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Tag: Taylor Swift discography

  • Just Like the Song, “The Fate of Ophelia” Video Has Little to Do With Shakespeare’s Character in Hamlet

    Because Taylor Swift has increasingly decided to cast herself in the role of “English teacher” to the masses, maybe it should come as no surprise that she opted to not only write a song called “The Fate of Ophelia” for The Life of a Showgirl, but to make it the first track on the album and the lead single. Even though, to be quite honest, of all the schlock on this record, the title track featuring Sabrina Carpenter probably would have been her best bet for “first single” material. But it’s obvious that Swift wants to style herself as some kind of literary authority with this track, even if, for the most part, what comes across is the fact that Swift kind of just likes all the imagery surrounding Ophelia, including plenty of water-related scenes, as well as the famed painting of her by Sir John Everett Millais. Finding it “actually romantic,” Swift delivers her own “Pre-Raphaelite” take on the image by opening the video on a scene of a rather generic-looking rich person’s house (think: the “Blank Space” video) before panning over to a painting off to the side that features Swift in a white dress in “Ophelia pose.”

    Naturally, the painting “comes to life,” with Swift rising up as though now on a set. And oh, turns out she is, with the backdrops behind her suddenly lifting as she walks along the sound stage and sings, “I heard you calling on the megaphone” as the presumed director of the “production” does just that (though, needless to say, “megaphone,” within the context of the lyrics, is all about the cheerleader connotation as it relates to football). Swift continues the literalism of the lyrics by taking an oversized matchstick from someone else on the set, miraculously igniting it against her chest and then tossing it casually toward someone else (conveniently, a fire breather) while singing, “As legend has it, you are quite the pyro/You light the match to watch it blow.”

    From there, Swift does another costume change into something decidedly more “showgirl”: a sequined red leotard, rounded out by platinum blonde hair. This as she joins her fellow “Eras Tour family” in the dressing room. Commenting on the reunion with her dancers (who appear in various other scenes as well), Swift gushed, “Writing, rehearsing, directing and shooting the music video for ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ was the thrill of a lifetime because I got to be reunited with my Eras Tour family!! I wanted each one-take scene to feel like a live performance and remind us all of how it felt to be at those shows together. Making every moment count. It’s a journey through the chaotic world of show business.” Though, if that was the intent, it certainly doesn’t come across—at least not even one iota as effectively as the chaotic world of show business displayed in, what else, Showgirls. Nor does it have much to do with Ophelia in Hamlet.

    Then again, nothing Swift yammers on about in this song really does, least of all the shudder-inducing chorus (which is the part of the song that sounds most like Demi Lovato’s 2011 hit, “Give Your Heart a Break”), “All that time I sat alone in my tower/You were just honing your powers/Now I can see it all/Late one night/You dug me out of my grave and/Saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia.” Never mind that likening Travis Kelce to Hamlet is in extremely inaccurate taste (for intelligence level alone), but, lest anyone forget, he was no Prince Charming positioned in any way to “save” Ophelia from her “fate”: death. What’s more, even if Kelce isn’t the Hamlet to her Ophelia, per se, that Swift likens a fairy-tale romance to being saved (while repurposing Shakespeare in the process) isn’t exactly a “cute look” for 2025. Though it does certainly fortify the long-standing speculation that she’s fundamentally Republican, ergo right at home with the MAGA crowd despite her “bad blood” with the Orange Creature.

    In any case, to heighten the cornball factor of it all, Swift gets into the weeds as usual with her special breed of arithmomania by having chosen to release the video on Kelce’s birthday, October 5th. Worse still, she urges, “Keep it one hundred on the land, thе sea, the sky.” This being a reference to his jersey number, eighty-seven, and her favorite/lucky number in general, thirteen, adding up to one hundred.

    The video isn’t always quite so precise, coming off like a, that’s right, kaleidoscope of random scenes as one of the showgirls backstage pulls back the curtain to reveal yet another iteration of Swift, who is now dancing onstage (this time with a brunette wig) in something more akin to a 1960s-era getup. Here, too, the intent appears less about promoting an awareness of Shakespearean plays, and more about announcing all the ways in which no one works harder than Swift. During a portion of this performance, Swift and her backup dancers (wearing the same wigs and dresses as her) are presented as though through a kaleidoscope—this tying into how her visualizers for each song on The Life of a Showgirl are also presented in a kaleidoscopic way.

    From there, Swift (who obviously directed) cuts to another stage backdrop that features her on a ship as she strums a mark tree (you know, that wind chime-looking instrument) and remembers that this song is supposed to be, at least somewhat, about Ophelia, singing, “The eldest daughter of a nobleman/Ophelia lived in fantasy/But love was a cold bed full of scorpions/The venom stole her sanity.” Naturally, there are some listeners who won’t bother to read that “scorpions” line as a metaphor, and take it to mean that there was, in fact, a scene of Ophelia lying in bed and suddenly getting stung by scorpions. But no, there is no mention of scorpions at any point in Hamlet, with that “symbol” being more prominent in Macbeth (specifically, when Macbeth says, “O full of scorpions is my mind”). Nor did “venom” steal her sanity, men did. Most especially Hamlet, who killed her father, Polonius. Thus, for Swift to liken her Prince Charming to being the proverbial Hamlet to her Ophelia is a bit…ill-advised.

    As the camera pans out to show that the ship is part of a more theatrical kind of production than a film one (perhaps another attempt at “paying homage” to Shakespeare), Swift continues to prattle on about how Kelce “saved her” from, for all intents and purposes, suicide. Or rather, emotional suicide. She thus persists in thanking him for “rescuing” her, praising, “And if you’d never come for me/I might’ve lingered in purgatory/You wrap around me like a chain, a crown, a vine/Pulling me into the fire.” And yes, Swift clearly thinks she’s endlessly clever for referencing fire instead of water here, seeing as how Ophelia drowned. But what she’s really indicating is that Kelce is pulling her into the depths of hell. If for no other reason than to co-sign some Faustian pact with the NFL.

    Funnily enough, Swift then kind of does “commit suicide” by jumping into the fake water that then transitions into her starring in some kind of 1930s/1940s Busby Berkeley-inspired production (and, by the way, Jennifer Lopez already tread that ground pretty thoroughly with the “Medicine” video) called Sequins Are Forever (they definitely aren’t, but one supposes that was the best “riff” that Taylor could come up with for Elizabeth Taylor’s famed documentary/general philosophy, Diamonds Are Forever). The camera then pans out to once again reveal that this is just a big-budget film production, with the clapperboard informing viewers that the “film” is “featuring” Kitty Finlay (a nod to the “character” that “The Life of a Showgirl” mentions in the first verse, as well as to her grandmother’s last name) and that it is “Take 100” (because Swift splooges every time she self-references, here reminding that she says, “Keep it one hundred on the land, thе sea, the sky”).

    The “spectacle” keeps going in the next scene as Swift, now in a brown-haired wig again, sports a “rope dress” to match with the piles of ropes around her as she’s then lifted into the air. This followed by a cut to her doing her Las Vegas showgirl cosplay because she remembered she didn’t play up the showgirl aesthetic enough.

    By the final scene, Swift seems to have lost the plot completely with what whatever “meaning” this video was supposed to have by showing Swift being pushed on a cart in a getup that harkens back to her “Lavender Haze” look as she again sings, oh so “eloquently,” “Pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes.” However, this time when it’s said, Swift ramps up the cringe factor by having someone offscreen pass a football to her to catch. As if the viewer/listener wasn’t already well-aware that the track is all about Travis being a hero/“knight in shining armor” (or rather, in a shining football uniform).

    The cart leads Swift through some 1920s-looking hotel, complete with the aesthetic of the bellhops (maybe she had recently rewatched AHS: Hotel and took notes). And, evidently, these bellhops are having a party (one that looks decidedly New Year’s Eve-y, which would make sense considering Swift’s song, “New Year’s Day”). While Swift feigns getting down with “the help” for a minute, she soon steals away to the bathroom where the final shot is of her lying in the bathtub (from the same photoshoot featured on the standard edition of her album cover). Driving home the point that she’s been spared from the fate of Ophelia in that she’s just taking a bath in her showgirl-wear, not drowning. All because some big, strong meathead saved her! Shakespeare would be so proud.

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Taylor Swift Increasingly Loses Touch with “The Commoner” on The Life of a Showgirl

    Although Taylor Swift has been famous for most of her life, one of the biggest keys to her success has always been “relatability.” Or at least the illusion of it. This has been done, more often than not, with lovelorn lyrics about being some “dowdy” girl who can’t ever quite get the guy/find love (most famously on “You Belong With Me”). With her twelfth album, The Life of a Showgirl, Swift loses some of that already dwindling “everywoman” cachet for the sake of a concept that’s centered on, essentially, living in a gilded cage. But it isn’t just the “poor me, I’m so rich” aura that makes The Life of a Showgirl frequently eye-rolling, it’s also the bathetic displays toward, unmistakably, Travis Kelce—whose podcast, New Heights, she appeared on to announce the album in the first place. Never mind that said podcast is aimed at discussing sports, not pop music.

    And yet, such “flouting of the rules” has been going on a lot during the “crossover potential” of Taylor and Travis’ (or “Traylor,” if you must) relationship. One that has even prompted the commissioner of the NFL, Roger Goodell, to gush about how she’s responsible for bringing in a younger audience to the games/generally drumming up interest in the sport ever since she started dating the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback.

    The very quarterback she does her best to wield within a Shakespearean context with The Life of a Showgirl’s first track, “The Fate of Ophelia,” with an effect that could very well have Shakespeare turning in his grave as Swift rewrites, you guessed it, the fate of Ophelia, by making it a “happy ending” for the erstwhile suicidal wreck. And who else should save her but the Hamlet stand-in of the song, “Prince” Travis? A man that Swift has the gall to sing of, “Late one night, you dug me out of my grave and/Saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia/Keep it one hundrеd on the land, the sea, thе sky/Pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes/Don’t care where the hell you been, ‘cause now you’re mine.”

    Cornball songwriting aside, “The Fate of Ophelia” is an insult to hallowed literature itself in that Swift would dare to touch Shakespearean scripture for the sake “Hollywoodizing” the ending—this further manifest in the lyrics, “No longer drowning and deceived/All because you came for me.” Mixing metaphors a bit, Taylor also talks of being rescued from a tower (hardly the first time she’s used that image in a song, with The Tortured Poets Department also mentioning it on “The Albatross” and “Cassandra”), in addition to the water in which Ophelia drowned. So clearly, she’s confusing Big O with Rapunzel, but no matter, Swift simply has a penchant for referencing other famous women.

    As she does on the second track, “Elizabeth Taylor.” And no, it’s not the first time Swift has mentioned this “fellow Taylor” in a song. She also name-checked the icon during 2017’s “…Ready For It?” (“He can be my jailer, Burton to this Taylor”), co-produced by Max Martin, Shellback and Ali Payami. It’s the former two that Swift reteams with for the entirety of The Life of a Showgirl, further distinguishing it from Reputation, which incorporated other producers apart from Martin and Shellback into the mix, including Jack Antonoff. The reteaming of Swift with just Martin and Shellback is, in fact, a primary gimmick of this album, and perhaps a subtle way to make amends for never getting around to Reputation (Taylor’s Version) after engaging fans in one of the biggest trolls in recent music history.

    Perhaps one of the peak examples on the record of “losing touch” with “the commoner,” Swift does her best to embody Elizabeth T. when she sings, “That view of Portofino was on my mind when you called me at the Plaza Athénée [said in a very non-French way]/Ooh, oftentimes it doesn’t feel so glamorous to be me/All the right guys/Promised they’d stay/Under bright lights/They withered away/But you bloom.” For a start, most of the football fans on “Team Travis” in this relationship would have no idea what the fuck she’s talking about, their limited sense of geography extending, at best, to what lies just beyond Kansas. What’s more, most Midwesterners are well over the constant favoritism given to New York and Los Angeles, yet Swift appears to have her own limited sense of geography when she says, “Be my NY whеn Hollywood hates me.” This statement feeling less like a nod to E. Taylor and more like one to Marilyn Monroe, who famously fled Hollywood for New York after getting into a contract dispute with Darryl F. Zanuck, the head of 20th Century Fox, at the end of 1954. No matter, Swift, like Lindsay Lohan before her, can be attracted to both legends’ stories—their tragic tales and love lives, intermixed with glitz and glamor.

    And, as if to highlight the cliches of “how lonely it is at the top,” Swift adds, “Hey, what could you possibly get for the girl who has everything and nothing all at once?” In many regards, this track is a “sequel,” of sorts,” to the question posed on 2019’s “The Archer”: “Who could ever leave me, darling?/But who could stay?” The answer, for the moment, is Kelce, who at least knows something about the pressure behind a sentiment like, “You’re only as hot as your last hit, baby.” If that’s the case, Swift might be in trouble with a song like “Opalite,” which trots out the same old color-related tropes she’s already overused in the past (though probably not nearly as much as Lana Del Rey mentions “blue”). In this case, the “onyx night” represents the darkness before the arrival of Kelce into her life, who provides the “opalite sky” in the wake of “the lightning strikes”—presumably a metaphor for Swift’s previous botched relationships and media scrutiny.

    Commencing the song with the verse, “I had a bad habit/Of missing lovers past/My brother used to call it/‘Eating out of the trash,’ it’s never gonna last/I thought my house was haunted/I used to live with ghosts/And all the perfect couples/Said, ‘When you know, you know and when you don’t, you don’t,’” it’s evident Swift is alluding to Jack Antonoff, Margaret Qualley and Lana Del Rey. The latter of whom wrote a song about Antonoff and Qualley’s relationship called, what else, “Margaret,” during which she sings, “When you know, you know” of the kind of true love that Antonoff found with Qualley. Later in the song, however, she does Swift one better by saying, “‘Cause when you know, you know/And when you’re old, you’re old/Like Hollywood and me.” Swift, of course, isn’t quite ready to refer to herself in such a way. For being an “aging showgirl,” as The Last Showgirl recently reminded, doesn’t generally bode well for one’s career.

    Even though Swift has made amply certain that she has plenty of other parachutes, as it were, should she need a graceful “out” from pop stardom. For she has her hands in numerous pies (many of which people probably won’t know about for years), as she’s keen to circuitously boast about via the mafioso theme of “Father Figure,” which dares to sample from George Michael, a big risk for anyone, but especially Swift. This because, when compared to the great pop musicians that came before her, particularly in the 80s, the ways in which Swift falls short become even more glaringly obvious. In other words, she has never “ate” the way that, say, Madonna, Prince, George Michael, Grace Jones or David Bowie have.

    Regardless, Swift does what she can with the interpolation of Michael’s 1987 hit (and, let’s just say that it works better than the interpolation of Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” on “Look What You Made Me Do”), wielding it to throw shade at all of the male executives who thought they could manipulate and control her over the years. Indeed, in a sense, it acts as The Life of a Showgirl’s “The Man,” with Swift getting into the persona of a big dick-swinging executive (or mafia boss) herself, with many speculating that Scott Borchetta is the source of inspiration. After all, he signed her as his first artist on his then new label, Big Machine Records, when she was just fourteen years old. So it is that Swift sardonically flexes, as though channeling Borchetta, “When I found you, you were young, wayward, lost in the cold/Pulled up to you in the Jag, turned your rags into gold/The winding road leads to the chateau/‘You remind me of a younger me’/I saw potential.”

    The chorus then goes for the jugular with, “I’ll be your father figure/I drink that brown liquor/I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger/This love is pure profit/Just step into my office.” The mafia motif is also peppered in throughout (as if The Godfather needs any more play in terms of fortifying a grotesque Italian stereotype), with Swift asserting, “Leave it with me/I protect the family” and “I got the place surrounded/You’ll be sleeping with the fishes before you know you’re drowning.” Elsewhere, another light Del Rey nod is made with, “Mistake my kindness for weakness and find your card canceled” (on 2019’s “Mariners Apartment Complex,” Del Rey sings, “They mistook my kindness for weakness”). As for another “unintentional” nod, it bears noting that Michael’s “Father Figure” has been having a moment this past year, with Harris Dickinson as Samuel offering a kinky dance in a hotel room to said track in Babygirl while Nicole Kidman as Romy watches before joining in (side note: Swift was sure to mention that she wrote this song before this movie came out).

    A title like “Father Figure” leads naturally into “Eldest Daughter” (which, yes, Swift is, with only one younger brother, Austin). A track that, incidentally, has a lot in common with Lorde’s “Favourite Daughter” from Virgin. Except that, unlike the catchiness of “Favourite Daughter,” which is something of a millennial anthem in terms of how said generation was conditioned to always achieve and strive for more, “Eldest Daughter” is a cheesy ballad that few Gen Z listeners could handle. After all, Swift is a millennial through and through (in case “as the 50 Cent song played…” didn’t also give it away on “Ruin the Friendship”) in part because of being fearless when it comes to being cringe. So it is that she addresses the current chicness of being callous and aloof in the first verse, “Everybody’s so punk on the internet/Everyone’s unbothered ‘til they’re not/Every joke’s just trolling and memes/Sad as it seems, apathy is hot/Everybody’s cutthroat in the comments/Every single hot take is cold as ice.” Apart from referencing some of her lyrics in “You Need to Calm Down” (e.g., “You are somebody that I don’t know/But you’re taking shots at me like it’s Patrón/And I’m just like, ‘Damn, it’s seven a.m.’/Say it in the street, that’s a knockout/But you say it in a tweet, that’s a copout”), the “hot take” line also seems to allude to that time she felt obliged to tell Damon Albarn off.

    The incident occurred in early 2022, when a written interview between The Los Angeles Times and Albarn went as follows:

    LAT: “She may not be to your taste, but Taylor Swift is an excellent songwriter.

    DA: “She doesn’t write her own songs.”

    LAT: “Of course she does. Co-writes some of them.”

    DA: “That doesn’t count. I know what co-writing is. Co-writing is very different to writing. I’m not hating on anybody, I’m just saying there’s a big difference between a songwriter and a songwriter who co-writes. Doesn’t mean that the outcome can’t be really great.”

    Swift was very quick to respond via Twitter, slamming Albarn about his “hot take” with the reply: “I was such a big fan of yours until I saw this. I write ALL of my own songs. Your hot take is completely false and SO damaging. You don’t have to like my songs but it’s really fucked up to try and discredit my writing. WOW.” But, to be fair, Albarn isn’t wrong. Swift does co-write most of her songs, with The Life of a Showgirl being no exception in that Martin and Shellback are her fellow collaborators. But it’s apparent that she is in total control of all themes, as unrelatable as they are. Granted, Swift pulls what Olivia Rodrigo and Addison Rae did with “vampire” and “Fame Is a Gun” respectively in that she insists everyone can relate to having a “public life” now thanks to the advent of the online persona. This being her inspiration behind “Eldest Daughter,” of which she commented,

    “[It’s] about kind of the roles that we play in our public life, because nowadays everyone has a public life. You have a life that you portray to other people or what you portray on social media, and then you have the you that everyone gets to know who has earned the right to be closest to you. And it’s really hard to be sincere publicly because that’s not really what our culture rewards. People reward you for being like tough and unbothered and like too busy to care. And you may be that about some things, but everyone has things that matter to them and people that matter to them.”

    For Swift, it’s always been apparent that being “the best” is what matters to her. This in addition to finding and securing her Prince Charming. It’s a variation on the latter theme that occurs in “Ruin the Friendship.” Yet another track that proves she’s sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel for “relatable material” in that she once again feels obliged to speak as though she’s still in high school. To be sure, Swift appears mentally stuck in that “era” in many ways, often writing from the perspective of an ostracized and/or lovestruck teenager (as she also does on TTPD’s “So High School”). And while that might have been her “core audience” once upon a time, many have been forced to leave such “childish things” behind.

    Nonetheless, Swift takes listeners back to a moment in time when she was friends with someone in high school (reportedly Jeff Lang, a man that died in his early twenties) who she had more than “just friendly” feelings for. Filled with regret over having never made a move, especially since that person later died (“When I left school, I lost track of you/Abigail called me with the bad news/Goodbye, and we’ll never know why”—apart from the “why” being, you know, drugs), Swift advocates for “ruining the friendship.” Or, more to the point, ruining a male/female friendship by breaking the “cardinal rule” and turning it romantic. For, as Vickie Miner (Janeane Garofalo) from Reality Bites once said, “Sex is the quickest way to ruin a friendship.” Looking back on her cautiousness now, however, Swift would have been only too willing to ruin it. Though probably not with sex. In fact, she is more inclined to mention a “kiss.” That’s the “sex act” she’s most willing to get on board with as she sings, “My advice is to always ruin the friendship/Better that than regret it for all time/Should’ve kissed you anyway.” Perhaps Joey Potter and Pacey Witter would tend to agree. Though Dawson Leery, not so much.

    Apart from discussing being “the best,” finding “Prince Charming” and dissecting “love lost,” Swift’s indisputable other favorite songwriting topic is her haters. Of which, of course, she has many. Though not nearly as many as she does lovers—that is, of her work. Even so, for Swift, it’s as Gaga (loosely quoting Madonna with, “If there are a hundred people in a room and ninety-nine say they liked it, I only remember the one person who didn’t”) once said: “There can be a hundred people in a room and ninety-nine don’t believe in you, but all it takes is one and it just changes your whole life.” For Swift, that person who “changes her whole life” by not believing in her is usually her hater (hear also: “Bad Blood,” one of her biggest hits inspired by none other than erstwhile “enemy” Katy Perry). If the “Easter eggs” of “Actually Romantic” are anything to go by, the latest hater that Swift is “taking down by taking to task” is Charli XCX. The shade is in the song title alone, which features “romantic” in it the way Charli’s “Everything is romantic” does. One of the many beloved songs that appeared on Brat last year. Along with “Sympathy is a knife,” which was speculated to be about Swift when Charli mentioned, among other things, “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show/Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick.”

    If Charli was, in fact, referring to Swift, she definitely got her wish about Matty Healy and Swift breaking up quick. As for the boyfriend Charli refers to, George Daniel, he’s since become her husband. A fellow “365 party girl,” though probably not nearly at Charli’s level. Something Swift shades when she opens the track with, “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave/High-fived my ex [Matty Healy] and then you said you’re glad he ghosted me/Wrote me a song [“Everything is romantic”] sayin’ it makes you sick to see my face/Some people might be offended.” Swift, though, not so much. Or so she claims in the chorus, “But it’s actually sweet/All the time you’ve spent on me/It’s honestly wild/All the effort you’ve put in/It’s actually romantic/I really gotta hand it to you/No man has ever loved me like you do.” In effect, Swift speaks on the fine line between love and hate, and how Charli (or any other chanteuse, really) might technically be showing her the former by fixating on her so much. So it is that Swift keeps ribbing, “Hadn’t thought of you in a long time [this channeling Lover’s “I Forgot That You Existed”]/But you keep sending me funny valentines [the song, one supposes?]/And I know you think it comes off vicious/But it’s precious, adorable/Like a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse/That’s how much it hurts.”

    Of course, Swift is lying to herself when she says it doesn’t hurt, otherwise she wouldn’t have written a song about it, digging the (unsympathetic) knife in as much as she can with other lyrics like, “How many times has your boyfriend said/‘Why are we always talkin’ ‘bout her?’” And yes, XCX does mention talking about “her” in “Sympathy is a knife” when she says, “George says I’m just paranoid/Says he just don’t see it, he’s so naïve.”

    What George—and just about everyone else—might see, however, is that The Life of a Showgirl is less about a girl who “puts on a show” and more about a girl who is obsessed with her boyfriend in the same way that she has been with every boyfriend before (as each album has evidenced). And when that meme of one of Taylor and Travis’ first dates came out with the caption, “Taylor taking her new album for a walk,” it was entirely accurate. For while the intent behind it was to emphasize that Swift always explores her breakups on her records (with Red and TTPD being a primary example), it turns out that the meme was right in a different way, because Kelce is the crux of her new album far more than being a performer is.

    “Wi$h Li$t” (which bears a similarity to Midnights’ “Glitch” in terms of Swift’s intonation and the sound of the track itself) is just such a beacon of that. During it, Swift details the different kinds of wishes that people have for themselves, many of them materially-oriented (e.g., “They want that yacht life, under chopper blades/They want those bright lights and Balenci shades/And a fat ass with a baby face [this somehow sounding like a jibe being made at one of Swift’s longtime nemeses, Kim Kardashian]).” Swift, on the other hand, claims, “I just want you/Have a couple kids, got the whole block lookin’ like you/We tell the world to leave us the fuck alone, and they do, wow/Got me dreamin’ ‘bout a driveway with a basketball hoop/Boss up, settle down, got a wish list.” A wish list, evidently, that not only one-ups Swift’s usual cringe factor, but also proves XCX “or whoever” right in calling her Boring Barbie.

    Try as she might to mitigate that nickname with the song that follows, “Wood.” An innuendo-laden ditty that makes all previous songs on The Life of a Showgirl come across as far less uncomfortable. And it’s not just because this marks the first time that Swift tries her hand at something like being “raunchy” (“Girls, I don’t need to catch the bouquet/To know a hard rock is on the way”), but because, well, she’s quite bad at it. Though, at the very least, she spared listeners from not being euphemistic (“The curse on me was broken by your magic wand”—oof). Because to hear her try her hand at something as sexually explicit as “WAP” would be so much worse.

    Nay, it might even get her “CANCELLED!” (spelled the British way, perhaps a residual side effect of being with Alwyn). A phenomenon that Swift insists she’s no stranger to, telling Time in 2023 that she was “canceled within an inch of my life and sanity” because of the “fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar.” Histrionic recounting aside, Swift was so affected by the backlash of that leaked phone call she didn’t bother releasing an album in 2016, let alone commenting on the election that year, even when her input would have been potentially invaluable, what with her influence on mass culture, right down to voting predilections. And, although she was never really at risk of “being put out to pasture” because of the incident, Swift commented that the experience made her have a new empathy for others who went through the same thing after her. As she stated via Amazon Track by Track, “I don’t naturally just cast people aside just because other people decide they don’t like them. I make my own decisions about people based on how they treat me within my life and their actions. And so, this is a song about all those themes.” Of course, such a comment leads one to wonder what her “hot take” on Woody Allen might be (especially since her bestie, Selena Gomez, once worked with him on the atrocious A Rainy Day in New York). And if there are others who have been “canceled” that she might side with sans publicly having the courage to say so.

    For the time being, however, she’ll have to leave listeners guessing on which canceled celebrities she’s still friends with (certainly not Blake Lively) by way of the generic chorus, “Good thing I like my friends cancelled/I like ‘em cloaked in Gucci [so much designer brand name-checking on this record] and in scandal/Like my whiskey sour/And poison thorny flowers/Welcome to my underworld [yes, it feels very deliberately Reputation]/It’ll break your heart/At least you know exactly who your friends are/They’re the ones with matching scars.”

    As are those who have been called “terms of endearment” in a condescending manner before. In this regard, “Honey,” the second to last song on the record (and not to be confused with Mariah’s iconic single of the same name), is probably the most “relatable” song on The Life of a Showgirl. Mainly because Swift, once again, taps into her rage against the patriarchy by recalling the times when people would call her “honey” or “sweetheart” in a derogatory sort of way. But, ever since she met her “Prince Charming,” the word has taken on a more positive connotation, prompting her to urge, “You can call me ‘honey’ if you want/Because I’m the one you want/I’m the one you want/You give it different meaning/‘Cause you mean it when you talk/Sweetie, it’s yours, kicking in doors, take it to the floor, gimme more/Buy the paint in the color of your eyes/And graffiti my whole damn life.”

    Unfortunately, that’s not even as saccharine as it gets on “Honey,” with Swift also singing, “Honey, I’m home, we could play house/We can bed down, pick me up, who’s the baddest in the land? What’s the plan?/You could be my forever-night stand/Honey.” This bearing certain correlations to Swift’s well-documented “nesting phase” on “Lover,” during which she also saw fit to make listeners nearly retch with the lines, “We could leave the Christmas lights up ‘til January/And this is our place, we make the rules [a.k.a. “playing house”],” along with, “All’s well that ends well to end up with you/Swear to be overdramatic and true to my lover.” These lyrics now no longer applying to Joe Alwyn, but to Kelce. Easily repurposed “in a pinch.” Not just in general, but when such sentiments are refunneled into other songs with similar “gushings” aimed at Kelce, with this particular one serving as something like the “Sweet Nothing” (one of many Midnights tracks directed at Alwyn) of the album.

    And for the grand, “show-stopping” finale, Swift pivots away from romantic love in favor of the love she has for performance (though, needless to say, her expression of this love comes nowhere near what JADE achieves on “Angel of My Dreams”—and, honestly, to gain insight into the life of a real-ass showgirl, it’s That’s Showbiz Baby for the win). Thus, she concludes with the eponymous “The Life of a Showgirl” featuring Sabrina Carpenter. And yes, tapping Carpenter to collaborate has a “full-circle” meaning in that Carpenter was one of the opening acts during The Eras Tour. In the time since, obviously, Carpenter has blown up to a level that might very nearly match Swift’s in due time—in fact, she now almost has as many albums, with Man’s Best Friend marking her seventh one (and arguably more listenable as “pop perfection” than The Life of a Showgirl).

    While the album is primarily a love letter to Kelce (whereas TTPD was a vinegar valentine to Matty Healy), there’s a telling line in “The Life of a Showgirl” wherein Swift declares herself to be “married to the hustle” (even if through a “character”). All while warning others aspiring to the life of a showgirl, through the lens of this famous broad named “Kitty,” “Hеy, thank you for the lovely bouquet/You’re sweeter than a peach/But you don’t know the life of a showgirl, babe/And you’re never, ever gonna/Wait, the more you play, the more that you pay/You’re softer than a kitten, so/You don’t know the life of a showgirl, babe/And you’re never gonna wanna.” But naturally, in both Swift and Carpenter’s case, they definitely wanna. And probably will “till the end of time” (as a more reluctant showgirl, Lana Del Rey, would put it). But while Carpenter is in an “era” that allows for more creative inspiration to flow, Swift seems to be indicating that her own “muse” is in the midst of some kind of “last gasp.” At least when it comes to being relatable to anyone other than tradwives.

    To that end, like the also Max Martin-infused Reputation before it, The Life of a Showgirl arrives at a time when things have never been more politically fraught. And yet, Swift has chosen to release one of her “fluffiest” records yet. For never has “glitz and glam” been more of an “in poor taste” sell than it is now (which is why Doja Cat had to feign going back to the 80s with Vie in order to do it). Further indicating that Swift seems to be more out of touch with reality/the common person than ever before.

    At the bare minimum, though, she seems to understand that she needed to keep this record breezy (read: short). Way more pared down than The Tortured Poets Department. This perhaps being a testament both to the critical feedback she encountered about that album’s length and the fact that, ultimately, she knows that froth isn’t something that can be explored too in-depth without really annoying people. And yes, if The Life of a Showgirl, as “superfluous” as it is, is an indication of where Swift is at now, it doesn’t bode well for where she’s going to be “artistically” once she’s actually married. If she gets divorced, however, well, that’s another story…

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce in attendance for Game 1 of ALCS

    Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce in attendance for Game 1 of ALCS

    Thanks, welcome.

    Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce in attendance for Game 1 of Yankees-Guardians series

    Turns out, Taylor and Travis like to watch a little baseball, too.Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and his girlfriend, Taylor Swift, are attending Game 1 of the American League Championship Series.Video above: Taylor Swift ‘shimmers’ in her signature red lip in arrival at Arrowhead StadiumThe New York Yankees, who defeated the Kansas City Royals in the American League Division Series, are hosting the Cleveland Guardians to begin the best-of-seven series. The famous couple sat together in a suite down the right-field line, in the second row above postseason bunting and a flag commemorating the Yankees’ 1932 World Series championship.Kelce, a Westlake, Ohio, native who went to high school in Cleveland Heights, sported a dark baseball cap with the words Midnight Rodeo on it. Swift also wore a hat on a 50-degree night in the Bronx.Kelce, who turned 35 on Oct. 5, grew up rooting for Kenny Lofton and Cleveland in the 1990s. Kelce threw a wild ceremonial first pitch before the Guardians’ season opener last year.Swift was also in attendance at last Monday night’s Chiefs game against the New Orleans Saints.It was the second major sporting event for Swift and Kelce in New York City over the past five-plus weeks. The couple also sat in a box to watch the men’s final at the U.S. Open tennis tournament on Sept. 8 in Queens.Kelce and the Chiefs, the two-time defending Super Bowl champions, had a bye this weekend after opening the season 5-0. Their next game is Sunday at San Francisco, a rematch of last season’s Super Bowl.

    Turns out, Taylor and Travis like to watch a little baseball, too.

    Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and his girlfriend, Taylor Swift, are attending Game 1 of the American League Championship Series.

    Video above: Taylor Swift ‘shimmers’ in her signature red lip in arrival at Arrowhead Stadium

    The New York Yankees, who defeated the Kansas City Royals in the American League Division Series, are hosting the Cleveland Guardians to begin the best-of-seven series.

    The famous couple sat together in a suite down the right-field line, in the second row above postseason bunting and a flag commemorating the Yankees’ 1932 World Series championship.

    Kelce, a Westlake, Ohio, native who went to high school in Cleveland Heights, sported a dark baseball cap with the words Midnight Rodeo on it. Swift also wore a hat on a 50-degree night in the Bronx.

    Kelce, who turned 35 on Oct. 5, grew up rooting for Kenny Lofton and Cleveland in the 1990s. Kelce threw a wild ceremonial first pitch before the Guardians’ season opener last year.

    Swift was also in attendance at last Monday night’s Chiefs game against the New Orleans Saints.

    It was the second major sporting event for Swift and Kelce in New York City over the past five-plus weeks. The couple also sat in a box to watch the men’s final at the U.S. Open tennis tournament on Sept. 8 in Queens.

    Kelce and the Chiefs, the two-time defending Super Bowl champions, had a bye this weekend after opening the season 5-0. Their next game is Sunday at San Francisco, a rematch of last season’s Super Bowl.

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  • The Darkness Surrounding Taylor Swift of Late

    The Darkness Surrounding Taylor Swift of Late

    As the news of Taylor Swift’s three canceled dates in Vienna over an elaborate terrorist plot make the rounds, it seems a general “dark pall” has been cast over the singer of late. It started earlier in the year, with the “conspiracy theory” (a.k.a. totally plausible hypothesis) that every time another female pop star has a chance of making it to number one on the charts, Swift chooses that week to release a new iteration of The Tortured Poets Department. Which is why there are now thirty-plus variants of the album. Yet another reason many people felt that Billie Eilish was shading Swift specifically when she told Billboard, “We live in this day and age where, for some reason, it’s very important to some artists to make all sorts of different vinyl and packaging… which ups the sales and ups the numbers and gets them more money.” The shade was felt whether Eilish intended it or not because everyone knows that Swift is the “queen” of doing this.

    Eilish also remarked, “I can’t even express to you how wasteful it is. It is right in front of our faces and people are just getting away with it left and right…” While Eilish was sure to say “some artists,” it was difficult for many readers, Swifties included, not to automatically think of Taylor’s album release methods. Or tactics, if you prefer. And yes, she weaponized them just in time for Eilish’s release of Hit Me Hard and Soft, her third record. Alas, it was blocked out of the top spot thanks to the three variants of TTPD that Swift unleashed the same day, May 17th. This precise “phenomenon” (and hardly what Chappell Roan would call a “femininomenon”) also happened when Charli XCX released Brat (after which the world was never the same).

    A week after the album might have slid into the top slot on the UK charts, Swift conveniently decided to release six—that’s right, six—TTPD album variants that were exclusive to the UK. The geotargeting on this front felt especially calculated (to use that word Swift hates being called), and totally merited XCX writing a song called “Sympathy is a knife,” suspected to be about Swift specifically because of the lyric, “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show/Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick.” This being a reference to the brief period when Swift was “canoodling” with The 1975’s Matty Healy, for which XCX’s fiancé, George Daniel, is the drummer. There were other “nods” to being made to feel insecure by Swift throughout the song, including the part of the chorus that goes, “‘Cause I couldn’t even be her if I tried/I’m opposite, I’m on the other side.”

    Charli fans were “moved” enough by the track and its supposed muse to start chanting, “Taylor is dead” at a show of hers in São Paulo on June 22nd. When XCX was informed of the “mantra,” she spoke out on social media, saying, “Can the people who do this please stop. Online or at my shows. It is the opposite of what I want and it disturbs me that anyone would think there is room for this in this community.” So yes, that’s just the first piece of the kind of darkness that’s been following Swift lately, this “varietal” ostensibly of her own making. To be sure, this aspect of said darkness is rooted in her competitive nature and insatiable drive to “succeed”—or, as Lana Del Rey put it earlier this year, “She’s told me so many times that she wants it more than anyone.”

    That much was made clear early on in her career, not just in her willingness to take a bum deal with Big Machine Records, but even in the mention, during an 00s-era interview, of why she decided to play a twelve-string guitar instead of a six-string one. The reason, as she told the interviewer, in the country twang she was then putting on, “I had this one real jerk of a teacher… he goes, ‘There’s no way that you’ll be able to play a twelve-string guitar at your age and your fingers aren’t developed enough and there’s no way you’d be able to play it.’ …So I got that twelve-string guitar and I would play it every day until my fingers bled, and, you know, at first it seemed really hard, and then I just realized that if I put my mind to something, then it was really mind over matter.” This seeming to be her ongoing philosophy for “winning” at the charts. Yet even her continued “domination” in numbers hasn’t fooled “the culture,” with The Guardian publishing an article titled, “Taylor Swift may have captured the charts, but Charli XCX captured the zeitgeist” the same week Swift blocked XCX from the number one spot.

    However, even if the cracks in Swift’s “reign” have started to show this (Brat) summer as the “Gen Z girls”—namely, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan—take over, there was still The Eras Tour to prove her “crown” undisputed. What with the hordes willing to schlep across the world and pay any price to see her (this also resulting in the “Taylor Swift economy” effect, as the business the tour brought to each stop bolstered the revenue of restaurants, hotels and the like). Including an American stalker of Swift’s, who made threats to both her and her current boyfriend, Travis Kelce. The stalker in question flew all the way to the Gelsenkirchen, Germany show, where he was arrested the day of the July 18th performance. Thus, the dark pall surrounding Swift got a shade darker. Ratcheting up on July 29th during a Taylor Swift-themed yoga class where twenty-five children turned up to participate. Tragically, three of those children, all girls, would not make it out alive after a stabbing rampage by a seventeen-year-old named Axel Rudakubana.

    In the aftermath of the attack, misinformation regarding the “background” (read: ethnicity and origins) of the stabber began to spread rampantly online, prompting ongoing political unrest throughout the UK that was propelled by proponents of the far-right. With Swift in the eye of the storm as the “link” to it all, any theories that the use of her name and music might have been a factor in the targeting of this class seemed to be corroborated by yet another, more ambitious terrorist (two, in fact) attempting to infiltrate her August 8th show in Vienna. The plot was foiled (ergo averting another 2017 Dangerous Woman Tour-level tragedy), with Swift spooked enough to cancel all three dates of her slated Vienna performances.

    This means she’ll be “on break” until August 15th, when her next rash of dates for The Eras Tour have her circling back to London’s Wembley Stadium, meaning that she’ll be in the heart of one of the sources of her recent darkness (apart from Joe Alwyn). And it wouldn’t be surprising if she mentioned the Southport stabbings while onstage (then again, Swift tends to disappoint when it comes to being open about anything “too political”).

    To round out the recent tincture of darkness enveloping the pop star, and almost as though to mock everything Swift and her fanbase represent, M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap was released at the beginning of August. It’s a movie that takes place at a “Taylor Swift-esque concert” where, you guessed it, a trap has been set up to lure and arrest a notorious serial killer (played by Josh Hartnett, in his villain era). Indeed, Shyamalan pitched the premise as: “What if The Silence of The Lambs happened at a Taylor Swift concert?” It doesn’t exactly help the current non-rosy image Swift seems to be embodying/attracting at the moment.

    But perhaps this darkness all goes back to what was initially referenced above: Swift’s obsession with being “ahead.” And while Swift herself loves to talk about karma, perhaps she didn’t consider the way in which she might have tipped the karmic scales by being so consumed with the number one (not, in this case, thirteen) spot. For it doesn’t feel like a cosmic coincidence that all of these horrible things should be happening after her summer of chart-blocking, preventing other women in the game from getting their flowers. All thanks to this thorny rose by the name of Swift.

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • It’s A Weird Time to Sell Florida As a Place to Escape To As Opposed to From: Taylor Swift’s “Florida!!!”

    It’s A Weird Time to Sell Florida As a Place to Escape To As Opposed to From: Taylor Swift’s “Florida!!!”

    For a long time, people were able to speculate that Taylor Swift was a “God-fearing” Republican. Her ties to the country music genre, paired with a staunchly apolitical nature, made it easy to opt for that assumption. Especially for the audience (mostly male) that wanted to believe Swift was their Aryan goddess. Those fantasies were shattered in 2018, when Swift made the first political statement and endorsement of her then twelve-year career. Her declaration of support for Democratic candidate Phil Bredesen in the midterm elections for Tennessee was accompanied by urging youths who hadn’t yet registered to vote to do so immediately, with Swift concluding, “So many intelligent, thoughtful, self-possessed people have turned 18 in the past two years and now have the right and privilege to make their vote count. But first you need to register, which is quick and easy to do. October 9th is the LAST DAY to register to vote in the state of TN. Go to vote.org and you can find all the info. Happy Voting!”

    It was not “happy voting” for Swift, in the end, though. Because Blackburn won that midterm election and continues to be the senator for that state as of 2024, amid the release of Swift’s eleventh album, The Tortured Poets Department. On said album, there are many songs to pick at in terms of “problematic lyrics” (not least of which is: “We would pick a decade/We wished we could live in instead of this/I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists and getting married off for the highest bid”), but one that stands out in particular is “Florida!!!” featuring Florence + the Machine (a.k.a. Florence Welch). As track number eight on the album, it falls appropriately between “Fresh Out the Slammer” and “Guilty As Sin?” Both titles evincing images of Florida in that everyone seems to be prison material and most people who live there are guilty as sin (no question mark)—not just of drug-addled misdeeds, but the crime of effectively supporting the state’s increasingly discriminatory policies. 

    Thus, for Swift to romanticize the state at a moment in its history when it has implemented among the most, let’s just say it, 1830s-inspired laws out there (Swift’s dream come true!) feels like a return to her being billable as an Aryan goddess for white supremacists. A category that Florida’s führer, Ron DeSantis, falls into based on his consistent support for extremely prejudicial legislation. “Luckily,” the U.S.’ clusterfuck of a justice system has prevented DeSantis from getting certain constitutionally-violating laws to stick (at least not entirely), including 2022’s comically named Stop Woke Act, which “banned employers from providing mandatory workplace diversity training.” A key portion of that law was blocked by a federal court of appeals earlier this year, indicating the rampant disgust for many of the laws that have passed under DeSantis’ encouragement. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, approving a measure that allows Florida residents to carry a concealed loaded firearm, supporting one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation and, of course, the notorious Don’t Say Gay law, which restricts Florida teachers from discussing gender, sex and sexuality. Such Orwellian laws are also in line with DeSantis and his Republican brethren banning trans people from using public bathrooms that affirm their identity and trying to limit the performance of drag shows under the measures proposed in the incongruously titled Protection of Children Act. 

    All of this is to say, again, it’s a weird time for Swift to be promoting Florida as a place of escape, rather than, in truth, a place people should be trying to escape from. Unless, of course, they’re white and heteronormative like Swift. To that point, Swift remarked of her “inspiration” behind the song, “I think I was coming up with this idea of like, ‘What happens when your life doesn’t fit or your choices you’ve made catch up to you and you’re surrounded by these harsh consequences and judgment, and circumstances did not lead you to where you want to be and you just want to escape from everything you’ve ever known. Is there a place you could go?’” It seems odd that the state that would jump out at her for that is fucking Florida. Because, to reiterate, Florida is where you receive said harsh consequences and judgment in the first place. And yet, with Swift having no real concept of what that would actually mean as a result of her long-standing privileged situation in life, maybe she really does have no clue that Florida offers nothing resembling “refuge.” Except, as mentioned, to people who look like her. And share her hetero “values.” 

    Nonetheless, Swift continued to prattle on about writing this tourism ad for one of the worst states, “I’m always watching like Dateline—people, you know, have these crimes that they commit. Where do they immediately skip town and go to? They go to Florida, you know?” Do they? That seems like a real “imagination” stretch on her part. Even so, she insists, “They like try to reinvent themselves, have a new identity, blend in [to reemphasize, one can only “blend in” in Florida if they possess Swift’s, er, aesthetic]. And I think when you go through a heartbreak, there’s a part of you that thinks, ‘I want a new name, I want a new life, I don’t want anyone to know where I’ve been or know me at all.’ And so that was the jumping-off point behind, ‘Where would you go to reinvent yourself and blend in? Florida.’” Oof. Absolutely not. Maybe she could have gotten away with the idea of Florida being a place for “reinvention” in the 90s, back when South Beach and Miami Beach were beacons of hedonistic gay nightlife to the point where even Madonna and Gianni Versace wanted to live there. But, at present, those days of “anything goes” acceptance are clearly long gone. 

    Even so, Swift and Welch adamantly declare, “Florida/Is one hell of a drug/Florida/Can I use you up?” Not if it doesn’t use you up first, which it definitely will. Elsewhere, they sing, “I’ve got some regrets, I’ll bury them in Florida/Tell me I’m despicable, say it’s unforgivable [it is…to champion Florida in such a way at this moment in history]/What a crash, what a rush, fuck me up, Florida.” Oh Florida will fuck people up all right—just not people like Swift. And her blithe promotion of this state as some kind of “oasis” for “starting over” is sure to help DeSantis’ cause in continuing to pass whatever dystopian laws he wants. After all, Taylor Swift still thinks it’s “the place to be” regardless.

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Just Who Is Taylor Swift Really Torturing on The Tortured Poets Department? Anyone She Can (Herself Included).

    Just Who Is Taylor Swift Really Torturing on The Tortured Poets Department? Anyone She Can (Herself Included).

    Pulling close to the same rate of album releases—one a year—that Rihanna once did starting in 2005 (with some rare breaks in 2008 and between the years 2012 and 2016) before she effectively retired to become a beauty mogul, Taylor Swift has always had a seemingly strategic release rate of every two years for studio albums (and no, the re-recordings aren’t being factored in). The Tortured Poets Department, her eleventh record, proves no exception to the every two year pattern (though Reputation did, with Swift waiting three years after 1989 to release it—but then, she had been “bullied” into sequestering herself by Kimye). And in the two years that have gone by since Midnights came out, Swift has only become more of a mythical figure to her worshippers. The ones who now despise Joe Alwyn for breaking her heart, throwing her away, etc. They’re likely to feel even less kindly about him (and several others) after hearing what Swift has to say on this record.

    Starting with “Fortnight” featuring Post Malone (though he’s featured in a similarly faded manner as Lana Del Rey on the original recording of “Snow on the Beach”), Swift brings her listeners into the pseudo-intellectual world of The Tortured Poets Department. Whether or not that’s meant to be a mirror of Alwyn’s own pseudo-intellectual, faux pretentious nature is at one’s own discretion. Though one imagines Swift is trolling him more than she’s actually taking herself too seriously when she says things like, “Your wife waters flowers/I wanna kill her,” there’s plenty of gravity in her admissions, “And I love you, it’s ruining my life” and “For a fortnight there, we for forever.” The idea of “I touched you for only a fortnight” also speaks to where she stands now with this person, who has been lost to a parallel existence that no longer aligns with hers. In this way, Swift channels Ariana Grande on Eternal Sunshine’s “i wish i hated you.” Specifically, when she resignedly laments, “Our shadows dance in a parallel plane/Just two different endings, you learn to repair/And I learn to keep me in one place.” Swift hasn’t really learned that, it would appear (not just literally, with her constant jet-setting, but figuratively as well). And, in contrast to Grande’s latest breakup album (nay, divorce album), Swift doesn’t come across in a manner that exudes “let bygones be bygones” vibes (and actually, at one point on “imgonnagetyouback,” she quips, “Bygones will be bygone”). No, instead, she fulfills many women’s fantasies of being able to publicly dig the knife into an ex who did her wrong by emotionally abusing her. So she abuses right back, as usual, with all the receipts.

    This includes highly specific references like the title track itself, said to be a riff on the name of a WhatsApp group (created by Andrew Scott) that Alwyn was a part of called “The Tortured Man Club.” And yet, ironically, “The Tortured Poets Department” is more directly aimed at Matty Healy than Alwyn. Particularly with lyrics like, “I think some things I never say, like, ‘Who uses typewriters anyway?,’” “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate/We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist” (he probably will be now after the streaming bump that comes with a “Taylor plug”), “I scratch your head, you fall asleep/Like a tattooed golden retriever” and “Sometimes I wonder if you’re gonna screw this up with me/But you told Lucy you’d kill yourself if I ever leave.” Elsewhere, Swift notes, “But I’ve read this one/Where you come undone,” which sounds a lot like “I think I’ve seen this film before/And I didn’t like the ending” on folklore’s “exile.”

    Nor does she seem to like the ending on “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys.” Yes, that means her. What’s more, she also uses the trick of dual applicability to either Alwyn or Healy. For verses such as, “My boy only breaks his favorite toys, toys, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh/I’m queen of sandcastles he destroys, oh, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh/‘Cause I knew too much, there was danger in the heat of my touch/He saw forever so he smashed it up” could work for both of them. Clearly, Swift has a thing for cads. Though that’s not hard to do when taking into account the selection of “straight” men available. And even though it’s the men of this world who are too damaged for long-term relationships, Swift insists that, “Once I fix me/You’re gonna miss me.” A line that channels the old internet chestnut that goes, “Once I do such-and-such, it’s over for you bitches.” As for the outro, it feels more, er, tailored to Alwyn when she says, “Just say when, I’d play again/He was my best friend/Down at the sandlot/I felt more when we played pretend/Than with all the Kens [guess that means Swift admits she’s Barbie]/‘Cause he took me out of my box/Stole my tortured heart/Left all these broken parts/Told me I’m better off/But I’m not.” Because surely, she can’t really think she’s not better off sans Healy.

    After being discarded like a broken toy by Alwyn, it’s only natural that Swift should be “Down Bad,” an uptempo song that betrays Swift’s heartbroken state as she sings, “Now I’m down bad, crying at the gym/Everything comes out teenage petulance/‘Fuck it if I can’t have him’/‘I might just die, it would make no difference.’” In point of fact, the majority of Swift’s work remains resonant to so many “aging” women precisely because the teen girl inside never really dies. And that’s where many women get frozen in their minds due to the traumas and insecurities suffered during said “era.” Swift also compares the high of her relationship to being abducted by an alien, only to endure the low of being cast out of his spaceship and back into dull, ordinary life. Which can never feel ordinary again to her. This, too, has applicability potential to Healy, much to fans’ chagrin.

    For those who were craving more specificity about Alwyn instead, “So Long London” is able to deliver. A contrasting companion piece to Lover’s “London Boy,” Swift details her loathing of Alwyn not only for breaking her heart, but also making her hate London as a result (“I’m just mad as hell ‘cause I loved this place”). The sentiment echoes Billie Eilish’s on “Happier Than Ever” when she says, “I don’t relate to you, no/‘Cause I’d never treat me this shitty/You made me hate this city.” Except that, while Eilish insists, “I don’t talk shit about you on the internet/Never told anyone anything bad/‘Cause that shit’s embarrassing…” Swift is perfectly willing to embarrass her own self with the details of this botched, and yes, tortured relationship—in addition to the rebound one with Healy.

    The closest Swift might ever hope to get to as far as her version of “Papa Don’t Preach,” “But Daddy I Love Him” offers country song vibes (sorry Beyoncé, Swift isn’t ready to hand over the genre entirely) not just in musical tone, but narrative one as well. As a song that seems to be less about Alwyn and more about her pair of romantic choices after Alwyn (A.A., if you will—which works on another level in that he seemed akin to a drug), Swift derides the critical, judgmental eyes of a small town watching her every move. A clear allegory for the media at large. When she sings, “Now I’m running with my dress unbuttoned/Scrеamin’, ‘But, daddy, I love him’/I’m having his baby/No, I’m not, but you should see your faces/I’m telling him to floor it through thе fences/No, I’m not coming to my senses I know it’s crazy/But he’s the one I want,” it could be as much about Matty Healy as it is Travis Kelce. Both men being more than somewhat “unrefined” choices for a “poetess” like Taylor.

    No stranger to getting off on dating “bad boys” (by Swift’s white bread standards), the theme of running away with a man/“forbidden love” is nothing new in Swift’s oeuvre, with songs like “Love Story” and “Getaway Car” urging the protagonist (Taylor, of course) to just say, “Fuck it” and make the “bad choice” by fleeing into the sunset with her bloke of choice. For a while, that was Alwyn, who might also be considered as being referenced here in that, “But Daddy I love him” is also a line Ariel from The Little Mermaid shouts in defiance. And what did Ariel have to do in order to be with basic-ass Eric? Lose her voice, ergo herself—obviously. Something Swift feels she did by catering to Alwyn’s privacy “needs.”

    On the track that follows, it would seem all her recent time with Lana Del Rey is rubbing off on Swift (complete with a song title like “But Daddy I Love Him”) in terms of being sure to mention the same color palettes repeatedly in songs. While in “But Daddy I Love Him,” those colors were gray and white (as in: “If all you want is gray for me/Then it’s just white noise, and it’s my choice”), “Fresh Out The Slammer” offers ​“gray and blue and fights and tunnels.” As the song’s name suggests, it’s not nearly as glamorous as Rihanna’s “Phresh Out the Runway.” No, instead Swift is wielding a prison sentence as an allegory for the “relationship time served” with Alwyn. So it is that the first verse consists of her declaring, “Fresh out the slammer, I know who my first call will be to.” Here, it’s apparent she’s referring to calling Matty Healy the moment she was free from Alwyn’s ostensibly dark cloud. Like Florida, Healy seemed to be a sunny and fun (even if trashy and humiliating) escape. And yes, Florida also happened to be the first stop on The Eras Tour after the breakup between Swift and Alwyn was announced.

    As for the mention of “work[ing] your life away just to pay/For a timeshare down in Destin,” it sounds weirdly coded as a message of support for Britney Spears, who did work her life away in a conservatorship to pay for her sister, Jamie Lynn, to have a million-dollar condo in Destin. Of course, it’s probably alluding more to sharing space inside a man’s heart (*cough cough* Alwyn’s), even though he was once the king of hers.

    Unlike other artists that have collaborated with Swift, Florence + the Machine isn’t one to “fade into the background.” And she certainly doesn’t on “Florida!!!,” a song that feels stadium-ready as the duo extols the non-virtues of a “drug” like Florida (initially mentioned in “Fortnight” when Swift sings, “Move to Florida/Buy the car you want”). Indeed, the motif of addiction (as well as mental illness) runs rampant throughout The Tortured Poets Department—begging the question of whether or not Swift should attend some SLAA meetings. In any case, Camila Cabello knows all about being seduced by Florida—it seems it’s the place to be seduced by again (despite its horrifying political policies), its light no longer dimmed after reaching a peak in the 90s (enough to compel Madonna to buy a house there). One that crested in the aftermath of the assassination of Gianni Versace in 1997.

    While there’s no question mark to Andrew Cunanan being guilty as sin of that crime, Swift puts that very punctuation after “Guilty As Sin?” Among the most generic-sounding tracks on the record, it could perhaps be because hearing little “Easter eggs” about Healy has already started to grow a bit stale (at only nine of thirty-one songs in). Yet that’s precisely how Swift opens the “poem,” making a pointed allusion to Healy with the lines, “​​Drowning in The Blue Nile/He sent me ‘Downtown Lights’/I hadn’t heard it in a while.” Cue the “Downtown Blues” streaming bump as well. In the same breath, Swift still makes time to refer to Alwyn by noting, “My boredom’s bone deep/This cage was once just fine/Am I allowed to cry?” At the same time, the “cage” she mentions could be just as much fame itself as it is her overly private relationship.

    A seeming nod to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” is less about the men who have been in Taylor’s bed and more about her increasingly fraught relationship to and with “fans,” the media and, as some are speculating, Olivia Rodrigo. After all, if “vampire” and “the grudge” really were about Swift, it’s only fair for her to weigh in with, “The scandal was contained/The bullet had just grazed/At all costs, keep your good name” and “I’m always drunk on my own tears, isn’t that what they all said?/That I’ll sue you if you step on my lawn/That I’m fearsome, and I’m wretched and I’m wrong.” Her contempt for losing her innocence as the years have gone by is also manifest in the analogy, “I was tame, I was gentle ‘til the circus life made me mean/Don’t you worry folks, we took out all her teeth.” As for the unique blend of narcissism and self-loathing that celebrities can have, Swift speaks to it (or Rodrigo claiming “vampire” isn’t about her) with the bridge, “So tell me everything is not about me, but what if it is?/Then say they didn’t do it to hurt me, but what if they did?/I wanna snarl and show you just how disturbed this has made me.”

    More subtle digs at Rodrigo seem to manifest with a title like “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can).” For, not only does Rodrigo sing, “But I am my father’s daughter, so maybe I could fix him” on “get him back!,” she also sells a sweatshirt with the phrase, “Maybe I can fix him!” as part of her collection of merch for Guts. But Swift seems keen to adopt the phrase for her own canon as she, needless to say, applies it to Matty Healy. Addressing how embarrassed everyone felt for her by describing a “character” whose “jokes” “were revolting and far too loud,” Swift eventually pronounces, “They shook their heads saying, ‘God, help her’ when I told ’em he’s my man/But your good lord didn’t need to lift a finger I can fix him, no, really, I can/Whoa, maybe I can’t.” Set against the backdrop of some country milieu and painting Healy as some kind of villainous cowboy, Swift again makes it overt that she’s not content to lose her erstwhile crown as Country Queen.

    The slowed-down piano ballad that is “loml” plays with the phrase “love of my life” (for which the song is abbreviated) until Swift delivers the dramatic subversion of it by the end as she rues, “And I’ll still see, until the day I die/You’re the loss of my life.” This one being among the few that more implicitly points to Alwyn, Swift paints her poetic images with verses such as, “Talking rings and talking cradles I wish I could unrecall/How we almost had it all/Dancing phantoms on the terrace/Are they second-hand embarrassed/That I can’t get out of bed?/‘Cause something counterfeit’s dead.” At the same time, Healy could still figure into the lyrics, “It was legendary/It was momentary/It was unnecessary/Should’ve let it stay buried.” In fact, “loml,” in its twisted way, can apply to all the many “great loves” of Swift’s life who have already inspired albums past. And maybe some part of her doesn’t want any one man to think he could be the true “loml.” That it actually takes many for her to get to the point of even singing a song like this.

    As for the emotional wreckage that occurred just in time for The Eras Tour to start, “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” acknowledges, “All the piеces of me shatterеd as the crowd was chanting ‘more’/I was grinnin’ like I’m winnin’/I was hitting my marks/‘Cause I can do it with a broken heart.” Seeing Swift at her most braggadocious and unafraid to take a bow for her skills and accomplishments, she also mentions that it often comes at the cost of being “miserable.” Particularly during the emotional aftermath of the Alwyn “affair.” So it is that Swift says with chirpy sarcasm, “Lights, camera, bitch, smile/Even when you wanna die,” adding, “He said he’d love me all his life/But that life was too short.”

    Her career’s life, however, is not, with Swift appearing to aim for the kind of longevity that some can only dream of. This is perhaps why she uses the tactic of “pretending it’s her birthday” every day when she’s depressed, so as to remind herself why it’s worthwhile to “power through the pain” and channel it into her music instead. So it is that she sings, “I’m so obsessed with him, but he avoids me, like the plague/I cry a lot, but I am so productive, it’s an art/You know you’re good when you can even do it with a broken heart.” For her “coup de grâce” line she concludes, “Try and come for my job.” This being a foreshadowing for another song on the album that speaks on a certain beef she can’t let go of with Kim K.

    In the meantime, she’ll keep coming for Matty Healy, as “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” indicates. That much is immediately given away with the descriptor, “Gazing at me starry-eyed/In your Jehovah’s Witness suit.” Swift then goes on to talk about Healy’s penchant for drugs and being disappointing, complete with the shade-drenched dig, “You didn’t measure up/In any measure of a man.” By verse three, the music starts crescendoing as Swift belts out her barrage of questions about why and how he could do this to her. Ruin her “sparkling summer” by rusting it.

    Swift then switches gears quite quickly on “The Alchemy,” marking her first unmistakable “homage” to Kelce with football metaphors that include, “So when I touch down/Call the amateurs and cut ’em from the team” and “These blokes warm the benches/We’ve been on a winning streak/He jokes that it’s heroin, but this time with an ‘e.’” Talk about hitting below the belt. But Swift, evidently, has been playing much too nice all this time in her lyrics, and is proving, once and for all, that the pen is mightier than the…British penis.

    Although, track order-wise, Clara Bow doesn’t deserve to be anywhere near a song that glorifies Kelce, “Clara Bow” is the song that succeeds “The Alchemy.” Swift undoubtedly homed in on Bow as a prime example of someone who was chewed up and spit out by the Hollywood machine after being one of its prized cash cows before the transition from silent movies to “the talkies.” In an alternate universe, Swift can seem to see her own path taking that “spit-out” route as she starts to realize the pressure of a revelation like, “You’re the new god we’re worshiping/Promise to be dazzling.” Of course, Swift also seems to be anticipating what happens as women in the entertainment industry get older and they end up being cast aside by the public in favor of a younger, shinier “model.” Hence, the bridge, “Beauty is a beast that roars down on all fours demanding more/Only when your girlish glow flickers just so/Do they let you know/It’s hell on earth to be heavenly/Them’s the brakes, they don’t come gently.”

    By the final verse, Swift gets ultra meta by remarking to the next proverbial “it girl,” “You look like Taylor Swift/In this light, we’re loving it/You’ve got the edge, she never did/The future’s bright, dazzling.” These lyrics come at a timely moment in the wake of certain (not inaccurate) comments Courtney Love made about the singer not being “interesting as an artist.”

    She does little to prove Love wrong upon transitioning to “The Black Dog,” yet another song that could be about either one of her two recent British blokes. A fact that’s kind of offensive to Alwyn considering how much of a blip Healy was by comparison. But maybe that’s part of Swift’s stinging intent toward her ex of seven years. Title-wise, the generic nature of it is meant to mirror the typical name of some British pub as Swift condemns, “I just don’t understand/How you don’t miss me/In The Black Dog, when someone plays The Starting Line/And you jump up, but she’s too young to know this song/That was intertwined in the magic fabric of our dreaming.” Again, Swift broaches the unpleasant subject of getting older herself, while exes of her past (Jake Gyllenhaal included) continue to date younger women. As the first track to signal the “second album” in this surprise double album (either putting Beyoncé to shame for passing Cowboy Carter off as one album at twenty-seven tracks or making her look even better for being able to release a non-double album with so many songs on it), little changes in terms of lyrical themes or musical tones.

    That much is also made clear on “imgonnagetyouback,” which, at times, sounds like the sonic sister of “Maroon” from Midnights. There is also some blatant knife-digging into Olivia Rodrigo again, in terms of ripping off the latter’s premise and double meaning conceit for “get him back!” This is done via the chorus, “Whether I’m gonna be your wife, or/Gonna smash up your bike, I haven’t decided yet/But I’m gonna get you back/Whether I’m gonna curse you out, or/Take you back to my house, I haven’t decidеd yet/But I’m gonna get you back.” Seems like she did just that to Rodrigo with this song. So whatever ex it’s “really” supposed to be about, the aim was ultimately taken at this Gen Zer. There’s also a continued element of surrendering to jadedness as Swift states that her “​​eras [are] fading into gray”—that go-to color of hers on this album.

    Another telling sign of Swift losing all sight of any rose-colored glasses in matters of love is “The Albatross.” Painting herself as that “burden to bear” for any man who dares pursue her romantically, Swift asserts, “I’m the life you chose/And all this terrible danger/So cross your thoughtless heart/She’s the albatross/She is here to destroy you.” Yet another instance of Swift’s tongue-in-cheek sarcasm on this record, she doesn’t seem to care anymore about trying to “protect her reputation” or “seem innocent.” Knowing that, no matter what she does, she’s damned if she do and damned if she don’t.

    That much is magnified on “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus,” another track about, you guessed it, Healy. Once again condemning him for his drug habits (and now, his occasional bisexuality), Swift accuses, “You needed me, but you needed drugs more (a similar line appearing in “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”)/And I couldn’t watch it happen/I changed into goddesses, villains, and fools/Changed plans and lovers and outfits and rules/All to outrun my desertion of you.” But, of course, that desertion was inevitable as Swift bowed to public pressure and backlash in the end. Opting for a more all-American boy like Kelce, who is also referenced in another shade-laden line that goes, “And you saw my bones out with somebody new/Who seemed like he would’ve bullied you in school.”

    Swift alternates back to dissecting Alwyn on “How Did It End?,” another melancholic piano ballad akin to “loml.” Her most blatant hint at Alwyn is the line, “He was a hothouse flower to my outdoorsman.” Famously private and averse to being photographed with or interviewed about Swift, it seems telling that she might mention this immediately as a prime reason for why it ended. She then reconciles with the public lust for watching her continue to fail in love with her mimicry of the masses going, “Come one, come all/It’s happ’nin’ again.” Step right up to watch her try to pick up the pieces of her shattered personal life. Among the more gut-wrenching images in the song is Swift subverting the elementary school tease about sitting in a tree and K-I-S-S-I-N-G, changing it instead to, “My beloved ghost and me/Sitting in a tree/D-Y-I-N-G.”

    And talking of elementary school, Swift’s subsequent track is the 90s-sounding “So High School,” one of the only songs that radiates the “old Taylor” in terms of being unapologetically cringe. We’re talking Lover-era uncomfortable. And maybe that, too, is another dig at Alwyn. The most out-of-place offering on TTPD (even “The Alchemy” fits in more seamlessly), Swift gets unabashedly bathetic when she gushes, “I’m watching American Pie with you on a Saturday night/Your friends are around, so be quiet I’m trying to stifle my sighs/‘Cause I feel so high school every time I look at you, but look at you.” Worse still, “Truth, dare, spin bottles/You know how to ball, I know Aristotle/Brand new, full throttle/Teach me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto.” This is Swift settling into her ultimate basic bitch, “I don’t care how uncultured my baby is” era.

    Reverting back to her “depressing diva” era (even though that’s Lana’s thing), “I Hate It Here” is another slow-tempo number that’s all about Swift’s unique ability to travel to the “secret gardens in [her] mind” when she can’t stand a place (e.g., the present). Saving all of her “romanticism for [her] inner life.” Even though, sometimes, that romanticism of the past can be a trap because, as she says herself, “Seems like it was never even fun back then/Nostalgia is a mind’s trick/If I’d been there, I’d hate it.” And when she was there, she actually did hate it. Namely, back in 2009, when her beef with Kanye West first began, and then, in 2016, when Kim Kardashian-formerly-West escalated it. Something Swift keeps thinking about to this day, as recently made evident in Time magazine for her “Person of the Year” interview, wherein she insisted she was “canceled within an inch of [her] life and sanity” thanks to the unnamed Kimye.

    She undoubtedly brought it up to help prepare listeners for the non-at-all-veiled “thanK you aIMee” (my, what a subtle stylization tactic). And yes, let us take pause to pay respect to the original pop princess who barely coded a song with the name Amy in it, the legendary Miss Britney Spears with “If U Seek Amy.” Swift definitely isn’t seeking her though, no matter how her name is spelled. Barely disguising the woman or story in question, Swift still does her “best” to frame the narrative in a more “high school-y” context (high school does, indeed, often seem to be on her brain), opening with the verse, “When I picture my hometown/There’s a bronze spray-tanned statue of you/And a plaque underneath it/That threatens to push me down the stairs, at our school.” Painting (no spray-tan pun intended) Kim as a high school bully throughout, she comes to the point of referring to that time North West danced to “Shake It Off” for a TikTok post and goes for the jugular by saying, “And in your mind, you never beat my spirit black and blue/I don’t think you’ve changed much/And so I changed your name, and any real defining clues/And one day, your kid comes home singin’/A song that only us two is gonna know is about you.” With “Shake It Off” being expressly about shaking off all the haters’ hate, including Kim’s, who now tries to cozy up for clout. How this song might affect the Lana-Kim alliance via Skims is unclear, but surely there must be a conflict of interest for LDR to try being friends with both.

    While the masses might be obsessed with “studying Taylor,” she has her own voyeuristic tendencies, as explored in “I Look in People’s Windows.” The shortest song on the album at just over two minutes, it would have been ideal, actually, to soundtrack The Woman in the Window. In this case, though, Swift is trying to find her ex among the windows across from her apartment as she admits, “I look in people’s windows/Transfixed by rose golden glows/They have their friends over to drink nice wine/I look in people’s windows/In case you’re at their table/What if your eyes looked up and met mine/One more time.” In another moment, she questions her ex (whichever one she might want to address) directly in the same way she does on “The Black Dog” by asking, “Does it feel alright to not know me?/I’m addicted to the ‘if only’/So I look in people’s windows/Like I’m some deranged weirdo.” At least she can cop to that in a way that few stalker-y men can.

    Rhyming “throttle” with “bottle” again like she does on “So High School,” so begins “The Prophecy” with the verse, “Hand on the throttle/Thought I caught lightning in a bottle.” Alas, she didn’t, “it’s gone again.” Thus, Swift can’t help but victimize herself a little bit by insisting she’s “cursed” as much as she is blessed. Delivering the tragic (for a white billionaire) lines, Swift pleads in earnest, “Change the prophecy/Don’t want money/Just someone who wants my company.” She then gets all Karen-y with the gods by demanding, “Who do I have to speak to/About if they can redo the prophecy?” But, in truth, one imagines she wouldn’t really want it to be redone, even though she laments, “Oh, still I dream of him.” One supposes, in this case, that means Alwyn…mainly because the sonic tone has a similar feel to “invisible string.”

    What else could follow “The Prophecy” but “Cassandra,” the name of the prophetess no one would believe when she delivered the vision that the Trojans didn’t want to hear. As is the case with “thanK you aIMee,” Swift weaves her own feud with West and Kardashian into this song, getting quite brutal by the time the bridge rolls around with the condemnation, “​​They knew, they knew, they knew the whole time/That I was onto something/The family, the pure greed, the Christian chorus line/They all said nothing/Blood’s thick but nothing like a payroll/Bet they never spared a prayer for my soul/You can mark my words that I said it first/In a morning warning, no one heard.” Swift then concludes with the scathing assessment, “When it’s ‘burn the bitch,’ they’re shriekin’/When the truth comes out, it’s quiet/It’s so quiet.”

    Swift switches tack again on “Peter,” not a reference to the apostle, but rather, to Peter Pan. While many have speculated that this song is about Alwyn in lieu of another ex (i.e., Healy)—thanks to the telltale line, “Sometimes it gets me/When crossing your jetstream”—it could easily serve as the anthem for all male millennials, the breed most known for suffering from Peter Pan syndrome.

    Acting in the slighted role of Wendy, Swift bemoans, “You said you were gonna grow up/Then you were gonna come find me/Said you were gonna grow up.” Unfortunately, “Peter” (or whoever she’s really talking about) never did. Even though it doesn’t seem like Travis Kelce is that much of a grown-up either.

    And yet, Swift appears to make note of her own puerile tendencies on “The Bolter.” While some might have assumed such a title would be about Alwyn, it is a self-referential track, with Swift describing, ultimately, how stifling a relationship can be, and, therefore, how liberating it can feel to be free of it. Or, as the chorus goes, “Started with a kiss/‘Oh, we must stop meeting like this’ [very The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside”]/But it always ends up with a town car speeding/Out the drive one evenin’/Ended with the slam of a door/But she’s got the best stories/You can be sure/That as she was leaving/It felt like freedom/All her fuckin’ lives/Flashed before her eyes/And she realized/It feels like the time/She fell through the ice/Then came out alive.” So yes, in the end, there seems to be a sense of relief about her “tenure” with Alwyn reaching a denouement, her “runaway bride steez” paying off yet again. As does her absorption of the LDR canon, with the lyrics, “Off to the races” managing to enter the fray during the bridge.

    Providing listeners with yet another piano ballad, “Robin” is a bittersweet track (yes, another one) that encapsulates the innocence of childhood (or what should be the innocence of childhood). Tying into “Peter” in this regard, Swift is ostensibly obsessing over this “era” of existence as TTPD comes to a close because it’s arguably the last time she can remember being as full of earnest hope unmarred by the crushing weight of fame-related reality (even if fame is a prime example of unreality).

    For the grand finale (also a piano ballad), Swift’s literary-themed (in keeping with the album title) “The Manuscript” is another meta exploration like “Clara Bow.” One that delves into how she can’t help but turn all the pain of each failed relationship into a “story.” One that, eventually, “isn’t [hers] anymore.” Mainly because she serves it up to the world for endless scrutiny and dissection in the name of alchemizing pain into art. One of the lines that might be overly examined in this instance is: “He said that if the sex was half as good as the conversation was/Soon they’d be pushin’ strollers/But soon it was over.” Since it’s often been joked about that maybe the reason Swift can’t “hold onto a man” is a result of her less-than-stellar boudoir skills, this lyric isn’t exactly helpful to kiboshing that theory.

    As for the many other lyrics about many other people well-beyond just Joe Alwyn, they answer the question of who TTPD is really torturing. And that is: anyone and everyone who has ever wronged her in the past decade. Hence, a bit of self-flagellating as well.

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Taylor Gets “Imma Let You Finish’d” Again With Accusation of Her Being Unworthy for Time Person of the Year

    Taylor Gets “Imma Let You Finish’d” Again With Accusation of Her Being Unworthy for Time Person of the Year

    Once again, Taylor Swift has dominated the conversation and, once again, a large part of that conversation is whether or not she “deserves” something. In this instance, being Time’s Person of the Year, a still respected and aspired to cover in a world where print journalism (and most other forms of print) has effectively gone the way of the dodo. The ones calling out the tone deafness of her appearance on the 2023 cover (for perspective, fellow “influencers” shortlisted for the latest edition included Barbie and Vladimir Putin—yes, you read that right) are not just her usual detractors, though. They also happen to be Swifties themselves…arguing that, instead, the masses should be seeing Palestinian journalists on the cover. 

    This was highlighted recently by the hit-or-miss stylings of Saint Hoax, who extracted a number of comments from fans that included such sentiments as, “Big Taylor Swift fan and she’s absolutely had one of the biggest years of her entire career but hey actually maybe there are ongoing world events that could’ve been highlighted with this piece” and “As a Swiftie I’m incredibly proud of her but the real heroes are the journalists documenting the genocide happening in Palestine.” To get slightly meta, the comments about the comments themselves were more divided, with one user agreeing, “Taylor and Beyoncé: nothing more than money machines this year. The world is falling apart and they haven’t said a single thing,” while another said, “Oooomggg stop trying to take this away from her. A young woman makes it to ‘Person of the Year’ on Time magazine and what about these other people who are more deserving?? I’m not even a Swiftie but this is perverse.” Then there was the glib assessment, “Sounds about White.” 

    While the hype and praise around Swift has often made this listener repeat the Heath Ledger as Patrick Verona phrase, “What is it with this chick? She have beer-flavored nipples or something?” it does seem telling that, for the second most obvious time, her proverbial “trophy” is being denigrated/taken away. In fact, in the article itself she alludes to the years-long beef with Ye that started back at the 2009 VMAs when he was still Kanye West. And yes, it also involved fellow 2023 touring powerhouse (complete with theatrical release of said tour) Beyoncé. On that front, one supposes it’s comforting that the cast of characters in the mainstream hasn’t changed too much (mainly because Gen Z has produced a paucity of “stars”). And Swift wants to remind people of that by rehashing some well-marinated beef that started in 2016 (years after everyone thought it had all “calmed down” between Swift and West). With a little song called “Famous,” wherein the erstwhile West asserts, “I made that bitch famous.” The implication being that, thanks to his hijacking of her acceptance speech for Best Female Video of the Year at the VMAs, Swift’s star began to shine a lot brighter afterward. Barring the fact that this is one of the key examples that speaks to West’s narcissism, it’s a flat-out fallacy. No one got Swift to her position except for Swift (and, to reiterate, winning the birth lottery by being born to affluent parents willing to support what many other progenitors would balk at as a pipe dream). 

    Being that Swift is something of the queen of dredging up old material these days (what with rerecording all her previously released albums from Big Machine), it makes sense that she has an innate ability to catalog and recall every “era” of her life. And this was the era that spawned her Reputation phase, one that embraced being the “bad guy” à la Billie Eilish before the latter even really entered the collective consciousness (but insisted before Taylor on “Anti-Hero,” “I’m the problem“). Of course, there was nothing all that “bad” in what Kim Kardashian (then known, foolishly, as Kim Kardashian West) manipulated the media and the masses into thinking: that Swift had consented to Ye rapping, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/Why?/I made that bitch famous.” When the song came out, however, Swift reacted negatively, rightfully condemning the reference to her as misogynistic and unsanctioned. This prompted Kim K to release select portions of the phone conversation Ye had with Swift about the song that made it seem like she whole-heartedly approved. Never mind that no one bothered to ask her how she felt about the accompanying video, which was even more crass as it paraded naked wax figures (that look just like “the real thing”) of Kanye West, Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, George W. Bush (of all people), Donald Trump, Anna Wintour, Rihanna, Chris Brown, Ray J, Amber Rose, Caitlyn Jenner and Bill Cosby (again, weird choice) lying in bed together. 

    With Kardashian’s damning “evidence,” Swift was fed to the media and internet dogs, branded with that damning word again: “calculated.” And, newly, “snake.” This betrayal and backlash is a moment in her life that is called out again and again in the Time article as a reason for why she is where she is now after the heartache of that treachery. For, despite the “pain” of being painted as the villain, Lansky notes, “Getting to this place of harmony with her past took work; there’s a dramatic irony, she explains, to the success of the tour. ‘It’s not lost on me that the two great catalysts for this happening were two horrendous things that happened to me,’ Swift says, and this is where the story takes a turn. ‘The first was getting canceled within an inch of my life and sanity,’ she says plainly. ‘The second was having my life’s work taken away from me by someone who hates me.’” Cue the lyric from Reputation’s “End Game” that goes, “I swear I don’t love the drama, it loves me.”

    That drama came first when Kardashian initially released the edited conversation Swift had with West and, second, when the complete recording was leaked in 2020 (a year when people had plenty of extra time to analyze such things). So it is that Swift can look back now and candidly say, “​​You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar. That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.” Yet they say what makes a successful person—a hero, even—is someone who doesn’t stay knocked down (though, this is the sort of cheeseball line that, as usual, totally overlooks the many benefits of privilege). Having been part of the fame game for so long at this point, and weathering the many so-called controversies of it (though never anything even remotely as interesting as dancing in front of burning crosses or getting pleasured amid gender-fluid patrons in a The Night Porter-inspired hotel), Swift has learned to take the bad with the good. What choice does she have, after all, if she wants to remain in the spotlight? Which she very patently does.

    As she tells Time, “Nothing is permanent. So I’m very careful to be grateful every second that I get to be doing this at this level, because I’ve had it taken away from me before.” This, to be clear, is her subjective response to being discredited, and has little bearing on the actual album sales that occurred after Kardashian and West attempted to disparage her reputation. Lansky remarks on this as well, coming to the conclusion that if Swift felt canceled, then it’s valid. Life being so much more about feelings than objectivity these days. 

    And what Swift feels now is that her “response to anything that happens, good or bad, is to keep making things. Keep making art.” She then adds, in a moment of pettiness that can’t help but overtake her, “But I’ve also learned there’s no point in actively trying to quote unquote defeat your enemies. Trash takes itself out every single time.” More direct shade against not just West and Kardashian (still somehow raking in her millions as “a girl with no talent”), but also Scooter Braun. 

    As for those who call Swift’s decision to talk trash about that trash in what is theoretically a “classy article,” well, it’s obvious why she would more than “casually” “hint” at the feud that ignited the material on Reputation: she’s about to rerelease that album next, and it’s always good to prime the masses for the narrative that was going on during the period in Swift’s life when an album was initially unleashed. And she’s, needless to say, very much ready to take back that narrative (you know, the “one that [she] never asked to be a part of, since 2009”). It being one of the only examples of a time when she wasn’t totally in control of it. Of rerecording this album, Swift muses, “The upcoming vault tracks for Reputation will be ‘fire.’ The rerecordings project feels like a mythical quest to her. ‘I’m collecting horcruxes. I’m collecting infinity stones. Gandalf’s voice is in my head every time I put out a new one. For me, it is a movie now.” As it has been for everyone else watching the drama unfold all along. Just as they’re watching a repeat of what West did to Swift at the VMAs by witnessing the internet insist that someone else (multiple someone elses) is more deserving of what she was honored with. Clearly, in this context, the “competitor” is literally in another playing field. Nay, battlefield. Making it difficult for anyone who doesn’t want to offend to argue that Swift being attacked for accepting her place on the cover has nothing to do with Palestine.

    To be even more direct, in America, no one gives as much of a fuck about Palestinian journalists as they do about Taylor Swift. And that’s just the cruel, pure honesty that has ruffled so many feathers. In this regard, the editors of Time actually did do their part to assess “the individual who most shaped the headlines over the previous twelve months, for better or for worse.” Considering the latest Israel-Palestine conflict didn’t even pop off until October, that alone gives Swift a more competitive edge for the cover, as she’s been making headlines from day one of 2023, most notably when the world was “shocked” to learn of her breakup with Joe Alwyn and then appalled by her decision to go for Matty Healy as a rebound. Is it bleak and unfortunate that celebrity culture is more influential and headline-shaping than the everyperson risking their lives to report on unspeakable atrocities? Of course. Is it new? No. Is it worth diminishing Swift’s record-breaking accomplishments in 2023? Not really. Unless one is fond of the symmetry that brings us back to the very moment that Swift says sparked it all for her to work harder, better, faster, stronger (a song Kanye has sampled, yes): being publicly shamed and told that someone else should have gotten her recognition. Recognition that, at this juncture, is almost comical in its absurd reverence. Case in point, at another moment in the article, Lansky pronounces, “As a pop star, she sits in rarefied company, alongside Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna; as a songwriter, she has been compared to Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Joni Mitchell.”

    All of these are extremely grandiose, over-the-top comparisons that give Swift a lot more credit than she’s due (ironically, the crux of the argument for why Palestinian journalists should be on the cover instead). Not because she hasn’t “earned her stripes” (even if it’s not as challenging to do so when, again, you have emotionally and financially supportive parents), but because, well, she’s just so vanilla compared to the aforementioned legends she’s being compared to. Even so, maybe it’s time that some people should just “let Taylor finish.” Like she said (despite being fined multiple times for not taking trash out), “Trash takes itself out every time.” Or, in this case, hyper-overrated pop stars doomed to “age out” of popularity do (at least when they’re a woman). Something Swift herself has openly admitted to waiting for, thus taking advantage of the spotlight while the world is fully committed to letting her bask in it. Genocide be damned.

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Taylor Swift Takes Us Back to 2014 With 1989 (Taylor’s Version)

    Taylor Swift Takes Us Back to 2014 With 1989 (Taylor’s Version)

    In 2014, a mere nine years ago, the world seemed simpler. It always does with hindsight. But in 2014’s case, things really were decidedly “safe” in America. Unless you were Eric Garner or Michael Brown or any other Black person subjected to the usual “rigmarole” of being Black in America and coming anywhere near law enforcement. But that’s not really the audience anyone associates with Swift. In fact, a recent study on the makeup of her fanbase revealed the absolutely unshocking statistic that three-fourths of “Swifties” are white. So no, you won’t catch many Black people bumping Swift tunes from their car, though that might “put them in good” with the cops who pull them over. More detailed statistics of the study revealed that “avid fans and U.S. adults agree that 1989 is Swift’s best album. Some 15% of avid fans picked this work, more than any other album.” Even though, for the sheer non-virtue of this album having “Welcome to New York” on it, that really shouldn’t be the case.

    But since Swift moved to New York in March of 2014, during which time she recorded the album, the horrifically schlocky “Welcome to New York” is what she chose to kick the record off with. After all, she had also just agreed to become the NYC Tourism Ambassador that year, offering people such “pearls of wisdom” as, “Having a good latte or a good cup of coffee is really important to me” and “I like how you don’t really have to make a plan. If you want, you can just let the day happen.” In other words, this bitch doesn’t know shit about New York. Accustomed, like many tourists, to the sanitized version of it that suits her “needs” best. And, to that point, of course the song would go on to soundtrack the opening sequence to the classist movie that is 2016’s The Secret Life of Pets. This was after Swift was permitted to perform it during Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, before the ball would drop to signal the arrival of 2015. That was about the only shelf life the song ever had. Because, as far as “New York anthems” go, it still blows ass.

    Perhaps that’s why she never released it as a single. “Blank Space,” on the other hand, is both the second single and the second song on the album. Out of all the re-recordings on the record, this is the one that sounds the most obviously different in terms of Swift’s evolving vocal pitch. Something she can’t always recapture from the original albums. And, by now, the lyric, “Got a long list of ex-lovers” has only become more applicable. Along with, “Cause you know I love the players/And you love the game!” What with Travis Kelce being her (football) game-playing new boo. And yet, if Swift taught her listeners one thing about “how” she’s able to “land” so many many men, it’s: “Boys only want love if it’s torture.” And what could be more torturous than the media scrutiny required of dating Swift, no matter how briefly or casually?

    “Style” is one of Swift’s most “Del Reyian” offerings on 1989, at least lyrically speaking. For yes, lest anyone forget, Del Rey resuscitated James Dean iconography on 2012’s “Blue Jeans” as she lazily sang, “Blue jeans, white shirt/Walked into the room, you know you made my eyes burn/It was like James Dean, for sure.” In Swift’s use of Dean, she sings, “‘Cause you got that James Dean daydream look in your eye/And I got that red lip classic thing that you like/And when we go crashing down, we come back every time/‘Cause we never go out of style, we never go out of style.” The song was a barely-veiled dig at her relationship with Harry Styles, including overt references to One Direction, like her urging in the bridge apropos of nothing, “Take me home/Just take me home.” To be blunt: the name of One Direction’s sophomore album is Take Me Home. In the present, Swift and Styles have made nice (at least during award show appearances), with Styles more focused on queerbaiting in the aftermath of his time with Swift.

    Nonetheless, like any worthwhile Swift boyfriend, Styles provided fodder for multiple songs, and “Out of the Woods” was one of them. Certain to incorporate the “Polaroid aesthetic” she had used on the original album cover (now missing from the more lackluster [Taylor’s Version] one), the opening verse features the nostalgically-tinged lyric, “You took a Polaroid of us/Then discovered/The rest of the world was black and white/But we were in screaming color.” And then they were just screaming. Namely, during the snowmobile accident Swift refers to during the bridge: “Remember when you hit the brakes too soon?/Twenty stitches in the hospital room.” As the accompanying Joseph Kahn-directed music video escalates more dramatically with scenes of Swift amid violent nature, echoing, at times, Snow White trying to make her way through the haunted forest. Indeed, Swift’s past relationships could easily create a haunted forest unto themselves.

    Having gone down to one of her “besties’” (Lorde) native land—New Zealand—to shoot the video, Swift was accused at the time of allowing her film crew to violate strict regulations preventing harm to dotterel nests along the beach. But then, of what importance is an endangered species when put in perspective to Swift being able to pursue her wildest artistic dreams? In effect, a video that could have been shot against a green screen and still included the cheeseball concluding title cards, “She lost him. But she found herself. And somehow that was everything.”

    Despite this presentation of a supposed newfound confidence, Swift goes right back to her needy, yearning ways on “All You Had To Do Was Stay” (track five always being, per studies done by Swifties, her most emotional). Continuing a running motif that exists in many of her songs, Swift basically instructs men how simple it is to maintain a relationship: “Hey, all you had to do was stay/Had me in the palm of your hand, then/Why’d you have to go and lock me out when I let you in?” This foreshadows later lyrics about being “locked out” of a man’s heart, including 2022’s “Bejeweled,” during which she bemoans, “Familiarity breeds contempt/Don’t put me in the basement/When I want the penthouse of your heart.” In the end, though, it seems that Swift doesn’t really want anyone’s heart…unless it’s roasting on a spit fueled by her damning song lyrics.

    To the point of often being accused of promiscuity (cue the later-appearing “From the Vault” track that is “Slut!”), the chirpy, uptempo-ness of “All You Had To Do Was Stay” continues on “Shake It Off.” As the first single of 1989, its intent was to get across that there should be no question about Swift’s complete transition from country star to pop star. The video, therefore, features an aura of jubilance and frivolity one wouldn’t usually associate with something directed by Mark Romanek (who, in more artistic days, directed Madonna’s “Rain” and “Bedtime Story” and Fiona Apple’s “Criminal”). Swift also harkens back to 2010 by dressing in Black Swan (a.k.a. Swan Lake) ballerina attire, among many other costume changes throughout the video that often looks like a reworked Gap commercial.

    Despite the occasional shade for her relationship-flitting (though nothing compared to what Britney Spears had to endure), Swift’s tendency to focus on one man and/or failed relationship with each album paints her as more of a serial monogamist (à la Jennifer Lopez) than a ho. And on 1989, that focus remains attuned to Harry Styles with “I Wish You Would.” A song that explores the additional pain of losing a friendship when you lose a romance. Yearning to still be able to talk to that person and tell them the things you once would have eagerly, Swift depicts a John Hughes-esque emotional landscape when she sings, “I wish you would come back/Wish I never hung up the phone like I did, I/Wish you knew that I’d never forget you as long as I live and I/Wish you were right here, right now, it’s all good/I wish you would/I wish we could go back/And remember what we were fighting for and I/Wish you knew that I miss you too much to be mad anymore…”

    Here, too, one is reminded of the influence Swift so clearly had on Olivia Rodrigo, who evokes similar emotions of bereftness stemmed from love lost on songs like “happier” and “love is embarrassing.” In the latter song, “I stayed in bed for like a week/When you said space is what you need” mirrors Taylor on “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” when she sings, “‘Cause like/We hadn’t seen each other in a month/When you said you needed space…what?” Unfortunately, the “feelings of warmth” Rodrigo once had for Swift seem to have cooled as of 2023, with many speculating that Guts’ “vampire” is really about the red-lipped “mentor” herself. In which case, “Bad Blood” applies to yet another fellow female pop star apart from Katy Perry this year. As the fourth single from 1989, it can’t be emphasized enough he chokehold this song and its video had on “the culture” in 2015. Complete with endless dissections of Taylor and her “squad,” which, per the video, consisted of, among others, Selena Gomez, Gigi Hadid, Cara Delevingne, Karlie Kloss, Lily Aldridge and, as though to add “which one of these is not like the others?” cachet, Lena Dunham. It was Gomez who played Swift’s betraying rival—ironic, to be sure, considering their close-knit friendship.

    Although many assumed, in the moment, that it was about another wrong-doing man, the truth about how Perry inspired it came out eventually. And, for like, the dumbest reason ever: she “poached” some of Swift’s backup dancers. Specifically, three of them. But then Swift went and blew the whole thing out of proportion by telling Rolling Stone in 2014, “She did something so horrible. I was like, ‘Oh, we’re just straight-up enemies.’ And it wasn’t even about a guy! It had to do with business… She basically tried to sabotage an entire arena tour. She tried to hire a bunch of people out from under me. And I’m surprisingly non-confrontational—you would not believe how much I hate conflict.” Said the woman who constantly courts it with her music. Ergo sarcastically singing on “End Game,” “I swear I don’t love the drama/It loves me.” And then there was that admission to more than slightly getting off on drama via the opening lyrics to “The Archer”: “Combat, I’m ready for combat/I say I don’t want that, but what if I do?” But what does one expect from a Sagittarius (hence, referencing “the archer” associated with that zodiac sign).

    With Rodrigo taking up the mantle on female friendship gone wrong diss tracks (at least according to conspiracy theorists), “vampire” is the “Bad Blood” of 2023…until Swift came along to reassert her dominance on knowing how to dig the knife into a female rival. Which brings us to the very glaring fact that since about three-fourths of Swift’s songs are about relationships/breakups, it doesn’t leave much room for her to discuss topics like female solidarity—despite characterizing herself as a feminist. But it’s plain to see Swift would choose dick over a friend any day of the week. Shit, for the inspiration factor alone.

    The kind of inspiration that also prompted “the muse” to give Taylor “Wildest Dreams.” Yet another overt nod to the end of her romance with Styles, Swift urges, “Say you’ll remember me/Standin’ in a nice dress/Starin’ at the sunset, babe/Red lips and rosy cheeks/Say you’ll see me again/Even if it’s just in your/Wildest dreams, ah, ha.” To underscore the bittersweetness of it all, Swift opted to set the narrative, of all places, in 1950s Africa. More to the point, in the white version of 1950s Africa. Indeed, the video (once again directed by Joseph Khan) was criticized for its glorification of white colonialism. And yes, it’s a bit odd that, of all the premises to choose, Swift opted for the faux 1950s movie of her video to be set in Africa. Even if she felt it was paramount to getting across the point that being on an isolated film set would invariably lead to a romance.

    And speaking of women who love to glorify the oppressive mid-twentieth century, more echoes of Lana Del Rey appear in this song, with “Wildest Dreams” also coming across like an unwitting companion piece to “Out of the Woods.” At the time, Billboard’s Jem Aswad wrote of the track, “Surprisingly, the famous figure who gets the most elaborate attention is Lana Del Rey: Swift flat-out mimics her on ‘Wildest Dreams,’ flitting between a fluttery soprano and deadpan alto, flipping lyrics so Lana—’His hands are in my hair, his clothes are in my room’—that it’s hard to tell if the song is homage or parody.” Perhaps somewhere in between.

    But Swift goes back to her “true” self on “How You Get The Girl,” which is very reminiscent of “All You Had To Do Was Stay.” That is, with regard to giving a man instructions on how to “catch a woman and keep a woman.” As far as Swift is concerned, that entails relentlessly pursuing said woman even after a breakup (proving she saw one too many early 00s rom-coms promoting a stalker-y “edge” for a man). Per Swift, it’s simple as showing up on her doorstep and saying, “I want you for worse or for better/I would wait forever and ever/Broke your heart, I’ll put it back together…” And, voila, “that’s how it works/That’s how you get the girl, girl.” Or, as Rodrigo puts it from a more openly sadistic view on “get him back!” (“I wanna break his heart, stitch it right back up”).

    Apparently, whatever he did worked because on “This Love,” Swift is talking about their togetherness again, even it still feels tenuous. Cyclical (even if viciously so). And, once again, she’s all about using the word “mark” to describe her love, a word decidedly territorial and possessive. Nonetheless, she uses it as she declares, “This love is good, this love is bad/This love is alive back from the dead [a.k.a. “We never go out of style”], oh-oh, oh/These hands had to let it go free, and/This love came back to me, oh-oh, oh/This love left a permanent mark/This love is glowing in the dark, oh-oh, oh.” Other notable times Swift uses “mark” to delineate a sort of scar from one of her relationships includes, “There is an indentation in the shape of you/Made your mark on me, a golden tattoo” from Reputation’s “Dress” and “Steppin’ on the last train/Marked me like a bloodstain” from Folklore’s “Cardigan.” That last line incorporating her simultaneous love of “marks” and “stains” to illustrate what so-called love does to her when it’s over. The “staining” will appear later on 1989, with, appropriately, “Clean”—when she sings, “You’re still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore.”

    But before “Clean” is the Reputation-y “I Know Places.” This before the “I know a place” meme that would offer up such isms as, “Girls be like, ‘I know a place’ and then take you to the friendzone” or Girls be like, ‘I know a place’ and then take you back to the date and time you lied.” In Swift’s case though, she knows a place where she and her latest love won’t be hounded by the paparazzi. While it might have applied to Styles then, it was as though she were foreshadowing how much she would have to defend the secrecy of her relationship with Joe Alwyn in its early days (perhaps the reason why the sound gives off such a Reputation vibe long before Reputation came out). In term of loathing the paparazzi chase she has to endure as part of the price for her fame, this is very much Taylor’s version (ha) of Lana’s “13 Beaches,” during which she rehashes the celebrity problem (an oxymoron, to be sure) of never having a moment to oneself in public via the opening lines, “It took thirteen beaches/To find one empty/But finally it’s mine.” As for Taylor, she assures her camera shy love, “Baby, I know places we won’t be found/And they’ll be chasing their tails tryin’ to track us down/‘Cause I, I know places we can hide/I know places.” If only Britney had known a place she could hide during the peak of her scrutiny, too.

    Alas, her knowing a place doesn’t really matter in the end, as “Clean” recounts, “The drought was the very worst, ah-ah, ah-ah/When the flowers that we’d grown together died of thirst.” And if the sound of “Clean” sounds the most differentiated from the rest of 1989, that might have something to do with Imogen Heap co-producing. Perhaps having her on board for this song prompted Swift to lend the track its “edgy” metaphor of a relationship being like a drug you have to wean yourself off of in order to get “clean.” That’s right, Taylor is saying what Kesha already did in 2010: “Your love is my drug.” But drug addictions can be kicked if you really want it. And that’s what Taylor aims to prove, coming out the other side and into “Wonderland.” Not, it would seem, a reference to John Mayer, but rather, the more classic association: Alice in. Marking the beginning of the deluxe edition tracks on the original 1989, “Wonderland” is yet another ditty that ruminates on a toxic relationship that felt so good (read: the dick was good…enough) when it was happening. Yet another track co-produced by Max Martin and Shellback, the early flickers of Reputation are also present on this song as Swift reflects, “We found Wonderland, you and I got lost in it/And we pretended it could last forever (eh, eh)…/And life was never worse, but never better (eh, eh).” So it is that Swift manages to paraphrase Charles Dickens (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”) in her own way. the repeated “eh, ehs” also channel both Rihanna on “Umbrella” and Lady Gaga on “Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say).”

    The mood slows down on “You Are In Love,” a song that has become even more retroactively cringeworthy with time. For, in case anyone forgot, Swift wrote the song about Jack Antonoff and Lena Dunham, who were dating at the time. Obviously, Lana Del Rey’s “Margaret,” about Antonoffs relationship with Margaret Qualley is a more tenable slow jam. In any event, as Swift said told Jimmy Kimmel, “I wrote it with my friend Jack Antonoff who’s dating my friend Lena [Dunham]. Jack sent me this song, it was just an instrumental track he was working on and immediately I knew the song it needed to be. And I wrote it as a kind of commentary on what their relationship has been like. So it’s actually me looking and going and ‘this happened and that happened then that happened’ and that’s how you knew, ‘You are in love.’” Evidently, though, not anymore. And it’s even more embarrassing that Dunham tweeted at the time, “My someday wedding song, as you know.” But that would have been weird considering she got married to Luis Felber.

    Swift does a sonic about-face again on “New Romantics,” with lyrics that show Swift at her most Kesha as she belts declarations about being young and bored (as Kesha said on “Blow,” “We’re young and we’re bored”). Then there is talk of the national anthem, which again borrows from Del Reyian iconography (who says “money is the anthem of success” and “tell me I’m your national anthem”) as Swift sings, “Baby, we’re the new romantics, come on, come along with me/Heartbreak is the national anthem, we sing it proudly.”

    And yet, what Swift sings most proudly of all on 1989 (Taylor’s Version) is “Slut!,” which commences the From the Vault portion of the record. And with the phrase “flamingo pink” starting the lyrics, one can hear still more Del Reyian flair, as it parallels 2015’s “Music To Watch Boys To” when Lana chose to commence her song with the phrase, “Pink flamingos.” The fact that Swift held back on releasing a song like “Slut!” in 2014 is perhaps the most telling of how times have changed. Swift seems less afraid now of getting on the already well-trodden bandwagon of calling out the double standard for women’s “dating practices” (particularly in the music industry), whereas, before, she appeared nervous about losing red state fans if she spoke her “boilerplate liberal” mind. Like “Shake It Off,” “Slut!” embraces her reputation as a woman who “collects” men. But Swift claims the flak is worth it because it’s all part of her necessary journey toward finding “the one” (or “the 1”). As she says in the chorus, “But if I’m all dressed up/They might as well be lookin’ at us/And if they call me a slut/You know it might be worth it for once/And if I’m gonna be drunk, I might as well be drunk in love.” A phrase, to be sure, that has extremely Beyoncé connotations, especially as “Drunk In Love” had been released the year before.

    As for keeping it off the album originally, Swift had a very Lana Del Rey reason for it: “I always saw 1989 as a New York album, but this song, to me, was always California, and maybe that was another reason it didn’t make the cut, because sometimes, thematically, I just had these little weird rules in my head.” However, many rules still apply. Such as constantly carrying on about an ex. With that in mind, like “All You Had To Do Was Stay,” “Say Don’t Go” exhibits the many abandonment issues Swift appeared to be having circa 2012-2015. And that much is palpable in the way she urges, “Say, ‘Don’t go’/I would stay forever if you say, ‘Don’t go.’” How very Sandra Bullock in Hope Floats when she tells Bill (Michael Paré), “I would have stayed with you forever. I would have turned myself inside out for you.” Such is the foolishness that women can display sometimes.

    Even Selena Gomez, who had her fair share of back-and-forthing during her relationship with Justin Bieber. But before Gomez sang on a track called “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” Swift had penned “Now That We Don’t Talk.” Arguably the song most worthy of being characterized as “influenced by 1980s synthpop,” the slow build at the beginning feels reminiscent of Thompson Twins. So perhaps it was worth the wait, as Swift stated that the reason it was left behind in the first place was because “we couldn’t get the production right at the time.” Yet another dig at Styles, Swift brings her feistiest shade yet with the lines, “I don’t have to pretend I like acid rock/Or that I’d like to be on a mega yacht/With important men who think important thoughts/Guess maybe I am better off now that we don’t talk.”

    The same story about to be told on the following track—where Swift again lets her Lana Del Rey freak flag fly. Because, needless to say, “Suburban Legends” is a title that could have easily been on Ultraviolence. And, funnily enough, Del Rey was just featured on Holly Macve’s “Suburban House.” As for the sonic tone and the intonation of Swift’s voice, it immediately reminds one of Midnights’ “Mastermind.” She begins the song with the line, “You had people who called you on unmarked numbers.” For, just as things can be marked, so, too, can they be unmarked. And yeah, it’s a weird way to phrase it when referring to what amounts to a burner phone. Elsewhere, she seems to be mimicking Kesha yet again when she says, “Tick-tock on the clock,” adding, “I pace down your block/I broke my own heart ’cause you were too polite to do it/Waves crash on the shore, I dash to the door/You don’t knock anymore and my whole life’s ruined.” Not really though, seeing as how she did just become a billionaire. And not even by needing to create a beauty empire like Rihanna, but actually from her music and tour sales.

    For those asking “Is It Over Now?,” well, it depends on what iteration of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) you’ve purchased. If it’s the “standard” one, it is over now with “Is It Over Now?” But with the deluxe (that’s right, now there are additional deluxe songs on top of the original three deluxe songs), there’s the superior version of “Bad Blood” featuring Kendrick Lamar. While the “tangerine edition” offers, instead, “Sweeter Than Fiction,” written for the 2013 movie One Chance and awash in the tone of a Powerful Scene From An 80s Movie. Because, as most are aware, Swift is nothing if not a deft capitalist. Either way, “Is It Over Now?” serves up major M83 vibes—for this was the era when “Midnight City” was playing everywhere (even though it had come out in 2011). At a certain moment, the way she shouts, “Is it over now?” sounds just like “Are we out of the woods?” (indeed, the singer stated, “I always saw this song as sort of a sister to ‘Out of the Woods’”). Swift, like her fans, probably doesn’t want it to be. Yet, as her erstwhile enemy, Katy Perry, said, it’s “never really over.” Least of all when it comes to Swift, who shits out new releases with more regularity than any prune eater.

    While 2014 might have been more open to casual mentions of wanting to commit suicide (i.e., Oh, Lord, I think about jumpin’ Off of very tall somethings) over a relationship’s end, the present generation doesn’t take too kindly to such things. Nor do they, really, to Swift’s brand of “ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love.” But that doesn’t mean Swift can’t and won’t endlessly appeal to her OG fans with the content of this record. And yes, always one for being hyper-sensitive to dates, Swift’s re-release of 1989 arrived on the same day—October 27th—that it did back in 2014. Only that week, there was nothing nearly as earth-shattering going on as the current war (though no one wants to call it that) between Israel and Palestine. This narrative overshadowing (only somewhat, sadly) Swift’s newly-released version of the album.

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • There Should Be Two Movie Theater Options For the Eras Tour Film: One For People Who Just Want To Sit There Without Clapping, Dancing and Singing and One For People Who Want to Do the Exact Opposite

    There Should Be Two Movie Theater Options For the Eras Tour Film: One For People Who Just Want To Sit There Without Clapping, Dancing and Singing and One For People Who Want to Do the Exact Opposite

    Maybe it was unfathomable to movie distributors that anyone other than a “bona fide Swiftie” would bother showing up to the Eras Tour film. After all, is there really any such thing as a “casual” Taylor Swift listener at this point? For the entire “purpose” of Swift’s music has become a matter of pride in proving that one has followed it from the start, tracked all the “Easter eggs,” read between all the lines about who each song is alluding to. This is, in part, what differentiates the “real” Swifties from the faux and fairweather ones. 

    And yet, whether one wants to be or not, the Eras Tour has rendered everybody a Swiftie. What with the nonstop coverage of it that began from the moment tickets went on sale, setting off a larger conversation about Ticketmaster’s monopoly over the ticket sales industry. The issue no one wanted to acknowledge at all, of course, is that the notion of presales altogether promotes a grotesque form of elitism when it comes to fandom, and spotlights how class infects every facet of culture. In other words, there is no “egalitarian experience,” not even when it comes to enjoying music. But no, that’s not what upset Swifties and status symbol flexers (e.g., billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg who showed up to the Santa Clara date) alike in this scenario. Rather, it was the idea that even concert-going had become a competitive sport in the era of devout fandom. Sure, Swift’s stadium tours, including the Red Tour and the 1989 Tour, never had any difficulty selling out before, but this was something entirely different. This was the greatest reflection yet that Swift had officially become: The Biggest Thing on the Planet! And also, per “the economists,” a reaction to the demand shock that was fueled by a public still thirsting to forget 2020-2021 ever happened by getting out and enjoying the things that were stripped away from them previously—like Taylor Swift concerts. In fact, 2020 was to be the year Swift embarked on a tour in support of Lover, conceptualized around the festival motif. Thus, she called it Lover Fest. Later deemed one of the biggest concert “what ifs” that became just another casualty of COVID-19. 

    Swift’s determination to make up for lost time has manifested in the far more juggernaut-y approach of the Eras Tour. A colossus many times larger than the scale of what she had planned for Lover Fest. And with Swift back out on the road after releasing five albums since her last tour (three of them new, two of them re-recorded), there was no one (save for those with more pressing survival issues at hand) that could pretend they weren’t interested in or curious about the Eras Tour and what it might contain. And unlike, say, Madonna’s Sex book in 1992, which experienced a similar media furor, no one was “turning their nose up at it while still being interested in it” (to paraphrase Madonna on the reaction to her tawdry tome). Quite the contrary, everyone is happy to admit their joyful, enthusiastic interest. What’s more, Swift’s entire career has been built on the kind of wholesomeness that has allowed her to transform into the first case of monoculture since Friends. Unless one counts the Barbie frenzy that also happened to take place over the same summer as the Eras Tour. Either way, it’s clear that blonde white girls are a perennial commodity. 

    That said, of course even “middle of the road” fans would want to check out the Eras Tour in theaters. Because to not experience the tour in this way, at the very least, would be to miss out on something that “literally” everyone else is talking about. In point of fact, that seems like the real reason (apart from raking in many more millions) that Swift chose to release the tour in theaters while it’s still making its journey around the world in real life: to offer a chance for everyone to feel connected through monoculture. Because, even for as apolitical as she is, it’s apparent that the world—and the “United” States in particular—could use some sense of unity to grasp at. Even if it’s through something as “frivolous” as pop culture. 

    Unfortunately, what proves to cause disunity in all this is the fact that there are two kinds of Eras Tour moviegoers: those who just want to sit and watch the concert in silence as they would at a “regular” movie and those who want to treat the viewing like an actual concert. Meaning it’s “okay” to sing along loudly, get up out of your seat and generally cause a commotion. Even if there are schools of thought on concert-going that also negate the idea that this is how it should be when people see a live show. For instance, even Swift acolyte/friend Lorde famously got irritated by the crowd singing along during a vulnerable a capella version of “Writer in the Dark” in 2017 that surfaced as a viral compilation video in 2022. Although some might have hoped Lorde was a one-woman advocate for “civilized behavior” at concerts, she was quick to respond to the sudden virality of the video by assuring, “The internet has decided that this was very bad and very rude. I think they haven’t come to one of these shows because, you know, it’s such a communal vibe. We’re all singing and screaming all the time. But I think occasionally there are moments for silence, and there are moments for sound.” 

    Those in the theater audience of the Eras Tour would beg to differ, instead exhibiting the idea that, when it comes to Swift, the moments are always for sound, i.e. the raucous parroting of lyrics. Yet to the sect of moviegoers (and they are out there) who want to watch it “Daria-style”—a.k.a. just sitting there with a blank expression—the theaters of the world would do well to carve out a separate auditorium for the “quiet camp” of Eras Tour viewers. But, as usual, the Swifties win, with “theaters… relax[ing] their rules around talking, standing and phone use for the Eras Tour.” And even the Swifties themselves would assume that only die-hards might show up, with one fan remarking, “I’m so happy that she did that. I feel like I didn’t miss out that much. I feel like I got to experience it, at least with like-minded people.” “Like-minded” usually being a term for political affiliations rather than fandoms. But then, Taylor Swift is her own political and economic ideology. Even when it comes to the movies.

    Thus, tragically, as in all things, the shy, introverted set is constantly forced to endure the barbaric customs of the extroverts. Or, in this more specific instance, the Swifties compelled by the power of Taylor.

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • For the Broke Asses in the Ultra Cheap Seats: The Eras Tour in Movie Format Makes It Clear That Taylor Swift Is Still the Apolitical “Good Girl”

    For the Broke Asses in the Ultra Cheap Seats: The Eras Tour in Movie Format Makes It Clear That Taylor Swift Is Still the Apolitical “Good Girl”

    Billed instantly as a “three-hour career-spanning victory lap,” Taylor Swift’s sixth tour is, needless to say, her most ambitious yet. Part of that ambitiousness has extended to releasing it as a concert film while still touring the world with the production. Obviously, she’s not worried about losing any profits by making it available to the “broke asses” who couldn’t manage to get themselves to the real thing. And even to those who already did, but simply want to see it in an even more “larger than life” format (IMAX being designed to accommodate such a desire). As Swift says, “Too big to hang out/Slowly lurching toward your favorite city.” That she is, as movie theaters across the globe roll out the reel and proceed to endure what can best be described, rather unoriginally, as Swiftmania. Indeed, one wishes Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr would weigh in on the matter, but instead non-Beatle Billy Joel already decided of Swiftie fanaticism and the Eras Tour, “The only thing I can compare it to is the phenomenon of Beatlemania.”

    Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone tapped into part of why people are so, ugh, enchanted with the tour when he wrote, “​​Taylor Swift keeps building the legend of her Eras Tour, week after week, city by city, making every night so much longer, wilder, louder, more jubilant than it has to be. There’s nothing in history to compare. This is her best tour ever, by an absurd margin. It’s a journey through her past, starring all the different Taylors she’s ever been, which means all the Taylors that you’ve ever been.” The thing about that, of course, is, well, Swift hasn’t exactly been all that multi-dimensional over the years. Sure, she’s changed her sound from country to pop and dabbled with some musical styles in between, but, in the end, she’s still the Aryan wet dream wearing red lipstick. Steadfastly committed to delivering a good time without much of any true substance to say in her position of power. Not through the music itself anyway (unless one counts the forced feeling of “allyship” in “You Need To Calm Down”). Over every so-called era, that has remained the most constant of all—Swift’s singular focus on one non-political topic and one non-political topic only: bad boyfriends. And, sometimes, when she’s cresting on the high of being in love, “good” boyfriends…before they inevitably turn bad. 

    This is one of the key aspects of Swift’s “relatability quotient.” With the “everywoman” seeing themselves in her despite the fact that few “average” women are giraffe tall, thin, blonde and blue-eyed. The Barbie ideal, as it were. Once upon a time, this was embodied by Britney Spears, who experienced a similar level of fervor at her so-called peak (that word always suggesting, somewhat rudely, that a person will never be as good as they were at a certain moment in time). The fundamental difference between the two is that Swift has remained America’s sweetheart throughout her career, while Britney defiantly ripped off the shackles of that role when she shaved her head and, months later, gave a somnambulant performance of “Gimme More” at the MTV VMAs. Up until that instance, Spears had always been a consummate performer. Dancing, (mostly) singing and sexing it up for the crowd. She chose one year in her life to have a rightly deserved breakdown, and things never really went back to being the same for her. 

    In 2007, Swift (a Sagittarius like Britney) was eighteen, and had just released her self-titled debut one year prior. This reality seemed to reinforce that, when it comes to the music industry, there is always another young(er) blonde pop star in the making, waiting to take over for the current “hot thing.” And Swift would embody the same “I’m a good girl who does as I’m told” aura (that Britney initially did) for the vast majority of her career. Herself admitting, “My entire moral code as a kid and now is a need to be thought of as good” and “The main thing I always tried to be was, like, a good girl.” Even now, after “going political” (a.k.a. making one public statement against a Republican Congresswoman), it’s clear that what lacks most from Swift’s work, ergo her stage shows, is a message worth imparting. Of course, her fans and casual listeners alike will say that there can be no more important message than simply “making people feel good.” To a certain extent, that’s true. However, after a while, one wonders if Swift’s failure to say anything on the same level as a Madonna stage show is an exemplification of how the public no longer really wants to be challenged. “Preached to,” as it were. This, in some respects, is emblematic of the “algorithm effect” that has taken hold of society, with everyone seeing only what they want to see, and no “unpleasant” (read: contrary) viewpoints thrown into the mix. Including the one that would dare call out Swift for being anything other than perfection. 

    In this regard, too, she differs from Spears, who was far more derided for being a talented blonde girl, but with “nothing to say.” This being most clearly immortalized in an 00s interview during which she said of George W. Bush, “We should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that, you know. And, um, be faithful in what happens.” Alas, Spears’ faith in a few patriarchal institutions has been shaken to its core in the decades since and, similar to Swift, she’s had a reckoning with the “good girl” she once thought she wanted to be in order to receive endless accolades and praise. For someone like Madonna, who provided the blueprint of the modern theatrical stage show with 1990’s Blond Ambition Tour, that was never a reckoning that needed to occur. She was always a “bad girl” from the start. In other words, a woman who spoke her mind without fear or inhibition. This is why one of her earliest stage shows, the Who’s That Girl Tour, addressed political topics ranging from AIDS to essentially directing the missive of “Papa Don’t Preach” at Ronald Reagan and the pope. No other woman, least of all in the hyper-conservative 1980s, would have ever dared to do that, and certainly not at the very beginning of her career. 

    And yes, it is Madonna, who was once marveled at for staying in the business for a paltry fifteen years, that has allowed for someone like Swift to exist in it for almost two decades without anyone questioning it. Because, as Madonna established, the idea of a pop star, particularly a woman, having many eras is merely a reflection of an inherently misogynistic public that expects to see something new in order to be kept interested in the same woman. Especially when there are more youthful options cropping up all the time. As Swift noted, “The female artists have reinvented themselves twenty times more than the male artists. They have to or else you’re out of a job. Constantly having to reinvent, constantly finding new facets of yourself that people find to be shiny.” This speaks to something Madonna said about the Who’s That Girl Tour: “That’s why I call the tour Who’s That Girl?; because I play a lot of characters, and every time I do a video or a song, people go, ‘Oh, that’s what she’s like.’ And I’m not like any of them. I’m all of them. I’m none of them.” In actuality, the real reason to highlight that title was the fact that she had a movie of the same name playing in theaters (briefly) the summer the tour was happening. A movie that was originally going to be called Slammer before then-husband Sean Penn ended up being thrown in the slammer himself and it seemed like it would be in poor taste. 

    Swift’s luck with movie roles hasn’t been much better than Madonna’s, but people seem to talk about the clunkers that are Valentine’s Day and Cats far less than, say, Body of Evidence or Swept Away. Both Swift and Madonna are, of late, focusing on what they do best, with the latter kicking off her own world tour the same weekend the Eras Tour film debuted in theaters. Perhaps an unwitting “flex” on Madonna’s part, as she still seems keenly aware that, of all the pop stars, she’s the only one willing to make a truly political statement during her shows. What’s more, no matter how “old” she’s gotten, she has always been an active participant in the choreography expected of a pop star/musical extravaganza. And so, while the Eras Tour film is deft in creating the kind of spectacle that allows the viewer to feel like they’re actually at the show (complete with annoying audience members singing along in the theater), perhaps what stands out more in the movie than it would in person is the lack of choreography that Swift herself engages in. Instead, she’s a master at the art of the illusion of movement as she struts frequently up and down the ample stage. Here, too, Swift can be differentiated from a “real” pop star in that she has always merely dipped her toe into what that means as someone who more strongly identifies with the singer-songwriter qualities that theoretically mean chilling at home and writing poignant lyrics without having to worry about executing a dance move correctly onstage. But this is where Swift makes it clear that, in the twenty-first century, a musician has no choice but to become the multimedia art project that Madonna always was from the get-go. A walking, talking embodiment of synergy. Even if an embodiment that has never truly “ate” (despite Swift’s recent comparisons to the likes of Madonna and Michael Jackson…stage presence-wise, among other ways). 

    The uninformed accusations that Madonna is jumping on the Taylor and Beyoncé bandwagon of doing marathon, theatrical shows is rather absurd considering this is what Madonna has been doing from the beginning, long before anyone else thought to put in the effort it requires. Particularly the effort it takes to endure the personal risk to one’s life and reputation by speaking out against the injustices of the world. This has not been received warmly by quite a few institutions, not least of which was the Vatican, who urged Italians to boycott Madonna’s Blond Ambition Tour for being blasphemous. In response, Madonna made a public statement in Rome during which she declared, “My show is not a conventional rock show, but a theatrical presentation of my music. And like theater, it asks questions, provokes thought and takes you on an emotional journey. Portraying good and bad, light and dark, joy and sorrow, redemption and salvation.” 

    As the Eras Tour film underscores, that’s not really what’s happening at a Taylor Swift show. And that’s fine, one supposes—it just serves as a reminder that what people go apeshit over often isn’t very thought-provoking. With Swift preferring to, instead, take a page from the name of an LCD Soundsystem documentary by just “shutting up and playing the hits.”

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Amid Comparisons to Madonna and Michael Jackson, It’s Worth Reminding That Taylor Has Never “Ate”

    Amid Comparisons to Madonna and Michael Jackson, It’s Worth Reminding That Taylor Has Never “Ate”

    As Taylor Swift continues to dominate the global conversation thanks to the Eras Tour (still not as record-shattering as the Renaissance Tour though), the comparison that keeps being brought up is that she is somehow the Madonna and Michael Jackson of our time. As for the latter, it’s difficult to make such a comparison for many reasons, not just because he was a Black man (at the start), but because he never had the squeaky clean image that Swift does (even before the pedophilia was publicized). Nor did (/does) Madonna. In fact, part of the reason both performers were so controversial was because of the sexually-charged manner in which they took the stage. And yes, Madonna grafted the crotch-grabbing maneuver from Jackson—yet another case in point of her tendency to appropriate from (gay-leaning) men of color. 

    As for Swift, who is being treated by this nation as though she has, to quote Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger) in 10 Things I Hate About You, “beer-flavored nipples” or something, she doesn’t ever get political enough to be as “dangerous” or retroactively controversial (let alone controversial in the moment). Madonna, for example, is currently being compared to Lizzo for possessing the same bullying nature toward her dancers from the Blond Ambition Tour. Famously encapsulated by her asking of one dancer, “Does anybody give a shit?” after he expressed an opinion. While those who “have a fuckin’ sense of humor,” as Madonna said during her August 5th Blond Ambition show in Nice, might be better able to understand that it’s all coming from a place of irony (and that everyone needs to stop being so fucking literal), there’s not much room for that “brand” of humor anymore. Instead, such forms of “jocularity” are doomed to be written off as a form of white privilege that’s no longer tenable. And yet, talking of irony, that brings us to Swift, whose own white privilege is rarely ever acknowledged in discussing her road to success. 

    As is the case with many white women who end up famous (including Billie Eilish), Swift had ample parental support. Hers was not just emotional, however. Having a father like Scott Swift, the founder of The Swift Group (part of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management) certainly helped her with the encouragement to “pursue her dream.” After all, there was no worry that Taylor might end up homeless or anything if the whole “music thing” didn’t pan out. Because, as Pulp noted, “‘Cause when you’re laid in bed at night/Watching roaches climb the wall/If you called your dad he could stop it all, yeah.” And who knows what Mr. Swift might have helped stop (and start) along the way for his eldest child (with Swift’s only other sibling being her younger brother, Austin)? 

    Madonna, in contrast, had neither emotional nor financial support from her father when she set off to New York. This after already scandalizing Tony Ciccone by dropping out of college (Swift didn’t bother with that form of education at all). Specifically, giving up the dance scholarship she had earned to attend the University of Michigan. Because, in her mind, she was destined to truly make something out of herself. Not to be molded by the proverbial machine. Swift, comically enough, signed with a record label called Big Machine. And while Swift was growing up on an idyllic Christmas tree farm (as immortalized in her 2019 song of the same name), Madonna was mourning the loss of her mother and dressing in hand-me-downs or clothes she despised that were sewn by her stepmother, Joan. In fact, part of the reason she despised them is because Joan would sew the same exact outfit for all of her female siblings, prompting Madonna to rebel/differentiate herself by mismatching her socks. At least it was something.

    Sometimes, “divine” intervention would occur to keep Madonna from having to wear one of her stepmother’s “bespoke” ensembles. Like the time Joan slapped her and Madonna’s nose bled onto the dress she might have had to wear to church were it not for the physical lashing. Madonna wasn’t upset, though. Quite the contrary. As she told Carrie Fisher in a 1991 Rolling Stone interview, “I was thrilled about it because my nose bled all over an outfit that she made me wear for Easter. I really hated it, and I didn’t want to wear it to church.”

    So yeah, Madonna had it rough compared to Swift’s idyllic, nurturing, largely trauma-free childhood—complete with a mother, summering in Cape May and traveling frequently to New York for her vocal and acting lessons (the latter of which didn’t much pay off in Valentine’s Day). And, talking of a mother schlepping her daughter to the big city, Britney Spears’ mom, Lynne, did the same thing. Only she didn’t actually have the money to do it. She (along with Herr Jamie Spears) was merely banking on Brit’s success in the long-run by betting everything they had on her in the moment. This still included “borrow[ing] money from friends to pay for gas to get her to auditions.”

    Despite the reward of Britney landing her role on The All-New Mickey Mouse Club (after getting rejected the first time at age ten), Lynne was certain to tout, “It cost a lot to send Britney to classes and competitions, and by the time she made it to The Mickey Mouse Club, what she made barely paid for the apartment we stayed in.” Even if that were true, continuing to gamble it all on Spears’ talent resulted in an irrefutable major payday later on (enhanced, of course, by that needless conservatorship). All of this is to say that perhaps there is something to the idea of women (and men) who struggle to become famous actually having the ability to be described as someone who “ate” after every performance. Because every performance is like a reliving of that time when they were fighting to prove themselves, to claw their way to the top. And yeah, it probably makes a difference in one’s eventual performance effect when their key formative influence was David Bowie instead of Faith Hill and Shania Twain (as for Britney, her key influence was Madonna).

    That said, Swift can put on all the sequined gowns and other assorted styles of sequined clothing she wants for the Eras Tour, but it doesn’t blind one to the fact that she is not giving (said in drag queen voice) the way a Madonna or a Spears can. She is not at that level of fierceness. Maybe it’s her surfboard body, or her inherent commitment to (as opposed to rebellion against) Christian values, or a refusal to address anything other than romance (instead of sex) and its demise in her lyrics. Whatever the reason, Swift is not the performer she’s being made out to be by overly ass-licking media just because she’s breaking records for album and tour sales. It doesn’t alter the reality that, when it comes to transcendent performance and actually pushing boundaries, Swift plays it entirely safe—in general and during the Eras Tour. Starting with the costumes that scream “generic pop star.”

    Take, for instance, her opening number ensemble: a Versace sequined leotard and shimmering Louboutin knee-high boots. This decidedly “prototype” look and style has not only been done to death by the average pop star, but it was helmed by Madonna in the 80s, starting with her “Open Your Heart” bustier paired with fishnet tights, worn for the Who’s That Girl Tour. The leotard/bustier aesthetic would come to define Madonna’s tours over the years, right up to a modified version of it for 2019’s Madame X Tour. 

    If that weren’t enough, Swift cops tour looks from many others, ranging from Tina Turner (with the fringe dress she wears during her “Fearless Era” section) to Florence + the Machine (with the flowy, feminine, witchy frocks she wears for the “Evermore Era” and “Folklore Era” sections). Elsewhere, things on the costume front get especially basic bitch for the “Speak Now, Red, 1989 and Midnights Era” sections. The supposedly “most original”/“cutting edge” ensemble she wears (during the “Reputation Era” section), an asymmetrical bodysuit with snakes (that look more like sperm) crawling up the side that actually has a pant leg, doesn’t say much about her ability to shake up fashion trends. It damn sure ain’t a fuckin’ cone bra. 

    This isn’t to blast Swift’s talents entirely. No one wants to undercut a woman who’s “killin’ it” in the music industry, but it bears noting that, clearly, the definition of “killin’ it” has grown decidedly soft in the present. And it’s kind of insulting to those who do still have a higher standard of what an envelope-pushing entertainer can achieve to be told that Swift is this era’s answer to someone like Madonna or Michael Jackson. Or even Britney. Granted, it was the increasingly absurd New York Times that sparked this debate by remarking on how Swift has “a level of white-hot demand and media saturation not seen since the 1980s heyday of Michael Jackson and Madonna.”

    As one person commented of the comparison, “Michael and Madonna both brought something new and leveled up the game. Taylor is simply not. She may have the same success level but she definitely doesn’t have the stage presence required to compete with those legends.” And it’s true. To put it even more succinctly, “Taylor Swift is literally immune from slaying. Living proof that you can be the number one recording artist of all time and never once serve.” Of course, that assessment was met with plenty of vitriolic pushback on the platform now called “X,” but it’s completely accurate.

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • What Should Come Across As Carnal Is Only Creepy and Unsettling in Taylor Swift’s “I Can See You” Video

    What Should Come Across As Carnal Is Only Creepy and Unsettling in Taylor Swift’s “I Can See You” Video

    It’s appropriate that Taylor Swift should feel comfortable, only now, with releasing “I Can See You” from “the vault” of her Speak Now era. For, even though it was a time in her life when she was reconciling with the raging urge to acknowledge that “ho is life,” it was never her “brand” to fully embrace such a “persona.” That was more Britney Spears’ thing, which she whole-heartedly executed on her own third album, Britney. This complete with the skin-baring aesthetics of “I’m A Slave 4 U,” “Overprotected” and “Boys.” Swift, however, was always about the long, flowing dresses that only ever allowed her arm skin to be showcased. Instead favoring the idea of “letting her songs speak (now)” for her, instead of her body.

    If that’s still to be the case with “I Can See You,” then Swift is saying far more than her “flesh” ever could. Even so, the chanteuse bears more skin than she ever would have in 2010 during her appearance in this video, in which she’s joined by co-stars Taylor Lautner, Joey King and Presley Cash (the latter two having previously appeared in the video for Swift’s Speak Now single, “Mean”). It is Cash who serves as the getaway car (or van, in this case) driver of the outfit, watching her surveillance screens from inside the vehicle as King exits into the dark, empty street. As she approaches the premises, Cash fiddles with the computer keyboard to ensure King can gain entry into the building where Swift is being held in captivity. But Swift The Person is a symbol of Swift The Body of Work in this scenario.

    Locked in a literal vault—fitting, as this song is “from the vault”—Swift sits with her knees almost pressed to her chest, showcasing an arm with the “Long Live” lyric, “I had the time of my life fighting dragons with you.” This being a clear nod to her fans and her team of handlers that continue to make all of this possible. It’s obviously King’s job to extract Swift from the vault in which she (and her talent) is wasting away. So it is that she must pull a Virginia Baker (Catherine Zeta-Jones) in Entrapment or Baron François Toulour (Vincent Cassel) in Ocean’s Twelve maneuver by dancing around some lasers designed to set off the alarm system if any movement is detected. When she makes it through the rather easy-to-navigate barrage of lasers, what King finds is a museum-like display of numerous Speak Now-era outfits, some of which aren’t even Swift’s own—like the white dress King wore in the “Mean” video.

    All at once, Lautner jumps down from the ceiling behind her, apparently there to help with Operation Set Taylor Free (#FreeTaylor, if you prefer). Meanwhile, we see Swift ticking off another mark on the wall of the vault, indicating how many days she’s been trapped inside. But now that she knows reinforcements are on the way, she has no hesitation with setting off the “alarm” (a bevy of security guards) by pulling the curtain off a framed photo of her new Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) album cover. And yes, it appears intentional that Swift wants to make it come across like some Mona Lisa-esque painting in terms of appearance, therefore value. After all, her entire aim with reclaiming the rights to her masters is to make people—fans, suits, whoever—understand the full weight of her worth. After all, this is the woman who once wrote, “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.” Swift didn’t feel her valuable art was being paid for at Big Machine Records. Quite the opposite, in fact. No, instead she was being ripped off, stolen from. Which is why it’s apropos that, in this video, she decides to steal back her work (represented by the framed album cover in the “I Can See You” video).

    As the security goons are fought off by King and Lautner, Swift can feel them getting closer, edging toward completing the rescue mission. Because, lest anyone forget, Speak Now was rife with a fairytale motif. And fairytales are nothing if not founded upon a girl “being rescued.” As the duo approaches the vault, Swift presses her ear against it as they proceed to take out all the tools necessary to rig up the vault with some heavy-duty explosives that will, at last, free Taylor.

    Emerging from the smoke with a wide-eyed expression of wonderment, she smiles gratefully at King and Lautner before they all run out of the building as everything else starts to crumble and fall. The building, too, explodes once they’re outside. Swift looks back at the wreckage before getting into the van and being whisked away across a bridge and into her new, liberated future.

    As far as tying in with the lyrics, the video has little to do with the hyper-sexual tint of verses like, “But what would you do if I went to touch you now?/What would you do if they never found us out?/What would you do if we never made a sound?” Overtly referring to the arousal of “secret sex,” Swift then alludes to a person she used to be in songs such as “You Belong With Me,” this time singing from the perspective of the admired person who knows she’s being admired from afar. Yet she turns the dynamic on its ear by saying that she does, indeed, see the “stolen glances” and “faroff gazes” cast in her direction by this “wallflower” as she sings, “I can see you waitin’ down the hall from me/And I could see you up against the wall with me/And what would you do?/Baby, if you only knew/That I can see you.” Probably shit a brick, that’s what.

    Perhaps un-coincidentally, Swift conveys certain lines in the same intonation as “she wears short skirts and I wear t-shirts” from “You Belong With Me.” This further evincing the notion that she knows all too well what it’s like to be the person who thinks no one can see her admiring from afar. So it is that she says in a “You Belong With Me” “inflection,” “And I could see you being my addiction/You can see me as a secret mission/Hide away and I will start behaving myself.” With a backbeat that sounds slightly like a tamer version of The Clash’s “London Calling,” the single is a vast departure from anything else of the Speak Now oeuvre, and Swift seems to want it that way. For it only serves to make this Taylor’s Version all her own. Distinct from the original Speak Now not just because her girlish country twang can’t be recreated, but because it reveals the range she was already capable of before Red.

    Although “I Can See You” bears lyrics that are meant to allude to sizing up a not-so-secret admirer and indulging in one’s own fantasies about what it might be like to blow their mind by reciprocating the lust, in the present, “I Can See You” as a title (and music video) has more sinister implications. Not just that Swift now sees how she was wronged by her label, but how we’re all being seen constantly. Whether we want to be or not. Swift, to be sure, still wants to be. Only now, it’s become far less “cute”/“endearing”/“arousing” and much more Big Brother-y. As Lana Del Rey once said, “Look at you looking at me/I know you know how I feel.” And something about that is all too meta (in the Zuckerberg sense as well) in its unsettling nature.

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Taylor Swift’s Country Twang Doesn’t Feel That Sincere Anymore on Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)

    Taylor Swift’s Country Twang Doesn’t Feel That Sincere Anymore on Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)

    We live in a dichotomous time. One in which ageism still runs rampant, but also when to acknowledge any potential limitations or alterations due to age would be, let’s say, unkosher. With the latest addition to Taylor Swift’s re-recording project, it continues to remain clear that she’s avoided re-recording her first album for so long (side-stepping the logical approach of getting that out of the way first) because it’s difficult to sing the way she once did with something like conviction. And for those who have been living under a rock, the way she once sang was with a country lilt. Something that turned out, in the end, to be an affectation she was ready to do away with after a certain point. Namely, after realizing that pop was so much more fun…and profitable. As country artists like Shania Twain found out before her, there was more than enough financial value to the transition than there was to something like “artistic integrity.”

    Swift dancing around the re-recording of her first self-titled album is not without coincidence. Nor is it that she seems eager to get the recording of her earliest albums out of the way. After all, the older she gets, the harder it is to “pass” for that “naïve little girl” she once was. And sometimes still likes to play. Particularly if she wants her re-recordings to come across with as much “sincerity” as the originals. But, obviously, it’s hard to “get it up” for certain periods of her career. In this instance, her pre-Red days.

    To put it in perspective, if Britney Spears is the benchmark (and of course she is) for measuring a teen singer’s transition into her “womanhood” era, then Speak Now is Taylor’s Britney, the very album on which Spears announced, “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.” Swift, too, was caught somewhere in between that “transition” in October of 2010, when Speak Now was released, just two-ish months before her twenty-first birthday. Britney, similarly, was also released in the October before Spears’ twentieth birthday in December (a Sag, like Swift). That said, Swift was still capable, while caught in the “girlhood era,” of saying and actually meaning the cringe-y lyrics on “Mine,” the first song and single to kick off Speak Now. On it, she chirps (as best as she still knows how with a “country accent”), “Do you remember, we were sittin’ there, by the water?/You put your arm around me, for the first time/You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter/You are the best thing, that’s ever been mine.” Possessive much? Of course. Because Swift is nothing if not one of many great reinforcers of the capitalist juggernaut, which includes monogamous coupledom at the top of the list.

    That much continues on “Sparks Fly,” a song written about Jake Owen (and, by the way, confirmed: he has green eyes). Who would have been about twenty-five to Swift’s seventeen when she opened for him at a gig in Portland, Oregon. Like Mariah Carey turning a kernel of her dalliance with Derek Jeter into “My All,” Swift does the same with her schoolgirl crush on Owen. So it is that she croons, “Get me with those green eyes, baby, as the lights go down/Give me something that’ll haunt me when you’re not around/‘Cause I see sparks fly whenever you smile.” Whether or not those sentiments were one-sided matters as little now as it did then. The point is, Swift was recognizing her sexual awakening a.k.a. becoming a boy-crazy horndog. Of course, this is not something one “should say”—just as, evidently, Swift thought she should no longer say the line, “She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress,” instead opting for the less slut-shaming, “He was a moth to the flame/She was holding the matches.” It doesn’t have quite the same “sick burn” feel, but Swift is nothing if not an obliging whitewasher (see also: her removal of the word “FAT” from her “Anti-Hero” video).

    The second single to be released from Speak Now, “Back to December,” also loses some of its luster with the knowledge that Swift is quite amicable with the ex who inspired it, Taylor Lautner. A claim that few, if any, of Swift’s exes can make (apart from Harry Styles). So amicable are they, in fact, that Lautner obligingly agreed to appear in the video for one of Swift’s “From the Vault” tracks, “I Can See You.” Swift’s expression of regret over breaking Lautner’s heart by ending things with him (for once, she was the abandoner, not the abandonee) rings hollower now, knowing her penchant for making mountains out of molehills (again, à la Mariah with “My All”). As she seems to with the lines, “So, this is me swallowing my pride/Standin’ in front of you sayin’, ‘I’m sorry for that night’/And I go back to December all the time/It turns out freedom ain’t nothing but missin’ you/Wishin’ I’d realized what I had when you were mine/I go back to December, turn around and make it alright/I go back to December all the time.”

    But apparently, all that wishing and regret wasn’t really necessary, for she turned it around by letting Lautner not only be in her new music video, but also sparing him the “Taylor curse” of being branded as a “bad man.” As is the case with John Mayer, whose cruelty toward Swift not only manifested recently on Midnights with “Could’ve Should’ve Would’ve” (featuring the immortally gut-punching line, “Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first”). However, he’s not the subject just yet, with “Speak Now” preceding “Dear John.” And it is the former that serves as the anchor for the overarching theme of the record—which is to speak up and say what you feel when you feel it, instead of repressing it into a lifetime of yearning and festering regret. In other words, what so many of Swift’s songs are based around.

    The legend goes that “Speak Now” was “sparked” by Hayley Williams, who has been friends with Swift in some capacity since roughly 2008, when the two started hanging out in Nashville together. Thus, the inspiration allegedly came from Williams having to attend the wedding of her ex- boyfriend (/ex-bandmate) of three years, Josh Farro, in April of 2010. That would have meant Swift came up with the track and overall concept for Speak Now pretty quickly (even if Williams probably got her wedding invite in 2009). Not to say she couldn’t have, it’s just that, knowing her penchant for advanced planning, it seems a bit far-fetched. Nonetheless, lyrics like, “Don’t say yes, run away now/I’ll meet you when you’re out of the church at the back door/Don’t wait, or say a single vow/You need to hear me out/And they said, ‘Speak now’” feel fairly applicable to the situation Williams found herself in. Should she have been the kind of girl to play the Benjamin Braddock role at a wedding.

    Unsurprisingly, there’s a continued “You Belong With Me” motif markedly present on this track as Swift sings verses that include, “She floats down the aisle like a pageant queen/But I know you wish it was me/You wish it was me, don’t you?” and “I am not the kind of girl/Who should be rudely bargin’ in on a white veil occasion/But you are not the kind of boy/Who should be marrying the wrong girl, hehheh.” That hehheh replacing a girlier, more tittering sort of laugh on the original version. Just another subtle sign of the ways in which it’s impossible to truly recreate something, least of all a phase of one’s life. And yet, that’s not really what the point has become with these re-recordings. Rather, it’s about Swift “reclaiming her narrative” and enjoying how she can control it with better, more effortless adroitness in her thirties. Which brings us to “Dear John,” the “All Too Well” of “Speak Now.” Hearing it remade in 2023, what stands out most is how much it sounds like something from the Olivia Rodrigo playbook—in other words, it highlights how big of an influence Swift has been on Rodrigo. Case in point, Swift berating Mayer, “You paint me a blue sky/Then go back and turn it to rain/And I lived in your chess game/But you changed the rules every day/Wondering which version of you I might get on the phone tonight.” This fundamental sentiment being repurposed by Rodrigo on “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back” (which itself samples music from the stripped down version of Swift’s “New Year’s Day”) as, “You got me fucked up in the head, boy/Never doubted myself so much/Like, am I pretty?/Am I fun, boy?/I hate that I give you power over that kind of stuff/‘Cause it’s always one step forward and three steps back/I’m the love of your life until I make you mad/It’s always one step forward and three steps back/Do you love me, want me, hate me?/Boy, I don’t understand/No, I don’t understand.”

    “Dear John” themes even persist on Rodrigo’s latest, “vampire,” with the latter singing, “And every girl/I ever talked to told me you were bad, bad news/You called them crazy/God, I hate the way I called them crazy too/You’re so convincing/How do you lie without flinching?/(How do you lie? How do you lie? How do you lie?)/Ooh, what a mesmerizing, paralyzing, fucked-up little thrill/Can’t figure out just how you do it, and God knows I never will/Went for me and not her/‘Cause girls your age know better.” The obvious precursor to this was Swift on “Dear John” accusing with equal anger-sadness, “Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with?/The girl in the dress cried the whole way home/I should’ve known.” Swift then adds,“And you’ll add my name to your long list of traitors/Who don’t understand/And I look back in regret how I ignored when they said, ‘Run as fast as you can.’” While the lyrics are heartrending enough, it lacks the same potency as “All Too Well,” which is surprising considering that said song was written on her sophomore record, which means “Dear John,” as a third album effort, should have more panache in comparison. But no, turns out, Jake Gyllenhaal is the better muse.

    And, talking of assholes, what follows is the third single from Speak Now, “Mean.” Better known as: the song Swift famously wrote about critic Bob Lefsetz, who ripped her a new one over her Grammys performance with Stevie Nicks. The two joined together onstage for a performance of “Rihannon” on February 1, 2010 (proving Swift can turn out a response song quickly, so there goes the theory about it not being possible that “Speak Now” could be in reference to Hayley Williams). While Nicks was acting ever the consummate performer, Swift appeared to be convinced they were at a karaoke bar. The result was Lefsetz’s damning criticism that included, among other false prophecies, “Taylor Swift can’t sing,” “…did Taylor Swift kill her career overnight? I’ll argue she did” and “Will Taylor Swift be duetting with the stars of the 2030s?  Doubtful.” Though that latter prophecy could be accurate for a different reason, as many potential audience members might have already been sacrificed to climate change (or will be too broke by then to care about seeing what adolescent(e) du jour is duetting with Swift).

    Swift’s decision to lash out right away after Lefsetz unleashed his “hot take” (for, as Swift would say, “Your hot take is completely false and SO damaging”) is telling of her age at the time, as she chose to ignore the old adage, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” Rather than showing and not telling Lefsetz what her career was about to do (/already doing), she let herself get tripped up on his words. For Swift, perfectionist that she is, doesn’t handle criticism well. Nor does anyone in the climate of today, least of all fans of the musicians being critiqued. In fact, Swift was ahead of her time in terms of foretelling that everyone would side with artists and not critics in the present day. With “stans” lining up to fight battles for their “queens” online and belittle any writer (reduced to the title of “blogger,” in certain instances) who they perceived to be slighting their “mother.” Overlooking the notion that criticism is an art in itself.

    “Mean” is the apex of Swift exhibiting herself as a “little girl” who can’t take the heat. And that much is evident in her erstwhile girlish voice continuing to accuse, “All you’re ever gonna be is mean.” Though she was sure to prove her prediction in declaring, “Someday, I’ll be livin’ in a big ole city.” One that she would choose to help trash as a result of being “big enough so you can’t hit me.” At least not with anything more than a paltry three thousand dollars’ worth of fines. To be sure, it seems timely that Swift should release another album on the heels of her trash controversy, much like she did with Midnights to mitigate her private jet usage backlash. Sure, it’s probably happenstance…but it’s also very convenient by way of helping people forget all about her environmetally-damaging foibles with the pretty distraction of her pop hits.

    Which brings us to the fourth single, “The Story Of Us.” A very early 00s-sounding ditty that finds Swift at her most Avril Lavigne-esque, with certain guitar riffs harkening back to “Sk8r Boi” as Swift proceeds to bemoan how “the story of us looks a lot like a tragedy now.” Another song presumed to be about John Mayer, Swift firmly establishes her songwriting preference for dissecting breakups with this track. One that segues into the slowed-down tempo of “Never Grow Up,” which starts out wanting to sound like Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” (perhaps another way for Swift to make up for butchering “Rihannon” in Stevie Nicks’ presence). But rather than being about having grown old already, Swift speaks (now) from the vantage point of still being in that “I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman” place. Hoping somehow that she can hold on to the girlhood side of things forever. And, for a long time, she did. This being part of why she noted in Miss Americana, “There’s this thing people say about celebrities, that they’re frozen at the age they got famous. I had a lot of growing up to do, just to try and catch up to twenty-nine.” Currently at thirty-three, it seems Swift still has her bouts with wanting to heed her own warning, “Oh, darling, don’t you ever grow up/Don’t you ever grow up, just stay this little/Oh, darlin’, don’t you ever grow up/Don’t you ever grow up, it could stay this simple.” Put more succinctly: don’t grow up, it’s a trap.

    Maybe that’s why she had a “rebellious teen” moment after her breakup with Joe Alwyn that led her to think it was a good idea to “canoodle” with Matty Healy. But it didn’t take long for her to become (dis)“Enchanted.” The only track Swift seems to want to make a permanent Speak Now mainstay on her Eras Tour setlist (complete with a bombastic, Cinderella-esque ball gown as her costume choice). Likely because, although “Enchanted” is not an “official” single, it serves as one of those other fan favorites that’s getting more love and acknowledgement from Swift in the present (though not to the same extent as “All Too Well”).

    As Swift belts out the chorus, “This night is sparklin’, don’t you let it go/I’m wonderstruck, blushin’ all the way home/I’ll spend forever wonderin’ if you knew/I was enchanted to meet you,” the fairytale motif is ruined only by the thought of the fact that it’s about Owl City’s Adam Young. Thus, it’s very much in the spirit of “Sparks Fly” in terms of how Swift decided to write a sweeping, dramatic love song based on a fleeting crush/fluttering of the loins. Her romantic flow is quickly interrupted by “Better Than Revenge,” the aforementioned song that Swift felt obliged to rework for the purposes of “relitigation,” as Laura Snapes called it in her assessment of the album. Once again channeling Avril Lavigne (no wonder Olivia Rodrigo wanted to collaborate with her onstage for a rendition of “Complicated” during her Sour Tour), Swift chastises the girl who “took” her man (or boy) in a manner befitting 00s rhetoric (hear also: Marina and the Diamonds’ “Girls”) regarding how women should vilify other women for their boyfriends’ inherent shittiness. Swift does just that by accusing, “She’s not a saint and she’s not what you think/She’s an actress, woah/She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress [again, these are the original lyrics], woah/Soon, she’s gonna find stealing other people’s toys/On the playground won’t make you many friends.” This before warning, “She should keep in mind, she should keep in mind/There is nothing I do better than revenge, ha.” Over the years, Swift has made that abundantly clear, learning to better bide her time and let “karma” do its job (even if it’s extremely narcissistic thinking to believe the universe gives a shit about any of us). And, in many regards, this particular track feels like a precursor to Reputation’s “Look What You Made Me Do”—though that wouldn’t be the first song inspired by Swift’s arch nemesis Kanye West. Indeed, that was still his legal name when she wrote “Innocent.”

    Another slow jam that frames things within the context of being a happy, naïve child versus a mean, jaded adult, Swift’s aim was to show forgiveness to West after he infamously bum-rushed the stage during the 2009 VMAs while Swift was in the midst of accepting the award for Best Female Video. Despite his rudeness and dismissiveness of her accomplishment, Swift found a way to assure him, “Time turns flames to embers/You’ll have new Septembers [the month the VMAs took place]/Every one of us has messed up, too, ooh/Minds change like the weather/I hope you remember/Today is never too late to be brand new, oh.” As everyone knows by now, it’s definitely too late for Ye to be brand new. Nonetheless, at the time, Swift thought he might improve, telling him, “It’s alright, just wait and see/Your string of lights is still bright to me, oh/Who you are is not where you’ve been/You’re still an innocent.” But turns out this “story of us” was also another tragedy.

    On the plus side, Beyoncé tried to correct the error as it happened, inviting Swift up onstage to finish her speech later in the ceremony when she accepted the award for Video of the Year. Incidentally, before Beyoncé got hold of the title in 2013, Swift had her own “Haunted.” A song that commences with the dramatic string arrangements (though nothing compared to the ones in “Papa Don’t Preach”) required of addressing yet another disintegrating relationship as Swift bemoans, “I thought I had you figured out/Can’t breathe whenever you’re gone/Can’t turn back now, I’m haunted.” Haunted, specifically, by knowing that the end of her romance is nigh as she struggles to figure out where it all went wrong. Thus, her explanation when it was first released, “‘Haunted’ is about the moment that you realize the person you’re in love with is drifting and fading fast. And you don’t know what to do, but in that period of time, in that phase of love, where it’s fading out, time moves so slowly. Everything hinges on what that last text message said, and you’re realizing that he’s kind of falling out of love. That’s a really heartbreaking and tragic thing to go through, because the whole time you’re trying to tell yourself it’s not happening. I went through this, and I ended up waking up in the middle of the night writing this song about it.” Probably sometime around midnight, to be exact.

    Thematically speaking, “Haunted” transitions seamlessly into “Last Kiss,” a more stripped down ballad about Joe Jonas (as “Haunted” easily could have been). The twenty-seven-second intro, in typical Tay fashion, undeniably refers to the twenty-seven-second call Jonas made to break up with Swift. Accordingly, it prompts Swift to woefully ruminate on the ruins of her so-called great love, “I never thought we’d have a last kiss/I never imagined we’d end like this/Your name, forever the name on my lips, ooh/So I’ll watch your life in pictures like I used to watch you sleep/And I feel you forget me like I used to feel you breathe.” Just as Swift would do with many others after Jonas broke her heart (a.k.a. wounded her ego and pride).

    Things shift to a slightly more upbeat timbre on “Long Live.” As it should, for it’s a love letter to Swift’s “team” (i.e., the army that wakes up every day to help make Taylor Swift Taylor Swift) and her fans. When discussing it back in 2010, Swift said, “This song is about my band, and my producer, and all the people who have helped us build this brick by brick. The fans, the people who I feel that we are all in this together, this song talks about the triumphant moments that we’ve had in the last two years.” Add thirteen more years to that now and you’ve got a breadth of work and accomplishments that very much adds up to “Long Live.” During which Swift chirps (albeit with less girlishness on this version), “Long, long live the walls we crashed through/How the kingdom lights shined just for me and you/And I was screaming, ‘Long live all the magic we made’/And bring on all the pretenders, I’m not afraid/Singing, ‘Long live all the mountains we moved’/I had the time of my life fighting dragons with you.” One of the latest dragons being Ticketmaster, as it were. With Swift managing to make a literal federal case out of Ticketmaster’s monopoly on live music after she predictably crashed the website when tickets for the Eras Tour went on sale.

    Although “Long Live” was the finale on the standard edition of the record, the final single from Speak Now, “Ours,” was originally on the deluxe edition of the album. Ironically, it’s the sort of song that has been a little too on the nose for Swift the past few months, with everyone casting judgmental eyes on her dalliance with Matty Healy. Therefore, when she sings, “Don’t you worry your pretty little mind/People throw rocks at things that shine/And life makes love look hard/The stakes are high, the water’s rough/But this love is ours,” it comes off with a touch more hilarity at this particular juncture in her life.

    After “Ours,” Swift offers up another song from the original deluxe edition: “Superman.” A track that reveals just how much in “fairytale mode” she really was during this era. For Superman is nothing if not a modern update to the white knight trope. So it is that Swift talks of being rescued when she sings in that country twang that feels ever less sincere, “I watch Superman fly away/You’ve got a busy day today/Go save the world, I’ll be around/And I watch Superman fly away/Come back, I’ll be with you someday/I’ll be right here on the ground/When you come back down/And I watch you fly around the world/And I hope you don’t save some other girl.” Her jejune viewpoint persists on the first number to kick off the “From the Vault” section, “Electric Touch” featuring Fall Out Boy. A band she cites as being majorly influential on her own songwriting. Unashamed to do so when she told Rolling Stone back in 2019, “I love Fall Out Boy so much. Their songwriting really influenced me, lyrically, maybe more than anyone else. They take a phrase and they twist it. ‘Loaded God complex/Cock it and pull it’? When I heard that, I was like, ‘I’m dreaming.’” As many listeners of “Electric Touch” (not to be confused with MGMT’s “Electric Feel”) might think they are when they hear the lyrics, “Got a history of stories ending sadly/Still hoping that the fire won’t burn me/Just one time, just one time,” with the two harmonizing on a chorus that goes, “All I know is this could either break my heart or bring it back to life/Got a feelin’ your electric touch could fill this ghost town up with life.” Whether that’s the “ghost town” of Swift’s heart or crotch is at one’s discretion. And yes, in many respects, it mimics the theme of “Mine,” with Swift also talking about being burned and afraid to open her heart or trust anyone.

    Tweaking that theme on “When Emma Falls in Love,” Swift positions the (anti-)heroine of the song as a heartbreaker on par with Amy from Britney Spears’ “If U Seek Amy.” And, just as it was on that song, Swift is really talking about herself when she talks about Emma (a.k.a. Emma Stone). Even if she sings, “If they only had a chance to love her/And to tell you the truth, sometimes I wish I was her.” Newsflash: Swift is. Particularly with depictions such as, “When Emma falls in love, she paces the floor/Closes the blinds and locks the door/When Emma falls in love, she calls up her mom/Jokes about the ways that this one could go wrong/She waits and takes her time/‘Cause Little Miss Sunshine always thinks it’s gonna rain/When Emma falls in love, I know/That boy will never be the same.” The reigning topic of a big-time girl in a small-time town also endures when Swift compares “Emma” to being “like if Cleopatra grew up in a small town.” Well, then one supposes she’d do like what Swift (or Madonna or Britney Spears or Lana Del Rey or, well, Emma Stone) did and become a star.

    Swift switches tone in her most marked way yet on the album by opting to release “I Can See You” as the lead “vault single.” And it’s obvious here that Swift reworked it heavily to fit in with her current pop sound, with a guitar riff that occasionally sounds as though it’s interpolating The Clash’s “London Calling.” It also stands apart for being a song about sexually charged desire (with Swift expressing such fantasies as, “And I could see you up against the wall with me”)—so no wonder she wasn’t ready to release it back then, lest she risk being slut-shamed. You know, the same way she slut-shamed a nameless girl on “Better Than Revenge.”

    If she had taken the plunge on releasing it back then, it could have (much sooner) instigated her “Castles Crumbling.” This being the title of her song featuring Hayley Williams (which, to be sure, feels like an “Easter egg” that confirms Williams being the influence behind “Speak Now”). An eerily prescient track (reiterating the belief that surely Swift must rework her vault songs) that finds Swift presaging the downfall of her “empire,” her dominance and prestige. This (sort of) occurring after her fall from grace in 2016 as a result of Kim Kardashian releasing select snippets of a conversation between Swift and Kanye West that indicated she gave him her blessing to release the final version of “Famous,” a single that found him bragging of Taylor, “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/Why?/I made that bitch famous.” Things went very downhill for Swift in the aftermath. At least in terms of her formerly “innocent” reputation giving way more fully to accusations of Swift being “calculated” and “a snake.” But, at the bare minimum, she got the chance to take back the narrative on 2017’s Reputation, along with taking back the snake emojis lobbed at her in her comments sections, parading the reptile as her primary “talisman” during this era.

    Regardless, there’s no denying she still felt like the “Foolish One” for quite some time. And it is this particular vault ditty that seems to get preferential treatment in that Swift enlisted her current go-to producer (apart from Jack Antonoff), Aaron Dessner, to help dust it off and polish it off with minimalist instrumentation that allows Swift’s self-deprecating tone to shine through as she curses, “You give me just enough attention to keep my hopes too high/Wishful thoughts forget to mention when something’s really not right/And I will block out these voices of reason in my head/And the voices say, ‘You are not the exception, you will never learn your lesson’/Foolish one/Stop checkin’ your mailbox for confessions of love/That ain’t never gonna come/You will take the long way, you will take the long way down.”

    Learning the hard way is, let’s just say it: “Timeless.” Just as Swift’s songwriting shtick of detailing the finer points of yearning and burning in a way not seen since the mid-twentieth century. That said, Swift references a “30s bride” and “a crowded street in 1944” on this song. Though she seems to be talking about a rando elderly couple after walking into an antique shop and unearthing a cardboard box with “photos: twenty-five cents each,” some fans have speculated the song is an homage to her grandparents, Marjorie and Dean. But, more than likely, it’s just Swift being her usual wistful, romantic self as she echoes sentiments from folklore’s “invisible string” while pronouncing, “‘Cause I believe that we were supposed to find this/So, even in a different life, you still would’ve been mine/We would’ve been timeless.” As would Swift’s grand romance with her fandom (maybe that’s why she secretly likens herself to Cleopatra, knowing full well she would have legions of devoted followers in any epoch).

    And yet, there are those listeners who aren’t as easily beguiled and “enchanted” by Swift in general or her re-recordings specifically. Laura Snapes, the aforementioned critic who described these albums as a form of “relitigation,” bringing the content “up to snuff” with post-woke culture, accurately remarked, “Still only halfway through, the project is starting to feel a little wearying and pointless, other than in the business sense.” Especially since, with a record like Speak Now remade in the present, it’s all but impossible to believe in Swift’s earnestness. Presently mired in the stench of wealth, prosperity and knowing full well she has the world (and many men in it) wrapped around her finger.

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • No Sleep (Til Every Last Dollar Is Extracted): Taylor Swift Releases Midnights: The Til Dawn Edition—Oh, and Midnights: The Late Night Edition

    No Sleep (Til Every Last Dollar Is Extracted): Taylor Swift Releases Midnights: The Til Dawn Edition—Oh, and Midnights: The Late Night Edition

    For those who had gotten their rocks off on making various memes about Lana Del Rey’s barely detectable presence on what was supposed to be a “blockbuster” duet from Midnights called “Snow on the Beach,” the Til Dawn Edition of the album is sure to please. And yet, its addendum of three songs (one of which, “Hits Different,” was already released on an erstwhile “exclusive” Target version of the CD) hardly feels worth the fanfare of putting out yet another version of the record. Especially when Taylor Swift could have just released the new “Snow on the Beach” (featuring More Lana Del Rey) as a single. And yet, it seems the true purpose of unleashing another edition is for Swift to showcase her “cred” with a version of “Karma” featuring Ice Spice.

    Being that “rap clout” is among the most viable of ways for white girls to prove their worth outside the pop sphere, Swift has only ever engaged with one other such musician on a remix of her song: Kendrick Lamar on “Bad Blood” (a major coup that still can’t be believed). Del Rey herself is no stranger to engaging in the “trend,” having collaborated with A$AP Rocky and The Weeknd more than once. Hence, her ill-advised, apropos-of-nothing humblebrag, “My best friends are rappers, my boyfriends have been rappers” (who? G-Eazy?) in early 2021 after announcing the release of Chemtrails Over the Country Club (ultimately, Lana’s folklore). Fortunately for Swift, the masses seem far less inclined to decry her for anything other than her romantic choices (and yes, Matty Healy is disgusting on manifold levels). Because oh, how quickly everyone was to forget about her obscene carbon footprint.

    As for her barrage of re-releases in the name of good capitalist business (a.k.a. “ownership”), no one would ever besmirch that. Even if “Dear Reader” was the perfect way to end the truest version of Midnights, the 3am Edition. As for “Snow on the Beach,” Jack Antonoff—the producer neither pop chanteuse can get enough off—provides different production this time around (complete with more “divine”-sounding string arrangements) as Del Rey’s voice is “permitted” to have a higher-volumed presence. And yes, it’s still unclear why she wouldn’t do that in the first place, despite her claim to Billboard, “I had no idea I was the only feature [on that song]. Had I known, I would have sung the entire second verse like she wanted.”

    But really, how could she not have known? Isn’t that pertinent information that both Swift and Antonoff would have mentioned to her? Furthermore, she could have sang at a normal decibel to begin with and awaited feedback about whether it was “too loud” or not. Nonetheless, Del Rey insisted her “job as a feature on a big artist’s album is to make sure I help add to the production of the song, so I was more focused on the production. She was very adamant that she wanted me to be on the album, and I really liked that song.” Even if Del Rey’s vocals and “persona” would be much more at home on “Vigilante Shit.” Indeed, “Snow on the Beach” is arguably the most flaccid song on Midnights, apart from “Lavender Haze” and “Question…?”

    Regardless, per Taylor heeding her and Lana’s fans command, “You asked for it, we listened: Lana and I went back into the studio specifically to record more Lana on ‘Snow on the Beach.’ Love u Lana.” Thus, Del Rey is given a full verse formerly taken by Taylor—the one that goes, “This scene feels like what I once saw on a screen/I searched ‘aurora borealis green’/I’ve never seen someone lit from within/Blurring out my periphery.” The two then join in together to harmonize on the lines, “My smile is like I won a contest/And to hide that would be so dishonest/And it’s fine to fake it ’til you make it/‘Til you do, ’til it’s true.” Both women having plenty of experience with that in the early days of their career, only to reach their respective zeniths in the present.

    For added flair, Del Rey layers on her own dreamy mmm-mmm-mmmm-mmms to the repetition of “like snow on the beach” (after the “contest” verse). Which, to be frank, isn’t all that anomalous in a climate change scenario. But we can pretend it still has “phenomenon” cachet for the sake of a jarring love metaphor. So, all in all, it features More Lana Del Rey for sure. Next, they’re going to have to obey a fan request for them to scissor on video for the Waking Up At Noon Edition.

    While Del Rey and Swift theoretically “gel” from a collaborative standpoint—yet still don’t deliver something that special with “Snow on the Beach” (the better Lana feature is on “Don’t Call Me Angel” with Ari and Miley)—Ice Spice makes absolutely no sense with Swift. And that comes across on “Karma,” with Ice Spice faintly saying at the beginning, “Karma is that girl, like (grrah).” Her signature “grrah” noticeably muted. Perhaps not to “scare” the fragile Swift audience with her “aggressive” Blackness. In this sense, Ice Spice becomes the new Lana on the original version of “Snow on the Beach” (now transformed into what amounts to a duet), toning herself down to blend into “Taylor’s world.” Her lone verse is hardly anything to instill fear either (let’s just say Nicki Minaj would have gone much harder) as she promises, “Karma is your chеck’s ’boutta bounce (damn)/Karma is the fire in your house (grrah)/And she ’boutta pop up unannounced (like)/And she never leavin’ you alone (damn)/Watch her put ya opps on a throne (damn).”

    Swift might have let her stop there, but instead, Ice Spice continues, “Got you wavin’ pretty white flags, feenin’ for that cash/Thinkin’ it’ll save ya, now you switchin’ up your behavior/It’s okay, baby, you ain’t gotta worry, karma never gets lazy/So, I keep my head up, my bread up, I won’t let up (never)/Promise that you’ll never endeavor with none lesser (ever, ever)/I be draggin’ that wagon, karma is a beauty winning that pageant, grrah.” Pageants and contests being the norm in Swift’s realm of white privilege.

    Another norm is releasing oh so many versions of things. Ergo, as further proof that Swift inexplicably favors East Coastians (especially those near New York), she also milked Midnights of another version called the Late Night Edition that she was only selling in a CD format at her The Eras Tour shows in East Rutherford. This one also including the Lana and Ice Spice collabs on the Til Dawn Edition, but swapping out “Hits Different” for a “From the Vault” song called “You’re Losing Me” (ostensible shade-throwing at Joe Alwyn). And maybe some Swifties would like to believe Taylor fucked over Target on their “Hits Different” CD exclusivity as retaliation for pulling select Pride merch, but, if we’re being real with ourselves, Taylor is her own big business with capitalist machinations à la Target—and therefore knows that the more versions sold, the more money made.

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Honey, I Blew Up the Taylor in Wonderland: “Anti-Hero” Video Shows Swift Being Too Big For This World

    Honey, I Blew Up the Taylor in Wonderland: “Anti-Hero” Video Shows Swift Being Too Big For This World

    After directing the aggressively white and heteronormative “All Too Well (Taylor’s Version),” Taylor Swift made it clear that she had plenty of other future directorial (and screenwriting) intentions in mind. Whether that will ultimately lead to a feature-length movie remains to be seen, but, for the time being, continuing to direct her own music videos is a good way to “flex the muscle” in the directing field. And perhaps she was watching a lot of Michel Gondry films—followed by Honey, I Blew Up the Kid and Alice in Wonderland—when she came up with the visual concepts behind her first single from Midnights, “Anti-hero.” For there is a calculatedly surreal quality to the narrative.

    One that opens on Swift’s back to the camera as the caption beneath “Anti-Hero” is sure to announce, “Written & Directed by Taylor Swift.” As she sits at the kitchen table (presumably around the midnight hour—since “midnights become [her] afternoons”), she proceeds to cut open one of the sunny-side up eggs on her plate that suddenly leaks glitter. And, to be honest, such a visual is patently ripped off from the Kesha playbook. Only slightly unnerved by the vision, it is the appearance of several “ghosts” in sheets (think: A Ghost Story) that causes her to truly freak out as she tries to call for help from her landline (this just being part of the many 70s aesthetics from the Midnights era), only to find the cord is cut. Much like the thin thread of her sanity as she runs into another corner of her house to hide from the “specters” that won’t leave her alone.

    Indeed, ghost imagery is mentioned a few times on Midnights, with one notable instance being on “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” when she sings, “And now that I’m grown, I’m scared of ghosts.” Even sheet-covered ones that wouldn’t make Lydia Deetz so much as flinch. Another standout lyric that opens the track is, “I have this thing where I get older/But just never wiser.” Which could be part of the reason why she refuses to branch out from collaborating with Jack Antonoff.

    When she finally goes to open the front door as a means to run out and escape, she sees the “vampier” version of herself standing before her with the greeting, “It’s me.” The Insomniac Taylor sings the “hi” part before “Devious” Taylor continues, “I’m the problem, it’s me.” Letting this version of her “worst” self in, Insomniac Taylor starts to let Devious Taylor influence all her thoughts and feelings as they do shots together and Insomniac Taylor takes down notes from the lesson plan Devious Taylor wants to impart: “Everyone Will Betray You.” This being, of course, a philosophy that feeds Insomniac Taylor’s trust issues.

    The next scene is where things really meld the plot points of Honey, I Blew Up the Kid and Alice in Wonderland as a giant Swift peers in on a dinner party of “friends” looking like she just consumed one of the same “Eat Me” cakes as Alice. Despite the incongruity of her oversized appearance, she tries to “act naturally” while the lyrics, “Too big to hang out [here, one is reminded of Lorde’s own fame-lamenting lyrics on “Liability”], slowly lurching toward your favorite city/Pierced through the heart, but never killed” play in the background. She then, quelle surprise, gets shot in the chest with an arrow (for she loves that “The Archer” imagery). As is to be expected, her wound bleeds glitter (as Kesha’s would). Then, as though fully surrendering to her bad reputation, she pulls the tablecloth off in one sweep and sends everyone running in fear, left by herself to eat and imbibe tiny food and drinks.

    Continuing to hang out with Devious Taylor (the “true” anti-hero within) doesn’t do much to help her self-esteem either as she’s pushed off the bed they’re jumping on together and judged harshly by Devious Tay when the scale that Insomniac Tay steps on informs her simply, “FAT.” Because, yes, even thin girls like Taylor have body image issues (but for something more authentic on that matter, one is best turning to Tove Lo’s “Grapefruit” and its accompanying video).

    Wanting to convey to viewers the full weight (no body image pun intended) of her directorial cachet, Swift is then certain to include a dialogue-laden segment that ties into her Knives Out-grafting plot in the lyrics, “I have this dream my daughter-in-law kills me for the money/She thinks I left them in the will/The family gathers ’round and reads it/And then someone screams out/‘She’s laughing up at us from hell.’” This, in its own way, is one of the most candid statements about fame, and the highly specific fear that many celebrities must “secretly” have when entering into the unbreakable contract of becoming a parent. For can a child of such a person ever “love” their money-bags progenitor for pure reasons? Maybe that’s part of why Taylor has yet to commit to having one.

    It would certainly seem like a nightmare based on the will-reading scenario Taylor has come up with, featuring John Early as Chad, Mary Elizabeth Ellis as Kimber and Mike Birbiglia as Preston a.k.a. her money-grubbing children who get up in arms that she’s instructed her beach house should be turned into a cat sanctuary (a large portrait of “Old Taylor” with a gaggle of cats serving as the “in memoriam” photo next to the flower display). Chad refuses to believe that, in contrast, she’s bequeathed only thirteen cents each to her progeny, insisting she’s doing what she always does: leaving a secret hidden message in the will that would give them something more. But the asterisk added from Swift herself is, “P.S. There is no secret encoded message that means something else. Love, Taylor.”

    Accusing Chad of being responsible for this lack of inheritance after “trading in on Mom’s name” for most of his life (e.g., a book called Growing Up Swift and a podcast called Life Comes At You Swiftly), he bites back that Preston is constantly using Mom’s name at the country club and that Kimber is wearing her clothes right now. Kimber tries to say, “No I’m not,” but Preston backs up Chad with the citation, “That’s from Fearless Tour 2009.”

    As the bickering goes on, we transition back to “reality”—back to that house where Insomniac Taylor must dwell with all of her insecurities and paranoias. And with Devious Taylor… who pops up all giant to look at Insomniac Taylor from below as she’s drinking wine on the rooftop. As the two then sit side by side (now scaled to the same size), a third, even more giant Taylor than before proceeds to walk down the street toward them.

    The other two appear welcoming to this ramped-up grandiose spectacle version of themselves, offering their tiny-in-ultra-giant-Taylor’s-hands bottle of wine to her. Because, if anything is taken away from this video, it’s the suggestion that there’s a reason why so many musicians end up with a drinking problem. The “too big for this world” aspect of her persona that’s being played up ultimately speaking to how Swift often grapples with not being seen as a real person, but rather, as an “entity.” And surely, “entities” are immune to such regular people things as cirrhosis.

    Genna Rivieccio

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  • Innovation Stalls on Midnights As Taylor Swift Does A Lot of 2012-Era Musical Recycling While Joe Alwyn Remains Her Eternal Muse

    Innovation Stalls on Midnights As Taylor Swift Does A Lot of 2012-Era Musical Recycling While Joe Alwyn Remains Her Eternal Muse

    While most insomniacs would settle for watching TV all night, Taylor Swift has shown us yet again just how “Type A” she can be by using some of her many sleepless nights for productivity purposes. Resulting in what is now her tenth album, Midnights. And yes, ten studio albums put out over the course of sixteen years is very impressive indeed (not to mention the work put into her re-recordings thus far). It puts Swift closely behind Madonna, who started all the way back in 1983, yet “only” has fourteen studio albums (fifteen, for those who want to include I’m Breathless). Rihanna might have one-upped Swift if she had kept up the pace of releasing an album a year (skipping a release just once in 2008 and then waiting four years in between Unapologetic and Anti), but, no, she had to gravitate toward the fashion and beauty industry instead. Lana Del Rey is the only who comes close to Swift’s prolificness, having almost the same number of records out despite having gotten her first official record release (Born to Die) six years after Swift’s.

    Maybe that’s part of why Swift felt the necessity to include her most comparable contemporary on this record, the only feature on the entire thing. But before we get to that, Swift starts us off with a very Harry Styles-esque tone and tempo (they did date, after all) called “Lavender Haze.” This being a title Swift grabbed when she heard it in a line from Mad Men and then confirmed that it was a popular turn of phrase in the 50s and early 60s. As a song that explores wanting to avoid having to deal with any of the media blitzkrieg that comes with someone of her fame level being in a relationship, she insists upon remaining in the lavender haze of a new love and its honeymoon period at all costs. Saying, “Get it off your chest/Get it off my desk” in that tone that reminds one of her saying, “Call it what you want, yeah,” Taylor indicates that she doesn’t care about the media’s bid for virality in dissecting her life. All she wants is to stay in her bliss. It’s therefore a song that proves you can be any age and get caught up in the googly-eyed version romance paraded in films and books, but the problems of adulthood infecting that kind of youthful outlook always tend to get in the way sooner or later.

    “Maroon” subsequently continues the color palette motif (something Lana Del Rey is also fond of). Musically disparate from anything she’s ever done, it’s a sound that itself has been done by many before her. Which brings us to the fact that Midnights has somewhat stalled Swift’s thirst for something like innovation. Just as Del Rey, she’s started to get too comfortable in the familiar formulas provided by Jack Antonoff, who himself reached a peak with the sound on Midnights via his own band Fun’s 2012 record, Some Nights (which not only reminds one of the title Midnights, but also has a similar album cover involving a lighter), featuring the seminal single, “We Are Young.”

    Musical genres come in cycles, that’s no secret. And the only person who was ever usually ahead of the curve on bringing those trends to the masses was Madonna (except starting in 2008, when she enlisted Timbaland, Pharrell and Justin Timberlake as producers on Hard Candy). Taylor herself has followed musical trends of the moment for most of her career, going the standard route of being a country star transitioning to pop (as Shania Twain and Faith Hill did). Even folklore and evermore were albums that tapped into a moment, speaking to the “stay home” laze of the pandemic era that Swift interpreted as “cottagecore.” Midnights seeks to not only shatter that era with 70s-inspired “going out” aesthetics, but also delves further back into the period when Swift was having her original success with Red in 2012. At that time, other acts like M83, Chvrches, Sleigh Bells and Phantogram were suffusing the landscape with the electropop/synth electronic sound that Swift eschewed for her careful treading along the line between country and pop.

    Nonetheless, Swift lends her signature songwriting style involving lament to what has already been a well-established musical trope from ten years ago. As a requisite “what might have been” song about a former lover, “Maroon” addresses one of the five themes Swift said inspired the record: self-hatred, revenge fantasies, “wondering what might have been,” falling in love and “falling apart.”

    In “Maroon,” a little bit of all five categories are embodied as she describes, “I wake with your memory over me/That’s a real fucking legacy, legacy (it was maroon)/And I wake with your memory over me/That’s a real fucking legacy to leave.” Luckily for the man she’s railing against in this song, the only person she hates more than him is herself, it would seem. At least, if the self-deprecating “Anti-Hero” is something to go by. This track, too, remains up-tempo and 80s-tinged as Swift rues, “It’s me/I’m the problem, it’s me.” Declaring, “It’s me” in that way she once said, “It’s you” on Lover’s “Cruel Summer.”

    She provides one of her most evocative verses of the record when she adds, “Sometimes, I feel like everybody is a sexy baby/And I’m a monster on the hill/Too big to hang out, slowly lurching toward your favorite city/Pierced through the heart, but never killed.” Lana Del Rey doesn’t seem to mind, willingly collaborating on the next song, “Snow on the Beach.” Alas, it is rather underwhelming as a musical marriage, with Taylor monopolizing all the vocals and Lana disappearing into the background (she got far more play in her collab with two other major pop stars, Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus). And, considering all the sexual tension between the two in terms of how much they orbit one another and echo each other’s songwriting style, maybe it was to be expected that this track would be an anticlimax.

    Even the lyrics are somewhat reaching in terms of a “trying too hard” to be poetic bent, with Swift and Del Rey noting, “And it’s like snow at the beach/Weird, but fucking beautiful/Flying in a dream/Stars by the pocketful/You wanting me.” At the very least, Swift offers her best analogy since, “I come back stronger than a 90s trend,” with, “Now I’m all for you, like Janet.”

    Going back to her more country twang (think: the Fearless era), “You’re on Your Own, Kid” shows us that Swift still has the Lana songwriting technique on her mind as she wields Del Rey’s favorite season to reference in the intro line, “Summer went away, still the yearning stays.” With a “tis the damn season” aura in its storytelling, Swift recounts, “I gave my blood, sweat, and tears for this/I hosted parties and starved my body/Like I’d be saved by a perfect kiss/The jokes weren’t funny, I took the money/My friends from home don’t know what to say/I looked around in a blood-soaked gown.” That latter image being an undeniable allusion to Carrie. A character that even tall, blonde and thin Swift could relate to as she was ostracized by the people in her school. Sort of like everyone walking off the dance floor at Christina Aguilera’s prom when the DJ played “Genie in a Bottle.”

    Realizing that she never should have looked to someone else for salvation or validation anyway, she comes to the conclusion, “You’re on your own, kid/Yeah, you can face this/You’re on your own, kid/You always have been.” The “kid” part coming across like it was condescending inspiration from Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.

    Using a vocoder to introduce the lyrics on “Midnight Rain” (because this record obviously needs to have a song with the album’s title somewhere in it), it’s the only sonic moment that doesn’t seem entirely generic as Swift proceeds to revert to her folklore/evermore narrative vibe (think: “The Last American Dynasty”). And, as was the case during “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” Swift reflects on small-town life and ultimately escaping it, this being a rumination, yet again, on the “what might have been” theme. So it is that Swift states, “My town was a wasteland/Full of cages, full of fences/Pageant queens and big pretenders/But for some, it was paradise.” “Some” like the boy she has “no choice” but to leave in order to pursue her big dreams in the big city. And yet, once she’s achieved her fame goals, she can’t help but “peer through a window/A deep portal, time travel/All the love we unravel/And the life I gave away/‘Cause he was sunshine, I was midnight rain.” But surely Swift would have thought the opposite if she had given up her career ambitions to play the little wife. Even so, in her late-night hours, she has to admit, “I guess sometimes we all get/Some kind of haunted, some kind of haunted/And I never think of him/Except on midnights like this.”

    Commencing with a somewhat paltry imitation of Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8r Boi”-style “portrait-painting,” “Question…?” describes, “Good girl/Sad boy/Big city/Wrong choices.” The intro has a brief tinge of “Blank Space” with the same light instrumentation that also uses “I remember” from “Out of the Woods.” A track about humiliation and ill communication, it’s one of the most deviating from a lyrical perspective. So, too, is “Vigilante Shit,” which continues her wannabe Lana angle (this time from an Ultraviolence era perspective, which, to re-emphasize the time period Swift is mirroring sonically, was released in 2013). Most notably when Swift wields the line, “Draw the cat eye, sharp enough to kill a man.” It glistens among all the rest of the tracks, with a moodier, more visceral backdrop than most of the other upbeat electro rhythms.

    Almost as “glistening” but not quite is a song about a girl who loses her shine by putting all her self-worth into the hands of a man. And yes, “Bejeweled” provides some of Tay’s most “poetic” lyrics on Midnights. Including isms like, “Didn’t notice you walkin’ all over my peace of mind/In the shoes I gave you as a present” and “Familiarity breeds contempt/So put me in the basement/When I want the penthouse of your heart.” In the end, she decides, “What’s a girl gonna do? A diamond’s gotta shine.” That it does—which she already made vaguely clear on “mirrorball.”

    Despite now contributing to the cultural lexicon with her own “Labyrinth,” it is the movie of the same name that will forever reign supreme. Plus, it’s a bit douchey to pre-quote oneself. Regardless, Taylor did just that with “Labyrinth” by incorporating the lyrics, “Breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out” into her commencement speech earlier this year at NYU. And even though such words might sound like part of a self-help book, the song is actually yet another ode to Joe Alwyn saving her from the sour taste (something Olivia Rodrigo knows about) that had lingered in her mouth from romances past. Accordingly, she sings, “Uh-oh, I’m fallin’ in love/Oh no, I’m fallin’ in love again/Oh, I’m fallin’ in love/I thought the plane was goin’ down/How’d you turn it right around?” Taylor will likely find that this metaphor is going to come back to bite her in the ass the next time there’s a major plane crash. Plus, being such a “New Yorker” nowadays, you’d think she’d know it’s still “too soon” after 9/11 to talk about plane crashes so casually.

    Gears shift on the maudlin love theme with “Karma.” Never mind that MARINA already had an untouchable song called “Karma” from 2019’s Love + Fear, Taylor has decided to create her own edition. Where MARINA’s was inspired by the #MeToo movement, and particularly Harvey Weinstein, Swift opts, as usual, to make things more specifically about herself and go for Scooter Braun’s jugular. What’s more, she borrows from another electropop band that had a moment in the 00s, CSS, by saying, “Karma is my boyfriend.” CSS already used that metaphor to greater perfection with the lyric, “Music is my boyfriend” (which is how Taylor sounds when she replaces “music” with “karma”) on the single, “Music Is My Hot Hot Sex.”

    Elsewhere, she uses highly specific details to allude to the fact that she’s talking about Braun as she accuses, “Spider boy, king of thieves/Weave your little webs of opacity/My pennies made your crown/Trick me once, trick me twice/Don’t you know that cash ain’t the only price?/It’s coming back around.” At the same time, this song also applies more than ever to Swift’s beef with Ye (formerly Kanye) that started all those years ago in 2009. And yes, Swift has definitely won that war as we watch Ye daily fall further from “grace.”

    On the next track, again one must say: never mind that Florence + the Machine already had an untouchable song called “Sweet Nothing” with Calvin Harris (in, quelle coincidence, 2012), Swift wants to have one too. Hers being more slowed down and stripped back. All for the purposes of, what a shock, providing a bathetic homage to Alwyn as she croons, “I found myself a-running home to your sweet nothings/Outside they’re push and shoving/You’re in the kitchen humming/All that you ever wanted from me was nothing.”

    Swift ramps up her Alwyn prose a notch on “Mastermind,” which allows her to spotlight her inner creep as she freely admits things like, “I laid the groundwork, and then/Just like clockwork/The dominoes cascaded in the line/What if I told you I’m a mastermind?/And now you’re minе/It was all by design.” Well, if one were Alwyn, maybe they would quote Taylor back to her by saying, “You need to calm down.”

    In another verse, Swift plays up her “loser” days as an unknown youth, lamenting, “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid/So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since/To make them love me and make it seem effortless.” Naturally, it’s anything but—and this is part of why Swift has been called “calculated” so many times throughout her career. But maybe it was all worth it for Swift to be able to come up with a riposte like, “This is the first time I’ve felt the need to confess/And I swear I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian/‘Cause I care.” The ultimate curse, but one that many a Sagittarian is burdened with while pretending not to be.

    While the standard edition of the album stops here, the “3am Edition” persists with “The Great War.” Once upon a time, that was what World War I was called, with the assumption that there wouldn’t be a second one. Now, Swift seems to be putting out this record at a moment when WWIII feels like an inevitability. Hence, the war metaphor being only too real despite most people of the millennial and Gen Z set only “experiencing” anything like battle in their video games. As she did on Lover’s “Afterglow,” Swift speaks of a great peace that will come after a great (relationship) war, assuring, “All that bloodshed, crimson clover/Uh-huh, the bombs were close and/My hand was the one you reached for/All throughout the Great War/Always remember/Uh-huh, the burning embers/I vowed not to fight anymore/If we survived the Great War.”

    “Bigger Than the Whole Sky” continues the theme of “The Great War,” indicating a brutal, destitute aftermath as Swift sings softly, “No words appear before me in the aftermath/Salt streams out my eyes and into my ears/Every single thing I touch becomes sick with sadness/‘Cause it’s all over now, all out to sea.” A line like that is ripe with the “we could have had it all” sorrow that pervades so much of Midnights.

    And, again ruminating on that theme, she inserts into the chorus, “What could’ve been, would’ve been/What should’ve been you/What could’ve been, would’ve been you.” Such lyrics also set things up for a later song called “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve.”

    But not before “Paris.” Indeed, not one to shy away from cliches, perhaps it was overdue for Swift to have a song named after the “City of Love” (though it’s really the City of Light). But Edith Piaf-flavored this number is not as the up-tempo rhythms of earlier on the record return for Swift to croon, “Drew a map on your bedroom ceiling/No, I didn’t see the news/‘Cause we were somewhere else/Stumbled down pretend alleyways, cheap wine/Make believe it’s champagne I was taken by the view/Like we were in Paris, oh.”

    Here it’s clear she’s using the city as an imaginary escape hatch (even though she could definitely just take her overused private jet there if she wanted to). Far from the scrutiny and as a place where people—even famous ones—assume they can remain in the “lavender haze” previously mentioned on the first track. So it is that Swift insists her and Alwyn’s love can stay protected if they just “fly over bullshit (as Beyoncé phrases it on “Alien Superstar”). If they just keep pretending “like we were somewhere else/Like we were in Paris.” The power of “pure imagination” also applies when interpreting the flashing lights of paparazzi cameras as nothing more that the shimmering lights of the Eiffel Tower (dimmed much earlier in the night now as a result of the energy crisis that won’t affect Swift). Thus, the lyric, “Let the only flashing lights/Be the tower at midnight.”

    As one of only three tracks on Midnights produced by Aaron Dessner, “High Infidelity” possesses a different tincture than the others crafted by Antonoff. Yet not different in the sense of Swift bringing up still another relationship past, this time likely referring to her transition from Calvin Harris to Tom Hiddleston circa 2016. With a retro video game-esque sound faintly punctuating the music in the background, Swift speaks directly to someone “like” Harris when she says, “You know there’s many different ways/That you can kill the one you love/The slowest way is never loving them enough.” The mention of the date April 29th also happens to be when “This Is What You Came For” was released. A.k.a. the single that prompted Harris to snap at his ex on Twitter with such venoms as, “I know you’re off tour and you need someone new to try and bury like Katy ETC but I’m not that guy, sorry.” This being a result of the real songwriter behind “This Is What You Came For”—Swift—being unveiled.

    Call it just another relationship malfunction. Or “Glitch”—a song that refers to Tay’s enduring romance with Alwyn as a “glitch in the matrix” that the system never thought was possible or would last. As the briefest little ditty on Midnights at two minutes and twenty-eight seconds, Swift makes it count with “sweet nothings” like, “But it’s been two-thousand one-hundred and ninety days of our love blackout (our love is blacking out)/The system’s breaking down.” That number of days adding up to, you guessed it, the six years Swift and Alwyn have been together.

    And, having been together that long, it’s no wonder Swift has to keep dipping back into her arsenal of exes for additional inspiration. As is the case on “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” which further hits us over the head with Swift’s preferred motif of the record: regret about a relationship. In this instance, she doesn’t wonder what might have been, but only wishes it had never been. The likely inspiration being John Mayer, as she mentions her age during this dalliance as nineteen (Lana, too, calls out being nineteen in “White Dress”—must be something affecting about that age). And, just as Jessica Simpson, Taylor would end up ruing the day she ever got into Mayer’s clutches, bemoaning, “God rest my soul I miss who I used to be/The tomb won’t close/Stained glass windows in my mind/I regret you all the time/I can’t let this go, I fight with you in my sleep” (this last line harkening back to the midnights/insomniac theme). That other beloved topic, revenge, is also peppered in with the lines, “Living for the thrill of hitting you where it hurts/Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first.” So it looks like Jake Gyllenhaal is only a runner-up to Mayer’s supreme level of dickishness.

    Sounding slightly like a romantic 80s ballad, the true closer of Midnights is “Dear Reader”—though, of course, what she really means is “Dear Listener.” Seeming to have enjoyed her life advice-giving status as a commencement speaker, she clearly had such a speech in mind when she wrote this track. For it offers “counsel” on how to live one’s life, mostly by staying true to oneself—yet also “bending” when necessary. As Jane Eyre did. And maybe that’s why Swift opted to reference Charlotte Brontë’s literary opus with the song’s title, famously taken from the mouth of the eponymous character when she announces, “Dear reader, I married him” (perhaps foreshadowing her own marriage to Alwyn). Even after the “him” in question goes blind in the fire, placing Eyre in the role of caretaker (but isn’t that what all women end up becoming when they consent to the part of “wife”?).

    Painting herself as a potentially unreliable narrator when she says, “Never take advice from someone who’s falling apart,” Swift still does her best to sound cocksure when she adds, “And if you don’t recognize yourself/That means you did it right.” Even though, just a moment ago in the song that preceded this, she asserts, “I miss who I used to be.” This dichotomy, this push-and-pull between wanting to “remain as one is” while also wanting to burst out of the proverbial chrysalis is what invades Midnights. For we can hear Swift grappling with attempts at being “avant-garde” sonically (you know, for someone who still “has to be” commercial), while staying as true as she can be to the girl she’s always been, therefore the musical and lyrical style (lovelorn, vengeful, regretful, etc.) she’s always relied upon. Which is something of a shame in that someone at her height could release anything at this point without worry of losing her devotees.

    To put it this way, Midnights is not Swift turning her back on the mainstream in any way remotely like what, say, Madonna did with Erotica thirty years ago (this particular album being released almost exactly the same day as Midnights, on October 20th). And if Swift is the artist she seems to want to be, more risk-taking is needed for future records. Something that goes beyond just another “solid win.”

    Genna Rivieccio

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