Taylor Swift’s Red is the last time the culture was OK and New Romantics though technically a bonus track on 1989 was really the last song of the Red era
So says kontextmaschine and if you don’t want to deal with his weird hang-ups you shoulda rigged your own periodization
When she floated above the audience in her high, high heels on that lighted dock, facing a stadium of sixty-eight thousand people, how could she feel anything except either a messiah complex or profound loneliness?
Later that night, I said to my husband, “I thought of her as a singer-songwriter.” And my husband, who has never voluntarily listened to a single word escaping Taylor Swift’s mouth, laughed. “Singer-songwriters don’t perform in stadiums,” he said.
S
itting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone's singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That's the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.
Well the really Kontextmaschine thing to say would be that she’s as good or better than I am at listening in on the tune America’s humming to itself and singing it back in response, she canonically browses tumblr and has long been rumored to lurk 4chan (which is not absolutely ridiculous - she’s our generation too and Lorde, who’s in her extended clique, workshopped Royals on /mu/) and God knows what else she gets up to on those days when she’s not in the mood to be a media object so she doesn’t leave her house.
That she too noticed that the worm turned somewhere in the last few months, and that she maneuvered this intentionally in full knowledge where it would go, that she knows that “a black girl tried to spin what was essentially personal jealousy as a race thing, in the process rudely rebuffing my attempts to seek unity on the grounds of Correct go-(white-)girl feminism, and then mean online media and Black Twitter picked on me over it” is actually going to be a good place to be when the backlash will be kicking in during her next album/tour cycle, that it’ll align herself with where her audience of white-girls-not-like-Coachella-white-girls-I-mean-but-not-NOT-like-Coachella-white-girls will be at by then.
(That all this is on purpose delicate and tangential enough to be disclaimable if it’s obsoleted by the next cultural turn, like how she went from doing a feather-touch War on Christmas song in 2007 to in 2014 having a throwoff line about vicariously enjoying the existence of gayness as a sign of cosmopolitanism in her growing-up-and-moving-to-the-big-city song.)
That if media try to force this meme and take on Taylor fucking Swift not only does that revalidate the picked-on pose she’s so good at but gets increasingly ridiculous as she settles in at the apex of pop culture, but it might even be the overreach that breaks the fever, like McCarthy taking on the U.S. Army, and having her name stamped on a major cultural turn (for which a nontrivial constituency will be grateful) is a good step on the way to becoming Queen of America.
Seriously, how fucking Kontextmaschine a response is that?
I don’t actually believe it though.
(Though in the course of even mooting the theory I’ve started to convince myself.)
ACTUAL ANGEL
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.
You know something I just picked up on? (about Taylor Swift, obviously)
“Welcome to New York” is a “moving to New York” song, in 2014, that invokes Manhattan at least once (“the Village is aglow”) but Brooklyn never. Now that might speak to her actual experience, but it’s kind of at odds with her populist pose, and she’s usually really good about aligning those two.
(Possible excuses are the “1989” theme or playing to a core audience of high school theater kids with a dated, second- or third-hand sense of what “New York” means, I guess)
Honestly, I think she heard Empire State of Mind and was like “oh, huh, New York anthems, that’s a thing isn’t it, I should do one of those”. Like I’ve mentioned, she is very very good at mimicry and matching affect. I complained that Shake it Off was really a Max Martin song, but hell, maybe she just wanted to prove that she could do a Max Martin song. I mean, Out of the Woods (put together with Jack Antonoff) is a fun. song, The Lucky One, off of Red, was a Jenny Lewis song and I hear one of the other 1989 tracks is basically a Lana Del Rey song.
I mean hell, her earlier, more country albums, where she wrote songs about dating a guy your dad didn’t approve of, or watching your daughter grow up, or being 32 and feeling shame about your slutty younger days, those are not experiences she ever actually had. She reverse engineered them from existing country songs and red state culture and repackaged them better than the originals. (Plus, you notice her accent on those albums? She grew up in Pennsylvania, in the county catercorner to mine, and we do not talk like that.)
Like, I love and respect the hell out of the girl, but at the same time I’m a little afraid of her, for real. She’s a supergenius shapeshifter who’s made it her life’s mission to absorb the entirety of American culture and reflect a perfectly polished version of it back at the country. And she’s really good at it!
Something to consider is the treatment of God in her work, only glancing references in the earlier albums - “the man with the reasons why”/“the man who put you here” on Come In With The Rain, “And when I got home, before I said amen/Asking God if He could play it again” from Our Song, just enough to signal not so much Christianity as Christian…ness, as a component of Real Murcanism (hell, she wrote a song called “Sweet Tea and God’s Graces”, unreleased and suppressed on YouTube, which is probably Correct).
The only explicit reference to Jesus in her released original material is in Christmas Must Be Something More, off her Christmas LP, which manages to be a War On Christmas song without any villains. And if, in 2007, you were buying Christmas music, you were enough of a Taylor Swift fan after just the first album to want Taylor Swift Christmas music, and you did your music shopping at Target, you were probably cool with that.
And now in homonationalist 2014 there’s songs with equally glancing references to gayness, and it just… happens to be possible to squint at her style and personal relationships (which have always been a conscious part of her performance) hard enough to read lesbian subtext, if you’re the kind of person who would want to.
When I say she’s gunning to become the Queen of America I mean it.
taylorswift I HAVE A FIRST DATE TOMORROW WITH A BOY IVE BEEN BEST FRIENDS WITH FOR TWO YEARS? WHAT DO I WEAR? HOW DO I DO THIS I DONT HAVE AN OLDEE SISTER AND I NEED ADVICE CAUSE WHAT IF IM NOT GOOD ENOUGH. I’m gonna have a breakdown about this tomorrow I’m not ready
don’t leave me hanging ://
If he’s your best friend and asked you out on a date, he’s probably seen you at your best and your worst, hair up or down, make up or natural… He likes you for you, so don’t act like someone else or stress out to the point of acting different than you usually act.
You got this.
I told you Taylor Swift is going to be Queen of America.
(She will be A Good Ruler)
No matter what happens in life, be good to people.
T-Swift is totally gunning for the Princess Di/Jacqueline Kennedy “Queen of America” role, you mark my words.
