Taylor Swift does not exist
by Sam Kriss (Numb at the Lodge, on Substack)
I don’t know who Sam Kriss thinks he is. Maybe he’s Genghis Kahn. Maybe he’s a rabbinical prophet. Other than that, he’s a limey music critic, ten years my junior, with a way with words.
His most recent take on Taylor Swift—one of a baker’s dozen, on this platform alone, about our global obsession with the pop star (most of which assume a tired, topical, political-interpretative stance with regard to the upcoming Super Bowl)—is the most hallucinatory analysis of American mega-celebrity since Lester Bangs consumed the fermented pharmaceuticals from Elvis Presley’s stomach lining, then channelled the dead King’s consciousness for 24 hours. In a first-draft book review never meant for publication. (Read a sample of Lester Bangs’ bizarre literary experiment, with an explainer, here.)
When it was rumored that Geraldo Rivera (“who is obviously a case of advanced ringworm it’s just impossible to say whose”) proposed to exhume the corpse of Elvis Presley, who’d been dead for two years, in order to autopsy the King’s stomach for evidence of drug abuse, it agitated Bangs enough to imagine:
pull[ing] your arm out of dead Elvis’ innards triumphantly clenching some crumbs off a few Percodans, Quaaludes, Desoxyns, etc. etc. etc. then once off camera now here’s where the real kick to end ‘em all comes as you pop those little bits of crumbled pills in your own mouth and swallow ‘em and get high on drugs that not only has Elvis Presley himself also gotten high on the exact same not brand but the pills themselves they’ve been laying up there inside him perhaps even aging like fine wine plus of course they’re all slimy with little bits of the disintegrating insides of Elvis’ pelvis
SO YOU”VE ACTUALLY GOTTEN TO EAT THE KING OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL!
Bangs spent the next seven pages ruminating on how the King must’ve felt—the cypherdom, vegetable consciousness, boredom, lost identity—“seeing what he saw and thinking what he thought perhaps up to the last final seconds before kicking the bucket.”
The ‘paragraph’ (if you can call it that) above reads like drug-addled grotesquerie, and indeed it may be. It’s also the sound of Lester Bangs exorcising the thoughts in his head, before settling down to write a respectable book review, of Peter Guralnick’s Lost Highway—a first-hand history of American roots music, undertaken by one of the most substantive biographers of Elvis Presley.
For a saner, more refined account of Elvis Presley by Lester Bangs, see his canonical Village Voice obituary, “Where Were You When Elvis Died?” (née “How Long Will We Care?,” 1977).
However, Bangs’ aborted book review is the more visionary of his two meditations on Elvis Presley, and cuts closer to the bone. ‘Eating Elvis’ turns out to be a surprisingly elegant literary device—the projection of Elvis’ psyche that ensues is poignant and lucid (relatively speaking), considering it’s the critic’s stream-of-consciousness rant to himself, private notes never intended for publication; Bangs comes as close as anybody to imagining how it personally felt to be King.
The meditation survives as a bit of oddball apocrypha compiled by Greil Marcus, “Fragments 1971-1982,” in the back pages of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, one of two compilations of Bangs’ work—“Rock ‘N’ Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock ‘N’ Roll.”
To give you an idea of Bangs’ devilishly-imaginative sense of humor, and foresight… the frontispiece to Psychotic Reactions is the facsimile of a letter received by fellow Creem writer Dave Marsh, four years after Bangs’ death—from his friend, Lester Bangs. (Definitely worth a quick read, and laugh.)
Anyway—not many ‘book reviews’ employ caprophagy and necrophilic cannibalism as a literary conceit. Similarly, not many Taylor Swift articles employ a journalist’s handwritten notes in ancient Aramaic and Hebrew, explanations of Old Testament apocrypha, female incels, or Lacanian psychoanalysis of the belly button to explain a female pop star—but Sam Kriss’ “Taylor Swift does not exist,” does.
I’d nearly shelved the notion that pop criticism could still be wildly entertaining and socially penetrating, light-years beyond its ostensible subject matter (Taylor Swift). As if Bangs’ “Notes for Review of Lost Highway” was pulled from the rib of Joan Didion’s “White Album,” then conceived an immaculate god-baby, sans-navel. (Kriss spends an inordinate amount of time surmising that Taylor Swift’s early-career refusal to expose her bare midriff is evidence that she was never, in fact, connected to the human chain of procreation through an umbilicus. She’s either divinely uncreated, or doesn’t exist. Either way, she’s not human.)
Similarly, certain critics of American culture are so singularly off-the-wall they seem to lack umbilical ties to their creative influences… but I suspect Sam Kriss may be the nearest living descendent of Lester Bangs:
Taylor Swift is, by any sensible measure, the most famous person in the world. The actual leaders of actual countries beg her to visit their dying lands, put on a show, make their miserable people spend some of their miserable money, maybe nudge the whole economy just a few points out of recession. When a war breaks out in Asia, both sides immediately try to argue that they’re fighting on the side of Taylor Swift. She is bigger than Elvis, bigger than the Beatles, bigger than God. She has blasted herself on a jet of pure sugary Americana into every quiet crevice of global culture. She provides the texture of daily life for thirteen year old Indonesian girls with hijabs and hard scraping eyes. There are swathes of rebel bushland in central Africa where children tear the guts out the earth at gunpoint and the central government has no power at all—but Taylor Swift does. In my travels across China, the only Western music you’d ever hear playing anywhere belonged to Taylor Swift. She’s not a solitary human being; she’s Coca-Cola. She has fundamentally changed the inner workings of the record industry, show ticketing, intellectual property—why not? Let’s say music theory too. She invented tone. She invented pitch. Taylor Swift seems destined to be remembered by our drooling, mud-eating descendants as a kind of culture hero, the mythical source of everything left for them to inherit. First was she who plucked strings and made pleasant sounds. Who taught man to spin thread and mark the hours of the sun. She who scattered the stars in the sky. She’s kind of a big deal.
Forty-seven years ago, a deceased Elvis Presley, speaking to his fans through the medium of Lester Bangs, said:
And fuck all the rest of you too, you “true fans” who bought any shit RCA slung out with my name on it and made yourselves love it or say you did or pretend to. Having Fun with Elvis on Stage, me babbling and sayin’ “WELLLLL” for nigh on an hour, even I’d be embarrassed by an album like that, if I wasn’t beyond embarrassment so long ago I can’t even remember what it felt like. You think you’re paying tribute but that’s the world’s worst possible insult. I’d rather you told me I was shit, some of the time, or even shit all the time. Anything. But to say you love everything, indiscriminately, just because it was me or had my name on it – well, that just says to me that you never cared about the music from day one.
Of Swifties, who at this moment are idolizing the mere titles of new songs from Taylor’s next album, because the tracks have been listed but the music has yet to be released, Sam Kriss says:
I don’t think any Swiftie can ever hope to adequately understand their idol. Taylor Swift is the formless crisis of the present and the void over which all things are spun. But all they can do is talk about her music, and her boyfriends, and her costumes, and her hair: things that simply do not, in any meaningful sense, exist.
Returning to Elvis, er, Lester Bangs, or whomever—the avatar of the formless crisis of the late 1970s, speaks:
After I started to get big, I could feel it moving in the opposite direction – I don’t know when it was, couldn’t pinpoint a day, all I know is that, all of a sudden, at a certain point, pretty far before the army too, I started to stop being me. Because, well, everywhere I looked I started seeing me. Every singer, every kid on every streetcorner, everywhere. There was so much me goin’ around it just started to look like Playboy. Yeah, I was still and always the leader of the pack, but that’s not the point. The point is that something I started doing to make people know I existed started rubbing out my existence, a little at a time, day by day, I could feel it going, seeping away, steady and calm … and nothin’ comin’ in to replace it. And I knew nothin’ ever would.
I can’t suppose how Taylor Swift feels right now, existentially. As Kriss admits, finally, she’s most likely just, “an ordinary woman, thirty-three years old and not five thousand, seven hundred and eighty-four, who’s always had a belly button like everyone else, and whose private life is probably, like everyone else’s, just a little sad.”
But I know that in my hometown this week, after a local movie theater decided to reprise Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour—the summer concert film phenomenon of 2023—online reactions were of violently-divided opinion on the theater owner’s decision. Threats were made against fans by haters, and visa-versa. Threats invoking Satanic ritual and the hurling of dead infants.
Over a Taylor Swift concert film.
Which reminds me of something Lester Bangs prophesied in 1977, in the last paragraph of his Village Voice obituary to Elvis Presley (italics mine).
If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation’s many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis’s. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.
“The great demon of indifference,” as Sam Kriss would write in 2024. “The primordial ex-girlfriend, the ex-girlfriend who hissed the magic of the earth at the very dawn of time.” The one with no navel.
Taylor Swift.
We won't see her total societal effects for another 10-20 years when Swifties mature and stake their place in all cultural corners across the globe. What John Wayne, Elvis, and the Beatles did to help define, or at least influence what/who a 'man' is, she will also have defining influence.
Good read. Didn't realize Marcus edited that Bangs book. Also, Taylor Swift exists, to all of our betterment.