Cleveland is a hard word to rhyme. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony don’t try to rhyme it. When it comes up in “Pancho and Lefty,” Townes Van Zandt makes sure to tuck it in the middle of a line. Alex Bevan’s “Skinny,” a totemic Cleveland song if there ever was one, gets extra specific: This “skinny white boy” is from “Cleveland, Ohio”—not Cleveland, Kansas, or Cleveland, Tennessee. (Not that the maneuvering to end the line with a nice rhymable vowel sound matters much in the end: Ohio, too, goes unrhymed. Perhaps something about Cleveland repels rhyme, steers prosody away from the nursery lilt.)
That Taylor Swift rhymes “he already took me to Cleveland” with “something we all can agree on” in her new song, fittingly titled “Cleveland!”, is maybe the most impressive songwriting feat she’s pulled off in years. What is Cleveland to Taylor? It’s where her new husband grew up, for one thing. It’s also a refuge from the haters. Over a twee piano riff—surely producer Max Martin, who has never sounded more out of ideas, is channeling his countryman Jens Lekman—she spends most of “Cleveland!” rattling off mean things people have said about her online. They criticize her dancing and her looks; they declare her to be washed; they say, as she’s complained about before in songs such as “Anti-Hero,” that she’s fake.
But this is a happy song. Just listen to that piano! It’s worth celebrating: Her husband doesn’t care about the haters. He doesn’t understand what they’re saying; maybe he doesn’t even know they exist. He “must not have read” the “scathing take about how I’m fake.” He might not know how to read at all. He is a holy fool, a stupid Romantic child. He simply “likes what he likes.” He is a human tautology, empty, pure as driven snow. And because of this, because he can’t see her shortcomings, he has taken her to Cleveland, presumably for a Bachelor-style meet-the-family moment.
“Cleveland!” cleaves the land in two. There is the internet, and then there is Cleveland. There is America A, which exists on the computer, and then there is America B, which exists in real space and time. There are the frothing masses of haters outside, and then there is Cleveland, home and hearth and border security. There is knowingness—criticism and self-criticism—and then there is Cleveland, the zone of forgetting, the cone of obliscence, the perpetual present of cranial trauma. News of the latest cancellation doesn’t reach Cleveland. Cleveland still listens to Ed Sheeran. Everyone in Cleveland has heard “Choosin’ Texas,” though “Choosin’ Texas” is not the most popular song in Cleveland. The most popular song in “Cleveland!”’s Cleveland is “Cleveland!”
It should go without saying that “Cleveland!”’s Cleveland is not Cleveland. It is a mirage. Somewhere outside history, in a nice big house some twenty minutes from town, is where this song really wants to be. It can’t get all the way there. It can’t keep its two worlds separate. The haters’ voices take over this song that was supposed to be a capstone on a celebrity wedding for the ages. As on the original The Life of a Showgirl album, all the crowing about domestic bliss scans as wish-casting through gritted teeth. “You only need to find one person in the world who doesn’t find you insufferable,” it advises—but the one person who fits the bill only does so because he is utterly clueless. “Cleveland!” is destined to be a big wedding song, but it is just as strange and subversive a choice as “Mr. Brightside,” the cuckold’s anthem. Everyone whose partner associates this song with their own wedding ought to feel insulted. If they don’t, then the song really is about them, too.
One wonders if Taylor Swift listens to music. One also wonders, given her history of collaborating with her romantic partners, if Travis Kelce had a hand in writing this one. If you listen to it enough, “Cleveland!” stops sounding like Jens Lekman—also a notable lover of weddings, the subject of his latest album and accompanying book—and starts sounding more like hold music. Thank you for contacting the zone of forgetting. A representative will be with you shortly.
Mitch Therieau
Mitch Therieau is a writer in California.