It is a controversy actually worthy of an exclamation point. When was the last time the internet lost its collective stuff over a single song the way it did this past week with Taylor Swift s  Cleveland! ? And they say there's no such thing as a monoculture anymore. It might have felt like everyone you knew had not only heard  Cleveland!  (unlike the millions of people coming onto X to proudly proclaim their unfamiliarity with  Choosin' Texas  as ot busted chart records) but had a Very Hot Take on it. In the realm of her fandom, much of that discourse was defense of the track. But inherent in all that was the idea that the song needed defending. Because at the tip of this social tsunami was a strong supposition that swiftly powered a gazillion Instagram memes:

Love and marriage have made Taylor Swift lose her dang mind… maybe even turned her into the mayor of Simpleton.

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But as the internet increasingly went into pile-on mode about the new song - almost ignoring that she'd simultaneously released three other new tracks, including the new single  Patient Zero,  all of them bringing the old, more morose Swift back to the phone - I began to feel a sense of deja vu. Where had I, and maybe the world, experienced a panic like this before, about an artist whose turn toward silly love longs had been seen as some sort of cultural betrayal, or basic job failure?

The answer, of course, was in the question. It was Paul McCartney, in the early and mid-'70s, who got besotted with the romantic sillies and asked,  What's wrong with that?  And further demanded:  I'd like to know!  Because, you know, here he goes… again… giving John Lennon unending nightmares there on Central Park West. It wasn't just  Silly Love Songs,  which came a few years later on; it was  The Lovely Linda,  the first song on his solo album, announcing that he had traded in the Beatles for matrimony and domestic bliss. His dream had come true, but in the eyes of those who had a different picture of what he ought to be doing, it was more like the dream was over, to quote his ex-partner.

Obviously the author of  H

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