Taylor Swift's New Album?

I spent most of my life hearing pretty much anything but "just like the white-winged dove".

 

Concur!
We all fall short on the humanity stage, but Ms Swift has always appeared to me to be a 17-year-old girl trapped in a 34-year-old's body.

Ms Gaga appears to be a little more....humane if her professional relationship with Anthony Dominick Benedetto lives up to it's billing.

 

Tony had real talent. Gaga still does.

 

nope. i must not go/listen to the right places

 

Funny, I was thinking about it just the other way ... when she emerged as a teen, I thought she was writing with insight and balance far above her years.

Seems she's been catching up to herself though. She's aging at the usual rate, only the insight doesn't seem to be staying the same distance ahead. If it had been, she'd be, like, a leading literary light by now. Instead, she's now a thirtysomething writing good pop music for a thirtysomething.

And some part of her does seem to have gotten stuck in that period she felt most wronged and dissed.

 

+1
...to hear her tell it, they were both blessed by those years.

I do not often run across Ms Gaga's work in the few hours that I devote to music for music's sake - but I have a level of respect for her that all too few others of her profession share in.

 

Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff Have Reached Their Collaborative Limit — Rolling Stone

 

I somehow manage not to let Ms Swift live 'rent free' between my ears.
One of the people in my orbit who is devoted to music as an art form (rather than moneyball) said that IHHO, Swift's latest venture was a middling effort at best.
Me?
I have two much adored granddaughters, and my thinking is that I can inoculate them against the Swiftie virus in the time honoured manner.....
IYKYK.

Who knows?
My own father railed against the evils of AC/DC back in the 70s/80s - and IIRC they are still knocking it out of the park.
MAYBE NOT 'music as an art form' but they DO seem to have teeth AND tail.....the latter of which is the real tell of the tape.

My own sweet daughter calls it "classic rock."
One of life's many pleasures is to point to a Gen-Z'ers 'classic rock' T-shirts and say:
"I remember THAT concert!!! ....sorta...."

 

i have nothing against swift or her success. pop music has always been like this, but we now have social media and 4 million 'news' outlets

 

Curiosity over that idiom led me to this article, which I found kind of interesting (even though it is 22 years old and, therefore, utterly lacks any connection to Taylor Swift).

"Tail" Over "Teeth"? — Computerworld

 

One hit wonders can be described logistically as having a lot of teeth, but not much tail.
This is why armatures study tactics while professionals study logistics.

'Gittin there the firstest with the mostest' isn't a new concept whether it be a political campaign, or military.

How this does or does not apply to Ms Swift I will leave th the tender imaginations of my fellow PC'ers.

 

Analysis: There is now some public evidence that China viewed TikTok data | CNN Business

"In what appears to be a first, a former employee of ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, has outlined specific claims that the Chinese Communist Party accessed the data of TikTok users on a broad scale, and for political purposes.
In a court filing this week, the former employee of ByteDance, Yintao Yu, alleged that the CCP spied on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong in 2018 by using “backdoor” access to TikTok to identify and monitor the activists’ locations and communications."

"But Yu, who pledged under penalty of perjury that he is telling the truth, alleges he viewed access logs showing that CCP officials — whom Yu described as part of a special “committee” with dedicated physical access to ByteDance’s Beijing offices — used a so-called “god credential” to bypass any privacy protections the company may have otherwise applied to the TikTok data."

 

In China and when dealing with the CCP think of Tiananmen Square - pancake protesters after the CCP dealt with them with tanks - little different when real live Communist access data.
1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre - Wikipedia

A little more discreet these days but the same old mindset - throw a protest in China against the Rulers and see what happens.

What happened when the Chinese and North Koreans gained access to personal data and networks- think of the turmoil in US Healthcare recently.
Communist/Socialist are not fun to play with.