Apparently the Taylor Swift backlash has reached Shropshire. You know Shropshire, right? Where AE Houseman wrote his brilliant poetry at the turn of the century barely containing his homoerotic desires in a time where he could get jailed for it with the greatest of ease.
How good was he?
“Oh, when I was in love with you
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well did I behave.
And now the fancy passes by
And nothing will remain,
And miles around they’ll say that I
Am quite myself again.”
But I digress and still as long as I am digressing, read if you can’t see Tom Stoppard’s “The Invention Of Love”.
But enough of that, here is your story. Zenna Kristian is an 18 year old girl who makes her living as a professional Taylor Swift lookalike and studies at Walford and North Shropshire College when she was jumped by some girls once her work became comnon knowledge. “Some girls at college had started making nasty comments, but it escalated really quickly. The girl came up behind me and dragged me off my chair by my pony tail, then started kicking me in the face.”
Pretty scary stuff, right. Feeds in, though inversely, to Lester Bangs claim that if boys could get Debbie Harry alone they’d beat her up instead of having sex with her. This is pretty senseless, and I am not sure if the girls hated Taylor or Zenna or more like both. But in the post-Lennon era of stardom nthed by the fake intimacy of social media (sometimes it is hard to remember that you have no relationship with the rich and famous) the fear is self-evident. The good news is that the intense emotions a Taylor (or a Lennon) provoke are increasingly rare.