On the one hand I’m ticked we might not get a 2-year Lover era, I liked it even better than Red
On the other she is VERY aware of the cultural context she works in, and after Reputation as the failed flirtation with 2010s minority-led pop culture and Lover as the summing-up of her entire body of work offering the way she resolved her personal struggles as a model for resolving our cultural struggles…
Cutting that era short to release an album called “folklore” with a Kinfolk magazine cottagecore aesthetic, kind of a maturing of the mason-jar-wedding-reception Americana aesthetic she dropped after Red, in July 2020 is FASCINATING
Like, ok, it’s black and white and it’s not wheat but this
is absolutely a white girl with braided hair and a folk dress in a field
You see when actual traditional European cultures whipped up a stereotype of “the iconic wheatfield wife in peasant garb”, it was like, the shriveled babushka, or “bawdy, sloppy, and fat”, both of which types I assure you remain well represented among rural working women today
Canada is this vision of how politics are progressing in an Anglophone nation that didn’t already run smack into a wall 2 years ago
Oh riffing off that “Canadian oil” also it’s worth pointing out that “canola oil” means “Canadian oil, low acid” because North Americans are too immature to admit it’s called “rapeseed oil”
[I tried like 30 mins to find the old field-in-blossom “YOU GONNA GET RAPE” macro, enjoy these white women in rape fields instead]
I too would see the scumbag left’s treatment of Liz Bruenig as weird if I didn’t think “look! we get real, actual wheatfield mommy gfs!” was a powerful, valid point
When someone writes the inevitable history of the “white women in wheat fields” aesthetic I hope they’re honest enough to acknowledge Hegre and Met-Art
CFWG word association: fields, wheat?, curds and whey, head band, “fashion”, corn fashion, fashioned corn, fashiony corn, fashionably cornfieldy, boring, awful, sucks, fields, blue-collar man, truck, Pall Mall, mall of america, minnesota, vikings, norway-findland-denmark-sweden, carefree white girl.
no matter what it will always end in carefree white girl. try your own.
Carefree White Girl. I like that, I’ve been waiting for a term for it. They are to pictures what Manic Pixie Dream Girls are to narratives:: I think I deserve them, but I know girls who really are them and meh/huh
