Taylor Swift’s Semantic Overloading

Okay, as I’ve established, I think Taylor Swift is a supergenius writer, the only one I consider my clear superior. But, I mean, have you heard those lyrics? Come on, right?

Okay, yes the vocabulary and grammatical structure is pitched at an eighth-grade reading level; her work is pitched at an eighth-grade audience. But that’s hardly to say there’s no depth to her lyrics, it’s just that a lot of it relies on semantic overloading, and particularly semantic overloading that specifically plays on her bridging of popular music genres. To simplify, pop-rock lyrics tend to set a mood while country lyrics tell a story, but Taylor Swift lyrics tend to craft an atmosphere in which individual lines suggest a story or multiple stories (which listeners can fill in, according to the specifics of their own lives or daydreams), which can in turn be taken as literal or as metaphors.

(A lot of her themes have traditionally been about the stock female coming-of-age, but they shouldn’t be taken as coming from personal experience - which makes them even more impressive. Remember that she spent her teenage years not going to school and dating but home-studying and establishing her career because, contra Fifteen, she knew exactly what she was going to be. And she does venture afield of this - Never Grow Up and The Best Day are about the experience of watching your child grow, and Innocent is about a 32 year old woman looking to distance herself from the things she’s done - “Taylor Swift lyrics as explications of manosphere/redpill themes” would be a pretty impressive series in its own right.)

Like, Mean, from Speak Now. It’s about bullies, right? That you’ll escape from when you leave this one-horse town and live in a big old city?

Or is it about abusive parents? I mean,

some day I’ll be
big enough so you can’t hit me

Girl bullying isn’t really a “hitting” thing, plus

I bet you got pushed around,
Somebody made you cold,
But the cycle ends right now,
cause you can’t lead me down that road

Or is it about critics, such as critics of pop-country star Taylor Swift?

Or yourself and your insecurity, as your own biggest critic? (cf. Tied Together With a Smile and A Place In This World from the debut)

The answer, of course, is “yes”.

And that’s not even adding in the reading where it’s about her and Kanye West at the VMAs - because Swift can wield her public celebrity tabloid persona to add more reading and layers of valence to her songs, in part through encoded messages in her liner notes. Like, the liner notes code isn’t hard to figure out - just take the letters incongruously capitalized. Because she’s pitching at an eighth-grade audience. And she’s pitching that audience encrypted intertextuality.

Okay, let’s look at another song, Long Live, from Speak Now.

For one, it works a sequel to “Change”, from previous album Fearless, with its blended imagery of supporting a relationship partner, general teenage pressure, and literal revolution (released two months after the first Hunger Games novel came out and shifted the dominant tone of YA from Twilight-era “supportive relationship” to “youth insurrection”).

It’s about triumph, in a supportive relationship, over general teenage pressure (with an aside about high school relationships not being long-term things, in a much more optimistic tone than the similarly themed White Horse and Fifteen), is it metaphorizing that through the recurrent imagery of a coronation, or is it telling a literal story about being named Prom King & Queen, and the answer of course is “yes”. And then the recurring line “bring on all the pretenders”.

“Pretenders”, like, “phonies”, Holden Caulfield style.

“Pretenders”, like, unsuccessful claimants to a royal title.

People loved their work once, and it didn’t matter if they worked in the public sector or in the private one. The men who worked in the CCC would take their grandchildren to see the forests they planted, while the men from the auto plants would point out the cars they’d built as they passed them on the new interstate highway system. The women who fastened the engines on the wings would watch the B-17’s fly off to make a liar out of Goering, and the women who taught in the public schools would point with pride when one of their old students got elected mayor. Work was about making money, certainly. It was about feeding the family and keeping the roof where it was, and maybe having a little left over at the end of the day, or at the end of the week, for some amusement. Maybe a trip to Lincoln Park or White City or a hundred other places, where you could take a moment and enjoy the cool of the evening, music riding the nightwind from a dance pavilion down along the lake.
But it was also about Doing A Job, and doing it well, which was different than simply Having A Job. It was about making good cars and strong steel and sturdy furniture. It was about learning a craft, even if what you were doing wasn’t recognized as one. There was a craft in tightening rivets, or feeding the open-hearth furnace, or planing the wood just so. You had your craft, and the person next to you had theirs, and, when all the work was done, and all the craft was practiced, and practiced well, there was something you could look at with pride and say, that is something I have given to the world. Job well done, as they used to say. You could teach seventh grade civics and then, one day, you’re on a podium outside of City Hall. That kid right there, you could say. That kid is something I have helped give to the world. Job well done, as they used to say.
Unions were greatly responsible for the pride that people took in the work they did, especially in the middle of the last century, when unions helped build the most formidable middle class in human history.
-— -— -—

There was an autoworker, Ben Hamper, who wrote a column in the Flint (later Michigan) Voice, which was the alt-weekly Michael Moore first made his name by running. A lot of his columns got collected and repackaged in an excellent book, Rivethead that I read in college.
I read it in a class by Stuart Blumin, who was my favorite professor and de facto advisor. He was an American historian, focused on labor and class and the development of capitalism, you could tell he was heavily influenced by EP Thompson and the Communist Party Historians Group over in the UK.
He was quite open that he had expected Communism to ultimately triumph, and that he had been wrong about that, and in subtext that he had wanted it to ultimately triumph, and didn’t think he had been wrong about that.
Anyway, Rivethead. The story is that Hamper was born in 1956, a fairly clever kid growing up in Flint, Michigan, the chronological and geographic apex of American industrial unionism, where everyone’s dad worked for GM.
And he could have gone to college but he gets some girl pregnant and so he goes to work on the assembly line not even really out of obligation or Catholic guilt or whatever but because that seems as good a life course as any, it’s what every man he’s known does, under the mighty UAW the pay’s on par with the kind of “educated” jobs you could get anyway, why not.
And so he goes to work on the line and eventually he ends up writing a column about it, and he talks about the color of the factory culture, playing soccer with rivets for balls and cardboard boxes for goals, drinking mickeys of malt liquor in your car on lunch break, the absurd fursuited mascot “Howie Makem, The Quality Cat” that GM would feature at rallies and shop-floor tours, being laid off in economic downturns and put into the “job bank” where you get paid waiting to be rehired in the next upswing, developing a perfect rhythm with your partner, training into a rhythm so perfect you can each trade off doing the two-person job yourself for 4 hours while the other one goes out to a bar on the clock, the dignity and solidarity of the American worker.
And time goes on and eventually his marriage fails but he takes it in stride, and his column gets recognized and he takes pride in that and then eventually he has an epiphany, and a complete breakdown, which are basically the same thing. And the inciting incident is when an older line worker, some guy he’d looked up to as a model of quiet, philosophical stolidity, just shits himself and is barely coherent enough to even notice this and he realizes the guy hadn’t been a Zen master, he’d just been checked-out mindless drunk on the line every day.
And he realizes that the rivethead life is destroying him, that the only thing holding it together was a budding alcoholism, and that it’s doing the same to all his co-workers, and looks back and realizes it had done the same to every grown-up man he knew, his father and uncles that growing up he had looked up to as models of masculine strength and fortitude really had just had their spark snuffed out and the life beaten out of them long before, and whatever pride they took in the cars out on the road was a defensive attempt to locate in an external form the sense of self-value that had been exterminated within them.
When Marx talked about “alienation”, well.
And he went crazy, and couldn’t bear to work on the line anymore, and there’s no redemption, that’s where the book ends.
And that was a theme that cropped up again in Professor Blumin’s class, that there were two great working class traditions that echoed through the ages, and they were
1) avoiding work
and
2) drinking
Back in the premechanized age of small-group workshop manufacturing, workers would celebrate “Saint Monday”, which was to say just not showing up for work, hung over after the weekend.
(This was riffing off of Catholic feast days, or holy days, from which we take the word “holiday”, and as time went on counted an increasing share of the days of the year. There was a reason that poor workers were aligned with the Church, and nobility, in “Altar and Throne” coalitions resisting the development of industrial capitalist liberal democracy.)
In the ‘80s, the crap time of American auto manufacturing, one trick that was passed around (pre-internet, so by word of mouth largely) was to look at the codes stamped on car bodies, which would tell you what day of the week they were manufactured, and to avoid Mondays and Fridays. Because those days had the highest defect rates, because the workers tended to be drunk, or hungover, or absent.
And back in the workshop days, you’d drink at work. Apprentices would be sent out for growlers or buckets of beer, there were elaborate rules of who in the hierarchy of workers was expected to buy rounds for who and when. And there was hellacious resistance to attempts to get them to knock this off, as the industrial era kicked into swing.
Those great satanic mills, where women and children worked in shifts at great water- or steam-driven sewing and spinning machines, stories of little kids getting their hands mangled by the machinery? One of the major reasons women and children were preferred was because they would actually show up on time every day, and stay sober around all those hand-manglers.
And I mean, this maybe sounds like an argument for socialism. Though not of any actually-existing- variety, as capitalist propaganda will be glad to tell you, Soviet work culture, at least when the morale thrills of the Revolution and Great Patriotic War faded from personal to institutional memory, was all about shirking and vodka.
So those complaints about how America celebrates Labor Day instead of May Day, ignoring the true meaning of labor - solidarity - in favor of mindless distraction? Psssh. Labor Day is a celebration of the truest, most ancient, most fundamental traditions of labor: not working (especially on Mondays), and getting drunk.
Happy Labor Day!

American nativist anti-UN sensibility should be seen in continuity with the historic American nativist anti-Papist sensibility.

Mind that the Roman Catholic Church as a historical institution included not just the ceremonial corps of a particular religious memeplex but a transnational social welfare and education system that operated in coalition with or to exclusion of host nations, a forum for and arbiter of international diplomacy, and the smiling front of great powers’ colonial apparatuses.

And also a secular, territorial, internally elective empire in its own right, that tended to pursue its own interests by forming the core of multinational military coalitions and using its mythology of universal human brotherhood, as promulgated through that embedded welfare/education apparatus and its affiliates, to constrain sovereigns through internal political pressure.

That cartoon of priests as alligators crawling from the ocean menacingly towards little children was about the fear that the church establishing a role in American education represented a move to capture American youth by, and in the interests of, an overseas and politically unaccountable sovereign.

Because that is exactly what it did represent, because that is exactly what that kind of institution will do if you let it.

The American mythos has drifted far enough from the Germanic Protestant one to make it hard to understand how having an official state church with the monarch as head could be taken as a proud symbol of freedom and independence.

The Starks as Critiques of Fantasy and the Fantasy Audience

I’ve touched on this before but let’s expand on it here. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is an epic tragedy in the classic sense, in which a succession of characters bid for the world before being brought low by their inherent personal shortcomings. What’s particularly interesting in this is that the Starks of Winterfell embody tragic flaws that are typically presented in fantasy fiction as virtues, the very traits that both signal that the protagonists deserve to win and enable that very triumph. As such, they serve as a critique of the fantasy genre and, implicitly, the audience drawn to it who see in such protagonists an idealized vision of themselves.

Ned Stark opens the series with a tableau engineered to position him as the Good Ruler, executing a man by his own hand, illustrating a firm will, capable hand, merciful heart, eyes open to the realities of power, and shoulders to bear the burden in service of others. He is Duty, Honor, Loyalty - to Robert, to the Old Gods, to (with his incessant focus on Winter) the realm as a whole rather than any factional interest. He could plausibly have contended for the Iron Throne after the overthrow of Mad King Aerys, but left the duty - and the corruptions of court life - to Robert and returned north to the “real things” of life.

He’s the noble, capable, masculine (but not macho) hero of so much fantasy, which of course is why he fails. He doesn’t play the petty sycophantic influence-peddling games of court - so when Robert dies he has no true allies in court, no knowledge of the power dynamics at play, no ability to see the manipulation of false allies. Concerned with the formal lineage of succession - as if truth and propriety matters more than appearance and power - but insistent on working through proper channels and unwilling to act without formal legitimation, he gives his enemies all the delay, forewarning, and opportunity they need to outmaneuver him and he ends up executed by the henchman of the most Unworthy ruler.

Sansa Stark is the feminine hero of romantic fantasy - like Ned, she’s enchanted with nobility’s self-mythology and given to mistake that for actual practice. She wants to marry a prince when she grows up, and orients the entirety of her selfhood to this end - acting proper and saying the right thing, above all striving to cause no offense. Like the heroine of so many romantic fantasy novels, she finds her prince. Like the plot of so many romantic fantasy novels he’s a ruffian in need of reform who takes what he wants. Like the readers of so many romantic fantasy novels her dreamy passivity does nothing to reform him. Like the plot of so many of their lives she finds herself paired off with a succession of alternatingly abusive, ugly, and lecherous men.

Arya Stark is I’d say two things - first, she’s the classic fantasy figure of the heir to the unjustly deposed Good Ruler, who has to go off on a quest, take on a mentor, make allies, et cetera et cetera, James Frazer. Except you realize she keeps doing this but given that the world doesn’t stay still while she’s off questing, she never accomplishes anything. She doesn’t make it to Winterfell, she doesn’t make it make it back to her mother, she keeps getting sidetracked and diverted. She finds mentors in Syrio and the Kindly Man, finds allies and travelling companions in Gendry and Hot Pie and Jacquen and the Hound, but none of it amounts to anything. She revenges some of her suffering but after years has 0 influence on the actual contest for the Iron Throne and has mostly just become an increasingly cold-blooded killer.

Second, Arya is the Strong Female Character, that archetype popular in the girl-power ’90s (and before) as superior to Sansa’s “weak” femininity. She’s not into sewing and delicacy, she ‘s into sword fighting and dirt. But for all that, she ends up dragged around and at the mercy of men as much as Sansa - yes, in an idiom that allows her to consider herself as more of an agent, and with an ability to hurt people who hurt her. But it doesn’t really keep her from getting hurt. (For a series with so much rape, especially in the early books of girls noted with an increasingly eyebrow-raising regularity as being exactly thirteen years old, the Stark girls sure do spend a lot of time at the mercy of abusive men without it quite going there, don’t they.) And by the “present day” she’s spending a lot of time hanging out with the demimonde in seedy bars down by the docks. Not that she’s a prostitute, oh no. She’s a rogue. Though she does take some pride in the fact that she blends in. Look, I did renn faires in middle school. Hell, I live in Portland. There’s a certain kind of girl… look, I’m not saying, I’m just… wait, no, I am saying.

Catelyn Stark is the good mother, who wishes the boys would put down their swords and realize what’s important is family, and the real force in this world lies with the generative potential of women. She’s ’70s-’80s feminist fantasy in the Marion Zimmer Bradley mold. She cares for her children, the girls as much as the boys - which is why she releases Jaimie in hopes of returning her daughters, thus forfeiting the Stark leverage against Lannister treachery. At the same time she respects her children’s autonomy, unlike Cersei not just as means to the ends of power, failing to compel Robb to marry for dynastic advantage. Which is her undoing, dying with her beloved child at the hands of a man who treats his wives as disposable incubators. The female power of generative blood proving ultimately vulnerable to the male power of destructive steel.

Robb Stark is the charming young hero, a less seasoned Ned. Capable but burdened with a sense of honor, duty, and obligation, he could have saved a whole lot of trouble by maintaining a distinction between the loving woman you use for sex and the woman of social position you marry to start a family with.

Bran Stark I think if anything is a standin for GRRM himself - he’s incapable of doing anything directly, but as a skinchanger he can inhabit anyone, see through their eyes, act through their bodies, in a manner paralleling the series’ regular cycling through POV characters. I’m not really sure what Bran’s arc “says” about that dynamic.

Rickon Stark is like three, dude. And Jon Snow? Is not a Stark.

Now that we’re here might as well touch on some other characters.

Daenerys is another critique of audience naïveté, thinking that oppressive hierarchy is a matter of bad morality rather than economic function. She frees slaves only to realize that oppressing the lower classes generates power and supports a fellowship of upper-class allies, while freeing and raising them up costs power and makes enemies. Also, even if she crosses the sea and conquers the Seven Kingdoms what of it? As an infertile woman, she can’t found or restore a dynasty.

Jaime is kind of a reverse of the Stark dynamic. They had virtues as flaws. Jaimie is defined by the vice of narcissism - his love for himself, which defines everything he does. Even his incestuous relationship with Cersei is an instance of self-love, beginning in childhood where, she says, if they switched clothes they were indistinguishable. But it’s that very narcissism that leads him, on joining the Kingsguard, to reform himself from within, to go from Kingslayer to Goldenhand. And thus a character first defined by defenestrating a child while incestuously cuckolding the King might well prove the realm’s noble salvation.

Tyrion obviously, is the character most suited to rule the realm, his tragic flaw being the repeatedly wounded pride that keeps him from accepting that he can only rule on condition of receiving no respect for it. Had he waited out his father’s plans he obviously would have found in Tommen a malleable figurehead.

Cersei’s flaw is her inability to distinguish between her person and her role. She thinks herself a master strategist because of her track record of success as a seductress; she thinks of herself as beloved because flattered by sycophants as regent. A Feast For Crows was hacked out. I’m a writer, I know the signs. GRRM split one book into two when he really had 1.5 of material and to maintain the “850 pages of setup, then main characters die and shit gets real” structure he had to force the middle half, which took years. She overestimates herself but even she’s too competent for the cabinet of toadies, the “I’m a good queen for not punishing my servants too bad for my getting fat” bit. Cartoonish. What should’ve happened was she intercepts a letter from one of the young nobles she thinks she’s seducing as part of a power scheme and learns that he’s been seeing the thing the other way around.

And that’s what I think about that.

Like, that’s an important point w/r/t the ’50s (supposed) social conservatism it wasn’t a point on the straight- line continuum from Then to Now. The Sexual Revolution, if you count it as the spread of nonmarital sex, didn’t start in the ’60s with college and the Pill, it started in the 1910s with IUDs, diaphragms, and single girls living alone in the big cities doing clerical work.

National magazines , the equivalent of today’s Salon or Slate or Gawker or The Atlantic (maybe The Atlantic itself) wrote articles in the late 40s/early 50s worrying that contemporary teens were starting sexually exclusive relationships too young without playing the field for a while, and that this would stunt their personal development.

And think about it, the imagery of “going steady”, a boy giving a girl his class ring/letterman jacket/fraternity pin to signal they had exclusive claims on each other, a sort of Marriage Junior. But that’s something over and above “dating”, right? Today we think of two people dating as being exclusive, but if you look at what it meant back then - call a girl up on Wednesday to go out on Friday, more a verb than a relationship state, popular guys dating different girls each week, popular girls fielding multiple offers. And then going to drive-ins, to dark movie theaters, “parking” on Lover’s Lane.

“Going steady” was what we’d call dating now because “dating” was what we’d call “hooking up” - going out with someone you didn’t necessarily love but could get along with and looked good, having fun, trading orgasms. Might develop into something more, might not.

You can pick up on this if you listen to goofy ’50s rock and roll, or movies about teens, and appreciate that “and we’re having sex” is the subtext. When Runaround Sue was running around, that’s to say she was sleeping around. That’s one of the reasons I dislike euphemisms - once the euphemism treadmill goes through a few cycles it can become difficult for different generations to properly understand history.

(and on that note I should specify that by “sleeping around” I mean having penetrative sexual intercourse with multiple nonexclusive partners)

Shit so this was supposed to be a tumblr about history and kontext, right? What’s all this happy hardcore crap?

Q: What is the Nihau Incident?

A: It’s what your American history books don’t tell you about when they get to Japanese internment in WWII and you’re all invited to have a sad.

Q: Aight, what was the Nihau Incident?

A: Aight. So Hawaii, yeah? And Pearl Harbor, yeah? Okay, so a Mitsubishi Zero coming off that all shot up. Can’t make it back, so he crashes on the tiny, westernmost Hawaiian island, called Nihau. (The official Japanese crashing island. Truefax.)

Which was entirely owned by this one sugar fortune heir, and administered as a cultural reserve for native Hawaiian ways of life, because that’s what happens when WASPs go native. (Basically all the real estate in Hawaii was owned by sugar and fruit barons or Hawaiian royal descendants until reforms in I think like the mid-90s?)

Anyway so the pilot crashes in a field, like, next to this Hawaiian dude and while he’s still dazed the Hawaiian dude takes his papers and gun. The dude doesn’t know about the attack but knows Japan and the US are tense so he’s still like “WTF is this?”

So he gets all his Hawaiian buddies together to deal with this, except the only language they have in common with the pilot is “terrible English” and they’re like “what did he say?”

So they send for one of the Japanese guys on the island. Once Captain Cook discovered Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific, basically everyone settled it.

So they track down this Japanese guy and bring him in, and the pilot and him have words and he goes white and walks out.

And the Hawaiians are like “WHAT DID HE SAY?”

So they go to get the other Japanese guy. (There are only like 150 people on this island.)

And the other Japanese guy shows up, and him and the pilot talk. And the Japanese guy turns to the Hawaiians and doesn’t mention Pearl Harbor, but he’s like “hmm, I really think you should give this guy his stuff back”. And the Hawaiians are like “pf no”.

So later the Hawaiians are listening to the radio and they hear news of the attack and they’re like “Oh, ok. Better guard this dude.” Because they’re expecting the island’s owner to show up on his regular route and they can ship him back, only the Navy has boats on lockdown while it tries to figure out how and why and where there was a war all of a sudden.

So they’re guarding him, in the house of one of the Japanese dudes from before. Except I guess they’re not guarding him very well, because the Japanese dudes (helped by the one dude’s Japanese wife) get together and get all the guns (actually both the guns, a shotgun and a pistol) and take over.

It’s kind of a comedy of errors, though, because when they come for the original Hawaiian dude with the papers he’s in the outhouse and manages to run away and secure them. He’s like “I gotta go get help!” But Nihau to Kauai, the closest island, is like 20 miles at the narrowest, and this was a Hawaiian traditional culture preserve, so there were no motorboats on the island.

The thing is, the one thing traditional Hawaiians are super especially good at is open-sea rowing. So just after midnight he gets his Hawaiian friends in a boat and they row

FOR TEN HOURS

to get help.

Meanwhile on Nihau the pilot really wants to find the Hawaiian dude, so he gets this other Hawaiian bro and is like “go find the dude”. And the bro knows the dude’s rowing for help, so he’s like “alright, whatever, pf”. And then the pilot’s like “no seriously, find this dude right now or I’ll kill you all”. And he’s there with one of the other Japanese guys, and they have both the guns.

So at one point the pilot hands the shotgun to the other Japanese guy, and the Hawaiian bro charges him. The pilot pulls out his pistol and shoots the Hawaiian bro three times, and then the Hawaiian bro picks him up

and throws him

INTO A WALL

(and then his wife bashes the pilot’s head in with a rock)

((and then he cuts the pilot’s throat))

(((overkill kinda, but the pilot had really been a dick)))

The other Japanese guy got the shotgun and killed himself with it, which wasn’t particularly useful, but the Japanese were hardcore like that back then.

This is of course entirely on the word of the survivors of that room, so.

And when the rowing dude came back with backup the next day, all that was waiting for them were two corpses, one Japanese guy, and the other guy’s widow. (The pilot torched the plane when he got free.)

And so going into World War II, that’s what was on the minds of all the American defense planners, that the very first time Japanese on American territory - two nisei and a long-term resident issei - had a chance, every single one of them acted - violently and to the death when challenged - for the Japanese empire, against the United States.

So there’s that.