ReportWire

Tag: Taylor Swift John Mayer

  • 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

    Source link

  • 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

    Source link

  • 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

    Source link

  • 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

    Source link