The Return to Craft: Taylor Swift, Nostalgia, and Covid-19

ABSTRACT

What I term “the return to craft” is a distillation of a pervasive phenomenon – the nostalgic, folk esthetic of contemporary Western society that has arisen partly in response to the Covid-19 pandemic but also to neoliberalism and climate change. It arises as a reaction to turmoil, offering the comfort of an imagined past, a tangible tactility, and a reconnection with the “old ways,” with nature, and the wild. In this paper, I explore the return to craft as a societal search for foundations via a case-study of its most commercially successful lockdown output, Taylor Swift’s folklore (2020).

KEYWORDS:

• cardigan
• Covid-19
• folklore
• lockdown
• nostalgia
• return to craft
• search for foundations
• Taylor Swift
• willow

We’re in a log cabin replete with open fire, the kind of warm Romantic environment where one imagines Thoreau writing into the evening. On the wall hangs a faded portrait beside an oil painting of a rustic country cottage. It’s early in the morning, or late at night, and a singer, wearing what appears to be an antebellum nightdress, is serenading us on a battered old piano, before suddenly she opens the top of the instrument and climbs in, all the time enveloped in an enchanted golden powder. She reappears in a mythic forest imbued with vivid green hues and vibrant, saturated moss. We’re watching the music video for Taylor Swift’s first single “cardigan,” from her 2020 album folklore.¹ Like Lewis Carrol’s Alice or the children in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, Swift opens the piano lid and enters another world (Figure 1). The fantastical folkloric quality of this setting in the Arcadian woods, what Vernallis would call the “implied geography of the video” (258), is reinforced by emotive lighting and majestic waterfalls (Figure 2). Next, the piano stool acts as portal, transporting Swift to sea, the instrument itself acting as life raft in a scene not unlike one from James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), before finally taking her home. The drenched protagonist comforts herself with the eponymous cardigan upon her return, in a significant teleological moment of audio-visual synchronization (Figure 3).

Figure 1. Swift’s piano portal in “cardigan – official music video.”

Figure 2. Arcadian landscape in “cardigan – official music video.”

Figure 3. The eponymous cardigan in “cardigan – official music video.”

What is being mediated here? Why this turn to folklore and indie-folk esthetics in Swift’s work? I suggest that this single and, indeed, the album folklore provide a peak example of a societal search for foundations during the pandemic. What I term “the return to craft” can be read as a distillation of the nostalgic, folkloric mode of contemporary Western society, one that has arisen in response to the cultural issues raised in part by the Covid-19 pandemic, but also by neoliberalism, homogenization, austerity, and the anxiety brought on by climate change. As Swift found a life raft in songcraft (literally, in the music video), so too did craft and the handmade deliver a figurative life raft, a comfort and a solace, to many during lockdown. This construction of imagined authenticities, the focus on essentials, on first principles, reflects something deeper than superficial YouTube self-help or commodification; it has also become a genuine source of relief in such difficult circumstances and its artistic outputs provide culturally contingent insights.

A Search for Foundations in a Time of Turmoil

Modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. (Lyotard 81)

A conception or re-conception of craft has often provided such a “solace,” an escape, a sense of perspective, for those undergoing national and even international periods of uncertainty and difficulty. The return to craft arises as a reaction to turmoil, offering the familiarity of a mediated past, often one that never existed in reality, an imagined utopian ideal, and a reconnection with the supposed “old ways,” with nature, and the wild. Lumberjack fashion, banjos, and Instagram Lomo filters have pervaded the nostalgia industry. Analog photography, candle-making, pottery classes, and bushcraft are its skills; industrial cafes, campsites, fire-oven pizzerias with exposed brick and steel RSJs its churches. The mediatization of supposed analog freedom promised by craft – working with materials, your hands, a return to the woods, to “live deliberately” (Thoreau), to hike, to go off grid, to create a “new life in the wild” with Ben Fogle – offers an apt mediated escape. An increasing focus on simple methods and ingredients is part of a widespread reappraisal and reappreciation of the local, the ritual, and the tangible. Rewilding nature, off-grid living, and van life are all offshoots. The move toward the handmade in lockdown society was reflecting a wider shift toward craft in Western culture. I see this as a contemporary return to craft, a form of folk esthetics that mirrors earlier instances of such a phenomenon.

We see it across the arts; a return to nature and the minimalist, manual pre-tech landscape is a common trope in dystopian apocalyptic cinema, novels and TV for instance, from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006, film 2009) to Netflix’s Sweet Tooth (2021) and, in a sense, the imagined apocalypse that was mediated at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic can be seen as performing out some of these fictionalized scenarios, as videos of shoppers fighting over toilet rolls went viral. Similarly, the nineteenth-century paraphernalia and dress depicted in Swift’s “cardigan” video, with just the right patina, is reminiscent of a darker side, like Robert Eggers’s folk-horror depiction of New England in The Witch (2015); and in Lovecraftian or Jamesian fashion (think Jonathan Miller’s TV adaptation Whistle and I’ll Come to You, 1968), Swift too engages with an object with supernatural forces. Far from the idyllic pastoral, folk horror has provided a productive mode to critique idealized views of history, foregrounding the perils of disinterring the past. The concretization of imagined pasts has often led to divisive forms of nationalism, and folk music has at times been appropriated for such means (see Wilson, and Boyes). Lyotard critiques nationalist tendencies in nostalgic reconstructions of the past, what Svetlana Boym calls “restorative nostalgia,” positing the dangers of the phenomenon as follows:

We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one. … Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name. (Lyotard 81–82)

The term “nostalgia,” an amalgam of nostos (return, homecoming) and algia (pain, suffering) was, in fact, first employed by Johannes Hofer in his 1688 Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia, oder Heimwehe. Hofer put forward nostalgia as a medical disease, one cured by a return to the nostos. Nostalgia isn’t always pleasant; the rose-tinted spectacles are sometimes cracked. As the antebellum nightdress might also suggest a darker period in American history, one that includes slavery, for instance, the nostos is not always as welcoming as first imagined. The term later left the realm of science and became a more ambiguous social disease (Stewart), for Boym an “incurable modern condition.”

For Helmut Illbruck, “[N]ostalgia’s death as a scientific term proved extremely productive. It was the fertile ground on which nostalgia could become a poetic obsession, a vernacular word vague enough to be applied to a host of somewhat related feelings and ailments” (147). The cultural return to craft has threaded through many areas of society over the last ten years nowhere more so than pop music.² Folk esthetics and the implied authenticities therein have been particularly prevalent. Folk music has always had this mythology for a lost past. Just as fairy-lore speaks of a previous time when magical creatures inhabited the local, only occasionally returning, so do old musical ideas resurface. In many ways, a perpetual dialectical cycle of renewal or revival is inherent and fundamental to folk’s survival and regeneration. Rather than mediatizing “folk revivals” from global pop folk acts like Mumford & Sons, to more niche American Primitive guitarists, from Bon Iver to cottagecore (gardening, wholefoods, and floral prints), we can instead recognize such instances as part and parcel of a wider-scale, cyclical dialectic between craft and its supposed, often stigmatized, antithesis – be it 1970s’ prog-rock, the synthesizer, the laptop and their arising reactions such as punk-rock’s return to the “original” beauty of the three-minute rock tune.

Much has been made of the so-called “vinyl resurgence” (Harper) amid the laments of a recording industry where meager streaming revenues are touted as the savior from piracy while artists see little of the revenue. Cassettes, VHSs, CDs, and vintage clothing are all part of this tactile materialist resurgence.³ Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher both captured the zeitgeist of “retromania” early on, describing it in terms of Derridean “hauntology.” For them, the specters of cultural artifacts dominate modern life, as the “crackle and hiss” is commodified as “authentic” cultural capital (Bourdieu) within a culture “out of joint,” and that has canceled previously imagined futures. Rather than solely reading this cultural turn solely in the frame of commodity fetishization (Marx) or authenticity construction (Moore), though, I’d also like to instead explore the return to craft as both a tangible material and practice, more holistically, as a societal if not generational search for foundations, a phenomenon that experienced a marked acceleration during the Covid-19 pandemic, and, indeed, its most commercially successful outputs.

While it was near impossible to find yeast or flour during the first UK lockdown (March–July 2020) and breadmakers had nationally sold out, the local parks and woods became a haven, a long forgotten magical space being filled with home-made fairy houses; and many of those home-imprisoned found solace in making, from knots to knitting and taking up an instrument.⁴ Culture has often turned to the imagined authenticities and tactile physicality of craft amid times of turmoil. From William Morris and John Ruskin to Grayson Perry and cassette-only labels we find it in the bakeries, coffee-shops, and microbreweries that are now ubiquitous. Alongside baking, there was a massive increase in the number of people re-watching old TV box sets such as The Sopranos (1999–2007) during lockdown, as audiences found solace both in the familiar scenes and contemporary resonances with Tony Soprano’s plight as a character “out of joint” with his own time (Renshaw).

Again, these themes are not unique to our times, rather they are dialectical, and such movements can be seen as cyclical reactions to what had gone before: lo-fi esthetics, transcendentalism, the safety pin as symbol for DIY, anti-commercialism, anti-branding – No-Logo (Klein), the Arts and Crafts movement which brought the hand back into making at a time of mass mechanical industrialization are all earlier incarnations. The Arts and Crafts movement that took place toward the end of the nineteenth century was a reaction to the dark side of the industrial revolution. With great industry and progress also came child labor, horrendous working conditions, and pollution. The loss of care and quality in the production of cheap, easily reproductible goods, and the alienation of the working-class from said products led Morris and Ruskin to reappraise the value of makers. Beyond a reappraisal of the Benjaminian “aura” and an embrace of the “mistake,” the unique haecceity of a handmade object, Ruskin’s focus on workers’ enjoying the physical creation of pieces was paramount.⁵ For Koplos and Metcalf, Ruskin’s Marxist argument for ownership and love of labor (labor of love) was key: “this vision, above all others, inspired the craft revival.” Their collection, A History of American Studio Craft, reminds us, though, that there have been other such historical moments: “The second great period of change in the crafts, which began just after World War II, has not yet come to an end. This resurgence moved craft in the direction of design and, even more, in the direction of art’s expressive and socio-political concerns” (Koplos et al. ix).

Nostalgia has dominated culture for the past decade, then, and the pandemic has brought it to its peak. Rebecca Rinsema describes the nostalgic yearning of the so-called millennials – as having an imagined idea of innocence in a world pre-911, pre the economic crash of 2008, Brexit, Trump, current global upheaval and conflict, and mourning a childhood “they only wish to have experienced,” a lost Utopianism. Fisher’s concept of “lost futures,” what he saw as a nostalgia and yearning for another time that never came to fruition, resonates with this idea (Ghosts).⁶ It might be further argued that millennials, have somewhat naively struggled to fill the void of present-day digital culture with a large-scale resurgence and fetishization of analog formats – most notably vinyl and tape but also sour dough, craft beer, and coffee beans. A supposed authenticity is brought about by aligning oneself with the comforts and familiarity of a continuing tradition, one that operates outside of mass markets (or at least implies this), carrying with it a Romantic ideology, an innate mythology.⁷ Such codes of authenticity are afforded by those who engage with the return to craft, as Bordieuan cultural capital is employed and signaled in a postmodern “nostalgia mode” (Jameson). Rinsema’s notion of lost utopianism and imagined childhoods is exemplified in Swift’s focus on magical portals and in the J.M. Barrie-inspired lyrics and imagery: “Peter losing Wendy.” The refrain, “When you are young, they assume you know nothing,” and the emotional “scars” paint a folkloric darkness that is taken up in the visuals for “cardigan.”

Pinning down such a wide-ranging phenomenon to an overly specific timeframe or set of sufficient identity conditions is sure to fail – indeed the very nature of craft, nostalgia, and the fallibility of memory negate such a purely objective approach, as Illbruck spoke of a “word vague enough to be applied to a host of somewhat related feelings and ailments.” We can, however, identity some key tropes and patterns in the return to craft, and its reemergence during the 2020–21 pandemic, and provide, in such a way, a productive method that embraces the inevitable, inherent contradictions at play. Echoing Deleuze, Bill Martin posited that “all good art and all good thinking is a matter of grappling with contradictions, because they are there to be dealt with in the world” (243). Beyond the cultural contingency for one coming about, then, I recognize the following salient elements, recurring motifs that can thus be seen across the landscape and that are not mutually exclusive nor exhaustive:

• minimalism – the reduction of materials.

• clear evidencing of skill in a semi-open fashion – semi-demystification of the creative act.

• connection with nature – awareness of climate cycles, the use and signaling of natural materials and processes.

• transformative repetition of process and learning – oral traditions, focus on the creative act. Particularly interesting when we consider digital promulgation.

• aura of the maker – a reverence for mastery and the unique.

Sushi Otaku and Transformative Tradition in Japan

Let’s take the example of sushi to explore these themes of the return to craft before we look to music. Craft has provided a replacement for the often maligned “expert” in contemporary society in the form of the revered master craftsperson. A prime example (though available on Netflix) is the sushi chef Jiro. Documentaries like Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) mediate a mastery of trade to a deep esthetic level, historicizing a continuation of ancient tradition, and a lifelong dedication. What I see as the dominant themes of the return to craft are all evident: minimalism (simple restaurant surroundings and ingredients, little interference with materials); clear evidencing of skill in a semi-open fashion (the visible preparation at the counter); the connection with nature (the fresh fish, seaweed, and rice sourced daily, seasonal ingredients); the repetition of process and learning (refined and ritualistic preparation) that takes place, and the aura of the maker (a locally revered master craftsperson creating a unique piece with excess Benjaminian value). Robin Holt and Yutaka Yamauchi elucidate the deep culture of sushi craft, outlining three key themes; transience (its fleeting nature), the relational (societal function and natural connectivity) and discipline (skill). They describe a new generation of sushi otaku (sushi “geeks”) who are pushing a more playful postmodern approach to both consuming and preparing the intricate dishes:

[T]he Sushi Otaku also acknowledge in their actions the impossibility of retrieving the past and its spirit, but do so more joyously, allowing themselves to be prompted by an intense interest in craft … the re-imagination of the past through craft affords exponents an emancipatory presence in the present whose spatial home is the sushi bar itself, to which one can arrive, albeit only ever in a spirit of care for its continual rebuilding, visit after visit. These shokunin [sushi chefs] who respond to this emerging subculture … [are] willing to explore the possibility of difference that comes in the repetition of attempts at creating things steeped in qualities of relationality, discipline and the fleeting. (39)

A craft of process is exemplified in this sushi otaku approach, as difference through repetition is embraced: “Rather than use the nostalgia for craft to resist and absorb the modern, these sushi otaku are its upshot, and here the affect of craft is not to linger with the old ways, but to suggest new ones” (37). While difference has always been embraced to a degree, in line with seasonal ingredients and so on, the sushi otaku exemplify a Deleuzian “repetition as difference.”⁸ This postmodern playful approach to craft and tradition is protean in nature. The “exact finish” was for Ruskin the product of industrial manufacture in opposition to the odd-shaped uniqueness of the hand-crafted. In replication, all difference is ironed out, all edges smoothed, and polished away (Koplos et al 6). The division of labor creates specialists for minute details in a product rather than creative holistic individuals, as the Fordist assembly line makes them more effective machines. The sushi otaku negate copying and imitation for the sake of “preserving records of great works,” with what Ruskin viewed as Romantic notions of canonization (ibid.); instead, they are more akin with Deleuze, who posited that exact repetition is an impossibility, they see how replication which embraces and accepts inevitable difference brings with it positive transformation.

Lockdown Songcraft

Folk music is going viral on social media in lockdown with a craze for sea shanties dominating TikTok, the video-sharing social media platform beloved by Generation Z. (“Why Are Sea Shanties”)

The return to craft as a search for foundations, then, has dominated mainstream pop during the 2020–21 lockdowns. Consider how a parodic sea shanty video went viral on TikTok as sea shanties began trending in global google searches. The tune in question was “Soon May the Wellerman Come,” a nineteenth-century New Zealand whaling song depicting quite gruesome images of butchery – the dark side of nostalgia again evident. What the song offered was, alongside the clear comic incongruity of the paired image and styling, an apt hopeful message of getting beyond present difficulties and strife: “One day when the tonguin’ is done, we’ll take our leave and go.” A piece on BBC Radio 3ʹs In Tune put it well: “The combination of the song’s jaunty, earwormy chorus, together with the promise of eventual relief from isolation, has proved a potent mix for lockdown times” (“Why Are Sea Shanties”). Videos tagged #seashanty swept across the web while thousands of users began sharing their own covers of folk songs.

Another trend, lockdown home concerts, offered a unique glimpse into the actual homes of artists during the pandemic. Many musicians from Mary Chapin Carpenter to Robben Ford provided regular YouTube videos, often livestreamed, within the familiarity of their own surroundings.⁹ More nostos than algia, these invitations into their homes provided much comfort for fans.

Perhaps the best example of the return to craft in mainstream popular music during the pandemic, though, was Taylor Swift’s release of an album entitled folklore on 24 July 2020. Swift collaborated with indie giants Aaron Dessner (the National) and Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) alongside Jack Antonoff (Bleachers). The marketing narrative was that of an artist retreating to focused, introverted songwriting amid the lockdown turmoil, as Bon Iver had mythologized the log-cabin genesis of his debut. The album was a departure for Swift; a stripped back low-key production of authenticity, reinforced by its surprise release without fanfare and the Arcadian, cottage-core artwork of the sleeve – also on vinyl, of course. Swift’s press release depicts the solitary artist in country tweed amidst a misty wilderness.

folklore is Swift’s eight solo record, signaling a move away from her more pop stylings and further embracing themes of nostalgia and introspection. It abandons the EDM/R&B beats of previous albums for a more minimalist indie-folk esthetic. Of course, Swift has transgressed genre boundaries before, having started her career as a country artist. The documentary Miss Americana (2018) portrays Swift discovering a new-found freedom of expression, overcoming traumatic public episodes of both physical and mental abuse prior to folklore. A subtler, more confessional side of her songwriting is seen coming to the fore. folklore became the biggest selling album of 2020 and lead single “cardigan” Swift’s sixth U.S. #1 (Billboard). The media response was also positive, with the album being predominantly read as an important step for an artist entering her 30s. NME called it “the quintessential lockdown album,” positing that it “felt like the perfect accompaniment for the weird loneliness” of the pandemic (Wills). Similarly, the Financial Times called folklore “the first great lockdown album” (“Who Have Been”).

folklore is a concept album. Significant to the concept is the contextual framework of blurred fictions. To explain, at the time of release, Swift posted the following on Instagram:

A tale that becomes folklore is one that is passed down and whispered around. Sometimes even sung about. The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and fiction become almost indiscernible. Speculation, over time, becomes fact. Myths, ghost stories, and fables. Fairytales and parables. Gossip and legend. Someone’s secrets written in the sky for all to behold. In isolation, my imagination has run wild and this album is the result, a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness. Picking up a pen was my way of escaping into fantasy, history, and memory. I’ve told these stories to the best of my ability with all the love, wonder, and whimsy they deserve. Now it’s up to you to pass them down. (Instagram)

Here, Swift employs various strands of popular music mythology – the autonomous “authentic” artist is signaled: “Picking up a pen was my way of escaping.” She also recognizes and indeed embraces the blurred boundary between fact and fiction in words reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s notion of “poetic, ecstatic truth” (Minnesota Declaration) in documentary when she states, “The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and fiction become almost indiscernible. Speculation, over time, becomes fact.” Beyond relating the work to oral traditions, however, there is a deeper layer present here. Yes, the supposed cultural capital of folk authenticity is being employed but perhaps Swift’s version of this myth is more real because of its blatant virtuality, its embrace of social media, its very existence entirely reliant on internet culture and portrayal of nostalgic fictions. Baudrillard spoke of such a process when he wrote, “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality of second-hand truths, objectivity and authenticity” (166).

Rather than attempting to rebuild a notion of the “real” or an “authentic” folk, Swift plays with the very ideas of myth and folklore themselves. Like the sushi otaku, Swift takes ownership of her own storytelling, constructing her own context and transforming tradition along the way. Nick Prior views Hatsune Miku in a similar manner, the vocaloid, crowd-sourced superstar is in some ways more real than another highly mediated celebrity like Justin Biber. This virtual software-instrument doesn’t pretend to be anything else and instead embraces “her” virtuality and crowd-sourced content. With folklore, like cottagecore, a fascinating dialectic emerges whereby an internet phenomenon embraces the signs of anti-tech, analog esthetics while itself relying on such digital technology for its promulgation and very existence. Rather than posit “technostalgia,” (Pinch and Reinecke) Swift instead employs tropes of analogue semiotics, deliberately engaging with mediated signs of technological polarization that have pervaded popular music history for the past few decades. As Boym writes, “We are all nostalgic for a time when we were not nostalgic. But there seems to be no way back” (355).

The internet enables this sort of thing for Swift; in fact, she is a master of social media, while the images and esthetic itself avoid any depiction of the internet or modern technology. These movements stem from internet and social-media platforms yet position themselves as organic. Such a contingent moment of imagined authenticity within the dominant digital market may also be read as instances of the late capitalist system feeding itself on the cultural capital and ensuing monetary capital that analog fetishization affords.

In the key of Eb Major, “cardigan” makes good use of the “home” I chord (Eb) as the chorus enters, in place of the minor ii that opens the four-chord progression of fmin (ii) – Bb (V) – Ab (IV) – Bb (V). This lifting moment of tonal stability is matched by the line, “I knew you.” While the musical accompaniment is minimal in approach, the record as a whole does not shy away from employing electric instruments and synthesizers. The record is certainly less electronic than previous Swift albums but there is no cultural capital signaled in terms of the analog/digital dichotomy of music production values. Nowhere is analog equipment touted as superior or more “authentic” in the Jack White kind of way. Swift’s marketing sidesteps any notion of Dylan-esque “Judas” mythology. Nowhere is this binary better foregrounded and embraced than in the opening lyric: “Vintage tee, brand new phone.”

If we return to key tenets of the return to craft outlined above, it is clear that Swift engages with all parameters. Swift employs a stripped back approach to instrumentation and production on folklore. Instead of big beats we have subtle orchestration, synths, drum pads, and an indie-folk esthetic (minimalism – the reduction of materials). She employs Instagram to situate her songwriting craft while her intimate breathy vocal technique and confessional songwriting display her skill in a semi-open fashion, with a residue of folk mythologizing (demystification of the creative act/clear evidencing of skill in a semi-open fashion). The lyrics in folklore abound with seasonal, nostalgic nature imagery (The song “August” contains the lyrics “salt air,” “rust on your door,” “August slipped away,” and the track “Seven” has the line “please picture me in the trees,” for instance – demonstrating a clear connection with nature – awareness of climate cycles, natural materials, and processes). Swift speaks of songwriting as a form of escape (as mediated on Instagram, alongside the discussion of folklore traditions); the return to craft offers her a way out and a therapeutic vehicle during the pandemic crisis. Oral traditions of folk music and folklore are invoked in the album title itself, LP artwork, video imagery, and lyrical content: “passed down like folksongs, the love lasts so long … like a folk song, our love will be passed on” (“Seven”; repetition of process and learning – oral traditions, apprenticeships, focus on the creative act). Finally, we witness the theme of singer-songwriter acting as agent for political and social change, feminist themes (“Mad Woman”), accomplished songcraft, cultural capital – critical acclaim bolstered by indie folk artist collaborations, social media aura, and fanbase reverence, visibly performing on piano in video in line with performer authenticity tropes of “liveness” (Frith; Moore; Sanden; aura of the maker – a reverence for mastery).

The closing credits for the “cardigan” video further illustrate the somber contingency of its genesis: “A special thank you to our on-set medics, COVID-19 compliance personnel and the crew for operating under the strictest guidelines including wearing PPE, practicing thorough sanitization and respecting social distancing during the video shoot.” There are plenty of Swiftian Easter eggs for fans and the intertextuality of this video is further expanded by the fact that the first single of her next album evermore (2020) (the album title a clear reference to Poe’s “The Raven”), “willow,” begins where “cardigan” ends as the viewer is brought back to this same cabin in the woods, as if both were shot in direct sucession or concurrent real / discourse-time.

“willow” extends the collaboration with Aaron Dessner as the thread of the cardigan furthers the narrative within the cabin. The video starts precisely where “cardigan” finishes, as a golden string, like an enchanted fiberoptic lace entices Swift to follow it and return through the piano portal (Figure 4) to the mythic landscape, this time appearing via a willow tree. The cardigan, willow and magical thread might be viewed as examples of what Sherry Turkle calls “evocative objects,” objects that are “provocations to thought” (5). The nature imagery is foregrounded once again as are the primary materials. Willow, the wood of choice for the craft of basket weaving is employed metaphorically by Swift for its inherent malleability: “Life was a willow and it bent right to your wind.”

Figure 4. Swift renters the portal in “willow – Official Music Video.”

The song makes direct reference to cyclical nostalgia: “But I come back stronger than a 90ʹs trend.” Folk-horror tropes are again signaled in the depiction of a ritual witch circle (Figure 5), wherein hooded, masked figures ceremonially conjure up some supernatural force. The lyrics “meet you after dark” and “As if you were a mythical thing” further reinforce the folkloric element of the song. At the close, we follow the thread again back to the cabin where her partner waits, and they leave the cabin together in a sunny haze (Figure 6).

Figure 5. Ritual circle in “willow – official music video.”

Figure 6. The couple leave the cabin in “willow – official music video.”

While Swift’s DIY esthetic may have been enforced or imposed by Covid-19 (she is even credited as hair and makeup stylist), her turn to folk signals more than mere necessity and opportunism. folklore is a success in multiple senses – a cohesive well-crafted piece of collaborative work – and the follow-up sister record, evermore, continues in a similar vein. Rarely do we see such an ambitious and contingent record reach so wide an audience today. Should we view this as the ultimate commodification of the return to craft by capitalist forces, or a unique moment wherein commercial appeal meets fruitful collaboration? As beer conglomerates both buy up existing independents and produce their own version of “craft beer,” are record companies simply profiteering on what Oli Mould calls the “outsider” by bringing them in, commodifying anything of interest and for which there is a burgeoning or pre-established market? The neoliberal corporatization of “creativity” leads to the destruction of “leisure time” allowed for true creativity, which is replaced by social-media advertising and the attention economy. The hit Netflix documentary of 2020, The Social Dilemma, charts the damage brought on by Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, focusing in particular on polarization, surveillance, and the attention economy. The film depicts an attention economy wherein all of our time is subsumed in slavishly scrolling for the next dopamine hit, the next notification, as the algorithm fights for our continued gaze – trapped in what Marshall McLuhan described as a “narcosis of narcissism.” Gabriel Menotti and Antonio Fernandez-Vicente sum up this anxiety well in “Myths of the Digital Age”:

[T]hese digital devices often provide glimpses into the content vacuum that gives rise to the search for pure connection as a remedy. As more and more people find themselves linking in networks that are, in fact, beneath their digital shadows, the lysergic detachment from the real presence and the concrete content becomes the dominant style of the everyday life. (Menotti and Fernandez-Vicente 46–7)

Commodification is inevitable, whatever has cultural capital will evidently be assimilated for its monetary capital affordances. For Fisher we can no longer “periodize music,” everything feels old so nothing is archaic, while the “slow cancellation of the future,” which Franco Berardi heralded, means that creative space is no longer creative. The return to craft might only offer a way out of what Fisher called “capitalist realism” if it remains agile and perennially transforms at the local level, managing to circumnavigate corporate homogeneity.

There is perhaps no better symbol of folk esthetics than the humble cardigan, a comforting, homemade garment lovingly knit from natural fibers, free of technological mediation, and industry. folklore and “cardigan” provided solace and familiarity for a large audience during the turmoil brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, narratives sustained in evermore and “willow.” Folk esthetics, a return to craft, nature, and simple materials perhaps reached its commercial zenith as Swift’s folklore shot to number one across the globe. Swift’s negotiation of both digital and analog frameworks, folk mediation via social media – enabled through digital recording methods and online collaboration – provides a current glimpse into the complex web of semiotic codes at play in the return to craft. Might this post-lockdown moment offer a more transformative engagement with tradition and the local in a manner akin to the young generation of sushi otaku in Japan? The return to craft and folk esthetics reflects dialectical historical cycles – patterns not unlike that of a knitted cardigan – but how will these threads now unravel?

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Note that the titles of folklore, evermore, “cardigan,” and “willow” are all stylized in lower case.

2. Rock music, itself deeply laden with mythmaking and iconography, has often been read as a folk art, the subject of much “rockism.”

3. A vintage clothing boom took place during lockdown – retailer Asda installed second hand clothing racks while online scenes such as “dark academia” emerged fetishizing vintage tweeds.

4. This re-enchantment of public space, part of a parallel turn to the irrational, magical, or occult aspects of human life is well discussed by Erik Davis, Phil Ford, and J.F. Martel (see “Exploring the Weird”; and Suddaby et al). There may also be a concurrent return to religion taking place, in what Habermas calls a “post-secular society.”

5. The commodity fetishization of analogue technology often focuses on the “mistakes,” “failures,” and “decay” of its medium, alongside the mediated corporeal / spatial “liveness” of its creation (see Sanden).

6. Another of the biggest selling records of 2020, besides Swift’s folklore, was Dua Lipa’s aptly titled Future Nostalgia.

7. Zygmunt Bauman has termed such a recent seeking out of idealized imagined pasts “retrotopia” (2017).

8. For more on Deleuzian “repetition as difference,” see McGrath.

9. Thanks to Richard Elliott for introducing me to these Mary Chapin Carpenter home concerts and the work of Sherry Turkle.