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
The thing is really someone coming from outside an established Hollywood family when Jake Gyllenhaal did would not have had either the necessary connections or the dynastic instinct to cover up his bisexuality
There is, or at least at the time was, a Hollywood pressure against “outing” people that was less about what it would mean in any particular circumstance than just preventing an “outing”-based paramedia ecology from establishing itself in the first place
My stake in this is I assume Taylor Swift was bi too and I want Red to be recognized as the first great bi m/f masterpiece
Like “oh ha ha, she’s really just BPD!” would be more compelling if I did not know multiple girls who used Taylor Swift to recognize their own bisexuality as a path out of BPD
You know you don’t have to conclude they were in a relationship to think a bisexual Taylor probably picked something up from Karlie Kloss re: the presentation of femininity for public consumption!
I mean the internet was better as /b/ than tumblr, that’s just getting older. Taylor Swift was better as a teenager than a thirtysomething.
Besides Lorde, who canonically came from 4chan?
I mean Taylor Swift, the human lyricist, is far ahead of where she was then but as a consumable object she’s behind but the thing about her was she understood this the whole time
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
Oh Jesus, I just realized that before when I tried to listen to the Taylor’s Version Red my phone speakers were just blown out in ways that washed out a lot of the subtlety into crap
I mean, this makes Butch Vig mixing Nevermind for car speakers still relevant, with more nuance
Like, you’ve got to understand that from my perspective, the whole of the 2010s was this mounting tension in like, the ~conception of society~ that I faced, permitted to pass over me and through me, assembled a not-insignificant coalition in the face of (that you’re part of), as it reached height with actual mobs on the streets of my town I fell into some sort of mythical slumber, and when I came out of the chrysalis not only had I been improved in several ways that don’t happen, but basically everything in the culture has churned through to be eerily ideal-for-me
Like, Matt Yglesias is playing the Michael Kinsley restorationist role (remember when it was gonna have to be Jesse Singal?)
Like, it has become a mainstream understanding that Taylor Swift, the artist of her generation, is using incredibly fine lyrical control to intertwine her persona with the zeitgeist through implication.
with the new personality you still sure you couldn't take on taylor swift and win?
Oh, it’s always been the case that there are conceivable conflicts where I could beat her out, there are probably more now but there’d never be any stakes for which I could end up in a fight with her on those terms. Like, it’s not just that her capabilities are impressive but it’s the support structure she’s built and and positioning she’s established that leave me impressed.
Not sure what I feel about “Taylor Swift is the key artist of my generation” becoming a mainstream take all of a sudden
Honestly it’s irritating to have so many people start to confidently proclaim such wrong takes on her, around the Taylor’s Version Red release people who never gave any previous signs of caring are like “oh, look out, she’s [what would have been a reasonably insightful take on her mentality circa the original release of Red that every album since has been about her journey away from]”
so how to you feel about tayswift's new (well, not new anymore i guess i'm late to the party) mombod? how does one account for this theoretically?
She is very deliberately running “a visibly thirtysomething woman” as her new look, you can tell when she debuted it her makeup people took a bit to get the right level of emphasis on her neck tendons and the wrinkles around her lips and eyes
In more “people really did not pay attention to the words Taylor Swift was (writing and) singing” news, remember in 2010 when she was still in country music America’s Sweetheart, Who Narrativizes Her Own Life mode she released an album the title song of which was imagining a wholesome wedding for the sake of looking down on everyone participating and fantasizing about stealing the groom in front of them?
You go back and listen to her early stuff like “oh it’s all about straight courtship!” no, it’s all about being a valued and desired girl
That is true, but her songs always seem to work on a number of layers at once in this vein, applying to lovers, friends, classmates, industry people, the press, the audience, the place she lives, and America writ large, all at once. You can look at a song like Bad Blood and say “it’s about Katy Perry” and she can say “I wrote it about Karlie Kloss (friendship drama)” but it functions as a piece of the album’s cycle about the eternal return of her romantic relationships, her feelings about living in New York, or the media saying things about her post Kanye. This makes it hard to anchor bisexuality on anything because the songs are referring to many different potential intersubjective partners or collective others, but they are always “bi-potential” (not that uncommon to make a pop song abstract enough to refer to any legible lover/lover relationship).
BUT, she has clearly steered into the skid of making the romance gender ambiguous, to the point of even having songs where the most obvious read requires the presence of a bisexual “I” (see Folklore’s so called teenage love triangle, but even that is cheekily complicated). It is fair to say her songs have always been subjectively fluid, but she has been moving into a different phase where the identification point is more condensed and not as centered on her lived experience. So as we approach full bi, we also get less certain she’s not projecting into a character.
ADDED: note that this applies to the notional “Taylor Swift” (holographic construct of song and media data) who I do not think is the same as the meat person, even if I talk about her life informing the readings as if it is. I saw Val so I might write more about this relationship soon. This disclaimer is to avoid being accused of parasociality.
It’s not even the lyrical narratives, though, it’s like how in even the most About The Heterosexual World stuff like The Man she’s clearly directly invested in the female roles she’s constructing
It’s taken a bit for her style team to nail it – I remember when they first started and suddenly the tendons in her neck were highlighted – but it’s worth noting that Taylor Swift’s current public-appearance look is as a glamorized take on a woman actually in her mid-30s
Actually mapping it out I don’t think Lover so much has arcs as it has clusters of tracks pitched to resonate with the emotional themes in the heads of a segmented imaginary audience
Palingenesis
Youve been listening to Taylor Swift since she was on country radio, alongside weepers about death and legacy. You’re worried about America, I mean you’re not like some of those crazies and you think it could still be okay but you increasingly don’t trust anyone who doesn’t see it.
Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince
Soon You’ll Get Better
Daylight
Mommy Dom
Really, you’re the same “get a job and a man in your small hometown” audience she had all along only in 2020 you don’t have a church but know what fanfic tropes get you off, which is the spirit you bring to mangetting. Will talk about the emotional appeal of the himbo but will also admit to the “attractive, controllable” appeal.
I Think He Knows
Paper Rings
It’s Nice To Have A Friend
Girlboss
“Wine Aunt” can be a thing too, and if it was still 2012 you could write the article in your sleep.
I Forgot That You Existed
The Man
You Need to Calm Down
BPD
Yes, new love can be amazing but also you can really take things too far sometimes and hurt people you care about. But with the self-awareness to take responsibility and communicate with your partner, you can enjoy that intensity within a lasting, ideal relationship.
Cruel Summer
Afterglow
Me!
Lover
Maybe you passed the BPD lesson, maybe you’re just mature now, and appreciate developing the ability to relax into a stable, low-key and long-term relationship
Lover
The Archer
Breakup
You’re not in the BPD segment but you love the classic Red-style drama, or you just went through a breakup yourself and need someone to externalize it for you. When people say they can’t think of a significant bi M/F relationship you remind them they know multiple songs about Swift/Gyllenhaal.
Cornelia Street
Death By A Thousand Cuts
London Boy is in her tradition of UK fanservice, False God I don’t vibe as part of anything but could be and I’m just not seeing yet, along with any number of slices with other stuff I’ve “already used” taken another way.
The folklore-evermore sequence has reassured me that Taylor Swift is good enough to make predictions 2 years in advance but NOT to evaluate things on a rolling 6-month window and honestly that makes me feel better
