9. Carly and Taylor: A Tale of Two Pop Girlies

What does it mean to be a popstar?

This week’s Write That Down is dedicated to my hyperfixation on pop music and two albums that show very different sides of the pop music spectrum. Before that, though, a Quickfire Round⚡️ of other things:

• Every day is just another day of being in denial about just how much climate change is fucking our world up irreversably.

• Get prepped for GE15 and check MySPRSemak for your voting details, kids.

• Andor give us even more proof that the Star Wars franchise is at its best when it’s not focusing on the Jedi and the Sith 🪐

• Chainsaw Man is visceral, imaginative, and beautifully animated—it’s got a lot of heart and I’m excited to see where else it goes 🩸

• Persona 5 is out on Xbox Game Pass, which means I no longer have any more free time for the next few months 🎮

A Tale of Two Pop Girlies 🎶

Taylor Swift is immensely talented and, at this point, she knows what she’s doing. She’s released some of the most iconic, memorable songs from the past two decades, and I am a casual fan who’s genuinely interested in what she puts out.

On her latest release Midnights 🌘 she sings—her voice always airy and drenched in reverb—atop thick, goopy, purple synths. It’s true to the middle-of-the-night vibes she’s going for, her lyrics written in silver pen on smoky purple pages. It’s cohesive, and admirably committed to its aesthetic.

There are some standout moments here. The hook in ‘Lavender Haze’ is so sticky; the entirety of ‘Anti-Hero’ is a self-deprecating bop; ‘Midnight Haze’ has some beautiful production flourishes; in ‘Bejewelled’, Taylor’s delivery of “I can still make the whole place shimmer”, well, shimmers.

In spite of that, I find myself struggling to recall a lot of the album. The purply goop spreads across the tracks like tar, and the sound of the album gets a bit lost in it. The instrumental choices that differentiate each track get drowned in it, giving the album a sort of anti-momentum that it can’t quite escape.

Still, I find myself drawn to this collection of songs more as I relisten again—maybe I can get past some of my qualms with the production because, I emphasise, there is a good album buried in here. I just wish they finished it off a little cleaner.

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Carly Rae Jepsen is immensely talented and, at this point, she knows what she’s doing. Her 2015 album E•MO•TIONmade its way onto some of the biggest music publications’ Best of the 2010s lists, for being a masterclass in modern pop music. I am unhealthily obsessed.

Her latest album The Loneliest Time ❤️ is exactly what you’d expect from her, with a little bit extra. There are the deeply cathartic synthpop holds-and-releases in ‘Surrender My Heart’ and ‘Talking To Yourself’ that somehow forge a trajectory to the hike-through-nature vibes of the more low-key ‘Western Wind’, which miraculously somehow ascends into the shimmery, glittering disco of the title track; pulling this all together is an earthy warmy

It infuses some 2020s pop sensibilities with musical sounds from the 70s and 80s, giving the record a pretty diverse musical palette that somehow manages to flow well and stay cohesive. The production, too, is impeccable.

The special sauce, though, is Carly Rae Jepsen herself. Her delivery is always earnest and true—she can be sarcastic, petty, mean or dismissive, but she’s never cynical. Pair that with her songwriting that walks the line between pop-star and singer-songwriter more gracefully than her last two outings, and you’ve got a lot of bops with a lot of surprising emotions.

‘Beach House’ is a total skip though.

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I want to be clear that I’m not pitting these two women in pop against each other. I just want to take a look at two women who make pop music, but with very different approaches.

So, that being said: what separates these two?

Taylor Swift is a whole persona. There is a mythology behind Taylor, a lore that the biggest fans know. There are theories, hidden Illuminati-style meanings behind some of her songs, little details the casual listener is sure to miss, but that the dedicated Swifties will understand.

She’s a capital-P Popstar. We know Taylor Swift, and when we engage with her music, we take part in a give-and-take of information and art, where we read what we know of her story into her art. That’s a very valid form of artistry, and I have no misgivings that Taylor is, to a very large degree, involved in her own mythmaking.

It makes her work bigger than just the work. There’s immediately a narrative stringing together each lyric, song, album. It gives us more to latch into, and makes her a massive cultural talking point. Say what you want about Taylor Swift, but she’s been wildly successful at doing this, and it’s enriched her art in a very special way.

Carly Rae Jepsen takes the opposite approach. I don’t think she wants to be a capital-P Popstar. Take a peek at her Instagram, and it looks like the feed of most 30-somethings. She seems like she lives a relatively normal life outside of touring and doing music. The music thing is her job, and a job that she seems to like, but there’s a pretty clear boundary between her life and her work.

Whether you realise it or not, that is something that makes a big difference. There’s no mythmaking behind Carly Rae Jepsen, no tabloid features on her latest partner, no scrutinisation of her lyrics to work out her personal life. There’s no discourse, no overarching story, no metanarrative to latch onto.

In a way, it means there’s less ways to engage with her work. Listening to Taylor Swift is 360° immersive experience that would make the engineers at Facebook’s Metaverse weep. Listening to Carly Rae Jepsen is a singular experience: here’s an album made by this person, enjoy.

So, while it doesn’t quite give you the all-encompassing experience of Midnights, it’s personally engaging in a very different way.