Rick Moody on Taylor Swift
"Does the Swift entity have personhood? Is personhood a meaningful requirement?"
With summer underway, we’re taking time to return to some of our favorite Public Seminar essays from the past semester.
This week: Rick Moody on how Taylor Swift can prove, once and for all, that she is not “a simulacrum, a hologram, an artificial intelligence program, or a hybrid of these.”
Taylor Swift: The Modest Proposal
Rick Moody
In this brief document, I propose that Taylor Swift should perform a note-for-note live cover of “Morning Dew,” the folk-song-turned-Grateful-Dead standard, apparently written by Bonnie Dobson (though later claimed, spuriously, to be the work of one Tim Rose).
My proposal is further that Taylor Swift should cover not just any version of “Morning Dew.” Rather I suggest that she cover the Grateful Dead version from the celebrated Barton Hall gig, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 5/8/77.
The urgent necessity for this proposal is to be found in that fact that by covering “Morning Dew” Swift, whose surname always reminds me of banking codes, will be repelling, once and for all, any and all suggestions that she, the Taylor Swift entity, is a simulacrum, a hologram, an artificial intelligence program, or a hybrid of these. These are clearly unwarranted assertions, calumnies, and it is a kindness to use a philosophically reliable technique to repel them.
This performance would, in all likelihood, prove “fleshy” the Swift entity’s being-status by resolutely non-legal means, according to the rigors of old-fashioned, not to say quaint, humanism.
That is, the Swift entity could put to rest any doubts about her personhood through art-making, in a medium allegedly practiced by the Taylor Swift entity, viz., musical performance.
Let me now speak briefly to the appropriateness of “Morning Dew” as vehicle for this performance by the Swift entity.
First, Swift alleges to play guitar and has been filmed playing it (the technical term is, I think, “strumming”), on multiple occasions, in documentaries and feature films, and during a “Tiny Desk Concert” performance. Naturally, virtually every recording of “Morning Dew” requires manipulation of this particular instrument.
And: the live performance would to some extent contraindicate software interface, or auto-tuning or radical compression or other digital interventions, all of which exacerbate the notion that Swift is a simulacrum or other AI project. The performance would self-select for analogue systems. It would, to a useful degree, authenticate.
(Bonnie Dobson’s original, which I believe was recorded at Folk City in 1962, is just singer and fingerpicked acoustic guitar.)
By covering the Barton Hall document, Swift will allude, metonymically, to her own conversion from “country” singer to singer of rock/pop material, just as when Dobson’s fingerpicked version became the Grateful Dead’s psychedelic rave-up on their first album and in the years subsequent, up to and including during the Barton Hall gig. This should come “naturally” to the Swift entity.
It should be noted: I don’t really like anything by the Grateful Dead after Pigpen died (circa 1973).
And yet: despite their obscure aleatory qualities and their inability to groove, one thing the various members of the Grateful Dead have done with stunning humanness is deal with the complexity of what is called in certain philosophical circles finitude.
Indeed, this idea of finitude is expressed in the very name of the band, the Grateful Dead, likewise in their famous skull and roses image, and in the various albums all adorned with skeletons, skulls, etc.
To their horror, they arrived at this band name, the Grateful Dead, according to chance operations, and then, thereafter, they were stuck with it, wherein their own finitude was henceforth built into their every performance, their every gesture, and intricated into the biography of the band, too. In, e.g., their inability to keep keyboard players alive.
Rick Moody is the author of six novels, three collections of stories, and three works of nonfiction, including, most recently, The Long Accomplishment, a memoir. He writes a column on music at Salmagundi and teaches at Tufts University.
I love this witty piece.