You know something I just picked up on? (about Taylor Swift, obviously)
\u201cWelcome to New York\u201d is a \u201cmoving to New York\u201d song, in 2014, that invokes Manhattan at least once (\u201cthe Village is aglow\u201d) but Brooklyn never. Now that might speak to her actual experience, but it\u2019s kind of at odds with her populist pose, and she\u2019s usually really good about aligning those two.
(Possible excuses are the \u201c1989\u201d theme or playing to a core audience of high school theater kids with a dated, second- or third-hand sense of what \u201cNew York\u201d means, I guess)
Honestly, I think she heard Empire State of Mind and was like \u201coh, huh, New York anthems, that\u2019s a thing isn\u2019t it, I should do one of those\u201d. Like I\u2019ve mentioned, she is very very good at mimicry and matching affect. I complained that Shake it Off was really a Max Martin song, but hell, maybe she just wanted to prove that she could do a Max Martin song. I mean, Out of the Woods (put together with Jack Antonoff) is a fun. song, The Lucky One, off of Red, was a Jenny Lewis song and I hear one of the other 1989 tracks is basically a Lana Del Rey song.
I mean hell, her earlier, more country albums, where she wrote songs about dating a guy your dad didn\u2019t approve of, or watching your daughter grow up, or being 32 and feeling shame about your slutty younger days, those are not experiences she ever actually had. She reverse engineered them from existing country songs and red state culture and repackaged them better than the originals. (Plus, you notice her accent on those albums? She grew up in Pennsylvania, in the county catercorner to mine, and we do not talk like that.)
Like, I love and respect the hell out of the girl, but at the same time I\u2019m a little afraid of her, for real. She\u2019s a supergenius shapeshifter who\u2019s made it her life\u2019s mission to absorb the entirety of American culture and reflect a perfectly polished version of it back at the country. And she\u2019s really good at it!
Something to consider is the treatment of God in her work, only glancing references in the earlier albums - \u201cthe man with the reasons why\u201d/\u201cthe man who put you here\u201d on Come In With The Rain, \u201cAnd when I got home, before I said amen/Asking God if He could play it again\u201d from Our Song, just enough to signal not so much Christianity as Christian\u2026ness, as a component of Real Murcanism (hell, she wrote a song called \u201cSweet Tea and God\u2019s Graces\u201d, unreleased and suppressed on YouTube, which is probably Correct).
The only explicit reference to Jesus in her released original material is in Christmas Must Be Something More, off her Christmas LP, which manages to be a War On Christmas song without any villains. And if, in 2007, you were buying Christmas music, you were enough of a Taylor Swift fan after just the first album to want Taylor Swift Christmas music, and you did your music shopping at Target, you were probably cool with that.
And now in homonationalist 2014 there\u2019s songs with equally glancing references to gayness, and it just\u2026 happens to be possible to squint at her style and personal relationships (which have always been a conscious part of her performance) hard enough to read lesbian subtext, if you\u2019re the kind of person who would want to.
When I say she\u2019s gunning to become the Queen of America I mean it.
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