Shut Up, Dude: This Week’s Best Comments

It's great to see Underneath The Tree become a Christmas standard. It's a really fun song to sing along and Kelly sounds great on it.

Videogummers!What were your favourite films of the year?I personally feel like this was the worst year for film in the 14 that I've been masquerading as a critic, in ways that also make me think they won't be getting better any time soon.

Even within that miserable death march through abysmal garbage, crushing disappointments, and empty franchise content, I got three incredible films that reminded me why I fell in love with the medium in the first place:

• Love Lies Bleeding by Rose Glass.Bound on steroids, "be gay do crimes" written in the clouds, actually fucking steamy and sexy (a.k.a. the movie children think Challengers is), and delirious fun.Between this and Saint Maud, Glass has It.

• I Saw the TV Glow by Jane Schoenbrun.One of the most suffocating, painful, trans-affirming, beautiful, devastating and existential experiences I've ever had in a cinema.Felt like I was being talked to directly, but the movie absolutely still works when setting aside my feeling seen.Brigette Lundy-Paine should be getting some Best Supporting Performance talk.

• Hundreds of Beavers by Mike Cheslik.The funniest film of the decade, the best video game/Looney Tunes movie ever made, a masterclass in physical comedy and the art of timed escalation, and proof that human beings with a shoestring budget and cheap mascot costumes will make art more creative, ingenius, compelling, and original than AI or business school execs with unlimited resources could manage.

Lol I literally just got back from the bank when that article slapped me in the face and I dropped that angry-ass diatribe.Fuck all you greedy bitches!I still want you to die!

This place is cool, though.

"Look What You Made Me Do" is a 2 out of 10. This is the start of the decline of Taylor's pop powers for me and the root of it is Jack Antonoff. Unimaginative, repetitive, and boring production work that sanded down the sugary rushes her songs with Max Martin provided. Taylor's vocal delivery can barely keep up with the speed of this song as it propels forward and then the hook is dead on arrival--no matter how many time she says "look what you made me do" there's nothing melodic about it to get stuck in my head.

reputation has some of my favorite Taylor songs of all time (the opening five song stretch is the best of any of her albums before LWYMMD rears its ugly head) but it also has a few of her worst songs by any stretch (LWYMMD, "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things" I can't describe as anything other than abject dogshit).

From a pop perspective this is the last time that Taylor tried to push herself into a new aesthetic, leaning into darker sounds of the time popularized by the Weeknd. It's been a major bummer that after this album's commercial failure relative to her other work she's played it safe with Antonoff (Folklore, evermore as outlier exercises). It's telling that fans are dying for the reputation re-release because even if they don't realize it, they just want to feel something resembling an actual thrill from her music again.

Merry Christmas, everyone, I despise this song!

Yes, leave it to a Taylor Swift song from an album I'm not keen on to bring me out. That and I woke up earlier than usual. "Look What You Made Me Do" was an indicator to me that the vast majority of Reputation wouldn't be much good. The fact of the matter is I don't think that Swift can pull off "dark and edgy" that she's so obviously trying with this song. Her delivery is off-putting as is the uncannily similar Right Said Fred backing track. I won't even talk about that mess of a music video.

I know her being off-putting is the point of the song in a sense, but she sounds practically monotone to me. I don't know what artist she's trying to emulate here, if she is at all. For example, much of 1989 was inspired by Imogen Heap and Florence + The Machine to an extent. Here, it's just one big question mark. The only genre I can think to call this is "bad".

I remember my initial reaction to this song being "what the hell is she thinking/doing?" I get wanting to mix things up from album to album, but this was just such an ugly departure compared to Red and 1989. I'm usually of the opinion that a little goth never hurt anyone, but I think she's someone who needs to stay far, far away from it. She tried going for a similar mood on the Tortured English Department or whatever, and I know literally nobody still talking about that album. Swifties included.

However, I say it's rare that Swift has made all that many "1's" in her career....but this is one of them. This is a 1, flaming hot garbage from its inception and not much better over the years. It's a festering pile.

Fuck this shit.

I just read that interview, and I’m sorry, but a paragraph of “apology” after an essay where he equivocates because he was “just talking shit” and only considers something regrettable or wrong depending on the location of some cultural “line” of the moment is some real bullshit. The gist of the article is him feeling sorry for himself because he was an edgelord prick his whole adult life and it ended up biting him in the ass. Not once until a brief line at the end of the article does he even talk about the victims of his behavior, just him and the people upset at him. He actually approaches the Pitchfork quote as if it was ever okay to say those words about people, even deliberating on whether it’s okay to use the R word.

If you’re being mean, if you’re bullying people, it has never mattered if you were “joking”. He seems to still think his mistake was in not knowing where the line between “edgy” and “acceptable” is, rather than understanding that nothing about his behavior was ever acceptable.

As a trans person, I also could give less of a shit about shifting the blame to their friend, even as he did his best to own up to it. I don’t have the luxury of not knowing who around me is transphobic. It’s really easy to tell, and that’s with people policing their language around me. There is no way he didn’t know exactly who this guy was and his mistake was assuming this guy cared about the imaginary line he thinks divides shitty things between good and bad based on public perception.

Also, at that moment, GLOSS was the center of a lot of love and a lot of hate, and his edgelord shit enabled the bullies (and still does). He seems to think the problem was always him being misunderstood, rather than him being mean, narcissistic, and irresponsible. He regrets the consequences of his actions, not the actions themselves.

I made sure to read that whole damn article before commenting this, because I hoped there’d be a genuine apology and understanding of the impact of his behavior, but what I got was a man still refusing to understand what he did wrong performing his guilt for himself.

Between this, Brand New writing new songs, and far too many fans of both irrepressibly excited about them, the end of this year has been really dispiriting for marginalized, othered, and victimized people in the scene. It seems that a lot of shitty people who were just staying quite are reveling in the post-reelection era, while people like me are taking to immigration lawyers. What a great way to start another Christmas Day my partner and I spend alone, because neither of us talk to our families anymore.

Stereogum, this is not okay. I’ve been able to look past the way you farm clicks off of outrage because I get that’s the industry. But platforming this band is disgusting. I’m ending my subscription and my patronage of this site that has until now been the last online community I’ve felt safe being part of.

Can I add “people whining about pop coverage on Stereogum”?

I came up with 100 comments for this story but I’m just going with this one.

we don’t do anything for clicks! there are no artist names in the headline or any mentioned on social so it doesn’t even get search traffic. and our pop columnist wouldn’t be writing about punk albums or whatever instead of this! merry christmas tho.