Editor’s note: Obviously, this is not what you’ve come to expect from TFF. Reader, I am sorry. It turns out that to keep my creative brain ticking along, I need to actively engage with the things I consume, which is mostly shit and garbage. Otherwise it sits and ferments and, much like jam, doesn’t benefit from ageing. Personal prose and poetry will be back soon, and in the meantime, I hope you enjoy reading my silly reflections on whatever the fuck.
I love pop culture. This week has been a biggie, but I think we’ve all reached saturation point with the new Taylor Swift album. To briefly touch on it, I’ll just do a few bullet points of my thoughts on the album, which I did listen to from start to finish… all 31 tracks…
Fortnight is a pretty song and it’s grown on me. I’m glad it’s the choice for a single. The first few lines summarise what irks me about Taylor, which is that a lot of her lyrics could have been a Tumblr text post circa 2015, and I know this because I was there and that was me. This set the tone for this feature cropping up a lot throughout the album — this sense that she has this turn of phrase to say and she just can’t contain herself, but it doesn’t sit right in the song and is done at the sacrifice of more interesting melodies. Anyway, she still has the incredible ability to break my heart with a hook as simple and sincere as “I love you, it’s ruining my life” and, while I’m not a superfan, it keeps me listening.
Taylor is at her best when she picks one metaphor and builds a good song from it — ‘The Bolter’ is a standout track.
‘Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me?’ — my standout track in terms of Taylor doing interesting things with her voice.
As has already been covered ad nauseam, the length of the album is obscene.
But something else happened this week. Something that, in true Meghan Markle fashion, rivalled something as big in celebrity news as a new Taylor Swift album and horses loose and covered in blood on the streets of London.
Actually, I think the three items look quite poetic together. The cavalry horses have broken free in violent protest. One of the steeds, a grey, is covered with blood, scarlet on white an age-old code for stained innocence, the image seeming hauntingly ominous. In Calabasas, a spoonful of blood red jam is being spread on a slice of white sourdough. Taylor Swift plays in the background:
A curious child, ever reviled
By everyone except her own father
With a quite bewitching face
Splendidly selfish, charmingly helpless
Excellent fun 'til you get to know her
Then she runs like it's a race
Behind her back, her best mates laughed
And they nicknamed her "The Bolter"
The first I heard of the jam scandal, which I’ll call jamgate, was through the refrain that keeps capitalism chugging along: competition. Competition from Buckingham Palace, who posted ‘five ways with our strawberry preserve’ or something, and Highgrove, whose jam sold out to fervent anti-Markle consumers. Competition that reveals something bizarre about our culture in recessive UK, as well as the US’s investment in our royal family.
Royal gossip is the most bizarre thing in popular culture, but I can’t stop. When I read about the jam, I was already imagining it as an Absurdist episode of The Crown. I was also trying to imagine what Slavoj Žižek would say about it philosophically, so I asked ChatGPT to role-play as him in this imaginary conversation. Here’s what SlAIvoj had to say:
“One cannot help but be drawn into the dialectical dance of consumption and spectacle, where the mundane transmutes into the extraordinary. Markle's jam, ostensibly a banal condiment, becomes a cipher for the commodification of the quotidian, a symbol of the relentless valorisation of the everyday under late capitalism. In this spectacle, the royal persona is not merely an individual but a commodified entity, subjected to the voracious appetite of the media machinery.
Yet, in its very commodification, there lurks a subversive potential, a rupture in the fabric of capitalist realism. For in the humble jar of jam lies the possibility of disrupting the ossified narratives of power and privilege, revealing the inherent contradictions of a society built upon the fetishisation of royalty and the fetishisation of commodities. Thus, Markle's jam becomes a site of contestation, where the banal and the sublime collide in a dizzying spectacle of consumption and critique.
As I sink my teeth into this deliciously absurd topic, I am reminded of the Hegelian dialectic at play — the tension between the thesis of authenticity and the antithesis of artifice, culminating in the synthesis of capitalist commodification.”
Insert sniffs at the appropriate intervals in your own imagination.
SlAIvoj gives some interesting prompts to explore. The voracious appetite of the media is a potent ingredient in this batch of cultural preserve.
As I predicted, the think pieces on the topic tend to come to the conclusion that the jam is not the problem, but the way the media vilifies women like Meghan Markle. I think it has more layers than that. I think it’s one of a few roles she has embodied to appeal to the public and the media. On the one hand, she has chosen plain old strawberry jam as her condiment of choice — very no-frills. A return to simplicity that many of us crave. Perhaps even cottagecore?
But her brand name, American Riviera Orchard, evokes a sense of glamour, luxury, and nostalgia. A promise of sun-drenched coastlines, luxurious resorts, and leisurely living. By associating the jam with the American Riviera, the brand seeks to evoke a sense of exclusivity and refinement, appealing to consumers' desires for a taste of the good life.
Enter the influencers. 50 carefully chosen celebrity recipients became part of this soft-launch narrative as they either got on board and created a breakfast recipe or gave a simple (perhaps baffled?) “thank you”. Friends… although I’m trying to imagine Kris Jenner and Meghan Markle having a conversation and I just can’t get there. Perhaps they laugh behind her back. Perhaps they call her “The Bolter”.
Logistics stormed the discourse. Why not make lemon curd or marmalade as a citrus orchard is on the property? Where did she source her strawberries from if nobody at her local farmers’ market has heard that she is working with any strawberry farmers in the community? (These are all questions I’m somewhat ashamed I was seeking the answers to.)
And there’s that word — community. Strawberry jam. Local markets. The simple gesture of sending a jar of jam to a friend. It’s quaint, but uncannily so. I can’t put my finger on it, but because pop culture has rotted my brain, it came up with this image:
Why is it giving Mom to me? Perhaps the juxtaposition of Markle's wholesome, cottagecore branding with the diabolical undertones of her media manipulation creates a sense of irony, highlighting the absurdities of celebrity culture and the media industrial complex.
And then there’s the former royal aspect of the whole thing. There’s the idea that consuming the jam makes one adjacent to royalty or celebrity. The jam of kings. The congealed blood of Christ?
And there’s the history of public figure jam making. Like Corbyn. Why is it different? Well, he doesn’t sell his jam, and his jam seems to be a symbol of self-sufficiency and community.
This provides a sharp recess to Markle’s jam, which at its soft launch had the impression of being a limited run. Friends received pot #??/50. Business experts have estimated a single jar is £200. The contradiction between rustic simplicity and exclusivity and luxury is killing me. It’s not that I think it’s out of character for Markle — actually, it reminds me of her former persona on The Tig.
It’s how this latest launch sits in the storyline of her transition from royalty to bolter to entrepreneur. It’s how she manages to embody feminist, tradwife, elitist and activist all at once. It’s wondering what ever happened with that podcast deal in which she only had to interview other people with pre-prepared questions, remotely… It’s wondering if she wants to work at all, or wait, my brain just interjected with another worthless piece of reality TV pop culture… The Simple Life. How apt.
It’s the capitalising on the image of a widespread yearning to simply be at home tending to our strawberries. A nostalgia for a time that never was for us.
It’s the inherent contradictions of a society built upon the fetishisation of royalty and the fetishisation of commodities.
It’s the scandal of it all, how it may as well be the McCanns putting out Merch For Maddie.
I love jam, it’s ruining my life.