music – Ainsley MacIntyre

Dust Off Your Highest Hopes: Revisiting RED (Taylor’s Version)

November 22, 2021November 24, 2021by ainsleymacintyreLeave a Comment

When Red was originally released in 2012, it represented a tale of two Taylors. A crossroads moment in her career in which there seemed to be two clearly divergent routes her music might take. There was the one that wound through Laurel Canyon, blazed by the likes of Joni Mitchell and Carole King, that would have seen her become the Poet Laureate of hyper-articulate girls who feel too much (glimpsed in songs like Treacherous, Holy Ground, or State of Grace); or the more straightforward path which ended in uncontested global domination (foreshadowed by all tracks produced by Max Martin).

If you’ve paid attention to music at all over the past decade, you know which option she chose, and though it was not the one endorsed by Robert Frost, eventually Taylor’s three album journey through pop megastardom looped all the way back around, and she was able to wander down the alternative songwriter path after all with last year’s releases of folklore and evermore. Perhaps a singular career like Taylor’s was never going to be plotted out in neat lines, perhaps it would always need to involve detours and scenic routes and doubling back from dead ends. That might be exactly why retracing every step with her now as she endeavors to reclaim control over her old music is so much fun.

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music, Pop culture

Everything I Almost Wrote

November 8, 2021by ainsleymacintyre1 Comment

What is the customary greeting you might expect from someone who has recently crawled out from under a rock? Or from someone who has washed ashore after many months of being adrift at sea? Or from someone who has finally awakened after a decade long slumber?

Whatever the appropriate words are (Hello again? Guess who? Well well well, I bet you thought you’d seen the last of me?) please consider them said, and please consider this post to be my bid for re-admittance amongst polite blogging society.

Because it has been, as they say, a minute. Here’s what nobody tells you when you start writing a personal blog: it is unbelievably easy to stop. Without an editor to be accountable to, without the pressures of deadlines or outside expectations, it is the simplest thing in the world to just … put off writing one of these old things until another day. And then another day. And another one, and so on, until you’ve accidentally taken a ~four month sabbatical and can’t figure out a discreet way to come back.

I suppose a good start would be to slip into using an active first person voice, instead of the cowardly and stylistically questionable blend of third and second that I’ve been employing thus far. I stopped writing for this blog, I ghosted this space like it was a Tinder match who repeatedly demonstrated an inability to distinguish between there/they’re/their. I have returned to it, bearing a humble handful of half-formed ideas with the vain hope that clearing my emotional and literal drafts will allow me to start this whole blogging enterprise anew.

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movies, music

The Ten Best Pop Culture Moments of 2021 (A Midterm Report Card) 10-6

July 16, 2021by ainsleymacintyre3 Comments

I’ll admit that I’m a little nervous about posting this one. Not because my summary of pop culture as it has unfolded in 2021 thus far promises to be shocking or even mildly controversial– I have zero fears that I’ll get cancelled over benignly declaring that Movies Are Good. No, my trepidation can be better traced back to what happened last year.

Less than 365 days ago, a much younger Ainsley– an Ainsley with considerably less trauma-induced wisdom but significantly better posture– attempted to write up the 2020 edition of this list. It wasn’t a terrible list. I stand by my exaltations when it comes to The Last Dance, and the fourth season of Insecure, and the albums released by Fiona Apple, Phoebe Bridgers, and Waxahatchee. Was it a blatant circumvention of the rules to include the 2019 film Little Women? Probably. Do I expect that many were baffled by my esteem for Sam Hunt’s Southside, an album that peaked at 5 on the Billboard 200 and barely made an impact with its true singles? It would be more baffling if they weren’t, to be honest. But overall, at the time I thought it was a valiant-enough, comprehensive-enough effort to account for what was great about a year that gave me very little to relish in.

Four days later, Taylor Swift released folklore.

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music

song of the summer 2021: June’s state of the race

June 29, 2021June 29, 2021by ainsleymacintyre1 Comment

I’m not proud, but I have made it my habit to care deeply about things that don’t matter. Award shows, and professional sports, and the athletes who play said professional sports, and made-up turns of phrase designed just to irritate. Basically anything with stakes that are demonstrably, laughably low, but that somehow still manages to make my heart rate spike up and my fingers start flying furiously over a keyboard in an attempt to bully others into sharing my opinion. I promise I care about important things– like, say, climate change– too. I do. But putting that particular panic attack into words just doesn’t come as naturally as finding yet another useless perspective upon which I might stake my whole identity.

Perhaps nothing encapsulates this phenomenon better than my profound investment in the race to determine The Song of the Summer. Is this an important question? No. Is it a noble cause? Also no. Is it just a marketing gimmick ginned up by Billboard and the major record companies to boost their own sales? Chances are good. But despite knowing all of this, I have maintained a personal tradition of closely tracking each summer’s contenders, along with the overall state of the race, and bestowing the results with a significance that is frankly disproportionate and undue.

Often, The Song of the Summer is a song that I don’t even like all that much, chosen from amongst a group of songs that likewise would not top any kind of list if I was in charge. But my personal tastes are beside the point. To me, the quest to determine what wins the title is less about music than it is anthropology. Ubiquitous, popular things are always more interesting for what they say about the society that consumes them than for what they say about themselves, and the history of summer songs has plenty to tell us.

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music, Taylor Swift

10 Years of Speak Now: I Rank All 14 Songs From My Most Cherished Taylor Swift Album

October 25, 2020October 26, 2020by ainsleymacintyre1 Comment

Two anecdotes to attempt to explain the depths of my devotion to the music of Taylor Swift, which might also inadvertently reveal a mildly concerning emotional fragility:

I have cried literal tears each of the three times I’ve seen Taylor Swift in concert. Not heaving, full-body sobs, or anything- I’m only half a lunatic. Picture instead an elderly Catholic grandmother attending an Easter Mass in Vatican City, as she catches her first glimpse of the Pope up on his balcony- the emotion welling up within her, catching her off guard and making her eyes shine. Basically that is me as a concert attendee.
I have a recurring nightmare in which I somehow encounter Taylor Swift in the wild and am unable to express how much her music has meant to me for a range of dream-logic reasons: my mouth has been sewn shut, or there are wolves chasing me, or she has somewhere else to be. In my waking hours I have legitimately considered jotting down some notes on the subject to keep with me at all times, just in case. Though I suppose now it would be more efficient to just point her towards this blog.

So. There. Two completely normal, extremely chill things to admit to the Internet forever. But I could never pretend to be anything other than exuberantly enthusiastic and achingly sincere when it comes to the songs that have soundtracked my life for nearly fifteen years, the lyrics that have helped shape my worldview and the mad dreamer-genius behind it all.

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