kontextmaschine:

So on the “literal Empress of America Taylor Swift” tip, dae notice that she followed up the album that positioned her as “Miss Americana” with one where she, Taylor Swift, only appears to establish a claim as heir to “the last great American dynasty”?

Sure it’s in parallel to a woman who dissipated it (“she had a marvelous time ruining everything”) but this is a concept album about how all of Taylor Swift’s issues would have wrecked her if they weren’t, uh, tied together by a perfectionistic will to power

And that since at least the prom court-themed “Long Live” (“bring on all the pretenders…”) she’s been depicting ultimate success as going down in history by capturing a royal title in American idiom?

Oh shit you know what I just remembered, Starlight, which before folklore was her starting to tell stories about other people in American history as a way to explore counterfactuals.

and they snuck into a yacht club party, pretending to be a duchess and a prince

Like she has this impulse to top the postwar American rich by claiming high nobility on account of being meritocratically superior at performing their rituals

which is why and how she is the apex product of her age