In more “people really did not pay attention to the words Taylor Swift was (writing and) singing” news, remember in 2010 when she was still in country music America’s Sweetheart, Who Narrativizes Her Own Life mode she released an album the title song of which was imagining a wholesome wedding for the sake of looking down on everyone participating and fantasizing about stealing the groom in front of them?

How funny is it that Jake Gyllenhaal’s chief legacy rn is as Taylor Swift’s muse?

redantsunderneath:

kontextmaschine:

You go back and listen to her early stuff like “oh it’s all about straight courtship!” no, it’s all about being a valued and desired girl

That is true, but her songs always seem to work on a number of layers at once in this vein, applying to lovers, friends, classmates, industry people, the press, the audience, the place she lives, and America writ large, all at once. You can look at a song like Bad Blood and say “it’s about Katy Perry” and she can say “I wrote it about Karlie Kloss (friendship drama)” but it functions as a piece of the album’s cycle about the eternal return of her romantic relationships, her feelings about living in New York, or the media saying things about her post Kanye. This makes it hard to anchor bisexuality on anything because the songs are referring to many different potential intersubjective partners or collective others, but they are always “bi-potential” (not that uncommon to make a pop song abstract enough to refer to any legible lover/lover relationship).

BUT, she has clearly steered into the skid of making the romance gender ambiguous, to the point of even having songs where the most obvious read requires the presence of a bisexual “I” (see Folklore’s so called teenage love triangle, but even that is cheekily complicated). It is fair to say her songs have always been subjectively fluid, but she has been moving into a different phase where the identification point is more condensed and not as centered on her lived experience. So as we approach full bi, we also get less certain she’s not projecting into a character.

ADDED: note that this applies to the notional “Taylor Swift” (holographic construct of song and media data) who I do not think is the same as the meat person, even if I talk about her life informing the readings as if it is. I saw Val so I might write more about this relationship soon. This disclaimer is to avoid being accused of parasociality.

Yeah, her semantic overloading.

It’s not even the lyrical narratives, though, it’s like how in even the most About The Heterosexual World stuff like The Man she’s clearly directly invested in the female roles she’s constructing

You go back and listen to her early stuff like “oh it’s all about straight courtship!” no, it’s all about being a valued and desired girl

One of the readings of King of My Heart was about the Instagram girls getting flown out to whore in the Persian Gulf, isn’t it

me: I wonder which BPD workbook Taylor Swift got

also me: she probably got the teacher’s edition with the answers in the back

This bar has all the recent Taylor Swift remixes on the jukebox which is a lot easier way to hear them than tracking down the Garbage import singles (2 CDs with different tracklists per song!) to hear Rabbit In The Moon and Goldie (Tricky? I always get them confused) mixes

God listening to Speak Now, it’s obvious in retrospect where Red came from as the breakthrough moment but still, God

I haven’t really been following the (Taylor’s Version)s, but a 30-song version of Red sounds intriguing

Actually mapping it out I don’t think Lover so much has arcs as it has clusters of tracks pitched to resonate with the emotional themes in the heads of a segmented imaginary audience

Palingenesis

Youve been listening to Taylor Swift since she was on country radio, alongside weepers about death and legacy. You’re worried about America, I mean you’re not like some of those crazies and you think it could still be okay but you increasingly don’t trust anyone who doesn’t see it.

• Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince
• Soon You’ll Get Better
• Daylight

Mommy Dom

Really, you’re the same “get a job and a man in your small hometown” audience she had all along only in 2020 you don’t have a church but know what fanfic tropes get you off, which is the spirit you bring to mangetting. Will talk about the emotional appeal of the himbo but will also admit to the “attractive, controllable” appeal.

• I Think He Knows
• Paper Rings
• It’s Nice To Have A Friend

Girlboss

“Wine Aunt” can be a thing too, and if it was still 2012 you could write the article in your sleep.

• I Forgot That You Existed
• The Man
• You Need to Calm Down

BPD

Yes, new love can be amazing but also you can really take things too far sometimes and hurt people you care about. But with the self-awareness to take responsibility and communicate with your partner, you can enjoy that intensity within a lasting, ideal relationship.

• Cruel Summer
• Afterglow
• Me!

Lover

Maybe you passed the BPD lesson, maybe you’re just mature now, and appreciate developing the ability to relax into a stable, low-key and long-term relationship

• Lover
• The Archer

Breakup

You’re not in the BPD segment but you love the classic Red-style drama, or you just went through a breakup yourself and need someone to externalize it for you. When people say they can’t think of a significant bi M/F relationship you remind them they know multiple songs about Swift/Gyllenhaal.

• Cornelia Street
• Death By A Thousand Cuts

London Boy is in her tradition of UK fanservice, False God I don’t vibe as part of anything but could be and I’m just not seeing yet, along with any number of slices with other stuff I’ve “already used” taken another way.

So the new development in Taylor Swift’s semantic overloading is she’s explicitly chaining her songs on the same album together into little arcs such that this reading of track 3 plus tracks 5, 9, 11 constitute their own narrative, while this reading of 2 (or even this other reading of 3) with 8 and 12 is another.

I listened to Lover today, I remember thinking Cruel Summer was ironic given the plague cause it was supposed to be the song of 2020 and I realized the whole album is supposed to be the album of 2020. Which means it’s a culture war album. But the thing is, preserving wide mass market-appeal and covering her ass, every thread within the cone of possibility from 2019 gets its own arc

Like, the “You Need to Calm Down” video makes the subtext explicit, even more than the You Belong With Me video was with “Look! Taylor Swift is an empathetic, geeky grind AND a catty attention-seeking sex bomb!”, that went with I Forgot That You Existed and The Man on the corporate masscult Diversity™️ arc

And the thing? Realizing we’re on the palingenetic path – Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince, Soon You’ll Get Better (imagine “‘Merica” as the addressee. I cried.), Daylight.

Meanwhile, she made a neo-traditionalist “white girl with braided hair in a field, putting herself in continuity with the pre-WWII upper class” aesthetic turn

ave tayswift regina americanorum

therealklt:

therealklt:

Honestly, do you want to know my hot take on Taylor Swift? Like, for real? You want me to weigh in on this discourse? I’ll do it. Listen up, okay, because this is about to get real. Every time I hear Taylor Swift, every single solitary time I hear her name, I think, “What a great name for a speedster.”

Imagine Taylor Swift running as fast as she can, trying to break the sound barrier so that she can take herself back in time to 2009 and stop Kanye West from interrupting her VMA speech, but just as she’s about to put a vibrating hand through his chest, a THIRD Taylor Swift explodes through a swirling portal and tackles her, preventing the impending flashpoint paradox.

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Jesus, Lover was still pretty good, huh?

oh my god the beat of Paper Rings was a NES TMNT reference

also 🎵I love my hometown, as much as Motown🎵 just means she considers her Pennsylvania Podunk on a level with Detroit, huh?

Jesus, Lover was still pretty good, huh?

kontextmaschine:

On the subject of tailoring your public health campaigns to their audience, it’s worth noting that one of the major themes of the last album Taylor Swift planned a 2-year, new-style, how-we-straight-girl-today touring cycle around was “getting treatment for BPD will make you stable enough to actually appreciate those fairy tale relationships you’ve been chasing”

But even then The Archer was like “but if you just like conflict as the substrate of your relationships that’s ok I get that too”

On the subject of tailoring your public health campaigns to their audience, it’s worth noting that one of the major themes of the last album Taylor Swift planned a 2-year, new-style, how-we-straight-girl-today touring cycle around was “getting treatment for BPD will make you stable enough to actually appreciate those fairy tale relationships you’ve been chasing”

stray thought: my GOD has Taylor Swift ever undergone the mortifying ordeal of being known

Evermore? Honestly felt like a B-sides/unreleased collection from folklore, there were the few good ones that woulda been on the platinum edition and some weird filler

“Taylor Swift bi” now makes so much obvious, intuitive sense to me it’s my headcanon

I was like “but she sings about straight couplehood SO much”

But you go back and a good chunk of that shit isn’t about the boy at all, it (and like all the fairy tale stuff) is about a desirable girl

In favor of “Taylor Swift bisexual” fan theories, I know multiple girls who used her as a springboard to “oh that’s what my love of performing female desirability was about” realizations