The “took him on tour” bit raises my eyebrows but the “stopped the bus and asked to be taught” thing I would absolutely believe – her songs repeatedly use the verb “know” as the highest compliment you can pay and the way to relate to a lover, to so completely internalize something that you carry a working model of it within you. And I think she is trying to “know” as much of American culture as she can, in that sense.

So Taylor Swift started her career as a songwriter in Nashville, and the way that works is you write your songs and play them on a bar circuit and basically the active/rising stars’ A&R men* or often the stars themselves hit the circuit and if they think your song would work for them they buy and record it

Anyway, so on her first self-titled album, released when she was 16 so who knows when she wrote and performed them in bars, sung with a twang we know she didn’t grow up with, there are the songs

Tim McGraw, the first single which made her as a name at all, which had the stunning effect of being titled after the biggest country star at the time, with the refrain “when you think Tim McGraw, I hope you think of me”

Teardrops on My Guitar, a ballad of friendzoned longing from the perspective of a country guitarist, written so you could totally swap the genders without breaking meter

A Place In This World, about how she’s an unsure young woman on her own but sure things will go for the best, “I’m alone, on my own… oh I’m just a girl, tryina’ find a place in this world”

Also, I’m Only Me When I’m With You sounds a little different knowing what “Taylor Swift” went on to mean

And I know everything about you
I don’t wanna live without you

I’m only up when you’re not down
Don’t wanna fly if you’re still on the ground
It’s like no matter what I do
Well, you drive me crazy half the time
The other half I’m only trying
To let you know that what I feel is true
And I’m only me when I’m with you

Also, Fearless had a song, SuperStar, where she played the role of a girl with a huge crush on a country star

This is wrong but
I can’t help but feel like
There ain’t nothing more right babe
Misty morning comes again and I can’t
Help but wish I could see your face

And I knew from the first note played
I’d be breaking all my rules to see you
You smile that beautiful smile
And all the girls in the front row scream your name

So dim that spotlight, tell me things like
I can’t take my eyes off of you
I’m no one special, just another wide-eyed girl
Who’s desperately in love with you
Give me a photograph to hang on my wall
Superstar

I’m told it’s very well-arranged for a beginner guitarist, Also, the title is a Carpenters reference

*I just realized why Red felt so comfortingly familiar to me, and it’s because the instrumentation reminds me so much of what I heard at the Tuesday Spaceland residencies in LA a few years before it came out

argumate:

I mean it’s a little foolish to knock Taylor Swift for basing her brand on authentic teenage experiences that she never actually had for the same reason that it’s naive to point out that William Shakespeare wasn’t an Italian teenager willing to die for love; the art is separate from the artist, and the better the artist the less likely they actually have any personal experience in what they’re arting.

that’s really rammed home watching this Dylan documentary where you have a pack of folk musicians, ie. hippies from New York and California, touring small town America and hosting a festival of Authentic Folk Americana for the rubes.

they describe Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who looks like a cowboy left out to dry in the desert for forty years, as the son of a Jewish dentist from Brooklyn, which he was (apparently he ran away to a rodeo as a teenager and saw his first singing cowboy and knew how he was going to spend his life) but the song writer and story teller and spinner of yarns is not the person who does things, they’re the person who acts out the doing! it’s an entirely separate role!

Taylor Swift is 29 now and in 2010 she had a song called Innocent about comforting from experience a specifically 32-year-old after having gone too deep into being a party girl and wanting to feel fresh and worthy again

Which was obviously not an experience she had, but it was something she noticed in the “red” culture country music serves. I see men out of that culture grousing about it, and about the pastors urging them to “man up” and accept these Nth-hand goods to love and to cherish as their household angels

And so she wrote that up, and honestly it’s more evocative and insightful than it has any right being, I really do think she’s an excellent lyricist with an eagle eye for cultural nuance

I just told you that her trick is appearing to everyone like they want her to and that I see her as a supergenius shapeshifter world-conquerer with my particular field of interest who’s my superior who uses people as means to her own ends, did you think that through? Hands up, who didn’t think that through?

thefutureoneandall:

kontextmaschine:

For real though, it wouldn’t come to that. Like, okay she might be a master manipulator supervillain who’s trying to dominate all of humanity and subjugate it to her ego, and she might pretty openly be a black widow who only takes mates for the purpose of draining their life energy, and honestly when she’s not being styled by the best artists in the world she’s a pretty unremarkable not-fat 29 year old white girl, but Taylor Swift could absolutely get it.

…which seems like another layer of the work she’s running, too, that it doesn’t matter whether you see what’s happening.

Like, obviously the baseline pitch for going into a doomed relationship is “a fling with me is better than a healthy relationship with somebody else”. Hence relationship sabotage as a thing to brag about, hence songs about being the ex who tarnishes all your future relationships. But that’s nothing new or Swift-exclusive. Break Up With Your Girlfriend is an overt, chart-topping expression of the same idea, but we’re not talking about Empress Ariana here. Why? Well, Ariana’s pitch is essentially “I’m hot and you should take whatever I offer”. Put it next to ‘thank u next’ with all her famous exes, and it’s pretty clear that things won’t last, and it’s because she doesn’t think you’re good enough.

Taylor Swift, though… Like you said, what’s striking is that the thing portrayed in her music isn’t “being with Taylor Swift” but “being with a character played by Taylor Swift”. The changeable identity is part of the package, the fantasy is quite explicitly to have one of the world’s most talented actresses play your personal dream girl for a while. Which is obviously a popular song topic in its own right, but it also helps sell the rest of the story. The relationship won’t last, but that’s not a measure of you, that’s just how Taylor Swift’s relationships always go. In fact, it’s how they inevitably have to go, because your dream girl’s identity probably isn’t even coherent, much less sustainable.

Even the black widow thing becomes a selling point. Seeking out someone so desperate for validation that she’ll mold herself into your fantasy would be fucked up, but this doesn’t count because she’s using you! Sure, she’s going to trash you on her next album, but that’s just going to get you sympathy. I’ve heard plenty of people talk about the “poor guys” she dated, but they’re talking about Calvin Harris, John Mayer, and a Kennedy. It doesn’t matter whether you smarten up and realize you’re being used, because you’re going to come out ahead anyway. 

People say the best magicians can make a trick look real even after they explain how it’s done. Well, Taylor Swift wrote Blank Space, then kept up the persona even with an analysis of it sitting at the top of the charts. And of course, there’s no bottom to the metatextual stuff, it just oscillates between sincere and ironic, the same way Blank Space knocked down Shake It Off. Here she is talking about the song:

kontextmaschine:

Is that you, Ozy? That’s Empress Taylor Swift. Enjoy!

That is not my approach to relationships. But is it cool to write the narrative of a girl who’s crazy but seductive but glamorous but nuts but manipulative? That was the character I felt the media had written for me, and for a long time I felt hurt by it. I took it personally. But as time went by, I realized it was kind of hilarious…

So I created this whole character and I had fun doing it. Half the people got the joke, half the people thought I was really owning the fact that I’m a psychopath. Either one’s fine. It was #1 for eight or nine weeks, so I have no complaints.

It’s all a bit, she’s not really like that. Except she really will dump you, then write a #1 song about it. But that’ll be a bit too, even while she really does it, because you knew it was coming. And she’ll write a #1 song about that too.

So it’s gonna be forever
Or it’s gonna go down in flames
You can tell me when it’s over
If the high was worth the pain
Got a long list of ex-lovers
They’ll tell you I’m insane
‘Cause you know I love the players
And you love the game

Maybe that’s the missing Fdom dynamic that balances the world.

Though from experience, no, the fantasy, when you’re engaging at that level, is that you could be the one that breaks through and is able to hold your own with her. It could be the “forever” option.

This is, remember, how Nick finally “wins” over Amy in Gone Girl

surfjohnstephens:

taylorswiftedit:

Taylor Swift for Rolling Stone September 2014

see now…..this jenny shimzu cosplay is miles more lesbian adajecent than whatever rainbow cotton candy nonsense aesthetic is happening in her new video

surfjohnstephens: taylorswiftedit: Taylor Swift for Rolling Stone September 2014 see now…..this jenny shimzu cosplay is miles more lesbian adajecent than whatever rainbow cotton candy nonsense aesthetic is happening in her new video Cherry lips, crystal skies I could show you incredible things Stolen kisses, pretty lies You’re the king baby I’m your queen Find out what you want Be that girl for a month Wait the worst is yet to come, oh no Screaming, crying, perfect storms I can make all the tables turn Rose garden filled with thorns Keep you second guessing like “Oh my God, who is she?” I get drunk on jealousy But you’ll come back each time you leave ‘Cause darling I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream

She leveraged being a lyricist/performer into being a celebrity, and she’s leveraged that into being an empire-builder by this point, my thesis is the moves she’s making are subtler behind the scenes and you have to look for the secondary signs

Like, you realize that’s at the core of my thing about Taylor Swift, that she’s a female version of me as a psycho bitch.

Like, she grew up in Southeast Pennsylvania as the child of a professional father that left her as petty gentry, like she fixedly studied the flow of American culture as expressed in places like social media and genres like country. She builds a following by telling this story back to the public in densely self-referential but playful texts, while maintaining a semi-approachable persona on tumblr. She’s very intelligent and a good writer, boosted by the fact that she’s intelligent enough to productively channel a significant pool of her crazy into her work.

Like, I’m bipolar, and in hypomanic periods like now I have a lot of high-quality output at once, and that tends to be the stuff that really makes my reputation. She is clearly Cluster B, or, you know, “psycho bitch”, she has an obsessive need for attention and validation and she’s developed a personality and social skills to serve it, of being a heinous user of other people while maintaining a pose as an innocent put-upon romantic who intensely cares about your interiority.

Which, like, we all know that girl, but she does it at scale, so good at it she has succeeded in capturing a nontrivial share of the entire American culture’s libidinal economy of attention and validation. She is living the dream!

You realize the joke about You Belong With Me and Fifteen is she didn’t have the all-American high school experience of being in the marching band and losing your virginity to a dreamy upperclassman who’s really using you and going to prom with the boy next door.

She home-studied as a Nashville stage kid while plotting an ascent to celebrityhood! Where she lost her virginity to and had her puppy-love relationships with celebrities, the exact guys who are on the covers of magazines for normie all-American high school girls to fantasize about! And she was absolutely using them!

And like, she is not only one of the most famous people in the world, but the highest-paid celebrity at $200mil/yr. And like, her dad was a finance guy, her recording sessions and tours are clearly scheduled as a way to maintain legal residence in no-tax Tennessee, she clearly knows what she’s doing with the money. As you see with her feuding with Spotify and now trying to stir stuff about her master recordings, she is obsessed with maintaining 100% stem-to-stern control of her brand, her funding and publication channels, her empire. She writes and produces stuff for other people now, have you noticed that? And she’s always trying to add other celebrities to her stable. She is possibly the only fully autonomous wildcard acting within American culture.

And God help us, she’s starting to get into politics. I am not joking when I say it is entirely possible she will end up as Empress of America, at least to Eva Peron levels, God help us.

And it’s not like she was disguising the fact that she’s a shapeshifting manipulator who treats other people as things to be used and discarded to feed an obsessive need to be valued that will not be satisfied until she dominates the world while putting up a perfectly calculated facade! She has risen this far by creating and performing works of art that are directly about that in subtext, metatext, AND just straight text!

She is the only writer and public intellectual – and I do first and foremost consider Taylor Swift a writer and public intellectual – that I consider my clear superior, honestly it kind of scares me that only people at my level even seem to notice this. Sady Doyle sure fucking noticed it.

I’ve seen the psycho bitch version of me, she’s on her way to taking over the world, and it’s awesomely terrifying.

kontextmaschine:

People talking about Taylor Swift “punching down” at poor rural conservatives – her original fan base! – need to remember that “being a heinous bitch” has always been part of the Tayswift brand.

Like, in 2011 she had a single about how terribly mean someone else is that just goes on about how they’re a pathetic unloveable loser who’ll never amount to anything in life while she’s gonna be famous

It was off an album where the title track was about stealing someone’s man at their wedding!

Like, she built her entire public persona on turning on her exes and shit-talking them in public!

And she was lampshading this! You remember how the whole concept of the You Belong With Me video, her mainstream breakout moment, was that the cute down-home girl next door and the bitchy popular cheerleader were both Taylor Swift?

And that even taking the perspective of the down-home girl, it’s a story about a girl who can change her appearance to fit any scene to get what she wants set to a song about shit-talking people as trashy to convince you how she deserves to take things from them?

People talking about Taylor Swift “punching down” at poor rural conservatives – her original fan base! – need to remember that “being a heinous bitch” has always been part of the Tayswift brand.

Like, in 2011 she had a single about how terribly mean someone else is that just goes on about how they’re a pathetic unloveable loser who’ll never amount to anything in life while she’s gonna be famous

It was off an album where the title track was about stealing someone’s man at their wedding!

Like, she built her entire public persona on turning on her exes and shit-talking them in public!

Yeah I could swear I posted about this, right after the Reputation tour ended she started getting her makeup done so you could see the lines from her nose to the corners of her mouth and the tendons in her neck

I’ve talked about Taylor Swift’s semantic overloading, how her lyrics are usu. at least three things at once so that they mean something to a broad swath and mean something really particular to a narrow beam so it becomes their song

I just listened back to Dear John, which at the time I “knew” was about John Mayer, but it was on 2012′s Red, the last album she pitched country at all

now imagine you didn’t know that but instead you “knew” it was about a stepdad

just saying

kontextmaschine:

argumate:

kontextmaschine:

Listening again to Taylor Swift’s Red, picked up something I hadn’t - “memorize” used in two different songs

In Stay Stay Stay,

you took the time to memorize me
my fears my hopes and dreams
I just like hanging out with you
all the time

and then in Red,

memorizing him was as easy as knowing all the words to your old favorite song

and I thought on it and realize this downright sapiosexual knowledge-as-intimacy theme is pretty important in Tayswift, it’s the load-bearing element of YBWM

I’m the one who makes you laugh
when you know you’re ‘bout to cry
I know your favorite songs
and you tell me bout your dreams
think I know where you belong
think I know it’s with me
can’t you see I’m the one who understands you
been here all along so why can’t you see
you belong with me

it’s even important in negative (which is how interrogators tease personality from pretense) in Red,

forgetting him was like trying to know someone you never met

thinking about that, and also remembering when her transparent brand strategy was accessibility and fans chosen to meet her would gush about her casually referencing something they mentioned on their tumblr long ago, and it’s like

AWW, she really IS just like us, in that her real output is multilayered invocations of accreted culture but she charms incidental humans by studying up on whatever incidental shit they happen to be and mirroring it back at them

I just want to know you better
know you better
know you better now
I just want to know you
know you
know you

why do you always make her sound like a bundle of chitinous plates and spines tightly wrapped in human skin

because her superpower is making you think she’s you

greyannis:

Sometimes I get inspiration from weird random thoughts that pop into my mind - in this case Taylor Swift (or a random lookalike pop star if you want, it doesn’t matter) revealing herself as a reptilian illuminati agent.

barthel:

For posterity’s sake, here’s the rest of this:

Keep reading

taylorswift:

Can’t believe we get to play Croke Park again tonight, my heart is still racing from last night’s crowd and now we get to do it again!!!! 💕💕💕
📷 Gareth Cattermole / Getty Images

the thing about Taylor Swift’s Reputation is that it makes perfect sense as a graceful recovery from 1989′s effort at bare-ribbed taste-making

like back to “oh better take all of contemporary America into me and re-present it back thematically united through me” which worked when she came up, when we had different subcultures, that had different thematics

It’s the most lyrical album of hers, I think, and I’m not really sure who it’s for

It’s the first time her songs pose her as getting drunk

…Ready For It? announces the theme of the album - a bit of producer beats and rhythmic lyrics and being so past white boys, a bit of revived vulnerability, and that little throat-clearing at the start makes it all quotative anyway

End Game (feat Ed Sheeran & Future) - feat Ed Sheeran AND Future. I wonder if she’s got a separate UK market strategy

I Did Something Bad - is it an “owning being a manipulative relationship user” song or an “owning being an unapologetic social media troll” song? It really leans the first early on with only the “flames” bit suggestive at all, but then the “pitchforks and proof, their reciepts and reasons, they’re burning all the witches even if you aren’t one” into the “light me up” breakdown..?

Don’t Blame Me - yeah you know what Taylor Swift could make a good trip-hop song, sure

Delicate - it’s not my thing but she carries more of this song on her voice than most but that might be because her tuning’s entirely electronic tbh, this might be a CRJ dig

Gorgeous is a classic Tayswift crush song, like pre-Red, with that papery hi-hat

Getaway Car is like ½ classic Tayswift and 1/6 Outrun signifiers and 1/3 actual “oh shit, Vangelis” ‘80s

King of My Heart might be a sorority girl-daddy song, or a first interracial relationship, or a Michael Jackson tribute, honestly, while being perfectly serviceable generically

there’s that semantic overloading

Dancing With Our Hands Tied - acceptably laser-gridded song, you can read the initial “25 years old, how were you to know” towards either partner with thematics intact

Dress – she always does “I can do my rivals better” songs and this is Carly Rae Jepsen - breathy, a little desperate friendzoned from the girl side - which is to say like her old high school wheelhouse but also her recent BPD Queen personas, throwing in just enough anchors to read your own story into - flashbacks/mistakes/rebounds/earthquakes

This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things - these days you need to try a lot harder to keep your feuds in the news to earn a feud song. the “bouncy, childish” affectations just sound childish. the return of the Bill Hader-ass “laughing out of the script” is cute

Call It What You Want – “yeah I lost that last callout war and went dark on social media, but I’m getting the best dick”, that’s one of Taylor Swift’s biannual Songs For Our Time

New Year’s Day - this is totally the “sorority girl reassuring herself about the relationship to her fraternity guy” - the “please, don’t ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere” echoes the “but if god forbid, fate should step in” verse from Long Live but you know they’ll have a location wedding with a mason jar reception themed after that interwar party from Starlight

Friendly reminder Taylor Swift came up through the Nashville system, heir more to Tin Pan Alley/Brill Building professionalism than folk-rockist singer-songwriter authenticity, and she’s always said she sees her legacy more as a songwriter

no seriously the Reputation review is taking so long because the songs are so lyrically dense and triply-layered and #include another song every two measures or so, this is peak kontextmaschinebait

kontextmaschine:

“I’ve never thought about songwriting as a weapon,” Taylor Swift said with a straight face to an interviewer from Vanity Fair while the magazine was profiling her in 2013.

No, not Taylor Swift. Not the author of songs like “Forever and Always,” written in the wake of her relationship with former boyfriend Joe Jonas, the better-looking Jonas brother, and featuring this lyric: “Did I say something way too honest, made you run and hide like a scared little boy?” Not her, who wrote/sang about her relationship with the actor Jake Gyllenhaal, “Fighting with him was like trying to solve a crossword/and realizing there’s no right answer.”

Not Taylor, who leaves the impossible-to-crack clues in her liner notes for each song by capitalizing a variety of letters that spell out the subjects in a very essential way: “TAY” for a song about ex-boyfriend Taylor Lautner; “SAG” for the Gyllenhaal one (as in Swift And Gyllenhaal, or that they’re both Sagittarius. I don’t know).

For Taylor Swift to pretend that her entire music career is not a tool of passive aggression toward those who had wronged her is like me pretending I’m not carbon-based: too easy to disprove, laughable at its very suggestion.

Don’t get me wrong—I say all this with utter admiration. Taylor’s career is, in fact, the perfected realization of every writer’s narrowest dream: To get back at those who had wronged us, sharply and loudly, and then to be able to cry innocent that our intentions were anything other than poetic and pure. Most of us can only achieve this with small asides. Taylor not only publicly dates and publicly breaks up, but she then releases an achingly specific song about the relationship—and that song has an unforgettable hook—all the while swearing she won’t talk about relationships that are over. Yes, date Taylor Swift, and not only will she shit on you on her album, but the song will become a single, then a hit, and then you will hear yourself shat upon by an army of young women at Staples Center. And then she’ll deny that she was ever doing anything other than righteously manifesting her art. It’s diabolical, and for a lifelong passive-aggressive like me, it’s made her my hero.

(relevant)

8/23/2015

her albums are dense, recursive two-year reviews of How We White Girl Now, is the thing