So the new development in Taylor Swift’s semantic overloading is she’s explicitly chaining her songs on the same album together into little arcs such that this reading of track 3 plus tracks 5, 9, 11 constitute their own narrative, while this reading of 2 (or even this other reading of 3) with 8 and 12 is another.

I listened to Lover today, I remember thinking Cruel Summer was ironic given the plague cause it was supposed to be the song of 2020 and I realized the whole album is supposed to be the album of 2020. Which means it’s a culture war album. But the thing is, preserving wide mass market-appeal and covering her ass, every thread within the cone of possibility from 2019 gets its own arc

Like, the “You Need to Calm Down” video makes the subtext explicit, even more than the You Belong With Me video was with “Look! Taylor Swift is an empathetic, geeky grind AND a catty attention-seeking sex bomb!”, that went with I Forgot That You Existed and The Man on the corporate masscult Diversity™️ arc

And the thing? Realizing we’re on the palingenetic path – Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince, Soon You’ll Get Better (imagine “‘Merica” as the addressee. I cried.), Daylight.

Meanwhile, she made a neo-traditionalist “white girl with braided hair in a field, putting herself in continuity with the pre-WWII upper class” aesthetic turn

ave tayswift regina americanorum