happy new year

taylorswift would be amazing in the Rebecca de Mornay role in a Risky Business remake

(when she internalizes that she can’t perfect her way into pleasing everyone, which she will gently ‘cause she’s competent)

((also the Dolly Parton role in 9 to 5, but the Dolly Parton role in everything, that’s a foregone conclusion))

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

An “official pop album” “inspired by the late ’80s”. Eeehhhhhhhhhh, we’ll see.

yeah, I don’t know why I even doubted her

Eeh, on second thought, I just listened to Red straight through again and I was like “holy shit I forgot how much better an album this is”.

1989 was the first Taylor Swift album to really be conscious that This Is An Album By Taylor Swift, Biggest Star In America. And it didn’t really bear that weight well.

The “1989” theme… I mean, the fact that there even was a theme. Red had the switch from Nashville to LA but that was more subtext than theme. The “let’s go back to the ‘80s” thing isn’t even new, nouveau-electropop has been the thing for a while, so not really any points for that. But that’s always been the Taylor Swift thing, she’s not a trailblazer, she just does whatever other people have been doing, improved and polished perfectly for the mass market. And the 100% hooks pop thing really plays against her strengths - she’s a songwriter first and foremost and even there more lyricist than arranger, but with the pop feel the lyrics don’t bear as much weight and she dumps more of the arrangement off on her producers.

There aren’t many great singles - Shake It Off was a decent way to introduce the new sound, and Blank Space really is the standout on this album. But beyond that you have what? Style. She could get away with I Wish You Would and/or How You Get The Girl, but that’s pushing it. Maaaybe This Love as something the country stations who supported her all this time could feasibly play, or else a twangier soundtrack song.

(It was a good idea to release “Out of the Woods” and “Welcome to New York” as teasers but not radio singles - they’re on the bubble of good enough, pushed over with the bonus from OHMIGAWD NEW TAYSWIFT, but don’t really hold up to replay.)

Wildest Dreams is too transparently “look, a Lana Del Rey song”, Out Of The Woods is “look, a fun. song”, Shake it Off is a Max Martin song.

I mean, I’ve said that The Lucky One was really a Jenny Lewis song, okay, but that wasn’t a single, deeper on the album. And circa Red the kids weren’t exactly listening to Jenny Lewis, but the 1989 sources are more direct competitors. WANEGBT was with Max Martin and Shellback and a dubstep drop, but no one was going to confuse that for Skrillex. It was built around a fucking ska guitar riff, for one.

(I’m pretty sure I Wish You Would is invoking Jesus Jones’ “Right Here, Right Now”, though, which at this point is respectably left-field)

Eh. I prefer it to the self-titled debut, for what that’s worth. At this point I appreciate her more as a celebrity than a musician anyway. Which I think is kind of a conscious shift. And another post.

tswiftdaily:

HQ Grazia France

longlives:

Taylor Swift by Thomas Whiteside.

taylorswift:

GUYS.

Blank Space Music Video
Directed by Joseph Kahn
Co-Starring Sean O’pry 

#BLANKSPACEMUSICVIDEO

GUYS. Blank Space Music Video Directed by Joseph Kahn Co-Starring Sean O’pry  #BLANKSPACEMUSICVIDEO

kbramer242:

😍🎶 #wcw @taylorswift #taylorswift #1989 #shakeitoff #outofthewoods #blankspace #thislove

taylorswift:

ohsoswiftly:

Taylor Swift Defines the Internet

It’s important that you watch this if you want to understand what I’m saying on tumblr.

kontextmaschine:

An “official pop album” “inspired by the late ’80s”. Eeehhhhhhhhhh, we’ll see.

yeah, I don’t know why I even doubted her

You know something I just picked up on? (about Taylor Swift, obviously)

“Welcome to New York” is a “moving to New York” song, in 2014, that invokes Manhattan at least once (“the Village is aglow”) but Brooklyn never. Now that might speak to her actual experience, but it’s kind of at odds with her populist pose, and she’s usually really good about aligning those two.

(Possible excuses are the “1989” theme or playing to a core audience of high school theater kids with a dated, second- or third-hand sense of what “New York” means, I guess)

Honestly, I think she heard Empire State of Mind and was like “oh, huh, New York anthems, that’s a thing isn’t it, I should do one of those”. Like I’ve mentioned, she is very very good at mimicry and matching affect. I complained that Shake it Off was really a Max Martin song, but hell, maybe she just wanted to prove that she could do a Max Martin song. I mean, Out of the Woods (put together with Jack Antonoff) is a fun. song, The Lucky One, off of Red, was a Jenny Lewis song and I hear one of the other 1989 tracks is basically a Lana Del Rey song.

I mean hell, her earlier, more country albums, where she wrote songs about dating a guy your dad didn’t approve of, or watching your daughter grow up, or being 32 and feeling shame about your slutty younger days, those are not experiences she ever actually had. She reverse engineered them from existing country songs and red state culture and repackaged them better than the originals. (Plus, you notice her accent on those albums? She grew up in Pennsylvania, in the county catercorner to mine, and we do not talk like that.)

Like, I love and respect the hell out of the girl, but at the same time I’m a little afraid of her, for real. She’s a supergenius shapeshifter who’s made it her life’s mission to absorb the entirety of American culture and reflect a perfectly polished version of it back at the country. And she’s really good at it!

Something to consider is the treatment of God in her work, only glancing references in the earlier albums - “the man with the reasons why”/“the man who put you here” on Come In With The Rain, “And when I got home, before I said amen/Asking God if He could play it again” from Our Song, just enough to signal not so much Christianity as Christian…ness, as a component of Real Murcanism (hell, she wrote a song called “Sweet Tea and God’s Graces”, unreleased and suppressed on YouTube, which is probably Correct).

The only explicit reference to Jesus in her released original material is in Christmas Must Be Something More, off her Christmas LP, which manages to be a War On Christmas song without any villains. And if, in 2007, you were buying Christmas music, you were enough of a Taylor Swift fan after just the first album to want Taylor Swift Christmas music, and you did your music shopping at Target, you were probably cool with that.

And now in homonationalist 2014 there’s songs with equally glancing references to gayness, and it just… happens to be possible to squint at her style and personal relationships (which have always been a conscious part of her performance) hard enough to read lesbian subtext, if you’re the kind of person who would want to.

When I say she’s gunning to become the Queen of America I mean it.

taylorswift:

fearlessforyouu:

fearlessforyouu:

taylorswift I HAVE A FIRST DATE TOMORROW WITH A BOY IVE BEEN BEST FRIENDS WITH FOR TWO YEARS? WHAT DO I WEAR? HOW DO I DO THIS I DONT HAVE AN OLDEE SISTER AND I NEED ADVICE CAUSE WHAT IF IM NOT GOOD ENOUGH. I’m gonna have a breakdown about this tomorrow I’m not ready

don’t leave me hanging ://

If he’s your best friend and asked you out on a date, he’s probably seen you at your best and your worst, hair up or down, make up or natural… He likes you for you, so don’t act like someone else or stress out to the point of acting different than you usually act.
You got this.

I told you Taylor Swift is going to be Queen of America.

(She will be A Good Ruler)

damn.

julyninths:

No matter what happens in life, be good to people.

T-Swift is totally gunning for the Princess Di/Jacqueline Kennedy “Queen of America” role, you mark my words.

Taylor Swift’s Semantic Overloading

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 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.