There were a lot of negative developments in American race relations over the 2010s, so the fact that Reputation was Taylor Swift’s worst album wasn’t in the top 20, but long-term it probably was in the top 40.

Been bumbling around the neighborhood lately, appreciating how it’s reinventing itself as the kind of “Portland” I knew closer in in the early 2010s but had started to write off, like “are we… in the sun-dappled clearing now?”

And had that in mind as I went into a dispensary and “Out of the Woods” came on because of course it did, and I had to keep from looking a fool and crying while the clerk rang up my Pink Lemonade Full Spectrum Blast gummies

memecucker:

Used to think riding with my parents over southeastern Pennsylvania highways through the fields and woods listening on the radio to ‘70s adult album contemporary and 90s country while thinking about what this meant re: the gestalt of America made me unique, but then Taylor Swift, biggest celebrity in the firmament, wrote some songs about same and it’s like hmm

Okay the understanding is now that Taylor Swift doesn’t outrank me, but as the veteran in the rank we’re both at she is my senpai

Also, when I talk about Taylor Swift as Empress of America I don’t mean “mommy is so great, we should recognize her as higher than a queen!”, I mean that if it breaks up into independent kingdoms she is the only one I can picture with the stature to claim the role of balancing them and holding them together in some understanding of America

centrally-unplanned:

centrally-unplanned:

centrally-unplanned:

eightyonekilograms:

Motherfucker why are you DMing Kelsey Piper get a lawyer Jesus Christ

Holy shit

Me, under investigation by the SEC for the largest financial fraud in human history: “Fuck regulators”

New EA Cause Area: Assassinate SBF to shut his fucking mouth.

“Woke Westerners” bro you RAN A PONZI SCHEME this isn’t because you didn’t hit your DEI targets. Vladimir Putin-level of bitter ideological overreach.

Well obviously as far as millennials who leveraged themselves up from merely UUMC families into positions of world-striding, financially staggering prominence off of performances of personality they dramatically proclaim were never natural but purely artifice, I prefer Taylor Swift.

But I don’t think you should read him as blaming the collapse on wokeness – it’s just that you’re looking for him to take and assign moral responsibility and so if that’s what he talks about you get the sense he’s assigning it to, it’s an amoral account of

W H A T H A P P E N E D

, maybe demonstratively so to illustrate that he’s working – you know, having spent the last however long as head of an 11-figure court/harem in royal gardens in island paradise – from an aristocratic morality, not a bourgeois one. And, implicitly, that he is herald of the transition from a long 20th century postwar bourgeois order to an aristocratic one.

I’m not sure this’ll net help, awake this awareness in other Masters of the Universe to come together and claim their domain. I think he might’ve been oversampling cultural sense from the crypto crowd that’re largely in crypto for the goal of reaching this potential and then this state, rather than independently having the potential. (And the fallout from this shit sure won’t get them there)

Like, to return to the top there is a reason my money’s on Taylor Swift as the American empress. Her shit’s just as much artifice but there’s enough authenticity – and authenticity about artifice – mixed in to establish a royal bond with the people at scale and bring them onside.

Can she reach normies as the middle layers of society can she ever. Can she reach the white working class, you realize she was a country star? Can she reach the UMC have you seen the strange new respect for her in their writing lately? Can she reach the would-be aristocrats literally Caroline and me have talked about orienting ourselves with respect to Taylor Swift.

(Can she reach the Black community? No, Reputation was terrible.)

Whereas SBF just generates conflicts, with institutional capital, with the crypto base that you’d want to co-opt at scale, with attempts to congeal a left-populist base that’ll splinter if they can’t find targets to rally against

But like, yeah, that is the shift we’re headed towards, kontextmaschine sees it – remember how I talk about the boarding school as basis for an estate and domain? – Taylor Swift sees it, SBF sees it

Taylor Swift Makes History as First Artist With Entire Top 10 on Billboard Hot 100, Led by ‘Anti-Hero’ at No. 1

Huh, I guess now on streaming a whole album of tracks starts earning position at once, unlike radio with staggered singles

So apparently off Taylor Swift’s “Mastermind” TikTok girls have been posting stories of the the schemes they pulled to pull a man

and honestly, “normalize femdom girl-gets-the-boy dynamics in popular culture” is not at all something I would put past Taylor Swift as a conscious goal

Like, I probably take things too far in viewing everything through the lens of Taylor Swift, but “the star who broke out in the mid-2000s as a hyper-social all-American teenage country singer fixated on the romance of romance is now a relative recluse releasing concept albums about how things are more complicated than her early work and pop songs about BPD recovery” is an amazing synecdoche of 21st century American culture so far

polyaletheia:

kontextmaschine:

Thinking about how via birthrate memes Shinzo Abe has left more of an impression than any other Japanese PM in my life

Thinking about how the role of Japanese Emperor isn’t so much to hold power in the country as to so thoroughly embody the nation that no one who merely holds power in the country can

I think this is generally the purpose and advantage of constitutional monarchy: to separate prestige from power. Thus in the UK the Queen is given all honour and respect, while the PM is treated as some government functionary, addressed not even as “Mister Prime Minister” but simply as “Prime Minister”. It’s healthier, because there’s always someone “higher” than the person who has the actual power.

This is one of the ways I think Taylor Swift would make a good Empress of America.

In Nashville, a Gerrymander Goes Beyond Politics to the City’s Core

Taylor Swift Assigned to New District

Thinking about how my appreciation of Taylor Swift is, in ways, the polar opposite of people who complain about “horse-race” political coverage

baconmancr:

garbagegold:

This is very high on my list of favorite Onion articles.

@kontextmaschine

but who?

Also of course recall that all the scheming I attribute to Taylor Swift she’s done while maintaining a position as the #1 anglophone lyricist, a regularly touring performer, and discharging the duties of an international megacelebrity

So I guess an obvious question with Empress Taylor Swift stuff is… would we ever see a royal wedding? Or would she hold her hand in reserve as a fleet-in-being, like Elizabeth I?

So when I say that Taylor Swift is positioning to be Empress of America, overseeing American culture (the nation, across however many American states), the last person to come within shouting distance of that role was Oprah Winfrey, and Taylor was aware that was the endstate much earlier in the process

Oh, I suppose Taylor Swift specializing in close-touch affect mastery for mimicry or commentary should’ve clued me in a Red cover album would be worthwhile; the last of bonus tracks, about going back in time, makes clear it’s intended as a portal, I had in fact been treating the original 2012 Red as an artifact from the last good time and if we’re all being invited to pick up from there and keep going sure. Ave tayswift regina americanorum.

So I’ve said for a while that Taylor Swift regularly deliberately writes her lyrics to accommodate multiple readings. My theory for this one, off 2019’s Lover, is that past the obvious sick-loved-one reading, there’s a reading where Taylor Swift is singing it to America

And I hate to make this all about me

But who am I supposed to talk to?

What am I supposed to do

If there’s no you?

This won’t go back to normal, if it ever was

It’s been years of hoping, and I keep saying it because

‘Cause I have to

Taylor Swift absolutely strategizing how not to get dragged into Tennessee abortion politics rn