Released less than a couple of weeks ago, on the 19th of April, Taylor Swift’s newest album titled The Tortured Poets Department has seemingly taken the music industry—and the internet—by storm. And whether or not you liked it, or listened to it in the first place, you most likely have seen or heard something about it, at least, as nowadays it seems to be increasingly difficult not to.
Judging from what has been floating around the online space since the release of the album, one song in particular seems to have reached quite a vast audience, if not because of the song itself, then because of the viral meme linked to it; it’s track number 10, titled ‘Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me’.
Roughly three minutes into the song, Taylor uses the phrase ‘You wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me', arguably referring to the detrimental aspects of stardom. But some internet users took a slightly different approach, adjusting the catchphrase to what they believe has been their “asylum” while growing up or even during adulthood.
Talking about some of the songs on the album with Amazon Music, Swift revealed that ‘Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me’ was written as she was “alone, sitting at the piano in one of those moments when I felt bitter about just all the things we do to our artists as a society and as a culture”, Variety reports.
TayTay added that there’s quite a lot about this particular concept throughout the entire album. “What do we do to our writers, and our artists, and our creatives? We put them through hell. We watch what they create, then we judge it. We love to watch artists in pain, often to the point where I think sometimes as a society we provoke that pain and we just watch what happens,” she shared.
Even though the phrase used with so many memes is believed to have first seen the light of day together with the release of the entire album, some people likely got acquainted with it a few days before. According to Know Your Meme, the buzz regarding that particular snippet of her song started some time before the official release, as some tracks had been leaked online just days before.
Know Your Meme also pointed out that the meme trend featuring Tay’s song lyrics was likely started by a netizen on X, who used it together with a picture of the set of the well-known Glee series. Implying that that was “the asylum where they raised them”, the X user started a wave of people sharing their own versions of such “asylums”. And, as you can see by this list, they cover an abundance of things popular at different times, including computer games, celebrity drama, social media platforms, and more.
Quite a few of the “asylums” netizens used in their memes refer to video games or activities popular at a certain time in their lives, which they have seemingly outgrown. “We get tired of these after we master them,” Dr. Roberta Michnick Golinkoff told Bored Panda, discussing why we lose interest in certain things or hobbies as time passes.
“That's why I like tennis,” she shared. “It is a game that takes more than a lifetime to master. For kids, some games like Candyland get old as they acquire more skills, as such games as Monopoly require you to know how to count money, for example, or chess requires you to think strategically.”
But more than video games or TV series, a factor that tends to influence people’s lives the most is other people. According to Dr. Golinkoff, we are all born into a “social soup”, as we start to interact with those around us from day one; and generally, it’s the people who are kind and nurturing to us that impact our lives the most, especially in regards to choices.
“Because people are social creatures, they may well start spinning new ideas together,” Dr. Golinkoff pointed out, discussing the importance of having someone you can relate to.
They might start to wonder, what would make a better video game, for instance. Or what can we do with all the glass in New Orleans? “A pair of friends decided to grind the bottles into glass and use them to fill in places where hurricanes washed it. They now have 15 employees,” the expert shared, providing an example of a fruitful collaboration, stemming from someone’s ability to relate to another person or a similar goal.