drainer 2 swiftie pipeline

How could you like something so bland and soulless and Bladee at the same time?

Taylor Swift was recently named one of New York Times Magazine’s 30 greatest living American songwriters. In her video interview, she mentions loving Sombr because his lyrics are “intensely confessional,” and adds that it’s nice to have a male artist saying stuff like that, because usually it’s just women.

That was the final connection, two of my top artists last year were Bladee and Taylor Swift. And in my ongoing crusade to understand my own taste, how it develops, what it means and why I keep returning to certain things I needed to make the connection. I could not figure out why I felt so strongly about two artists that exist in completely different spaces. One is the most streamed person on the planet. The other is a Swedish rapper whose lyrics include taking a knife and draining your life.

But Taylor talking about Sombr cracked it open. Bladee’s music is intensely confessional just like hers.

In many ways, perhaps most obviously sonically, they couldn’t be more different. But confession doesn’t care about genre. Taylor watches American Pie. Bladee goes to McDonald’s and orders the Sad Meal. Both are wrapping pop culture, mythology, and raw feeling into something that shouldn’t work but does.

Take Eyelash, one of Bladee’s newest releases. He wants to be so close to someone that he wants to be the apps on their iPad and the eyelash on their eyelid. That’s not the usual bragging that we are used to in rap. That’s the same specific, tenderness as Swift writing that wants to wear her lovers initial on a necklace

Their regret is also identical. In Back to December and Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve and Midnight Rain, Taylor is cataloguing her own failures and wrong turns, “broke his heart because he was nice”. Bladee does the same on Flatline: “I find a way to sabotage everything between me and you.” On Waster he just says it plainly “sorry mom, I know you hate to see me this way.” Both of them are compulsively returning to the scene of their own bad behaviour and writing it down.

The polarity thing is also there, “He was sunshine, I was midnight rain” Taylor actively seeking out pain while her partner wants comfort. In Obsessed With Death, Bladee watches someone glittering and spinning while he’s preoccupied with destruction and death. Same energy just different fonts.

And both of them are genuinely, unapologetically dramatic. The Tortured Poets Department is 30 songs about a situationship, with lyrics about dying in a tree because of Matty Healy. Cold Visions is 30 songs that move from conversations about God, to Armani, to a darkness beyond sadness, to reflections on fame. Both albums feel completely unhinged from the outside but feel completely earned from the inside.

They’re also both obsessed with God, not really in a gospel way but in the way you reach for God when the feeling is too big and you’ve run out of ways to say it yourself.

Because confession needs a witness, you can’t just say things into the void and have it mean something. Both of them seem to know that the confession only lands if something all-knowing is on the other end. Something or someone that knew you before you made the mess.

Taylor’s version feels like prayer, Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve is repetittive and incantatory, she’s listing everything she did wrong, she wants absolution. Bladee reaches for God too but his version is more about dissolving into something than being forgiven by it. Which is why their hauntings feel different. Taylor is haunted by what she did or what was done to her. Her ghosts have names and adresses, the guy she left in December or the nineteen year old she used to be. They knock and she opens the door and writes an album. Bladee is haunted by what he is, the ghost isn’t a past lover or a bad decision. The ghost is him! On Cold Visions he’s not reckoning with something that happened, he’s trying to figure out where he stands in all of it.

So when God doesn’t answer and in both their catalogues, God often doesn’t, the haunting is what’s left. Taylor’s ghosts are unfinished confessions. Bladee’s are what happens when the witness was never there. Both are reaching for the same thing, something or someone that knows them completely. The difference is Taylor believes it’s listening, and i don’t think Bladee is so sure.

The funny part of all of this, when I posted a little feeler about this on TikTok, the Bladee fans came for me. “Bladee would never reference American Pie” “Bladee lyrics clear” “How could you like something so bland and soulless and Bladee at the same time”

Which is ironic, because the fanbase behaviour is also identical. Taylor fans are famously militant, I genuinely don’t tell people I like her music in certain contexts because the assumption is immediate: you must be insane! (I AM!! I’m literally writing a Substack post about her right now) And turns out Bladee fans are exactly the same, protective, ready to fight, threatened by the idea that their artist might share a quality with someone mainstream.

But that’s what makes it interesting. If you can love Bladee and Taylor Swift, and draw a line between them, what does that mean for someone whose identity is built on Bladee being inaccessible? Maybe the thing they love about him, that raw, specific, confessional isn’t as niche as the packaging suggests. Maybe it’s just a human thing that keeps showing up everywhere in Nashville AND in Stockholm. You don’t have to like them both, I’m not asking for that but I just needed to find the throughline in my own taste, and Sombr handed it to me lol.

Confession is confession. The knife and the quill are just different ways of saying the same thing!

To quote both Bladee and Swift: Can’t end on a loss, but you know when its time to go…