barthel:

Congrats 2 Taylor, hope she and October 24, 2006 will find true happiness 2gether

popculturediedin2009:

Taylor Swift Myspace comment, October 2005

“listen my queer fellow”

“drive over in your sex van and come pick me up”

Pretty sure if Taylor Swift titled her next album Great Again my head would explode.

kontextmaschine:

taylorswift:

sarahwearsamask:

Yeh MOM??? taylorswift

Isn’t that just the normal way to hold cellular phones?
I’m very confused now. I’m going to work on my cross stitch for a while to get my mind off of it.
By the way, young lady, shouldn’t you be asleep at this hour?

Okay so maybe I see your point.
But only when I have my reading glasses on.

Taylor Swift is her audience as they see themselves, that’s her thing she’s her audience as they see themselves, and when her audience comes around to seeing themselves as fuckable office moms (and they will, and it will blindside you because you’ll expect 2020 to act like 2015 same as you expected 2015 to act like 1998) she will be the MOST fuckable office mom holy shit

OK you know how she has distinct looks for each 2 year album/tour cycle? The 1989 tour ended on December 12, and since then her styling’s subtly changed such that her nasiolabial folds and superficial neck muscles are noticeably more prominent. Just saying.

(She’s 26, which is sliiiightly above American mothers’ mean age at first birth. I’m not even going to bother trying to work out the number for unmarried non-Hispanic white non-college centimillionaires.)

Look like a goddamn wreck in this photo, but made a friend.

sadbeautifultragic-deactivated2:

taylorswift:

drinkingmaplelattes:

WHEN YOU ASK TAYLOR TO HIT YOU IN THE FACE WITH A GOLF CLUB AND SHE ACTUALLY DOES!!!!! I AM CRYING I WALKED INTO THE MEET AND GREET AND SHE WAS STANDING THERE WITH A GOLF CLUB! THANK YOU SO MUCH TAYLOR I LOVE YOU

HIT ME IN THE FACE WITH IT

Okay so the first thing to appreciate is Wildest Dreams is a Lana Del Rey track. Not just the generally woozy instrumentation and vocals, not just the thematics, but very specific quirks - the way she pours syrup into her leading consonants (she used to sing with a twang, recall), the way she aspirates for emphasis in things like “this is getting good now”, “end” and “begins”, the transition on “say you remember me” at 2:38 where lush instrumentation abruptly drops out to a bedroom purr.

Ask me, Taylor Swift is less a musician than a master mimic who operates in the field of music (most of the time she’s mimicking her audience, which is Correct - the way to master predatory mammals, humans included, is to look them straight in the eyes and mirror them back to themselves with more confidence), and she does this occasionally.

Honestly I think it’s just to show off her professionalism as a performer and to throw a bit of shade, take a sound that’s getting attention and prove that she could trivially do that too if she wanted. (And really, is it that odd if the girl who’s known for writing hit singles just to be catty to her romantic rivals were to write hit singles to be catty to her professional rivals?)

ANYWAY, so Lana Del Rey’s brand identity is woozy Jet Age glamour Americana, and so in that context the video is kind of brilliant, the Old Hollywood international spectacle sitting right at the intersection of that and Taylor’s own 1989-cycle brand identity, the “I’m A Fucking Superstar Now” victory lap.

That’s one thing.

I guess the big thing about it in hot take land is that it’s a manifestation of colonial white priveleged racism, because that’s always the big thing about anything in hot take land. Aaron Bady, who is trying to make a name for himself as the American Richard Seymour, wrote the best of them but boil away the writing and the point is that the “Africa” setting is implicitly Kenya - colonial Kenya - which I suppose is true, and that this means the video is substantially in a colonial setting while not being about colonialism, which I suppose is true, and that it doesn’t even seem to feel any obligation to be about colonialism, which I suppose is true. Which seems about right for a Taylor Swift video tbh. So I wouldn’t say he’s wrong, just… tangent to anything interesting.

One point I think he could have stood to make though is that when you look at some of those shots - a boy with his arms around a girl as they gaze upon a golden field, etc. - this is actually some of the most countryfied imagery she’s used for a few album cycles.

So if you want to talk about Africa and whiteness and ownership, maybe mention how the video models whites-in-Africa using an established vocabulary of relationship between land and the reproductive unit drawn from an artistic tradition founded on settler-colonial volkishness and white indigeneity.

Or not. For those of us more interested in Taylor Swift in herself, the interesting thing is how the visuals in the video for what’s possibly the last single off 1989 almost come off as an attempt to retroactively place the song, and by extension the album, as much more in line with previous Tayswift canon. Shots like that attach a countryfied image to her first not-at-all country release.

But beyond that is the plot - there is a desirable boy, there is a girl (Swift), there is romantic tension between them that ends with the girl’s heart being broken but an assurance that this is error and a correct analysis would place her as most desirable.

And while that isn’t completely incompatible with the lyrics, it’s not something you could have extrapolated from the lyrics alone. (Really, things like “I can see the end as it begins” better suggest, as with other tracks on the album, an acceptance of relationships as distracting amusements with expiration dates.)

What it IS, though, is the signature Taylor Swift plot from her earlier albums. Which means that at the end of an album-cycle that was explicitly themed around “I’m not the heartbroken country girl anymore”, we get this almost after-the-fact “…or am I still, just a superstar now?”

And that’s interesting.

taylorswift:

christabelletay13:

tswiftandnewyork:

The progress of the catwalk… taylorswift

YES

This!!!!

When she floated above the audience in her high, high heels on that lighted dock, facing a stadium of sixty-eight thousand people, how could she feel anything except either a messiah complex or profound loneliness?

Later that night, I said to my husband, “I thought of her as a singer-songwriter.” And my husband, who has never voluntarily listened to a single word escaping Taylor Swift’s mouth, laughed. “Singer-songwriters don’t perform in stadiums,” he said.

tayllorswifts:

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone's singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That's the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.



“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)

iswiftt:

today is never too late to be brand new.

boewing:

Vanity Fair (HQ)

Got my Tayswift playlist on random, man I Know Places into Jump Then Fall is a striking transition.