rendakuenthusiast:

kontextmaschine:

Empress, the one who by charisma and appeal to national narrative and myth could hold the successor kingdoms together

> ave tayswift regina americanorum

According to the Neo-Latin lexicon, “America” the country is a feminine 1st declension noun America, -ae; whereas the adjective “American” is a 1st/2nd declension adjective Americānus, -a, -um. So you could write “Ave tayswift regina americana” or “Ave tayswift regina americarum” for “Queen of the Americas”; but “americanorum” is just incorrect; that would imply the adjective and there’s no genitive plural masculine noun in that sentence for such an adjective to agree with.

Yeah, I tried asking around when I started using the tag but at this point I honestly don’t care

Empress, the one who by charisma and appeal to national narrative and myth could hold the successor kingdoms together

kontextmaschine:

The “took him on tour” bit raises my eyebrows but the “stopped the bus and asked to be taught” thing I would absolutely believe – her songs repeatedly use the verb “know” as the highest compliment you can pay and the way to relate to a lover, to so completely internalize something that you carry a working model of it within you. And I think she is trying to “know” as much of American culture as she can, in that sense.

You wouldn’t think it from 4 notes, but after the “the Cold War was America discarding Soviet allies and adopting German to win World War 2”, the Taylor Swift knowledge-as-love thing is the kontextmaschine take I’ve seen spread furthest.

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

On the subject of tailoring your public health campaigns to their audience, it’s worth noting that one of the major themes of the last album Taylor Swift planned a 2-year, new-style, how-we-straight-girl-today touring cycle around was “getting treatment for BPD will make you stable enough to actually appreciate those fairy tale relationships you’ve been chasing”

as a reminder, this is the last American presidential election Taylor Swift is ineligible for

cold was the steel I had to grind/for the boys who broke my heart/now I send their babies presents

is an incredibly warm, pro-family and charitable way to say “you used to matter to me but now you’re busy raising kids and I’m the boss”

that’s why she’s going to be empress someday

“Being a passenger in a motor vehicle with someone as a model for your emotional relationship to them” is one of the oldest and most consistent Taylor Swift themes

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

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?

kontextmaschine:

…huh

On the one hand I’m ticked we might not get a 2-year Lover era, I liked it even better than Red

On the other she is VERY aware of the cultural context she works in, and after Reputation as the failed flirtation with 2010s minority-led pop culture and Lover as the summing-up of her entire body of work offering the way she resolved her personal struggles as a model for resolving our cultural struggles…

Cutting that era short to release an album called “folklore” with a Kinfolk magazine cottagecore aesthetic, kind of a maturing of the mason-jar-wedding-reception Americana aesthetic she dropped after Red, in July 2020 is FASCINATING

Like, ok, it’s black and white and it’s not wheat but this

is absolutely a white girl with braided hair and a folk dress in a field

redantsunderneath:

I’m reading Taylor Swift’s diaries now, the four on the special editions of Lover. They start at age 13, so compassion should be exercised, but she’s no normal kid, and I find her fascinating.  She has gifted kid syndrome - she looks at everything in terms of whether people like what’s she’s executed. She doesn’t know how to relate to people other than “do they approve of my works?”  She wants to learn (self help) but the take home of the personal growth has a lot to do with showing others appreciation through gifts.  For her, choosing what to buy/style is a large part of her identity.  My contention of her exemplifying the struggling subjectivity of an object/Laura Palmer type is supported.  Often this issue is a masculinized one pertaining to “work,” you are what you’re good for, so I look at this and see a version of my life with narrative art instead of clothes/decor and no “being famous.”  But she has to contend with the horror of being seen.

She flew home because she was lonely and was so glad she did because she “wrote a song called Red on the plane.” Her introspection has aspect of alien autopsy with really nice candles burning. 

The 4 journals are all contemporaneous (though not 100% in order) and are curated to emphasize her excitement at good things happening, how down she gets, the fact that family is important, and the fact that she actually writes the songs.  There is a longing for human connection and a having to be goal directed 24/7… it’s noteworthy when there is a day off, and she wants you to know she can appreciate this as long as she’s helping her mom choose a light fixture.  The diary seems like she imagines someone reading it and there are many stories of “I played it for them and they loved it.” At 13, she’s expressing that she doesn’t want to be at a large label where she gets lost, but Capitol won’t give her the deal she wants.  

All of this could be written last week, but somehow this doesn’t matter because it’s selected to paint a picture anyway, and there is ample subtext.  She writes about how she’s getting old at 21, and feeling like the girl before the girl you spend your life with/valorizing never getting married at 16.  There are lines of “what good will I be when I’m useless.” The pro guy stuff is all  princess fantasies and she undermines every instance by repeatedly, harshly disbelieving the myth.  She wrote a song called White Horse about the hero myth being soul rending bullshit which is the best unknowing Laura Palmer nod this side of this “secret diary” itself.  

It calls attention so some of her writing ticks, like the “didn’t you see this relationship was your shot at perfection yet you threw it away” and I really get this can’t mess up paranoia/fear of uselessness that hangs over everything.  All the relationship songs going back are as much or more about her struggle to make her own identity happen through an “audience.” All of the business stuff is about how producers and celebs see her and her work.  There is a long passage of hating the album cover for 1989 until she saw a polaroid that chopped off her eyes but retained her lips and body.

I think releasing this is an exorcism.  There’s no cancer or the solid guy.  There is a bunch of never had a real high school experience so my idiom is stuck there, which explains all the cheers and marching bands and prom dresses. But I think that’s over.  If the next album’s not a baby album, then it’s a wedding one then baby one.

Lover, cont.

She’s always done densely referential stuff but this is another fucking level entirely, within four bars she’ll reference five of her own different songs, separately in phrasing, meter, vocal affect, beat, and instrumental sound, and ALL THE CROSS-REFERENCES ACTUALLY MAKE SENSE AND ADD DEPTH, it’s fucking insane, she’ll have reference chains that bounce across 5 albums and a decade as if she was planning it all along, and then while you’re absorbing that you’ll get to another track and learn you were being set up for an entirely different reference chain the whole time

A bit ago I was like “why is she riffing off Katy Perry 2012” but that’s a definite decision. On one hand Lover “sounds” like 1989 or Reputation in the same way that Red progressed from the country sounds of Fearless or Speak Now, but on the other there is nothing on the album that would be out of place when Red first came out in 2012

Like her duet guests are the Dixie Chicks and the lead of Panic! At the Disco, there are points where she’s referencing Rilo Kiley, CHVRCHES, Annie and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. She uses one of her “I’ll rip off and caricature a rival singer’s style to count coup on her” slots on Lily fucking Allen

After Reputation added “getting drunk” to the Tayswift universe, this album’s vice theme seems to be “gambling”.

It is the most political album she’s ever done yes but of course the endorsing Democrats and You Need To Calm Down videos were a headfake, it’s more “country” in subject matter and style than anything since Red, it directly references Jesus for I believe the only time apart from the 2007 Christmas album

There’s a lot of color imagery with red, blue, and purple (the album’s color scheme, but pastel so it also kinda looks like the trans flag), she is offering herself as the one capable of reuniting the American tribe. There’s an entirely viable reading of the album, from I Forgot That You Existed (if you take that “one magical night” as Election Day) through to Daylight (as the promise of the coming civic peace) as “well gosh, we’ve been going overboard into Too Much Politics and it’s been crap, time to put that behind us”. Though along the way, at several points, if you want to, you can read her as speaking directly to red OR blue tribe and validating them.

We just need to take several seats and then try to restore the peace and control our urges to scream about all the people we hate. Time to be what we love.

kontextmaschine:

she not only somehow folded 1989 and Reputation over into themselves and made an alternate-universe Red, she’s narrating the folding of 2013-2019 over into themselves to make an alternate universe 2012 for us to pick up from

ave tayswift regina americanorum

I’m not kidding, this album is like if Thriller was also Rumours and all previous Taylor Swift albums simultaneously, and constitutes a real offer to scrap the entire 2010s from American culture and lead us through doing it right instead

she not only somehow folded 1989 and Reputation over into themselves and made an alternate-universe Red, she’s narrating the folding of 2013-2019 over into themselves to make an alternate universe 2012 for us to pick up from

ave tayswift regina americanorum

The “took him on tour” bit raises my eyebrows but the “stopped the bus and asked to be taught” thing I would absolutely believe – her songs repeatedly use the verb “know” as the highest compliment you can pay and the way to relate to a lover, to so completely internalize something that you carry a working model of it within you. And I think she is trying to “know” as much of American culture as she can, in that sense.

kontextmaschine:

dancingtotaylorsbeat:

ACTUAL ANGEL

That’s how the populists of the Late Roman Republic came to power, leading up to Caesar himself. Winning over the people with conspicuous displays of charity and great arena entertainments. Bread and circuses.

When I say she’s going to become the Queen of America, I FUCKING MEAN IT.

Friendly reminder there exists a Tennessee-based private welfare network that will probably need to find an heir for its charismatic country-crossover songstress leader in the next decade or so

kontextmaschine:

;)

I’m sure she’d love to be the solution to any of those for you, anon

Like, you realize that’s at the core of my thing about Taylor Swift, that she’s a female version of me as a psycho bitch.

Like, she grew up in Southeast Pennsylvania as the child of a professional father that left her as petty gentry, like she fixedly studied the flow of American culture as expressed in places like social media and genres like country. She builds a following by telling this story back to the public in densely self-referential but playful texts, while maintaining a semi-approachable persona on tumblr. She’s very intelligent and a good writer, boosted by the fact that she’s intelligent enough to productively channel a significant pool of her crazy into her work.

Like, I’m bipolar, and in hypomanic periods like now I have a lot of high-quality output at once, and that tends to be the stuff that really makes my reputation. She is clearly Cluster B, or, you know, “psycho bitch”, she has an obsessive need for attention and validation and she’s developed a personality and social skills to serve it, of being a heinous user of other people while maintaining a pose as an innocent put-upon romantic who intensely cares about your interiority.

Which, like, we all know that girl, but she does it at scale, so good at it she has succeeded in capturing a nontrivial share of the entire American culture’s libidinal economy of attention and validation. She is living the dream!

You realize the joke about You Belong With Me and Fifteen is she didn’t have the all-American high school experience of being in the marching band and losing your virginity to a dreamy upperclassman who’s really using you and going to prom with the boy next door.

She home-studied as a Nashville stage kid while plotting an ascent to celebrityhood! Where she lost her virginity to and had her puppy-love relationships with celebrities, the exact guys who are on the covers of magazines for normie all-American high school girls to fantasize about! And she was absolutely using them!

And like, she is not only one of the most famous people in the world, but the highest-paid celebrity at $200mil/yr. And like, her dad was a finance guy, her recording sessions and tours are clearly scheduled as a way to maintain legal residence in no-tax Tennessee, she clearly knows what she’s doing with the money. As you see with her feuding with Spotify and now trying to stir stuff about her master recordings, she is obsessed with maintaining 100% stem-to-stern control of her brand, her funding and publication channels, her empire. She writes and produces stuff for other people now, have you noticed that? And she’s always trying to add other celebrities to her stable. She is possibly the only fully autonomous wildcard acting within American culture.

And God help us, she’s starting to get into politics. I am not joking when I say it is entirely possible she will end up as Empress of America, at least to Eva Peron levels, God help us.

And it’s not like she was disguising the fact that she’s a shapeshifting manipulator who treats other people as things to be used and discarded to feed an obsessive need to be valued that will not be satisfied until she dominates the world while putting up a perfectly calculated facade! She has risen this far by creating and performing works of art that are directly about that in subtext, metatext, AND just straight text!

She is the only writer and public intellectual – and I do first and foremost consider Taylor Swift a writer and public intellectual – that I consider my clear superior, honestly it kind of scares me that only people at my level even seem to notice this. Sady Doyle sure fucking noticed it.

I’ve seen the psycho bitch version of me, she’s on her way to taking over the world, and it’s awesomely terrifying.

Taylor Swift – Umbrella

2008