redantsunderneath:

kontextmaschine:

You go back and listen to her early stuff like “oh it’s all about straight courtship!” no, it’s all about being a valued and desired girl

That is true, but her songs always seem to work on a number of layers at once in this vein, applying to lovers, friends, classmates, industry people, the press, the audience, the place she lives, and America writ large, all at once. You can look at a song like Bad Blood and say “it’s about Katy Perry” and she can say “I wrote it about Karlie Kloss (friendship drama)” but it functions as a piece of the album’s cycle about the eternal return of her romantic relationships, her feelings about living in New York, or the media saying things about her post Kanye. This makes it hard to anchor bisexuality on anything because the songs are referring to many different potential intersubjective partners or collective others, but they are always “bi-potential” (not that uncommon to make a pop song abstract enough to refer to any legible lover/lover relationship).

BUT, she has clearly steered into the skid of making the romance gender ambiguous, to the point of even having songs where the most obvious read requires the presence of a bisexual “I” (see Folklore’s so called teenage love triangle, but even that is cheekily complicated). It is fair to say her songs have always been subjectively fluid, but she has been moving into a different phase where the identification point is more condensed and not as centered on her lived experience. So as we approach full bi, we also get less certain she’s not projecting into a character.

ADDED: note that this applies to the notional “Taylor Swift” (holographic construct of song and media data) who I do not think is the same as the meat person, even if I talk about her life informing the readings as if it is. I saw Val so I might write more about this relationship soon. This disclaimer is to avoid being accused of parasociality.

Yeah, her semantic overloading.

It’s not even the lyrical narratives, though, it’s like how in even the most About The Heterosexual World stuff like The Man she’s clearly directly invested in the female roles she’s constructing