Cruel Summer

The way my one break from the new music so far was to stream Champagne Godblems and 'Tis The Holy Season

I'm not sure I'll touch that radioactive cesspool with a 130 foot pole, but I agree and I'm even enjoying the fourth just fine - they just don't understand that sometimes when people enjoy things it's more important to continue experiencing and enjoying them than arguing with literal brick walls on the internet

This is slander! We all know I'm actually a cheap Getaway Car ripoff, which pre-dates this song by the better part of a year - she still deserves prison obviously, but not for this.

I mean, Madonna was getting top ten hits thirty years into her career, her biggest tour was just a few before that, and the entire Confessions era came later in her career than Taylor currently is so… I think she kept doing fine!

The way they're spending their Saturday doing things like generating AI slop memes of Taylor fans and venerating some crusty old bastard who hasn't been particularly relevant since the late 70s but has just hyperbolically proclaimed her as the "APOTHEOSIS OF MEDIOCRITY" like honey that's not normal go to talk to someone

At this point, Taylor's status has gone way past simple pop girl territory and turned into a phenomenon like Beatlemania - and the internet social media era coinciding with that has yielded the unfortunate and disturbing new counter-phenomenon of a literal, actual second fanbase that thrives on negativity, trolling, and snark, using her essentially as a maladaptive coping mechanism for whatever feelings for which they struggle to find an outlet otherwise. An inverted cult of identity, obsessed with the ever-incoming downfall of someone they think is safe and acceptable to hate. You can't challenge their twisted world view without being attacked, because it genuinely means even more to them than experiencing and sharing positive feelings with music we like means to us. Sad!

Calling it now, Patient Zero will smash in the US, another multiweek #1, pop radio #1, etc secured

The absolute smashery The US numbers are kind of wild, if it has any legs here after the video and being sent to radio it's going to be massive.

not my favorite Taylor gif of all time still alive and kicking omg

soooo fun fact about the username I registered with and how I maybe kinda sorta bought four of every single format and variant of this song

I genuinely think it's already my most played of the year, I just can't turn it off, it stomps a little harder every time

the way that's... way more accurate to what people who hate her and the album act like when people like it and it stays successful

I'm on Apple, but I bought it too (I'm streaming the lossless version tho ofc) to make up for the deficit the way I'm at 136 plays already

so Patient Zero has broken my personal record for most plays in a month in under 24 hours of release mess

My personal hope for TS13 is that she's secretly been keeping tracks in the vault that she's written over the years and thought were genuinely 100% her very best, but needed a milestone project like this to earn their recording and release. Also, transparently, I want her to write, record, and produce all of it on her own, not a single other soul. I almost feel like that's part of why Showgirl was an intentional return to Max and Shellback - she's talked so much about what she's learned from them in a technical sense that I can't help but wonder if to her, it's a stepping stone toward being able to confidently do it all herself. Edit: and also there's 13 songs and it's called something like 13 lmao