kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

This is such a 1998 look tho

This look has a favorite Snapple “Real Facts” bottlecap

This look has a remix by Tricky

This look is joining with Melissa auf der Mar to present an award to L7

I think this is the specific look she was referencing with “I’m a mirrorball”

actually you know what as someone with weak ankles I notice here?

First, how high those heels are and how far she’s leaning back (tallest tiptoes, highest heels, etc.)

Second, those wraps against her lower leg aren’t just stylish, they’re bracing (like how Roman centurions’ sandals were marching boots) and how Taylor fucking Swift doesn’t risk twisting an ankle to look like that

kontextmaschine:

This is such a 1998 look tho

This look has a favorite Snapple “Real Facts” bottlecap

This look has a remix by Tricky

This look is joining with Melissa auf der Mar to present an award to L7

I think this is the specific look she was referencing with “I’m a mirrorball”

Oh no, she probably had a stray thought once and built it into something #relateable. It’s a concept album around “what if Taylor Swift’s life didn’t work out?” which just reminds you that it did

If you’re ever like “so what’s up with how Taylor Swift is like… curating a set of established aesthetics and not creating her own?” or “what’s up with how she dated Tom Hiddleston?” remember the girl literally spent her 20s hanging out on fandom tumblr

kontextmaschine:

Looking over it I suspect the overlook she’s talking about is the one at 8591 Mullholland, between Laurel and Coldwater Canyon, at a right angle turn so keeping straight would launch you into undeveloped trees from either direction

It’s pretty and a great view and a fun drive in its own right, do go! Do not commit suicide there, it would be obnoxious and she would disapprove.

also, if she is signaling that she hung out in the canyons and not the bird streets, that is an incredibly subtle dunk

folklore, first take:

Marvel publishes alternate-continuity comics called What If?, soon to be adapted as TV, about what would happen if significant Marvelverse events had gone differently

folklore is a What If? concept album on the theme “What if Taylor Swift’s life wasn’t a success?”

Like the 1 is “What if she never got over her bad breakups”, mirrorball is “What if she never learned to weaponize the bpd dynamic from Blank Space and it broke her?”, the last great american dynasty is “What if that period romance from Starlight didn’t have a happy ending”, there’s a few “What if she never escaped the undertow of small-town Pennsylvania adolescence?”

Also:

• it starts off as a bedroom pop album then in the middle turns into 90s VH1 chick-pop(!!!) mirrorball is dream pop, august is Natalie Merchant, I’m pretty sure mad woman is invoking Tori fucking Amos
• speaking of which, the vice element added this album is “cursing”
• none of the titles are capitalized
• It’s better than any of her other stuff than maybe Lover, but I still like Red better

folklore

fandom: oh hey yr back early

Taylor Swift: world’s haunted

fandom: what?

Taylor Swift: *doing vocal exercises and releasing another album* world’s haunted

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

Also, Lover is about a girl who rode the carousel in her 20s using the experience to become a gentle femdom mommy, but y'all ain’t ready for that take

1. Lover
2. Red
3. It’s a toss-up between Fearless and Speak Now, mostly determined by which side of the country-pop divide you come down on. Speak Now is more country, and broadly more about the lyrical narrative; Fearless is relatively more pop, and broadly more about the sound of the music

also me: Taylor Swift’s “Mine” is about some scumbag landing a scumbag’s daughter by exploiting her history and fear of abandonment, because while she thought she was defining herself in opposition to him she was really just developing as a codependent enabler

me: holy shit

also me: of COURSE he made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter, where do you think her image of what a male partner looks like comes from?

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

Still mulling over the significance that Afterglow, off Taylor Swift’s Lover, is a BPD comedown/aftercare anthem

For one that creates a striking parallel with her BPD high anthem Blank Space

For another, like, it is a song explicitly about how she accepts fault, she is to blame for drama, it was gratuitous, and she is sorry; and we haven’t talked enough about how this is an explicit rejection of her whole previous Taylor Swift™ schtick

What are the precedents? Stay Stay Stay she kind of acknowledges she’s creating gratuitous drama, but in the context of appreciating someone literally donning armor to endure her. Back to December she kind of accepts blame for a relationship failure, but in the context of interpreting a months-ago ex as an epic, continuing drama, which is maybe not the best BPD self-awareness

Hm, just remembered that with Lover released in fall, Cruel Summer was supposed to be the song of this summer.

kontextmaschine:

listening to the Cats (2019) soundtrack again, as someone who used to listen to the original Broadway cast recording

Wow did they not cast Broadway singers. Even where they cast professional stage performers OR professional musical performers!

Tayswift’s “Macavity” sounds like a grown-up wash on singing it in front of the mirror when she was 8, which I would totally believe

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

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