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
Cats was as batshit as they say and it was great, very specifically true to the spirit of 1981 London musical theater taking on prewar London
The only part I thought didnt work was the fight scene on the trash barge with Ian McKellen and Rebel Wilson
OK and the Jenny Anydots musical production with the human-faced cockroaches she kept eating, ngl that was weird but it opens the film with a decent nod to an earlier Bubsy Berkeley tradition of adapting stage musicals to film
They do a better job of rescuing incoherent source material than any movie since Resident Evil – with a bit of dialogue, scene changes, and close-ups, they stitch it into viable mechanical (Macavity plots to steal the Choice!) and emotional (Mr. Mistoffelees gets confidence and saves Deuteronomy, Victoria joins the Jellicles and saves/sets up Grizabella, they end up together) arcs
Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, and Taylor Swift are transparently enjoying the hell out of themselves
It is, in fact, the horniest movie I’ve ever sat through previews of treacly kids’ movies (Harrison Ford co-starring with a dog!) before.
The Taylor Swift performance of “Macavity” was a very Taylor Swift performance, showing off her standard vocal tricks, aspirating her leads and weighting her vowels and then swapping into a British accent for a line. For all that, it probably departs from the stage Original Cast Recording least of any take in the movie.
By contrast, the Taylor Swift-written song is like the most Taylor Swift song, uses all her standard writing tricks and her little-poor-me outside-looking-in perspective. Not to mention it is the defining song for Victoria, the new central viewpoint character (and Taylor is clearly ventriloquizing her vocal approach), so it claims basically the entire movie for her, specifically appropriates Grizabella’s pathos for herself, and steps on the last line of Memory with a callback.
So, it is the most Taylor Swift song.
(Her role here probably counts as some of that U.K. market-specific fanservice I’ve mentioned, too)
wtf is going on between ave regina and her record label, she got entangled into an over-restrictive contract with an excessive no-re-record clause? her dad's like the biggest country signer around, you'd think they can get a lawyer before signing anything
First off, Taylor Swift’s dad isn’t a country singer at all, I have no clue where you got that from. He’s an investment advisor, and an early investor in her former label, Big Machine, so I’m sure the contract was well-lawyered.
The issue wasn’t that the contract, under which Big Machine, lately purchased by Scooter Braun, owned her master recordings was crooked. The issue is it was first negotiated not with international superstar Taylor Swift but nobody teenager Taylor Swift on the basis of her potential to, maybe, best case scenario, be another LeAnn Rimes.
So the terms not as favorable to her as the current balance of power would suggest, in fact her new contract with Republic under which Lover was released gives her ownership of her master recordings.
And it’s normal for acts that make it big to chafe under the terms of their early contracts, and ownership of the masters is a common friction point. And it’s normal for industry money guys to respond that the hope of catching a rising star and riding it to the bank is why they invest in finding and developing new talent, most of which doesn’t earn out the expense.
And it’s normal for Taylor Swift to make poor-me appeals to her audience, but it’s normal for the industry to ignore that stuff. From the industry perspective, all Ke$ha dishing shit on Dr. Luke in the media was just an external pressure campaign by a hit act trying to get out of her early deal and the response was “cool story bro, see you in court”. It’s not like they can take the L for goodwill and trade that towards something better, owning a share of a hit act is what you’re trading towards, how you cash out.
So, court is probably where this’ll be resolved, with claims and counterclaims and expensive lawyers and collateral attacks and in the end it’s more about balancing raw power than anything, but taking raw power grabs and dressing them up as the story of a vulnerable girl fighting off the haters to come into her own is pretty normal for Taylor Swift
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.
Listening back over Taylor Swift again, and Better Than Revenge, the way the song is zero percent about the boy at stake (referred to as a playground toy) and 100% about the thrill of kicking up some girlfight drama jumps out more than I remember
The basic theme of every Taylor Swift album is just a girl who, in that particular year and at that particular age, has to be heterosexual
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!
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”
Checking off classic Swift boxes, it’s a straight-up “here’s a song about things you saw in the tabloids” AND a “rip and riff on a competitor’s style” taking on Lily Allen, which really pushes the “back to the early 2010s” vibe
Also a lot of her stuff’s really marked by particular cities - Red is the LA album, 1989 is NY, the country stuff was obviously Nashville, and she’s riffing on that, isn’t there somewhere else in the album where she compares herself to New York City?
But mostly, in an album where she presents herself as an avatar of America - “Miss Americana” - it’s an assurance to her British fans that she still appreciates them. Since Red when she was hanging out with Ed Sheeran all the time, she’s devoted some effort specifically to the UK market (where her familiarity with country, and more generally American tropes is less useful). I’d like to read something about her British fandom someday.
Taylor Swift reminds me of Laura Palmer: all amped up subjectivity in a world that sees you as an object to possess and destroy, that wants to kill you so it can worship your corpse. This album is her Fire walk with Me - after a window into her world of massive social power, abject structural powerlessness, the pain of self regard, despair, identity uncertainty, and dream of escape, an encounter with the real causes her to take responsibility for herself as an agent in the world and ultimately refuse to be possessed by the spirit of negativity that has characterized her experiences. The whole record feels like an escape, but not from (as she is always on about) but to.
On a second listen, @kontextmaschine is right about the culture war stuff… the project of this album is to depict a woman becoming comfortable with herself, being able to be a partner and settle down, and healing sickness which is literal (her mom’s cancer), mental, celeb-cultural, and within America. It envisions getting the guy, knowing yourself, embracing the haters, and bringing the tribes together as the same act which, like I said, is sigil magic, which the ending of the album attempts to heal the world as she knows it. The model for this is her now 3 year successful relationship, which she tries to pull the other aspects in line with. It also reminds me of the end of this season of Legion, where the world is part of someone’s mental landscape, and that person must heal to fix the world.
The lyricism of the later tracks on the album seem different than her usual output. There has been a structure to her songs - the verses are the “it’s like this” of it all, and this can be exuberant, jokey (she likes a good absurd undermining of common phrases and puns), or impressionistic, the chorus dreams and desire, and all the movement (the heavy lifting) is in the bridge, the resolution of the is/aughtta be dialectic. The most common such movement is escape from. I haven’t dug deep enough to support this, but it seems there has been a grammatical passivity and subjectivity in her lyrics, an avoidance sounding like an actor in the world. This happened, I felt like this, my action is reaction, why can’t my dream appear, why not run. The end of this album is more assertive grammatically and doesn’t relegate a happy ending to a nonthreatening dream state. It says “I am going to have this.”
The album is really about fear of death and what to worship, and the answer is to give yourself over to synthesis: of identity, with a lover, with the world. Ignore things that push apart, or at least tell them to shut up. Find yourself through the religious ecstasy of union, and make of everything one body (which, yeah, isolated body parts are as common in her work as that of Paul, but the religion being in your lips, the alter in my hips is pretty much amazing the way it draws together community, worship, committed love, being a stage performer, and oral sex). There is a dark night of the soul fractility, nicely shown in the last 4 tracks which are “Afterglow” (not as an end for once), a song about accepting herself, a song about love as friendship, and “Daylight.”
This album is the sequel to 1989 and Reputation is just a thing that happened that this album addresses as subject matter and isn’t really in dialogue with ( at least not any more than a songwriter with pronounced ticks can avoid). At the moment, I still like 1989 better, but the song craft on this one is still emerging to me. It’s kind of a country album, with many references (I see Ryan Adams and Rilo Kiley as the strongest referents, and a real persistence of marching band instrumentation) and it needs to sink in a bit.
Yeah I think you’re right on the country referents. In an album where she folds all her old stuff back in, she seems to be taking the Ryan Adams version of 1989 on an equal plane as her own. And while she’d obviously at least heard Jenny Lewis by the time she did The Lucky One, Lover (the song) is produced to sound like Take-Offs and Landings. Honestly she was getting a bit alt- to her country already in Red, or at least Laurel Canyon – You said you never met one girl/Who had as many James Taylor records as you/But I do – which made sense for the “LA” theming
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)
