Revisit: part one, two, three
The question I posed some weeks ago—“is crushing and breaking up all that different?”—I intended to answer promptly; I drafted the bulk and tottered off. Then, all the better to approve a proper shape, life kicked some dust up into that cloud.
Here is what I would have said, and what I still stand by: Why am I putting the two at odds? On the face of it, sure, no question needed. But prolong turning that corner a little longer and you’ll find a place to rest your hand on the furniture. I am one of those people who dread hard and fast romantic beginnings because you’ll irrefutably remember the stupid clothes you were wearing when it tears apart. (“In the end it always does”). It’s peculiar but simple that a song designed for (catalyzed by? brought to the table of?) breakup agony should be interstitially lifting.
Top comments on the “Hits Different” YouTube page include similar notes on the happy-go-sad, along with armchair remarks on the end of eras (‘this is Swift unmasking herself!’), and seem to strive towards placing the work in a box.
Nothing unusual: people do this, especially with the cultural, and financial, cache of sitting pretty within a Y2K rehaul. Those who can’t remember those years, or who remember only those years, find some resonance and, of course, the easiest thing to agree with is the simplest bargain to make. For my part I hadn’t noticed that pliability, and I can’t say I find it very much after looking…calling it a mid-movie power rock supergirl anthem feels hollow at best and damning at worst. Are we going to reduce all art to that comfort of having seen something like it before?
Still, if you want something it will be there. The date you know to portend will have early quick rain and green wind. (It won’t really, but that’s preferable to hold than the truth of it, which is that the trees are in full pregnant flush and I have something to do). There will be stamps, if brief, on memory—not necessarily what you would have wanted to show up, but weeks and months from now some kind of beatific impossibility that ever it was so (and here you are barely registering it).
A breakup and a crush both traffic in this register of myth, if you’re doing them with any sort of investment—not necessarily in the other person, even in yourself. The kind of life you could brag about having lived, but, even better, would keep gnarled up when pressed (because what is romance without mystery?). In a certain obvious way they could both lead to humbling dark what-ifs; in another, it’s that the indefinite, sometimes permanent, not-touching takes on a propulsive force: everything you did do finds remembrance. It’s nice to know there was ever a day or moment where so much at once barreled through; on the other hand, the stuff of it eventually rejects itself.
Ergo: clowning around, getting close enough to the bird to know it is a bird, finding out…It’s funny that the cinch of this song is not the same as its point. We know where the chorus’s waistline will be before its coat is fully shrugged off, and maybe its clean palm—”It hits different ‘cause it’s you”—is a purposeful shock, a white flag where you expected all the roiling you’ve come to weather. The point is what’s too big to let land: “Nothing has ever felt so wrong” could lurch easily into a winged weeping wretch of a ballad but it singes into the first bouncy chorus; the final one leaves time to disassemble because how could you be expected to exit on one leg straightaway.
What am I trying to say? What have I come to regard and extend? I thought prattling on about this, giving it space and dedication, might alight into decisiveness. The most obvious is the last found: this is a song about an experience on the other side of a “you”. I didn’t know old intact fullness could ever expire, and I miss when, amid white flowering trees, I still had something to change into sound.