GIMME! Vol. 3: The Taylor Swift Cringe Bracket

Plus: the mind-melting implications of hat shopping

And Just Like That (a Max original) we’ve reached the end of Q1: a time for reflection and panic, for spring cleaning, for rationalizing exactly why your New Years resolution simply wasn’t that sustainable, which is actually a productive act in its own right! Life is hard and it’s important to be kind to yourself. Consuming, (if it can even be counted as a separate entity from life itself) can be hard, too, especially if you are someone whose ultra-powerful brain causes you to overthink to the point of agony. For example, parts of my brain, prime real estate once occupied by things like French verb conjugations, are now being horned in on by the concept of “spring wardrobe essentials.” Everyone on the internet wants me to buy a cherry-red cardigan and button only the top button, even though it makes me feel like the rude male ladybug from A Bug’s Life. Enough! Je suis fatiguée!

Luckily, this month’s issue features a refreshing male voice speaking out in solidarity about this very topic, which has somehow, against our collective will, become a central tenant of human life on earth. That is, shopping. And furthermore, clothes shopping. And furthermore, the idea that one can “express” one’s self, sometimes unwillingly or unwittingly, through the items with which one chooses to adorn their god-given nude form. That male voice comes from Henrik Blix, a writer, comedian, and friend, with a grueling account of purchasing the single most difficult-to-perfect item you can put on your body (besides, maybe, a robotic prosthesis or a poignant-but-tasteful tattoo): the hat.

I Want To Buy A Hat (An Impossible Task)

by Henrik Blix

Something truly horrible happened to me recently.  My girlfriend’s dad gave me $50 to buy a hat. 

A kind gesture that if directed at a normal person would simply result in them having a new hat. But I am no normal person. I am a man with a brain condition called Too Much Thinking. 

You see, I don’t want to just take the money. I want to honor the spirit of the gift by buying a hat as The Giver intended. Unfortunately, I can’t. I need your help. 

The quest to buy a hat lies at the nexus (a word I recently learned the meaning of—I type the word nexus with about 80% confidence) of several philosophical/personal/aesthetic conundrums that plague my experience here on Earth. Each of them very small on their own, but when combined turn the task of Buying A Hat into a question of “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “What was I made for?” Essentially, I am going through my own Barbie movie with the only difference being pretty much everything.

Here are the main issues at hand:

1. I don’t really care to promote or endorse any brands. This isn’t a moral thing. I do plenty of “immoral” stuff, like own an iPhone and have sex outside of marriage (just once, on a dare).

2. I hate the way I look. Not in a “I’m disgusting” or a “please tell me I actually look great” way. The issue is that without meticulous care and intention, I look like a huge asshole. As you can imagine, this makes wearing a hat almost impossible. 

Let’s explore these two issues, one at a time.

Issue 1: Hats are essentially billboards, they all display a brand or a team, or a little quip. Which is great if you have a brand or team or little quip that you like. I unfortunately don’t. 

I’m not really super into the idea of a hat that says “Nike” or “Adidas” or “Miller Genuine Draft.” My horrid, rancid brain has concocted a narrative that wearing a brand prominently implies my explicit endorsement of that brand (despite the fact that I don’t hold anyone else to this standard).

“But don’t you wear branded clothing?” Says you, the imagined reader of this impactful thinkpiece. Of course! But there’s a crucial difference.

Wearing INSERT BRAND shoes for example is a necessity. If I barefoot my way around town my feet will get scraped up and infected by the piss-soaked streets of the “greatest city in the world” - Hamilton.

Wearing an INSERT BRAND hat however, is completely different, because it is a free billboard that says “I love INSERT BRAND and everything about them so much that I am advertising them for free.” Sorry, them’s the rules. I didn’t write ‘em. (I did).

This also eliminates the other primary men’s hat design: a beer logo. I am gluten intolerant so it would be death-penalty level of inauthentic for me, a man with a coward’s guts, to act as though I not only could physically drink beer, but enjoy it enough to say “this beer represents me.” 

There’s one brand I WOULD support. Patagonia. While this was the frat-douche brand of a few years ago, the owner/founder did an honestly incredible thing and gave away ownership of the company to turn the entire thing into a non-profit to help the environment. A billionaire who didn’t want to be a billionaire and all of his children agreed and decided to make their company something that would benefit the world!?!?! I’m in. I’m so fucking in. Hell yeah. Fucking shit yeah!!! 

Unfortunately their hats don’t fit me. 

As for teams, I went to Michigan State University and root for their football and basketball teams, but also, Michigan State University has done some BAD SHIT that I DO NOT like. I would be better suited by a hat that says “I feel complicated about Michigan State Athletics” but the designers at Nike don’t seem to make things for people that turn normal tasks into a personal trolley problem.

The answer is clear!!! (You might be thinking) Just buy a generic NY or LA hat. Sorry fuckos!! That feels fake to me. I am not from those cities nor am I a Dodgers or Yankees or Mets fan. To wear those hats would be a lie! A dirty, filthy fucking lie. Do I hold others to this standard? No! It’s just a hat for god’s sake, it isn’t a big deal. Except for if I were to do it. I would be a dirty filthy fucking liar. Do you understand now????

Issue 2:  I look like a douchebag.

For reference, a picture:

This is my headshot, I don’t really like the way I look, but this is on the less-douchey looking end of the spectrum for me. The problem is that any hat I buy transforms me into too much of whatever type of guy the hat is designed for. This is actually probably a good thing for my acting career. I have such a neutral, blank, create-a-Sim face that any additions totally change my vibe. However, it makes styling a personal laser field.

I find it important to add at this point, that while you might be thinking “these are the writings of a crazy person who needs a medically-prescribed, doctor-supervised bonk on the head” I would again say: 1. Yes. If you have any recs I am interested. 2. I have evidence to support my claims.

I have had numerous (more than 5) now-close friends tell me that when they first saw me, but before they met me, they assumed I would be a huge asshole, based solely on how I look. I’m not complaining. Everyone gets judged on how they look. This is simply myyyyyyyy waayyyyyyyyyy (sung in the style of Frank Sinatra) and therefore I must be careful about hats.

One of these flat-brimmed little corduroy guys? 

I am transformed into Bushwick fuckboy who smells bad.

One of these throwback vintage hats?

I am now jock asshole who maybe smells good but whose room smells bad.

One of these Huega House caps that promote the Danish idea of coziness?

On one hand, I like the idea of these, on the other hand…you know I’m gonna look like an asshole in this bad boy, regardless of smell.

The one I’m closest to pulling the trigger on is this Picasso Bulls hat. 

Despite the fact that it has “funny” in the description (typically signaling the least funny thing anyone has ever seen) this is funny to me. My friend has this on a t-shirt. I like it. But it does feel a little “look at me! I’m the funny guy! I also have a Bill Murray t-shirt! All my friends say I should do stand up!” 

So where does this leave me? Primarily scrolling through hat websites on the train until I’m motion sick, but also at the nexus (yeah that feels good here) of a much larger question: what type of hat is “me?”

This question struck me so hard as to momentarily leave me silent, unmoving at my keyboard. Unable to proceed. I am not kidding. 

Buying a hat demands that you answer the fundamental question of who am I? And I tragically must report that I DON’T KNOW. I really don’t.

Given a chance to buy whatever clothes/hats/shoes I wanted with unlimited budget, I have NO IDEA what I would get. I learned in my 20s to dress as neutral as possible to prevent new people and audiences from instantly inferring that I am An Asshole Who Sucks.

It was my hope that at the conclusion of this masterpiece I would have a revelation and understand once and for now at least, WHO I am and more importantly WHAT hat I should get. But I don’t know. So I guess until then I’ll try to construct an identity the old-fashioned way, by letting others tell me who they think I am.

So please, sound off. Tell me what type of hat you think I should get. I am so lost. God I’m more lost than ever. If life is chaos and my identity is uncertain then truly what is the point of my time on earth? I am simply an animal, living meal to meal, turning food into shit until I die unless I can find the right hat for me. I’m actually kind of leaning toward that Grizzlies throwback, so speak up if you disagree.

Henrik Blix is an Emmy and WGA award-nominated writer/comedian who wrote for the iconic Seal Team 6 and earned his first nomination for coming up with the idea to kill Osama Bin Laden. He later worked as a staff writer on The Problem with Jon Stewart.

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The Taylor Swift Cringe Bracket

By Staff

“And what new Era, its hour come at last, 

slouches toward the Tortured Poets Department to be born?”

-William Butler Yeats (paraphrased)

Taylor Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department, comes out in less than a month, and with track titles such as “Down Bad,” “But Daddy I Love Him,” the question is not whether or not it will be cringe, but rather how cringe it will be. In anticipation, I am hereby introducing the official Taylor Swift Cringe Bracket based on an informal poll of the most cringe songs in her discography, in order to crown the ultimate Cringe Queen Cringe Anthem (until the new album comes out and shakes up the ranking, that is). You can vote on every matchup by following GIMME on instagram. See the full bracket below! And below that, my articulated and expanded thoughts on Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift, Cringe Queen

As someone who is (almost!) as old as Taylor Swift, it’s funny to reflect on how her now-inescapable presence has ebbed in and out of my life; I first became aware of her freshman year of high school, when a girl showed up to class late because she’d rear-ended someone while singing along to “Picture To Burn.” From there, I remained pretty neutral as her fame continued to grow and her brand, not until semi-recently divided into neat “eras,” evolved. Red brought straight-across bangs and a toe-dip into pop music; 1989 brought a long bob, some synth, and her cementation as a bonafide pop star, and Reputation was the bad girl backlash album. I wasn’t a huge fan of Reputation. “Look What You Made Me Do” felt too try-hard, “End Game” let Ed Sheeran rap. Plus, the album art was fugly (I still think this). I’ve more recently come around on Reputation, but regardless of how it has aged, I think Reputation was the first Taylor Swift album to be widely referred to as “cringe.” To quote one of the songs I always skip, “So It Goes…” (yes, the ellipsis is part of the title, ew). 

Yes, with every ensuing Era, so came the gradual ascent of the perfect term to sprinkle into the discourse: cringe. Taylor Swift is frequently, if not eternally, indelibly, cringe. How did we discuss Taylor Swift before “cringe” entered the lexicon? Did we say “she makes me cringe”? Certainly not. To cringe is a reflexive, singular judgment that lasts only a moment, but to be cringe is somehow more objective, less escapable. “Cringe” implies a level of effort, intentionality, calculation.

Lover brought yet another rebrand—uh, era—with sparkles and pastels, and a butterfly motif replacing the snakes of Reputation. The Lover Era also featured Taylor’s first-ever foray into a vague notion of “politics/social justice,” using her gargantuan platform to voice opposition to Republican Tennessee Senate (then-) candidate Marsha Blackburn, who won the race anyway, which in turn inspired Taylor to write the triumphantly ageist anthem “Only The Young,” released in tandem with her documentary Miss Americana. Even as a Taylor apologist at best, fan at worst (feel free to swap that “at best'' and “at worst,” however you see fit), it’s indefensibly embarrassing the way “caring about human rights” was folded into the Lover aesthetic along with rainbows (but not explicitly THAT rainbow), pastel pantsuits and dip-dyed hair. This was exemplified in “You Need To Calm Down,” Taylor’s dubious attempt at a Pride anthem with verses drawing parallels between homophobic discrimination and being mean on the internet (much less comparin’ all the girls who are killin’ it).

A steady vein of cringe runs through Taylor Swift’s entire discography. “Love Story,” for example, is, in my opinion, terribly cringe for such a massive hit. It’s a mishmash of cliches (“you were Romeo, I was the Scarlet Letter”?), and I hate the use of the word “daddy.” Yet, people love it. People bring fucking engagement rings to the Eras tour and propose marriage to their significant others during this song! It’s like looking straight into an industrial spotlight emitting 900,000 lumens of earnestness. It’s cringe! But the cringe isn’t reserved only for songs written by Teenage Taylor, or for songs about love, which is perhaps the most universally cringe-producing emotion there is—her Midnights sultry revenge anthem “Vigilante Shit” was widely mocked online, even by hardcore fans, as millennial-core cringe. Here, the cringe is found not in earnestness, but in how put-on it all is. 

Taylor Swift that has been commonly identified, by the internet and elsewhere, as a sort of high priestess of “girlhood”: that is, generally, the ability for women to be soft, tender, and earnest, without the layers of irony armor often deployed against patriarchy. In this sense, Taylor Swift and her fandom present a welcome refuge from the real world. When I attended the Eras Tour last August—not beating the “Taylor Swift fan” allegations there—I sat among tens of thousands in glitter and sequins and friendship bracelets. Some tweens or younger, some middle-aged or older, all, somehow, girls. Reader, it felt nice. Some things you can’t really explain, no matter how deep you are into an essay about it. It was nice. 

But, again, this is Taylor Swift (™), whose talent for career calculation is well documented in years of easter eggs, an unmatched commitment to self mythologizing, and generally being the master of any narrative in which she plays even a bit part. She was in Cats, for christsake, and walked away not only unscathed, but with a Golden Globe nom for Best Original Song, the movie’s only award nomination that wasn’t for a Razzie (of which it won 6!). She’s even changed the narrative on the aforementioned much-hated “Vigilante Shit” with her addition of a very slay-mama-boots chair dance for the Eras Tour. Now the fans love it. 

In Midnights, arguably her darkest and most mature era yet, she fires back at the haters with a derpy shrug: “It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.” With a single plucky chorus, she preempts any and all criticism: Oh, is my private jet terrible for the planet? Guess climate change is all my fault! Want me to take a political stance when it doesn’t tie into one of my lead singles? Guess I’m the worst person on earth! She both grabs us and shrinks away from our adoration, shrugging off her enormous influence while sarcastically apologizing for being “the problem.” Meanwhile, an actual problem with her is that she’s never really made the right people mad, barring one time when Marsha Blackburn’s far-right Senate campaign happened to dovetail into the vibe of the Lover Era and also provided a convenient arc to her Netflix documentary. So to whom, then, is she a (or the) problem? People who don’t like her music? Kanye West? What year is it? 

Curious as to my peers’ thoughts on the matter, I conducted an informal poll among my friends—some avowed Taylor Swift fans, some avowed Taylor Swift haters. What did they consider to be the most “cringe” Taylor Swift song? A small sampling of the responses:

“‘You Need To Calm Down’ is absolutely number one; I think ‘The Man’ is up there; ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ is pretty bad; And the title track of Speak Now is also cringe; finally: ME!” 

-“The gay one with Brendan Urie maybe” 

-“Shake It Off is up there. The one where in the music video she’s blonde with glasses and the bad girl is brunette with no glasses is dumb af” 

-“22 is definitely one of the first ones to come to mind for me but unfortunately i do think there are multiple answers here; ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ is also up there…any song where she’s pretending to be a badass.” 

-“‘ME!’ is my number 1 I think…Dreadful” 

-“Vigilante Shit” 

-”Look What You Made Me Do” (then) “actually no the one about being gay” 

A look at the data shows that Taylor Swift’s cringe seemed to crystallize around the Lover era, with brief preludes in 1989 and Reputation. Interesting! Could it be that she was simply more tolerable when she was a lovelorn teen, and that as her fame grew, her perceived authenticity shriveled away or morphed into something put-on and fake? As Taylor Swift’s world grew beyond her high school, did her efforts to relate to more adult struggles simply feel too unbelievable for someone so rich and famous? 

Or is it the attempts at gritty badassery that are cringe? Do we simply not buy that she, a pretty blonde woman with an idyllic childhood, a proud devotee of cats and baking, could be scorned to the point of drawing her cat-eye sharp enough to kill a man? Could that explain all the Reputation hate? 

Or is it the earnestness that’s cringe? Did she actually think it felt like the perfect night for breakfast at midnight? Or that you’ll never find a lover like Her, Her, Her? Does she know it’s cringe, and wants to show how unafraid she is of being cringe, because that feels earnest and authentic? Is her whole career one big cringe ouroboros? 

Cringe or not, most everyone polled, even some of the most vocal TSwift haters, admitted there were some songs they enjoyed. There are a lot of songs I like, even love, and there are some that I find criminally cringe, and even some of those I still sort of like. Taylor’s skill for songwriting has been praised by a lot of people who know a lot more about music than basically anyone: Paul McCartney, Carole King, Bruce Springsteen. The hard work is there, the skill is there—what is it about her that’s so hateable, so cringe? Her brand, I guess. In Miss Americana, Taylor talks about approaching her 30’s and her worries about how long the industry will continue to “tolerate” her as she ages. At this point, though, she had not even yet reached the height of her fame; this was before Folklore and Evermore, before the (Taylor’s Version) rerecords, before the Eras tour. Was that just another ploy for relatability, knowing deep down that her beauty and success would insulate her from the quotidian worries of a typical 30-something peasant-woman? Or was that real? Was it real and it just happened to also work as marketing? Can anyone accidentally make that type of money? Is the cringe a feature or a bug? 

Maybe nothing about Taylor Swift has to be real as long as it feels real. It’s hard to separate one product (the Taylor Swift persona) from another (her songs) but it’s not impossible. One of my favorite Taylor Swift songs is arguably one of her most cringe, at least judging by its title. In“Hits Different,” the embarrassingly meme-y title gives way to a banger about feeling pathetic in the wake of a breakup. I haven’t even gone through a breakup recently, and the song still, forgive me, hits different. There’s so much truth in it that I don’t give half a shit if it’s “about” Joe Alwyn or someone else, or how it factors into the grand parasocial mythology of Taylor Swift’s life. “Oh my, love is a lie!” But if it’s a lie, it’s one that can still reduce you to a pathetic whimpering wounded animal, hoping against all hope that everything might still be alright: “I heard your key turn in the door, down the hallway / Is that your key in the door? Is it okay?” Fuck! Maybe this is how those tweens proposing to each other during “Love Story” feel. Maybe for them, god bless ‘em, “Love Story” taps into something real. Maybe I love Taylor Swift, but then again, love is a lie. Is that cringe?

NEXT MONTH…is APRIL!