#actually this is a girlboss tv show. women rock

[johannestevans]

favourite thing about abusive husbands and serial killers etc on tv is that like. somehow it's always somehow the guy's mother's fault.

like this guy could have hung drawn and quartered his entire family and the plot will be like "and this is all bc of his mom"

"this guy is a controlling and abusive rapist, all because his mom was just TOO nice to him"

"this guy kills people and systematically abuses every woman he's intimate with, bc his mother abused him"

"this guy's mother ABANDONED HIM, CRUELLY, as an INFANT, which made him kill"

like sure maybe that guy's mother sucked but like. did his father. his grandparents. his great aunt. or like, hear me out here… maybe HE sucks? maybe HE chose to do some murders, and it's not one of his parents' fault for what he did as an adult?

[chongmiz]

I heard I can fo it with a broken heart on the radio

And aside from the chorus being kinda awkward (I'm so depressed I act like it my birTHHHdaayyyyyYY)

I think this whole 'i sold you a lie you think I'm doing well but I'm not but I'm killing it so I'm a #girlboss try come for my job' is so embarassing

Because everything shes done over this last year I've thought 'theres a woman doing real bad'

Like I'm not trying to dispute the effort and energy that goes into touring like she does, but a lot of her decisions both professional and personally have made me think uh oh

Its giving 'could a depressed person do this?' But it's about dating the worst men on the planet and looking like shes going to cry on stage half the time

💌 come talk to me, a veteran swiftie in the anti- tag in the same way that martin luther still thought himself catholic

where i land with it lyrically is in conversation with four songs: "mirrorball" from folklore, "nothing new" from red TV, and two other ttpd tracks, "who's afraid of little old me" and "clara bow"

per the long pond sessions, she wrote "mirrorball" partially about COVID's effect on touring ("and they called off the circus, burned the disco down / when they sent home the horses and the rodeo clowns"). pair that with the much discussed WAOLOM asylum line and... it might be because she says "circus," it might be that while i have no personal experience of involuntary hospitalization i Do have basic empathy, but i think of the two great blond celebrity memoirs of the last few years: britney spears' the woman in me and jeannette mccurdy's i'm glad my mom died. which is all to say, she doesn't Have to do it with a broken heart! actually! "the asylum where they raised me" sounds like her pursuit of fame was coerced by say, a stage mom or an abusive contract or monetary need (it wasn't), if she was in an urgent health crisis like ICDIWABH suggests ("even when you wanna die"), she has all the power to postpone or cancel dates. she's not in a conservatorship, she's not being Made to tour; i can imagine feeling obligated to pay the hundreds of people it employs, but she is an actual billionaire, i think she can afford blue cross blue shield PPO plans for a militia. you can interpret "all the pieces of me shattered while the crowd was chanting 'more!'" as resenting the audience, but there's other performers in smaller venues with less freedom and power who need to be onstage to afford food. idk.

then there's the "try and come for my job:" extremely vague as to who is coming for it, and the popular reading is of other pop stars on tour. "clara bow" is my favorite track on ttpd by a long shot in part because it feels like a more mature version of "nothing new;" it's a little kinder to the ingenue and seems to respect her predecessors, recognize that She was the ingenue once, but it does not match up to her actual conduct in public. this is where i become very asian, but besides her being uhhh... pretty drunk at the grammys this year, i think her behavior is more a symptom of white american culture as egoistic and ahistorical—this is the kamala harris "you think you fell out of a coconut tree" meme, yes, but more broadly my complaint is filial piety. acting up in front of the likes of celine dion and tracy chapman and joni mitchell, especially on a night that celebrates all three of them, is absolutely unacceptable to me. they're your elders, they paved the path you're on (nothing new: "she'll know the way, and then she'll say she got the map from me"), but her teenage fans who've never heard any other music don't know or accept that she Isn't actually the progenitor of acclaimed women singer-songwriters

she wants to be seen as a "cool big sister" mentor to younger pop girls or boosting indie acts like boygenius, but afaik she herself hasn't shared the stage with an older female musician since alanis morrissette as a surprise guest on the 1989 tour. sure, she showed up to induct carole king to the rock 'n roll hall of fame, with a solo stage. but as much as people first cringed at luke combs' "fast car" cover, he acquitted himself with his grammy performance. there is true reverence there. if taylor brings stevie nicks (who wrote a poem?? for the ttpd physical editions) onstage at some point soon, i'll Maybe start to believe she doesn't see women over 40 as piles of dust she's either embarrassed to stand near Or, you know, who expose that she did not in fact fall out of a coconut tree, and have more stage presence sitting down than she does in sequins