Also, can we talk about how Lover, the song, is produced as a Rilo Kiley track?

And ME!, Jesus. First, the album version isn’t as annoying as the video, but also in the context of an album about how you’re the savior of America, a song about how unique and irreplaceable you are is amazing leaning-in

Also a little weird seeing her CRJ and LDR impressions grow up and become actual voices

Like okay I am so generally positive about Taylor Swift I would understand you discounting my praise

But look at it this way: do you know how good something has to be that I’m convinced I had been underrating Taylor Swift?

Lover is that good, it’s one of the all-time American masterpieces

like, things I think it already exceeds:

• The Great Gatsby
• Infinite Jest
• The Godfather
• Nevermind
• Hotel California
• Use Your Illusion
  

Things I am not yet convinced it exceeds:

• Tom Sawyer
• Gone With The Wind
• Citizen Kane
• Moby-Dick
• Pet Sounds

Currently on the borderline:

• The Velvet Underground & Nico
  

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.

kontextmaschine:

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

I’m not kidding, this album is like if Thriller was also Rumours and all previous Taylor Swift albums simultaneously, and constitutes a real offer to scrap the entire 2010s from American culture and lead us through doing it right instead

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

In 2016, the average yearly income of 25-to-29-year-old just-white American women who never attended college would have gone down by about $113 if you excluded Taylor Swift as an outlier

worldoptimization:

kontextmaschine:

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

imo I’d Lie is the most underrated song on this list

I mean, come on:

early evidence of “memorizing is Taylor’s love language”

that chorus, the way she slows down and pauses on “if you asked me if I love him,” allowing a moment of vulnerability and rawness and pain …

and then snaps back with an upbeat, almost cheerful “I’d lie,” exulting in artifice as if the alternative is too much to handle

Eh, it’s kind of cobbled together from elements she did better on other songs, though.

The “passenger seat” imagery that gets used and not followed-up on in the beginning was done better in Our Song and honestly even alluded to in Picture to Burn (that stupid old pickup truck you never let me drive) and similar to the “laughing on a park bench” bit from YBWM

The sound of “as he runs his fingers through his hair”, “i don’t think it ever crossed his mind/he tells a joke, he fakes a smile”, and “he sees everything in black and white/never let nobody see him cry” are all transparently ripped from Train’s Drops of Jupiter, which she had a cover of.

“His sister’s beautiful, he has his father’s eyes” - the invocation of family as a way to establish him as an ideal domestic partner but then immediately complicating it, that’s The Way I Loved You

The “stuff you memorized about the crush who has you in the friendzone” and even the specific phrase “all his favorite songs” was YBWM

Honestly “he looks around the room/innocently overlooks the truth” doesn’t have a perfect match but it still reminds me of Enchanted and The Story of Us and Teardrops on My Guitar

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

re: Lover

yeah i can tell the difference between Hobby Lobby and Target wine moms too, Taylor, but whatcha gonna do about it?

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:

Personally, Red, but Speak Now is the peak of her lyricism

kontextmaschine:

dancingtotaylorsbeat:

ACTUAL ANGEL

That’s how the populists of the Late Roman Republic came to power, leading up to Caesar himself. Winning over the people with conspicuous displays of charity and great arena entertainments. Bread and circuses.

When I say she’s going to become the Queen of America, I FUCKING MEAN IT.

Friendly reminder there exists a Tennessee-based private welfare network that will probably need to find an heir for its charismatic country-crossover songstress leader in the next decade or so

kontextmaschine:

;)

I’m sure she’d love to be the solution to any of those for you, anon

argumate:

You Belong With Me permutations, eg. “you’re on the phone to your girlfriend she’s upset” being sung by a boy to a boy, by a boy to a girl, by a girl to a girl,

see this is the queer content the fandom wants

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

Also, I guarantee you that 80% of Taylor Swift showily going Democrat when she finally came out of her political chrysalis is that she sees from the trends around Nashville that Tennessee will flip from red to blue in her lifetime and wants to hitch a ride on that as a state power broker

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

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