coney Island, wondering where did my baby go” is a terrific tribute to classic pop, but then Swift rhymes it with “the bright lights, the merry go,” as if that’s a serviceable shorthand for merry-go-round, and says “sorry for not making you my centerfold,” as if that’s somehow a desirable relationship outcome. The comparison of the bygone affair to “the mall before the internet/ It was the one place to be” is clever but not exactly moving, and Berninger’s lines are worse. Dessner’s droning arrangement does not come to the rescue.

This song is also overrun with metaphors but mostly in an enticing, thematically fitting way, full of good Swiftian dark-fairytale grist. It’s fun to puzzle out gradually the secret that all the images are concealing—an engaged woman being drawn into a clandestine affair. And there are several very good “goddamns.”

The lyrical conceit here is great, about two gold-digging con artists whose lives of scamming are undone by their falling in love. It reminded me of the 1931 pre-Code rom-com Blonde Crazy, in which James Cagney and Joan Blondell act out a very similar storyline. And I mostly like the song, but I can’t help thinking it would come alive more if the music sounded anything like what these self-declared “cowboys” and “villains” might sing. It’s massively melancholy for the story, and Swift needs a far more winningly roguish duet partner than the snoozy Marcus Mumford. It does draw a charge from a couple of fine guitar solos, which I think are played by Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver, who will return shortly).

The drum machine comes as a refreshing novelty at this point. And while this song is mostly standard Taylor Swift torrents of romantic-conflict wordplay (full of golden gates and pedestals and dropping her swords and breaking her high heel, etc.), the pleasure comes in hearing her look back at all that and shrugging, “Long story short, it was a bad ti-i-ime,” “long story short, it was the wrong guy-uy-uy,” and finally, “long story short, I survived.” She passes along some counsel I’m sure she wishes she’d had back in the days of Reputation: “I wanna tell you not to get lost in these petty things/ Your nemeses will defeat themselves.” It’s a fairly slight song but an earned valedictory address.

Swift fan lore has it that she always sequences the real emotional bombshell as Track 5, but here it is at 13, her lucky number. It’s sung to her grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, who died when Swift was in her early teens, and it manages to be utterly personal—down to the sample of Marjorie singing opera on the outro—and simultaneously utterly evocative to anyone who’s been through such grief. The bridge, full of vivid memories and fierce regrets, is the clincher.

This electroacoustic kiss-off song, loaded up with at least a fistful of gecs if not a full 100 by Dessner and co-producers BJ Burton and James McAlister, seems to be, lyrically, one of Swift’s somewhat tedious public airings of some music-industry grudge (on which, in case you don’t get it, she does not want “closure”), but, sonically, it’s a real ear-cleaner at this point on Evermore. Why she seems to shift into a quasi-British accent for fragments of it is anyone’s guess. But I’m tickled by the line, “I’m fine with my spite and my tears and my beers and my candles.”

I’m torn about the vague imagery and vague music of the first few verses of the album’s final, title track. But when Vernon, in full multitracked upper-register Bon Iver mode, kicks in for the duet in the middle, there’s a jolt of urgency that lands the redemptive ending—whether it’s about a crisis in love or the collective crisis of the pandemic or perhaps a bit of both—and satisfyingly rounds off the album.

[engl2030018]

An Annotated Bibliography: What Toxic Masculinity Does To Health and How Do We Teach It?

Jordan Harms

Digital Annotated Bibliography

Dr. Mohrman

March 9, 2019

An Annotated Bibliography: What Toxic Masculinity Does To Health and How Do We Teach It?

Toxic masculinity has adopted many definitions. In today’s culture, toxic masculinity involves topics such as sex, violence, harassment, status and aggression. These things mask the ability for men to show weakness and emotions, and give men a label as acting “feminine.” Since it is not understood at a young age, children will never be able to understand how it could become apparent in their daily lives. Other things need to be taken into account like health issues that come along with the controversial concept of toxic masculinity.

Popular Sources:

1).Source Cited: Caroline, Gilpin, and Natalie, Proulx, “Boys to Men: Teaching and Learning About Masculinity in an Age of Change,” The New York Times,(April 12, 2018), Accessed March 04, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/learning/lesson-plans/boys-to-men-teaching-and-learning-about-masculinity-in-an-age-of-change.htmlIts

Caroline Gilpin and Natalie Prolux explain how important it is that male roles in younger boys’ lives are being called to prevent toxic masculinity. In this reading, the main focus looked into changing how boys act in the pursuit of their growing lives. Gilpin and Prolux continued to ask questions about expectations from boys at such a young age. What has been modeled to young boys to show them what it means to be a “true man?” How can boys avoid toxic masculinity further on into their lives? This source provides knowledge and guidance when asking young boys questions about their future. It challenges parents or other adults to change the way toxic masculinity is taught to young boys.

2).Source Cited: Diane, Barth, “Toxic masculinity is a terrible shorthand for a real problem plaguing men,” NBC News Think: Opinion, Analysis, Essays,(January 04, 2019), Accessed March 4, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/toxic-masculinity-terrible-shorthand-real-problem-plaguing-men-ncna957941

Everyday men struggle with the concept of toxic masculinity that causes psychological issues. This reading points out that all ideas about masculinity have all become bad. Barth really emphasizes on the health issues, mainly psychological issues, that men are facing due to toxic masculinity. The norms for masculinity are changing and have started to lay foundations to a larger audience. Men are attempting to “undo” the concept of toxic masculinity and working alongside with women. In the ready Barth gives an example of a client she was working with in the past who was three years old and was told by a teacher he was a little “fragile.” What does being fragile mean as a man? Barth incorporates a multitude of psychological issues that comes along with the concept of toxic masculinity. The behaviors that toxic masculinity presents needs to be addressed, not defined.

3). Source Cited:Kristian Berhost “The History and Health Consequences of Toxic Masculinity in the U.S.” The Medium,(January 29, 2018), Accessed March 04, 2019, https://medium.com/@kristianberhost/the-history-and-health-consequences-of-toxic-masculinity-in-the-u-s-82dfbc53f1ca

           Health is something that is very overlooked when toxic masculinity has become a popular topic for discussion. In this article, Berhost provides many statistical numbers that correspond to health issues listed in the reading. The author provides the leading causes of death in men that all surround the concept of toxic masculinity. After reading this article, the controversy of the concept of toxic masculinity isn’t only just a bad rap, it masks other underlying issues.  

4). Source Cited:Alia, E. Dastagir, “Men pay a steep prove when it comes to masculinity,” USA Today,(March 31, 2017), Accessed March 4, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/03/31/masculinity-traditional-toxic-trump-mens-rights/99830694/

Boys have been taught throughout their entire lives what it means to be a man. Gender equality has changed positively for women, but has it for boys and men? Men are aggressively working hard to teach young boys about what toxic masculinity means and how it can be changed. This article provides statistical evidence to support the idea that toxic masculinity is something that isn’t easy for men to face.

Source Cited:Alia, E. Dastagir, “Men pay a steep prove when it comes to masculinity,” USA Today,(March 31, 2017), Accessed March 4, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/03/31/masculinity-traditional-toxic-trump-mens-rights/99830694/

5). Source Cited: Samantha, Smithstein, “Toxic Masculinity: What Is It and How Do We Change It?,” Psychology Today,(October 02, 2018), Accessed March 4, 2019, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/what-the-wild-things-are/201810/toxic-masculinity-what-is-it-and-how-do-we-change-it

Psychology and teaching are two major things that need to be taken account for while discussing toxic masculinity. This reading incorporates real mean facing the challenge of toxic masculinity. Smithstein offers the telling of an individual male and his experienced living in toxic masculinity. Not all men strive to live that way and would rather be masculine, without being toxic. One major point in this reading states the act of bullying. Many children in school faces bullying everyday; majority of them being boys. This is a perfect example of how toxic masculinity is very vibrant in schools. Men are striving to educate themselves and their boys.

Academic Sources:

6).  Source Cited:Kathleen, Elliott, “Challenging Toxic Masculinity in Schools and Society,” On the Horizon, Vol. 26 Issue: 1, pg,17-22 (2018), Accessed March 4, 2019

Today, there are very obvious signs moving toward gender equality. In schools, teachers focus on addressing the advancement and empowering of women. Rarely do school focus on addressing masculinity, especially toxic masculinity. It is rare to dive into how boy are being raised in taught in their lives early on. This results in allowing toxic masculinity. The blame is being on put on how parents or guardians do not spend the time teaching their boys how to be masculine in the correct and positive way. It is very important for all educators to focus on masculinity as well as other gender inequalities.

7). Source Cited: Bryant, W. Sculos, “Who’s Afraid of ‘Toxic Masculinity,’ Class, Race, and Corporate Power,(2017), Accessed March 4, 2019

           It is important to understand the meaning of toxic masculinity. People can do this by looking in deeper to popular culture topics and relating them back to other specific topics. The author of this article mainly talks about how he tries to teach people about toxic masculinity. Reading this makes it easier for the reader to understand what toxic masculinity is. It is important that people have the knowledge to understand and teach about this topic because there is so much want for change in society today. This article asks the main question “who is afraid of toxic masculinity?’ It could be that the fear is being a man and presenting toxic masculinity or not teaching younger generations about toxic masculinity.

8).Source Cited: Tim, Lomas, “New Ways of Being a Man: “Positive” Hegemonic Masculinity in Meditation-based Communities of Practice,”

Sage Journals

, (23, Marcj 2015), Accessed March 11, 2019

           Lomas immediately describes how toxic masculinity can be very detrimental to ones health and well-being. Men take on the brutality of toxic masculinity which results in masking their true emotions. Even if men are working hard towards changing toxic masculinity, it is still present in their everyday lives. Lomas does a good job at explaining the term “hegemonic” and how toxic masculinity and the term hegemonic work together in unison. One of the main ideas relating to toxic masculinity is dominance, also meaning hegemonic. Men can change, but Lomas states that social processes can block this from happening.

9). Source Cited:Raewyn, Connell, “Masculinity Construction and Sports In Boys Education: A Framework For Thinking About The Issue,” Sports, Education, and Society,Vol. 13, No. 2 page 131-145

           Sports plays a huge role in masculinity. Boys are expected to play sports during school. If they don’t. In the reading, the author talks about how girls success is a threat to boys. If boys are successful in sports, then the boys feel as if they win. This is a perfect example of toxic masculinity is sports. Education allows for boys to show their masculinity, but doesn’t offer a clear understanding of what toxic masculinity is. It is common for boys to panic about being failures in sports. In the article, Connell states that sports is the most segregated area in schools because of dominance. Schools could apply more information to the students, specifically the ones in sports, about toxic masculinity. Not all boys want to go to school and play sports at the same time. Boys should be able to go to school and know that it is okay not to be involved in sports. Connell explicitly explains the trauma boys receive, even if they are involved in sports, during their school year. Toxic masculinity is very apparent in not only a school setting, but a sports setting as well.

10). Source Cited:Jim, Burns, “Biopolitics, Toxic Masculinities, Disavowed Histories, and Youth Radicalization,” A Journal of Social Justice,(2017) Vol. 29, page 176-183

           Burns disactivates from the term masculinity and uses the term “radicalization.” He puts into terms how children act more radical. This relates to the idea of toxic masculinity. As young boys, the idea of being masculine is greater than being yourself. Boys begin to fear feminism at a young age, so toxic masculinity becomes masked. Burns uses real world examples to explain how the youth are leaning more towards radicalization. Radicalization means people going against norms and adopting extreme political, social or religious ideas that are commonly rejected. This reading supports the idea that toxic masculinity is very present in young boys and something needs to change in education.