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Tag: Taylor Swift Lover

  • For Taylor Swift, “God I Love the English” No Longer Applies

    For Taylor Swift, “God I Love the English” No Longer Applies

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    Having recently opted for “all-American boy” Travis Kelce, it seems the days of Swift’s fetish for British men are over. Though, for a while there, it was going quite strong, starting with Harry Styles in his One Direction era. Swift then moved on to Calvin Harris (who would probably specify he’s Scottish, not British—but still), then Tom Hiddleston, then Joe Alwyn. The latter British bloke being her longest relationship at approximately six years (though maybe less, if one is to go by “You’re Losing Me” being written in early December of 2021). Even so, Swift didn’t seem to be fully convinced she was entirely “over” British peen, briefly dabbling with The 1975’s Matty Healy before quickly realizing how damaging he was to her “brand.” In fact, Ice Spice’s involvement in the entire dalliance (with comments Healy made about Ice Spice on a podcast quickly resurfacing during their time together) appears to be something Swift is still making up for now (after already giving her a feature on a “remix” of “Karma”), carting her along into the multimillion-dollar box (a.k.a. suite) seats she enjoyed while watching “her man” play in the Super Bowl. 

    And what she’s also apparently making up for is all that lost time without some good old-fashioned American dick in her life. We’re talking the kind of sausage that is as American as they come: an Ohio-born football player for the NFL. As for Kelce’s own recently-ended long-term relationship, it was with sports and fashion influencer Kayla Nicole Brown. Having been with her for five years (albeit on-again, off-again), it seems as though Kelce, too, wanted to make an about-face, “type”-wise. Because yes, Taylor Swift is about as far from a Black woman as you can get. Nonetheless, she’s been doing her best to get as close to one as possible by way of Ice Spice, who is clearly spicing up Taylor’s fucking life more than Travis Kelce. A man that has only served to bland-ify it with his Americanness and general lack of a “cosmopolitan” nature (let’s put it this way: he isn’t going to be putting a dress on or reading aloud from a book of Romantic poetry anytime soon). What her British boyfriends all possessed, even if only by sheer virtue of actually being in the arts as opposed to being football players. And that’s not a trait to be overlooked. For, as Swift saw forever crystallized in a meme of Kelce screaming like a wild animal in his coach’s face, it’s no good when someone has that much sports-driven testosterone coursing through their veins. You never know when it’s going to cause a rage flare-up. Though perhaps Kelce knows better than to fly into one around Swift, lest he risk having his temper tantrum immortalized in a song. 

    Although Swift isn’t a stranger to dating the all-American boy, including Joe Jonas and a Kennedy (Conor), Kelce is arguably the biggest cliche of what that trope represents. And it’s unlikely that, with future boyfriends, Swift will be able to ever top such a stereotype of what it means to “be American.” Unless, of course, she should decide to go the Lana Del Rey route and date a cop. But no, not even Swift could make cops “chic.” Football, on the other hand, is something easy to breathe life into once more (especially through a highly publicized end-of-game kiss, delivered in a Hollywood ending fashion). After all, it’s no secret that, in the U.S., all of life is just an extended metaphor for high school. Where the jock and the thin blonde girl are treated as royalty while the rest of the “student body” merely looks on with the requisite amount of awe and reverence. Thus, although some might have been growing fed up with Swift’s British bloke fetish, at least what could be said for it was that it didn’t reinforce the already barely latent idea that all the world’s a high school, and those with the “objectively” good looks and wealth are the ones who will be perennially rewarded by society’s capitalist values. 

    And yet, what’s also rather ironic about Swift’s sudden one-eighty toward embracing the cheerleader role in her football player boyfriend’s life is that she, at one point, viewed herself as someone who was not “football player’s girlfriend” material. In truth, it was the very song about this “difficulty” of hers that put her on the map beyond just the country music radio scene: “You Belong With Me.” In the accompanying music video, Swift plays the so-called dweeb (mainly because she has giant black-rimmed glasses holding her back from being seen as the “hot” girl) who lives across from her “cute” friend. Who, quel choc, happens to be a football player that she can’t seem to attain. Not only because she’s a “nerd,” but because he already has a cheerleader girlfriend (also played by Swift, in a very bad brunette wig…let’s just say she’s not sporting the same quality hair as Rachel McAdams in her ten-thousand-dollar [some even say twenty-thousand-dollar] wig for Mean Girls). Thus, “Nerd” Swift is relegated to the sidelines in a far crueler way than she is now, forced to watch the object of her affection look out toward Brunette Swift instead of her, all bedecked in her marching band attire. 

    By the end of the video, though, Swift, in the style of a true high school rom-com formula, takes off her glasses, puts on a form-fitting gown and shows up to the prom so that the football player dude can see how “hot” she actually is without her dweeb costume. Naturally, the two end up together. And Swift ostensibly admitted that she was never born for the “unpopular girl” role. Yet she held off for this long on returning to Brunette Taylor status by giving in fully to the high school fantasy/fairytale she conveyed to us long ago in 2008 (though the single and video were released in 2009). One she perhaps tried to stave off for several years with British men, assuring listeners at one point, “God I love the English” on Lover’s “London Boy.” Ultimately, however, Swift has succumbed to her most puerile desires from the Fearless era in seeking out the validating comfort of the all-American jock. And there’s no doubt that Matty Healy helped give her the final push back in that direction. With The Tortured Poets Department slated to be a scathing spotlight on her years spent with Alwyn, listeners will soon know even more about why Swift has returned to preferring her own Uh-muhr-ih-cuhn breed. Cemented by featuring a song on the album called “So Long, London.” De facto “Hello ‘Murica.”

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    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

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    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.

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    Genna Rivieccio

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