Eating After 'Midnights'

This week, Defector writer Kelsey McKinney published a pan of Taylor Swift's 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, titled "No Good Art Comes from Greed." In it, she adds to the pile of exhausted, mediocre reviews with some particularly barbed prose. "The Life of a Showgirl is the weakest and least interesting album Swift has ever made," she writes. "It has no heart, no purpose, no emotional core. And it is transparently clear why that is: because Swift clearly cared more about producing something—anything—that could be sold for profit than about making an album worth buying."

It is a cutting remark—a shot across the bow of the world's most omnipresent pop star. And it couldn't be further from the truth.

Assuming my Discogs collection and Apple Music library aren't lying to me, I own 13 albums of Swift's. From 2008's Fearless to 2022's Midnights, every studio release is accounted for—deluxe editions of Fearless, Speak Now, Red and 1989; non-deluxe editions of Reputation, Lover, folklore, evermore and Midnights; and, of course, the re-recorded "Taylor's Versions" of the first four I mentioned. I think I also downloaded a karaoke version of 1989 to appreciate its production. I missed her self-titled debut during my time in retail, and watched in horror as its secondary-market value increased after her estrangement from original label Big Machine. I bought Midnights at a Barnes & Noble under duress, concluding that there would be no easily accessible physical version collating all the bonus tracks from the various deluxe editions. (The "Late Night Edition" came close, offering most of the material from the digital "3am" and "'Til Dawn" editions plus an extra track—but it was only sold at the merch table for the Eras Tour.)

Such is my particular folly as a fan. The availability of Swift's full oeuvre on physical formats is a personal struggle. It's certainly nothing new: I expressed my dissatisfaction when Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter was truncated on disc, and have championed this Marc Hogan piece for NPR about the increasingly-common practice. Her release idiosyncrasies dig at me more: I've sought to collect her work because I find enough aesthetic value in it. I think she is a gifted performer with an uncanny ability to connect with people through her deeply specific lived experiences. So it bugs me when her work gets reduced to a collectible commodity—and worse, seemingly by her own doing.

The willingness of the music business to bow at the altar of product is nothing new. Generations of buyers have graduated from 78 RPM shellac to 45 RPM singles to 12" long-playing albums to cassettes to CDs to digital files with plenty of fly-by-night formats in between. I've lived through landfills worth of product, from Tooth Tunes to ringles. Even the ones we venerate the most are often, at one point or another, gimmicks. In 1964, EMI released an album literally called Beatles for Sale. Six of its tracks were covers; one was "Eight Days a Week." It had little of the forethought that came with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or Electric Ladyland or 3+3 or Thriller or Copper Blue. The label wanted you to buy it because it said "Beatles" on it. And many did!

This huckster spirit is still alive. It's there twice a year at Record Store Day events: the latest, next month, will see independent retailers enticing you with Pee-wee Herman picture discs and color vinyl variants of Seals & Crofts albums. The miracles of digital distribution have made the idea of an album even more malleable than before; many of them will sprout bonus tracks without warning. Maren Morris' latest, which I've enjoyed in the limited time I've spent with it, recently just did so weeks after its release. Surely they could have made it on the disc I bought, no?

For more than 15 years, I have reported on what I've felt was the most benign form of this kind of selling: the anniversary reissue or box set—products that hopefully feel tangible and value-added enough to part with a greater amount of money. Sometimes that's true, and sometimes a Pink Floyd reissue comes with bonus material and marbles for some fucking reason. (Perhaps it's me, hi, I'm the problem. It's me.)

When Swift released The Tortured Poets Department last year, I really started to feel a little ridiculous about her release strategies. If someone valued her songcraft (and the sanctity of physical formats) the way she ostensibly wants them to, they might have pre-ordered the album as it was originally released, then three time-released CDs each featuring an exclusive track, then would have had to go to Target on Black Friday (a practice I, a former worker there for seven years, recommend to no one) to finally physically own The Tortured Poets Department (The Anthology), the surprise double-length album that digitally dropped two hours after the original and included those three exclusive tracks among its 15. That doesn't even count the timed digital versions with their own bonus tracks.

Those familiar sideways-mouthed emojis are coming up as The Life of a Showgirl prepares for a staggering first-week sales tally, buoyed by eight vinyl and CD variants available as pre-orders and a further four just-announced CD pressings featuring two acoustic versions of songs apiece. I would hope to heaven these all get collated together in one version down the line that could be purchased by less impulsive folks (or ones less afraid of the horrors of shipping anything in and out of the country right now). But one never knows, and I think that's part of the problem. Another part is certainly that no one knows when to stop here. Where is the line? Why wasn't TTPD a double album in the first place? How many times can you pull a Doakes before someone emerges from a pile of glittery, scented record sleeves and begs for mercy?

The whys are virtually unknowable. Showgirl would still likely have a sales week to rival Adele's 25 (released in 2016 on CD, Target-exclusive deluxe CD and vinyl, while purposefully held from streaming). Swift will hover ever closer to the commercial achievements of Elvis, Presley The Beatles or Michael Jackson (who released his last studio album with four different-colored covers). She has shattered so many ceilings, one of which is that an artist in more control of their own art than any other blockbuster hitmaker can make choices as baffling as any profiteering record label.

As businesslike as Swift can be, however, I truly don't think she just shits songs out to meet a sales projection. No living artist does, I think, and to claim otherwise is needlessly cynical. Yes, the music business is a cynical one, but I think (I hope!) she has separated this part of her career from the one that values the way she connects with mass audiences and wants to keep doing so. Thus, I cannot in good faith agree with McKinney's notion that "no good art comes from greed."

And if you don't believe me, I want you to watch Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

Throughout the 1980s, Warner Bros. Pictures kept hounding director Joe Dante to consider making a sequel to Gremlins. He didn't feel he had anything new to say with the characters, so he resisted. Hollywood—no stranger to craven commercialism—would spend the rest of the decade turning out three Back to the Future films, a third Indiana Jones, a second Ghostbusters, two RoboCops and more before he finally relented, with caveats: he wanted a bigger budget, and total creative freedom.

To his surprise, Warner was hungry enough for another bite of that apple that they agreed, and so 1990 saw the release of Gremlins 2: The New Batch, less a sequel and more of an attempt to make a 3-D, celluloid version of a MAD magazine issue. The film lampoons itself and its parameters for existing multiple times, breaks the fourth wall several times, and makes such wild creative decisions that Key & Peele brilliantly got its number some 25 years later. The film did not earn its budget back, but it is unbelievably funny—almost inspirationally so, a kind of "you can do that?" joie de vivre that can, has and will fuel any 12-year-old mind for the better.

So no, it's not true that greed can't produce good art. Warner Bros. would do anything for more of that sweet, sweet Gremlins money, and we got a movie you'll never forget. Please: stop reading this and go put on Gremlins 2: The New Batch. We can think of ways to better Swift's sales strategies next time—which will, after all, be her 13th album. Something tells me we're going to need the luck.