FATHER JOHN MISTY
Josh Tillman is nervous. In five days he’ll perform “Total Entertainment Forever” on Saturday Night Live , but he can already see the headlines from Monday morning from his hotel room in New York City. That song, whose opening lines describe a future where everyday Americans spend their evenings having sex with Taylor Swift inside an Oculus Rift VR headset, lands so squarely at the nexus of celebrity and salaciousness that it’s hard to imagine it will inspire anything resembling a calm, measured response. No, in a click-bait culture where the Internet has basically devolved into what Tillman calls “pornography and outrage,” he understands that the nuance of such a song is almost certainly going to be swept away in the ever-present rush to get the first hot take. “I’m going to sing Taylor Swift’s name, and that will be interpreted as ‘This fucking asshole will say anything for attention,’” he says. “And I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to be seen that way. I would rather quit than to live my life being seen that way, when the fact of the matter is that I don’t want that to happen to Taylor Swift. I think that’s horrible, and I know it’s coming.”
Five days later, things go off without a hitch. With a backing band of bearded musicians, Tillman steps up to the mic and describes a future of endless self-indulgence, where humans finally achieve the dream of having everything they want and entertainment becomes the substance of life. “No gods to rule us/No drugs to soothe us/No myths to prove stuff/No love to confuse us,” he sings on the bridge, then concludes with images of humans slowly wasting away, skin and bones with smiles on their faces, while plugged into their devices. It is not a song about Taylor Swift.
Tillman had good reason to worry. Two hours before his SNL performance, Pitchfork ran a news item titled “Father John Misty Sings About VR Sex With Taylor Swift in New Song ‘Total Entertainment Forever.’” By Sunday morning the headlines started rolling in. Nearly all of them missed the point of the song entirely. Vancouver culture magazine The Georgia Straight commented that the song “seemingly suggests [Tillman] might enjoy having carnal relations with Taylor Swift.” Teen Vogue called the song “gross” and argued that Tillman should have chosen “less offensive lyrics that could have carried the same message.” Argentinian newspaper La Voz’s headline proved that the song’s meaning wasn’t lost only on English speakers with an article titled, “Father John Misty tiene una fantasía: tener sexo virtual con Taylor Swift” (translation: Father John Misty has a fantasy: to have virtual sex with Taylor Swift).
By Monday the first think-pieces emerged, with science and technology magazine “Should We Be Allowed to Have Virtual Sex With Taylor Swift?”—an article that at least picked up the larger thread of the song. By the end of the day, most of the news had shifted to endless recitations of Tillman’s explanations of the song’s meaning—that, no, he doesn’t
