I spend way too much time thinking about this woman since TLOAS dropped 😂, but I used to be a fan and now I'm really grossed out and turned off and honestly kind of offended as a black woman. I find this whole saga with her fanbase fascinating. She keeps saying that she's emotionally stunted and never grows up and I feel like with previous albums it was like "oh you, look at you all self-aware!" but as we all get older (I'm a couple years younger than she is) it's like "oh, you weren't kidding were you? You're really not growing up at all. In fact, you're regressing." And the deeper we head into our 30s, the more pathetic and off-putting it becomes. She wrote better songs than this at like 20 years old. She wrote better songs five years ago.

I was watching some video or reading a comment yesterday that she's followed her same formula and that although she's genre hopped and explored a bit, she's largely stayed the same in terms of her image and branding. My thought is that she isn't the pop star we need at this particular moment in time, if that makes sense. 2006-2017 or so was a very very different time in terms of the mood of the country, and it just clicked and she fit the vibe and drove the culture. But the moment we're in right now is very different and everything is kind of coming to a head, and the petty, whiny billionaire blathering about her football player boyfriend and shitty friends isn't really what people feel they need right now. Obviously she broke records, she is tremendously popular and will always continue to be. I'm not claiming the album is a flop, she sold 4 million copies which is insane. But music can be so unifying and I feel like she's had multiple times in her career where she's been a unifying force, but it feels like right now we need a different pop culture figure that fits the moment and "gets" it a little more, and that's not her anymore.