kontextmaschine:

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

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.

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!

This whole album cycle so far seems pitched to people who preferred 2012 Katy Perry to 2012 Taylor Swift, it’s weird

Taylor Swift Facebook page confirmed for nonbinary

“you call me up again just to break me like a promise/so casually cruel in the name of being honest” is a really good line

Taylor Swift isn’t doing astrology for this album cycle and that’s honorable

Jewel tones, huh, is that gonna be this album/tour/2 years’ theme

Oh it’s a fucking guest duet. That’s honestly the worst thing the pop switch from rock to rap introduced

Well the stage bit kinda acknowledges the connections to pre-rock (non-folk?) commercial producer/songwriter traditions, while eluding how she came up as part of a Nashville machine where producer pop MEANT volkischness

This whole thing would make sense if she were still pitching herself to 2015 tumblr

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:

I wonder how many people even realize she has a War On Christmas song

kontextmaschine:

I keep saying, she performs of-her-generation white middle-class American girl/womanhood, that’s her thing, in her songs, in her celebrity persona. You can really trace the generation’s progression in her album sequence.

And “enthusiasm for electing Democrats” is very much something urban millennial 20something women are into right now

Honestly, the fact that she still maintains Tennessee residency (after she’s better known for swanning about NYC/LA) is what interests me most. I suppose it’s probably a tax thing

…actually I remember hearing she uses the Nashville property as a home base during tours, flying back regularly. That plus maintaining NY and CA residences would be a pretty clever way to live a blue state coastal life while paying red state taxes

(recall that her backstory of growing up on a farm was a Christmas tree farm - i.e. agricultural tax exemptions but only a narrow yearly period when it actually functions as a job site - bought by her Merrill Lynch trader dad)

I keep saying, she performs of-her-generation white middle-class American girl/womanhood, that’s her thing, in her songs, in her celebrity persona. You can really trace the generation’s progression in her album sequence.

And “enthusiasm for electing Democrats” is very much something urban millennial 20something women are into right now

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

me: Mariah Carey's coming out as Bipolar II
also me: tell me when Taylor Swift promotes an album off BPD

yo we don’t talk enough that Taylor Swift has never been to college

OH SHIT, “I recall 8 November” coming straight after the postmillenial mdom-tease line, into “but would you run away with me”, that’s something