Years ago, I would feel a sense of dread whenever Taylor Swift put out an album. It wasn’t because I hated her music or anything, it’s because A) I hated all of the exhaustive and often juvenile backstories of Taylor’s many grudges, many of which were disseminated through lyrical “blind items” and B) some people within Taylor’s fanbase, aka the Snake Fam, are incredibly toxic. It was less than one year ago – just November 2019 – when Taylor told her fans to “let Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun know how you feel” about her business beef with them. The Snake Fam doxxed Braun and Borchetta, sent death threats to Big Machine employees and harassed Scooter’s wife.
I hoped that sh-t was over with Taylor’s new album. I hoped that her fans would mature with her, and that Taylor would have learned by now that it’s incredibly dangerous to weaponize her fanbase against her real or perceived enemies. So… what happened? Pitchfork reviewer Jillian Mapes gave a measured and mostly positive review of folklore, Taylor’s latest album. Mapes complimented the album but it was not a sycophantic “TAYLOR IS THE BEST AT EVERYTHING” sort of piece. Which led to the Snake Fam doxxing this poor woman.
The calls started around 2 in the morning—an hour after Pitchfork senior editor Jillian Mapes’ review of Taylor Swift’s eighth album, Folklore, posted on the site. It was a largely positive review. But it was not positive enough for a certain subset of fans, who began to use some of the internet’s dirtiest and most dangerous tactics to harass the writer who’d dared to scorn their queen with insufficient praise. Mapes’ even-handed review deftly and artfully expressed Folklore’s strengths and weaknesses—and given Pitchfork’s historical skepticism toward popular artists, the piece might as well have been a rave.
But certain lines didn’t sit well with Swift’s most rabid fans. And perhaps more importantly, the 8.0 numerical score that accompanied Mapes’ review—a metric determined not by the reviewer, but from multiple staffers’ ratings—threatened to drag down the album’s aggregated Metacritic score. That, apparently, was an intolerable insult.
Various tweets, some of which have now been deleted or removed and some of which still remain, included Mapes’ address and phone numbers old and current. Some have included photos of Mapes and even her home. Users have “joked” about burning her house. Others have posted screenshots of a Halsey tweet responding to a bad review earlier this year—in which the singer wrote, “can the basement that they run p*tchfork out of just collapse already.” Halsey deleted the tweet at the time after realizing that Pitchfork is, in fact, run out of One World Trade Center. Swift’s representative did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Despite these fans’ insistence that their concern is the fairness and quality of the reviews Folklore receives, they really appear fixated on the album’s Metacritic score. Specifically, many lamented the possibility that Folklore could drop below a 90. At the time of writing, the album’s Metascore is an 89.
Music stans have begun using elaborate methods to boost new releases from their favorite artists in recent years. They coordinate streaming parties and create hours-long playlists and pool money to buy as many fans digital copies of new releases as possible. All of this aims to boost albums’ and songs’ chart positions by getting as many people listening for as many hours as possible, on as many platforms as possible. But in targeting a journalist like this, some fans have taken things to a dangerous extreme. And perhaps more importantly, this is not the first time that Swift’s most zealous fans have used doxxing and death threats to punish people they feel have wronged her.
Yeah, again – go and read the Pitchfork review. It’s clear that Mapes liked the album, and it was a pretty positive review. Even if Pitchfork had trashed the album, that wouldn’t be a “good reason” to doxx some music critic, but the situation is even more ridiculous because the review was generally a rave. Just because the Snake Fam thinks Taylor farts rainbows and invented folk-pop doesn’t mean we all have to think that. There’s always a conversation about whether a celebrity can be blamed for their fans’ actions. Last year, with Borchetta and Braun, I believed that Taylor was actively trying to weaponize her fans. In this situation, I think it’s just a case of some of her fans being way too extra. Could Taylor shut it down if she said something to them? I don’t know, honestly.
Photos courtesy of Taylor Swift, WENN and Avalon Red.
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