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

kontextmaschine:

Taylor Swift – Umbrella

2008

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

kontextmaschine:

Oh shit I just remembered how good the lyrics on Speak Now were

Like she was really like “it’s 2010, I’m a red state queen and this twang is fake, let’s fuck with it”

Oh shit I just remembered how good the lyrics on Speak Now were

Realizing both Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” and “New Romantics” have “scarlet letter” references, which I guess is about right for someone that writes densely referential work for 9th grade readers

Like I’ve given her shit for writing a sequel to “Memory” that’s about how she has it even worse than Grizabella, but “Love Story” is a fucking retelling of Romeo & Juliet where it gets a happy ending thanks to Joshua Harris-ass ask-her-dad Biblical courtship culture.

Like on the one hand that’s obviously what a 2008 country-pop hit for teenage girls was about, that shit was all over the red states then and her eye for cultural trends is half her thing, but my God, the balls

kontextmaschine:

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 in 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.

redantsunderneath:

kontextmaschine:

Miss Americana? Well, I don’t have Netflix and there’s no Alamo Drafthouse in town. But if I did see it I’d probably analyze it less as a “behind the persona” view than as the persona’s newest, 2020, mirror in the hall

Yeah. It’s crafted, alright.  But like her whole persona, I think it’s fairly representative of who she is, just optimized for clarity of narrative and edited to remove the guarded bits. The scene where they take off in a private jet feels too much like middle middle class casual, first time in this situation, to be believed and the way they are unprepared for stuff sliding around on takeoff too cute by half, but there was some level on which I bought it… just a good natured girl “from Nashville” trying to be normal in the situation.

The narrative as presented is rooted the gifted child thing I’ve accused her of.  The takehome is she’s trying to learn how not to tie all her happiness into whether others tell her she is performing well, which she feared is all she ever was. It’s a terrible doc if you want more about her dating life (as presented, it’s “I dated and people were shitty about it, I found a more stable relationship with a guy I will barely show,” which was like 2 minutes screen time, one of which was her and London guy eating burritos which she “had never had till recently”) or her father (barely mentioned) or the impact of her mother’s illness (sketchy details). Instead you get her relationship to her weight and political awakening, which is kind of cool to see presented from her perspective (Marsha Blackburn gets more screentime than anyone but Tay and mom and maybe Brendon Urie).

But, since the doc is mostly about showing you how normal she is in an abnormal situation, there’s a “I never grew up” aspect that kind of oozes out.  In the “I put ice in my white wine” part (I’ll let you decode all the cultural shit packed into that) she essentially says red wine is for grownups which punctuates a theme of there being a line she’s avoiding stepping over.  The arrested development aspect of her as a lyricist and production deciderer (something I love and find fascinating) appears to be an aspect of an overall personality characteristic.  She talks about having kids in a way that’s so abstract she should have been playing with a Barbie when she did it. 

Besides the narrative itself, the most interesting thing is her working in studio. There is always a feeling that the “demo” extras on the albums were complete artifice and this, at least, felt more cherry picked than scripted. I would have liked more focus on the summer of 2016 as a clear cut point of crisis from which a new self developed, but mostly it’s just odd that applying screenplay rules to a documentary feels like a correct approach.  Worth a watch.

For gods sake, just borrow someone’s Netflix login like a normal person.

Yeah, I guess her thing has always been “living out the iconic American White Girl life-course”, so she can make art of it

And that now includes “go to therapy for BPD as you turn 30”

Of course the Tayswift version of therapy is thinking about it real hard and getting autobiographical

I’d love to see the branded CBT worksheets, tho

Taylor Swift is going out with voluminous hair framing her face and her cheeks not makeup-contoured hollow again like she used to circa late 2000s, despite that it makes her face heart-shaped

That and doing her makeup so you can see the lines in her neck and face, she’s deliberately easing off presenting as the hot young thing now she’s hit 30, that’s interesting

taylorswift:

Sock Appreciation Post 🧦

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.

kontextmaschine:

infraredarmy:

kontextmaschine:

the breakout single of Lover is gonna be Paper Rings, which is about kink replacing Christianity as the idiom by which non-elite white people form default bonds

this is gonna be fucking amazing

explain

Okay this is maybe a bit overblown, it triggered existing ideas in my head about #sexual media and all that, a little overenthusiastic “oh my god, if SHE sees it too, it’s real and I’m on the right track.” So maybe it’s better taken as an example of her writing things so specific yet so open-ended that everyone can see what they want in it.

But I can defend it.

Okay to start with this song feels like a sequel to Stay Stay Stay - bouncy healthy, resilient relationship positivity that uses language that’s kind of therapeutic (“you should never leave a fight unresolved”, “who always took their problems out on me”, “I think that it’s best”) and somewhat colloquial (”I just like hangin’ out with you‘), distant from the core Taylor Swift character. You… get a sense this couple owns at least one Funko Pop. Now. First off, the refrain:

I like shiny things/but I’d marry you with paper rings

There are two ways I can see that, first like “the formal bridezilla accoutrements of a wedding sound nice but we’re poor and I’d accept just you.”

Now that’s specifically not the coastal elite model of marriage as a “capstone” once you’ve got the rest of your lifepath sorted. Especially when you factor in the painting the brother’s wall - these are people who didn’t move away from home.

The second is that they retain a respect for the symbolic meaning of marriage - either the “blue” one as a capstone of self-constructed life trajectory, or the “red” one as the sanctified beginning of family and household formation - but that aside, what they really want is just you.

And the last decade in Portland honestly I’ve been seeing that from both sides - couples who moved from the mountain and interior west who have no ‘Merica god, guns, or country in them at all, but who still take it as normal to marry at 22 and have a kid at 24; people who in my generation would have been blue coastal strivers but no longer expect a rise-to-power plotline and might as well settle anyway, into a relationship based on mutual support without external referents

I hate accidents/except when we went from friends to this

Okay but here’s the thing, the song opens with a description of how “this” happened – “the night we first met/went home and tried to stalk you on the internet”, “cat and mouse for a month or two or three”.

That does not sound like an accident, and it goes straight from that to “now I’ve read all the books beside your bed” without a stop at “friends” in between. (also that’s a great example of her words=sex thing that she establishes they’ve been sleeping together by saying she’s been reading his books)

So what is it? It’s a counterfactual. It’s roleplay. Or it’s a romantic idiom so prominent in Funko girl’s mind she puts it under that even if it doesn’t apply - the “friends to lovers” trope that Taylor Swift has been writing all this time, and the acccidental setup that finally brings them together.

OR, she knows it doesn’t apply, but that’s the idiom of “how to get a man” that she grew up internalizing (you ever think about how odd it is that the great 2008 friendzone anthem was written and performed by a woman?) so she was secretly aiming for it the whole time, and as far as he knows that’s what happens but the first lines were the calculations only she saw.

I want your complications too, I want your dreary Mondays, wrap your arms around me baby boy

Like, that’s hurt/comfort, that’s depression reassurance, that’s ASMR, they’re not “kink” per se, but I increasingly see stuff suggesting the old saw is true and women don’t seem to have such a firm distinction between romance and erotica or physical sex acts and relationship power dynamics. That’s also finished off in a gender-swap of “baby girl”, the sub counterpart to “daddy”.

The other thing is the recurring “dirty dreams” as the context for how she wants him and in the outro that resolves to “in all my dreams”

Ohhhh, it’s an Fdom song, I dunno how I missed that conclusion

But that’s kinda what Stay Stay Stay is, isn’t it?

…

wait, Stay Stay Stay is about an abusive relationship, isn’t it?

wait, they’re both about an abusive relationship while sounding like a bouncy positive healthy relationship as told from the female side, is that the joke?

She throws her phone across the room at him, then manipulates him with therapeutic language (this morning I said we should talk about it/’cause I read you should never leave a fight unresolved)

And then he shows up wearing a football helmet! Because when she says she wants to talk he puts on armor against physical blows! Ha!

and then she tells a story about how she had Problems that he’s the solution to - before you she only dated self-indulgent takers, now you carry her groceries and now she’s always laughing

But he never made some dramatic turnaway, he~ee~e… stayed, he gave her no choice but to stay, stay, stay, all those times that he didn’t leave. He acts like it’s funny when she’s mad, mad, mad (no one else is going to love her)

She thinks that it’s best if they both stay, stay, stay stay stay stay

haha wow! I just got that reading!

Fifteen, about how people will tell you fake love stories to manipulate you, was two albums earlier!

infraredarmy:

kontextmaschine:

the breakout single of Lover is gonna be Paper Rings, which is about kink replacing Christianity as the idiom by which non-elite white people form default bonds

this is gonna be fucking amazing

explain

Okay this is maybe a bit overblown, it triggered existing ideas in my head about #sexual media and all that, a little overenthusiastic “oh my god, if SHE sees it too, it’s real and I’m on the right track.” So maybe it’s better taken as an example of her writing things so specific yet so open-ended that everyone can see what they want in it.

But I can defend it.

Okay to start with this song feels like a sequel to Stay Stay Stay - bouncy healthy, resilient relationship positivity that uses language that’s kind of therapeutic (“you should never leave a fight unresolved”, “who always took their problems out on me”, “I think that it’s best”) and somewhat colloquial (”I just like hangin’ out with you‘), distant from the core Taylor Swift character. You… get a sense this couple owns at least one Funko Pop. Now. First off, the refrain:

I like shiny things/but I’d marry you with paper rings

There are two ways I can see that, first like “the formal bridezilla accoutrements of a wedding sound nice but we’re poor and I’d accept just you.”

Now that’s specifically not the coastal elite model of marriage as a “capstone” once you’ve got the rest of your lifepath sorted. Especially when you factor in the painting the brother’s wall - these are people who didn’t move away from home.

The second is that they retain a respect for the symbolic meaning of marriage - either the “blue” one as a capstone of self-constructed life trajectory, or the “red” one as the sanctified beginning of family and household formation - but that aside, what they really want is just you.

And the last decade in Portland honestly I’ve been seeing that from both sides - couples who moved from the mountain and interior west who have no ‘Merica god, guns, or country in them at all, but who still take it as normal to marry at 22 and have a kid at 24; people who in my generation would have been blue coastal strivers but no longer expect a rise-to-power plotline and might as well settle anyway, into a relationship based on mutual support without external referents

I hate accidents/except when we went from friends to this

Okay but here’s the thing, the song opens with a description of how “this” happened – “the night we first met/went home and tried to stalk you on the internet”, “cat and mouse for a month or two or three”.

That does not sound like an accident, and it goes straight from that to “now I’ve read all the books beside your bed” without a stop at “friends” in between. (also that’s a great example of her words=sex thing that she establishes they’ve been sleeping together by saying she’s been reading his books)

So what is it? It’s a counterfactual. It’s roleplay. Or it’s a romantic idiom so prominent in Funko girl’s mind she puts it under that even if it doesn’t apply - the “friends to lovers” trope that Taylor Swift has been writing all this time, and the acccidental setup that finally brings them together.

OR, she knows it doesn’t apply, but that’s the idiom of “how to get a man” that she grew up internalizing (you ever think about how odd it is that the great 2008 friendzone anthem was written and performed by a woman?) so she was secretly aiming for it the whole time, and as far as he knows that’s what happens but the first lines were the calculations only she saw.

I want your complications too, I want your dreary Mondays, wrap your arms around me baby boy

Like, that’s hurt/comfort, that’s depression reassurance, that’s ASMR, they’re not “kink” per se, but I increasingly see stuff suggesting the old saw is true and women don’t seem to have such a firm distinction between romance and erotica or physical sex acts and relationship power dynamics. That’s also finished off in a gender-swap of “baby girl”, the sub counterpart to “daddy”.

The other thing is the recurring “dirty dreams” as the context for how she wants him and in the outro that resolves to “in all my dreams”

Kind of surprising that Taylor Swift isn’t more of a writers’ icon, really. If not for her own writing, for the fact that one of her most consistent themes is “people should be rewarded – with money, power, love, sex – in direct proportion to how good they are at understanding things and putting them into words”

(Her fanbase, or at least the part she interacts with on social media, seems to be more theater kids, but maybe that’s just who makes the dramatic, reblog-worthy gestures.)

Like, and I mentioned how another one of her classic themes was the importance of being a good lover, more important than being attractive. But they’re kind of the same thing, she metaphorizes being good at sex AS being good with words – I’ll do anything you say/if you say it with your hands – and marks being a writer as more important in a partner than being attractive – Hey Stephen, I could give you fifty reasons/Why I should be the one you choose/All those other girls, well they’re beautiful/But would they write a song for you?

People don’t realize how much of a Lisa Simpson she is. I think part of it is she never manifested a love of schooling, she not only never went to college but left school to be self-taught after 10th grade. She constantly sings about the importance of knowing or memorizing things, and has a good deal of stuff about school, with no overlap between the two, the latter being posed as a social setting for meeting friends and lovers.

But like, to return again to the symbolism of the You Belong With Me video, sure, the bitchy popular girl wearing shiny dresses in public is Taylor Swift, but the thing is the girl blowing things off to stay home in her room studying is also Taylor Swift.

So, to pick up on references I went back and relistened to Red through Reputation. My main takeaway from hearing them all in a row:

Taylor Swift has a frankly hilarious number of lines that are like “oh, and I’m amazing in bed”

Which, like, at this point she’s basically a shapeshifting empath who’s also an obsessive crazy chick, I bet so

But I thought on that more, and honestly, that’s a real, important theme in her work, that the reason you should want to get with her isn’t that she’s hot, it’s that she’s an excellent lover

Like, that’s even You Belong With Me, once you add in the way she uses “know” as the correct idiom to relate to a lover - to memorize them so completely you carry a working model of them within yourself.

Taylor Swift is demisexual as hell

(The YBWM video is about the good lover version of Taylor, the one who unguardedly sings, and dances, and communicates through writing, proving her superiority to the merely hot version of Taylor, with the bonus that the good lover version cleans up to be pretty hot)

…

I feel kind of weird admitting I find her sexually attractive, not least ‘cause, you know who’s known for lurking tumblr reading posts about Taylor Swift and only much later letting on that she saw everything? Taylor Swift.

But I mean, she puts a lot of effort and energy into convincing people they should want to fuck Taylor Swift, it would almost be ruder to not. Plus, she’s the last person that gets to give anyone shit for having a thing for celebrities, honestly one of the most charming things about her is how openly kid-in-a-candy-store psyched she is that she gets to fuck celebrities.

I suppose when you think about it, Taylor Swift writes fanfic about hooking up with Taylor Swift for a living, ever since she was a teenager. (She specializes in angst, slow burn, friends to lovers, and celebrity pairings)

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.

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

Identifies her primarily as a songwriter who’s not an interchangeable performer like competing young singers, as a carpetbagging code-switcher (contrasted with her not-that-wide vocal range, even), but with a distinct writing style that can be traced through all her works… see, I’m not the only one who notices that. It even mentions that some songs were clearly aimed towards an older generation and that she’s obviously absorbed some Jenny Lewis at some point.

Generally agree with the rest of the judgment – Red was the best album, but the second half (esp. the duets) is a drag you have to slog through – and it’s impressively thorough – the Christmas and iTunes Live From Soho albums, the Beautiful Eyes EP, even a bunch of special edition bonus tracks I’d never heard of before

Not really. She seems to have gone into all of it with a good sense of what being a celebrity really means and she schedules enough recovery and alone time into her 2-yr album/tour cycles to keep her head.

Also if she can use her public persona to add layers to her performances, she can do the reverse to manage expectations - Reputation was I’m pretty sure the first time she had lyrics as someone who drank and got drunk (the shots at 22′s girls night and the champagne at Starlight’s yacht club party were merely implied, but then again they’re semantically overloaded so their real audiences were both older adults looking back on their youth and young teens having a vision of adulthood)

And Cats, at however disclaimably, obviously not-Taylor Swift it is (an 80s cat!) is still her as a stage star who walks around with a bottle of hard drugs.

The one wildcard I’d guess is if some external force took control away from her, like she suffered some injury that legitimately required her to take painkillers to maintain her tour schedule.

Also, she guest starred on an episode of CSI back in 2009: