Taylor Swift doing Capital One commercials is interesting.
Ultimate comedy option is she’s just doing them to get credits towards her Screen Actors Guild health insurance
Oh my God what if she had been doing it to get in before the strike?
Also “Taylor Swift was the first female country artist to sing about BPD” is a bad take. I mean,
“Taylor Swift was the first female country artist to acknowledge BPD” also a bad take! She didn’t! She’s been doing it all in subtext, it’s just the 21st century and she’s better as a lyricist!
“Oh Taylor Swift is woke bowdlerizing Speak Now by replacing the ‘she’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress’ line about Camilla Belle”
Listening to Jump then Fall, marveling that that’s the same Taylor Swift we know today… what is she doing with her voice? That’s not even the thing where she had a country drawl on her early records, what is she doing with her voice?
Clean, off 1989, is an addiction experience-as-metaphor-for-relationship song that’s not that great, but eventually you pay attention to the lyrics and appreciate how well she wrote them to line up with either situation, and then you realize that the point is no, that the Taylor Swift trick is vocalizing you so well that you think she’s one of whatever you are and the trick is any Swiftie who had an actual addiction recovery experience now has a Taylor Swift song that speaks it to be “her song”
Reporting someone’s white collar crimes to the FBI is like the definitional opposite of vigilante shit, Taylor.
See, the real trick is what if it’s a deposit in the favor bank with white-collar prosecutors, to get “you could turn in evidence of his fraud” on the nation’s jilted exes’ mind, so she’ll be popular with them and no one will dare try to make a name for themselves going after her – her dad was a financial advisor, at least her residence-hopping smells like tax avoidance, I’m sure her fortune’s structured in ways that are at least challengeable.
taylor swift fans interpret her lyrics the way protestants interpret the bible
Amusing that as she tries to tailor her romantic narratives for the normies who grew up with her, Taylor Swift’s sense of How Young Adults Date Now is like
[old lady voice] when I was your age taylor swift had a country accent
::hears the “did all the extra credit and got graded on a curve” line from Bejeweled::
Taylor Swift didn’t go to high school or college, that girl’s never been graded on a curve
It’s a good summary of Taylor Swift’s balancing of the spectacular and the everyday relatable; the specific way her care for female autonomy manifests; and her control of her entire image-making apparatus for her own ends that the current Look she has all her style team lined up behind is basically “mid-30something woman Who Fucks”
Taylor Swift Making Feature Directing Debut for Searchlight Pictures
Huh, it’s for a script she wrote herself, that has promise.
(And it retrospectively shows that her expansion of All Too Well into a 14-minute version with an accompanying short film was essentially an audition to prove herself)
(Recall that she essentially became a performer and a celebrity in service of getting her writing produced)
Taylor Swift Making Feature Directing Debut for Searchlight Pictures
Huh, it’s for a script she wrote herself, that has promise.
(And it retrospectively shows that her expansion of All Too Well into a 14-minute version with an accompanying short film was essentially an audition to prove herself)
Funniest thing about realizing the old personality was autistic is that Taylor Swift was a “special interest”
And then you notice how heavily her performance style is rooted in mimicry and how many songs she has about how none of it comes naturally, she has to try at it, and you’re like “wait, is she…”
But that’s the Taylor Swift Trick: whatever you are she’ll convince you she is too
Huh, I suppose that’s pretty much BPD “mirroring” put in harness, huh?
Funniest thing about realizing the old personality was autistic is that Taylor Swift was a “special interest”
And then you notice how heavily her performance style is rooted in mimicry and how many songs she has about how none of it comes naturally, she has to try at it, and you’re like “wait, is she…”
But that’s the Taylor Swift Trick: whatever you are she’ll convince you she is too
You know it is a great treatment for imposter syndrome to see how in Cats 2019, Taylor Swift, master lyricist Americana storyteller, is just not that good at writing in the post-Sondheim singing-about-yourself Broadway musical tradition, that her performances are highly based on mimicry but her sense of the stuff to be mimicked is still at a band-geek-in-YBWM’s level of Cats fan, that her sense of role is clearly leaning on Grizabella – a character already in this exact musical! – and wherever the scene is not specifically catering to her, her sense of stage is that of a freshman that doesn’t get a part
Free Britney
I have been filtering every tumblr post that says “Taylor Swift”, but I am stopping this for a bit in case somebody replies something interesting.
I have notices that people on tumblr and twitter really don’t like to separate art from the artist, for example the artist Adele, or Taylor Swift. Everything has to be about the person Taylor Swift, and the kabbalistic implications of pieces of the lyrics. It’s not enough for people to like or not like her music. It’s all about Taylor Swift existing in the public eye, criticism is criticism of her person, her life.
When Adele lost weight, the twitter meltdowns were at least fun to point and laugh at.
With Taylor Swift, even the posts that criticise the way the media exploit or paint Taylor Swift feel painfully parasocial. Taylor Swift is this persona, this media product, and somehow every time a new song or album comes out, her fans defend Taylor Swift, the misunderstood all-American girl, the brave lesbian, or whatever she is now. Her songs are so catchy, everybody just reads the lyrics on genius.com and posts them to tumblr for deep exegesis. Why don’t you just upload mp3s or embed YouTube videos like a normal person?
The whole “Free Britney” movement creeped me the hell out, too. There was a group of people that followed Britney Spears and her fight to get out of the public eye again. Like, didn’t you guys see the irony? Did you feel conflicted? Did you say yes, it is with a heavy heart, yada yada…
Or did you think you were one fo the good ones?
So anyway: I didn’t watch Blonde. I am not going to. It’s on Netflix. But what turned me off were all the rave reviews. It’s a biopic, not a documentary, but everybody is playing fast and loose with historicity. It’s fictionalised. It’s heightened reality. Fuck you!
You can’t have it both ways! You can’t make a movie about how Marilyn Monroe was exploited and had no privacy, and then make a fictionalised movie about Marilyn Monroe that re-enacts those moments. Own your voyeurism, or don’t. I don’t need a movie to show Marilyn Monroe sucking JFK’s dick, and I definitely don’t need a film review telling me how stunning and brave this director is for including that. Or maybe the dick sucking was implied. I didn’t watch Blonde.
I don’t need a movie about the personal life of some superstar, but I definitely don’t need dishonest fans, promoters, late night hosts, and film reviewers to tell me I am empowering, you are exploiting, he is The Male Gaze.
I’d rather watch Some Like It Hot again. It’s good.
Taylor Swift is
In approximately that order. She isn’t really an instrumentalist – does she even still play guitar? – and was never an instrumental arranger, but coming back to that “maestro” bit her introduction to the media world was through a Nashville tradition that never really bought into a rockist valorization of completely self-made music, but one where all the same the buck ultimately stopped with the star’s team. Which doesn’t always mean the star themselves – this was effectively what the Colonel was to Elvis – but all indications are that she herself serves this role in ultimately being the one to decide on her co-writers, collaborators, media relations people, stylists, etc.
Taylor Swift the actual human is very much the author of Taylor Swift the media property. Judging by her lyrics she indeed has some issues arising from all this, but all indications are in her capacity as a maestro she arranges things to make this manageable in her capacity as a celebrity/singer, learning from mentors and the experience of forerunners – she schedules morale breaks in the course of tours to relax and touch base with the network of allies and peers she’s cultivated rather than burn out on the road, etc.
Yeah no when you relisten you realize Taylor is acknowledging like 4 of her previous songs and somehow 2 70s classics in the first 6 bars of everything on Midnights
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
This is another, lighter album where the music draws the lyrics behind it like 1989 or Reputation, but she’s figured how to hit that balance better. With the lyrics bearing less weight she can play whimsically with the vocal line while constantly wandering into that thing she does where she’ll invoke one of her earlier songs in rhythm of intonation, or gauzily underdescribe a scenario or characters in a way that they vibe like she’s borrowing from ones she established before
Snow on the Beach, the song with Lana del Rey, is like the fourth most Lana del Rey song Taylor Swift ever released
You’re On Your Own, Kid is another subtle case of her invoking Jenny Lewis
Is still kind of sad the Lover era got rained out by COVID, there were some real anthems in there, and it introduced new like, lore about her attitude to like, men and herself. I suppose one role of this album is to reestablish that stuff with a light touch while not being redundant
Both Midnights and Folklore each feel like plausible follow-ups to Lover, wandering off in directly opposite directions (Evermore felt like a b-sides and outtakes collection)
The aesthetic for this album is definitely early 80s, her dress and hair and eyeshadow in the promo shots established it and yeah, the music is chime sweeps and horns and digital beeps and 808 drums as embellishments but it’s honestly less defining than 1989’s periodizing, which was not even that heavy
Think I bought the deluxe edition but I don’t know which ones are the “bonus” tracks
Oh, they’re on the cover, that’s nice
Paris tossing off a bit about the two meanings of “shade” is a callback to You Need To Calm Down
High Infidelity suffers from the way that her unmarked-plausibly-Taylor-as-narrator stuff lately has been so about healthy relationships and relationship skills that it can’t switch smoothly to be about relationship conflict of any weight. Folklore she very much rendered her narrators as third-party characters
Honestly might be the first Taylor Swift album you could put on while you do something and enjoy even without paying any attention to the lyrics