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It is a controversy actually worthy of an exclamation point. When was the last time the internet lost its collective stuff over a single song the way it did this past week with Taylor Swift’s “Cleveland!”? And they
say there’s no such thing as a monoculture anymore. It might have felt like everyone you knew had not only heard “Cleveland!” (unlike the millions of people coming onto X to proudly proclaim their unfamiliarity with “Choosin’ Texas” as ot busted chart records) but had a Very Hot Take on it. In the realm of her fandom, much of that discourse was defense of the track. But inherent in all that was the idea that the song needed defending. Because at the tip of this social tsunami was a strong supposition that swiftly powered a gazillion Instagram memes:
Love and marriage have made Taylor Swift lose her dang mind… maybe even turned her into the mayor of Simpleton.
But as the internet increasingly went into pile-on mode about the new song — almost ignoring that she’d simultaneously released three other new tracks, including the new single “Patient Zero,” all of them bringing the old, more morose Swift back to the phone — I began to feel a sense of deja vu. Where had I, and maybe the world, experienced a panic like this before, about an artist whose turn toward silly love longs had been seen as some sort of cultural betrayal, or basic job failure?
The answer, of course, was in the question. It was Paul McCartney, in the early and mid-’70s, who got besotted with the romantic sillies and asked, “What’s wrong with that?” And further demanded: “I’d like to know!” Because, you know, here he goes… again… giving John Lennon unending nightmares there on Central Park West. It wasn’t just “Silly Love Songs,” which came a few years later on; it was “The Lovely Linda,” the first song on his solo album, announcing that he had traded in the Beatles for matrimony and domestic bliss. His dream had come true, but in the eyes of those who had a different picture of what he ought to be doing, it was more like the dream was over, to quote his ex-partner.
Obviously the author of “Helter Skelter” came through that bout of disapproval over getting ditzy with love pretty unscathed, and so will the author of “Folklore” survive whatever blasts she takes for “Cleveland!” But the accelerant qualities of social media can make the scorn feel much more immediate and wide than the days when the worst McCartney had to face for a while was from Rolling Stone subscribers.
“Cleveland!,” for anyone not yet keeping score at home, was one of four new songs tagged onto an extended edition of 2025’s “The Life of a Showgirl” album, subtitled “The Encore.” The other three were what people have mostly come to expect from the singer, looking back on long-distant relationships with rue and regrets — that she might have treated one of her past loves poorly, in the subtly moving “Pink Clouding,” or that she ever got involved in the first place with guys who turned out to Not Be All That, in “Patient Zero” or “Babylon.”
The crime of “Cleveland!” wasn’t that she’d created another earworm — which the chorus hook almost undeniably is, if you’ve listened to it more than a couple of times — but that she’d she’d allegedly given up being a poet in the service of no longer being tortured. “Cleveland!” is one of the most prosaic entries in her nearly 300-song catalog, with lyrics that start by recounting recent nasty things that’ve been said against her — that she can’t dance, that she has no ass (that word is blotted out, by the woman who usually has no trouble dropping F-bombs), that she’s gotten old. The other theme is the one where her asslessness doesn’t matter, because Travis loves her anyway. It kind of recalls the songs on “Reputation” where Taylor exulted that her new guy adored her in spite of Kim and Kanye dragging her name through the mud, but this is undoubtedly the bubblegum version of that, between the hyper-cheery arrangement and no real recent scandal to react to; it pivots on the admittedly questional idea that her new husband is noble for cherishing her even though she’s only a better dancer than 99.9999% of the planet.
Throw in a spoken-word section — which gave some people PTSD, bringing up the repressed memory of the spoken bit from “Me!” that she actually eventually excised from that recording — and it was a recipe for much of the public to start piling on. Now, I was on record within a couple hours of the tune coming out last Thursday night as not minding the song, saying anyone who’s truly and madly in love deserves an outlier goofball moment in the course of their honeymoon phase. But some of the reactions were funny, the ones that were just amused instead of morally stricken. I LOL-ed at one meme I saw on Instagram, captioned “What happens when Taylor writes about Travis,” which pictured a young woman repeating phrases like “He’s my man… my man… MY man” while looking up Cleveland Heights on Wikipedia.
Swift had set her fandom up for this dichotomy when she filmed a conversation with Harvey Mason Jr. at the Grammy Museum a few weeks ago, before the amended album release was announced. She said then, “I think that the way that I’ve chosen to express myself as a lyricist has changed over the years, and there are times when like those contradictions will come up where fans will be like, ‘I can’t believe the same person who wrote this wrote this.’ Because one will be very simplistic and silly, and one will be very detailed and deep and we’re doing tons of allegory, and we’re just in a whole other world of atmospheric speech. But I think that that human contradiction is fun. I think that it’s fun to make playful songs. I think it’s fun to make songs that are desolate and lonely and just bedraggled lyrically as well.” Swifties assumed she meant to explain the difference between “Ruin the Friendship” and “Wood,” when really she was warning everyone that a song as exquisite as “Pink Clouding” would soon be juxtaposed with the unrepentant bluntness of “Cleveland!”
This all came to fore, for me, the other night when I went to an L.A. FYC screening of the Paul McCartney & Wings documentary “Man on the Run.” The middle of the movie goes deep into some of the resistance that critics and fans — an estranged Lennon at the top of the list — put up when songs about Linda became the focus of his attention, initially with folky musical single-mindedness to match. Granted, McCartney already had a reputation as the Beatle who counterbalanced Lennon’s darkness with your “Honey Pies” and your “Your Mother Should Knows,” but he also certainly had a quality of depth on his permanent record as the author of “Yesterday,” “Eleanor Rigby” or even the then-very-recent “You Never Give Me Your Money.” Now he, Linda and the sheep were on seemingly the world’s most extended honeymoon, with moony music to reflect it. And for some dismayed fans, it only got worse from there, from McCartney tap-dancing on a TV special to putting out “My Love” as the embodiment of what would come to be known as adult contemporary.
Lennon dragged his ex-collaborator in interviews that bordered on the vicious, leading Paul to respond in song with “Too Many People,” before Lennon dug in further and better with the ultimate diss track, “How Do You Sleep,” taking the position that McCartney should rightfully be kept awake at night by the haunting thought of having become such a lightweight.
Lennon’s rejoinders hurt McCartney’s feelings so terribly badly that he went on to write and record “Silly Love Songs,” a sweet-faced F-you to Lennon and anyone else who’d objected to the previous few years of objectifying Linda as his true lady madonna.
So… Taylor Swift in 2026 as Paul McCartney in 1971? The analogy gets more complicated when we consider that, at times, Swift has been more of a John than a Paul, actually. (Then again, there were moments when Paul was more of a John, too, but that’s a digression for another day.) Swift’s brutal, bitter takedowns of not just some of her former loves but former business partners or industry enemies in some of the darker passages of “Folklore” could legitimately be characterized as Lennon-esque. And that was not so many years after the decidedly Paul-like “Shake It Off”… and not so many years before she began writing about her future husband with “So High School,” the pep-rally outlier on the otherwise fantastically depressing “Tortured Poets Department.”
As a lifelong McCartney fan, when rifling through his catalog, I’ve often skipped over “The Lovely Linda,” “My Love” (unless it got to the brilliant guitar solo, and then I was inexorably hooked) and “Silly Love Songs.” Yet I never shunned them entirely, and I was happy they existed. Similarly, in the week that the extended “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore” has been out, I’ve played three of the four new tracks a good deal, while I have saved “Cleveland!” for, uh, special occasions. It’s never going to be a favorite, but it’s never going to feel like a moral affront, either. It’s always been my position that people ought to get at least a partial pass for the things they say and do in the immediate throes of a new love, or in the first aftermath of a breakup — it’s those extreme reactions that make the world go round. You can love that she’s in love without having to love the latest song that came out of that altered state… or without having to demonize it, either. (Especially when it’s, you know, a bonus track?)
In the bigger picture, perhaps we could listen to what the man said: Love doesn’t come in a minute. Sometimes, it doesn’t come at all. Those lines have always struck me as deep and resonant, weirdly, in a song that’s otherwise anything but.
In the meantime, back in inflammatory meme-land… To quote the sage poet who wrote the previously most famous song about Cleveland, Randy Newman: Burn on, big river, burn on!
