Welcome everyone to Dolls of our Lives. This is the podcast where we're reliving the American

Girls series book by book except here on Patreon where we're tackling all kinds of interests

in the world of the show. I'm Mary.

And in this episode we're going to get into Daniel Smith's recent book, Shine Bright,

a very personal history of black women in pop. But first, Allison, what's new, what's exciting.

Besides, you know, getting into the world of melody, Allison, and getting to read this book,

let's see, Ben, you know, doing my obligatory Taylor Swift concert watch

on Tik-Tock every weekend.

So I could be saying that for six months.

You know, it's like for a while we had Maddie in the mix, we had ice spice in the mix.

Now it's like we're on a little bit of a break.

She was just in Detroit, just like Melody.

So we're all kind of like coming down from that.

There will be a weekend where I open my phone

and it's not people at this concert, but it's not this week.

That's fair.

And we haven't talked about Taylor Swift's recent like the Maddie of it all the breakup like what do you have thoughts on that like her career like the impact on the Maddie of it all like any of it ice spice to me Maddie Hilli it's like it's like someone said she's dating a brontosaurus like I didn't like I had to have a young person like explain what he was to me I did not know I had to read articles to kind of get

caught up I do know that he is a Manchester man so he is not a London boy I'm aware of like that reality that was kind of it so I've like done a little bit of

research because I wanted to understand the controversy I do think that

eventually we will get the definitive timeline of when Joe was out

Maddie was in and when Maddie was out but I think that right now we're being like

deliberately misled I think to me that's the most interesting piece of this

...