#swift zeitgeist

[girl4pay]

the fact that joe jonas is the straw that breaks the camels back re misogynistic divorce smear campaigns is actually kind of fascinating to me i feel like the combination of sophie not being like particularly famous in like a superstar way but still young and recognizable and girl next door-y enough combined with the jonas brothers trying to make themselves the next kardashians but lacking any charisma or hatewatchability so pushing the wives to the front sank that ship

[isopodhours]

I cannot for the life of me manage to keep track of which pop artists we like and which ones we think it's funny to shit on, I work in retail and everything they play over the speakers just melts together into one big indistinguishable mass of vapid overproduced designed-by-committee sludge starring the most vaguely unsettling heterosexual monogamy I've ever seen. They could replace it all with an endless stream of freshly generated ai slop and it would take me days to notice

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

Sometimes do you ever just remember what a gift folklore was in the depths of 2020

[tiktaalic]

Like she wants to be Relevant but she’s bad at it so her song names are slang that’s just shy of being relevant that have been ran thru the ringer and are in the process of getting spat out. But she also wants to be a Serious Artist so she throws in her serious Artist titles. But she’s bad at this as well. But she wants to merge this with being relevant. I have in the past thought I’ve been too harsh on her for my criticisms about how she has no backbone artistically and will change whatever she’s doing to trend with the zeitgeist. And I’ve thought I’ve been too harsh because she’s been famous since she was 17 obviously she’s not going to be the same person forever. But i mean the difference between midnights visuals and whatever this is. This isn’t an evolution of style this is the selling of an aesthetic. What was I trying to say. We must remember and Taylor swift will never let us forget. That she is cringe

[settledthingsstrange]

Unlike the apostles and the martyrs, most of us will spend a significant portion of our lives shopping, scrolling, reading books, watching movies and television, and listening to music. For this reason, taste isn’t a trivial matter that only affects a small, contained aspect of our lives. Taste isn’t merely a preference for the Stones over the Beatles or some one-off affinity for Jamaican cuisine, or Doris Day films, or Monet’s paintings. Rather, taste determines a good deal of what we do with our lives. This hasn’t always been the case.   If we lived on rural farms during the Middle Ages or worked sixteen-hour days in nineteenth century textile factories, taste would play a relatively small role in our lives. Medieval farmers didn’t have to decide whether to listen to Taylor Swift or Frederic Chopin while cooking dinner. They didn’t have to decide between Ordinary People and Transformers on Friday night. They didn’t have to choose between Grace Lutheran and Sponge.TV Faith Café on a Sunday morning. We do, though. These are daily, even hourly decisions modern men have to make. What is more, the modern world is arranged in such a way that a conscious, defiant act of the will is necessary to avoid spending one’s entire life reading, watching, and listening to banal trash. The average man does not so much form his own tastes as he accepts the tastes dictated by his age. He reads what he is told to read, which is why a very small number of books sell so many copies. He sees ten to twenty new movies every year, most of which are wildly popular. He doesn’t deeply enjoy these books, which is why he doesn’t return to them after the zeitgeist stops telling him to read them. Instead, he reads whatever the zeitgeist tells him to read next.

[basiltonbutliketheherb]

hello and welcome to my chappell roan ted talk

these days, more than ever, i am feeling incredibly disheartened by the treatment of female artists and the deep societal misogyny that it signifies. there is such a vast expanse between this and the typical experience of a male artists, that they have come to occupy an entirely different space in the cultural zeitgeist. male artists are often considered evergreen. allowed to make mistakes, to be rude, to release below average material and be given endless chances, to age, and to have problematic pasts and relationships. (yes, i am generalizing, of course male artists experience mistreatment as well, but generally to a lesser, and less permanent degree. we are talking about women today.)

the experience of a female artist is that of being constantly balanced on a knife’s edge. they are idolized, deified and built up to insanely lofty heights, then one (real or perceived) wrong move and they are viciously turned upon. they are built up almost solely so that they can be delicious to destroy.

we’ve seen this over and over in the past with people like taylor swift, demi lovato, britney spears, katy perry, kristen stewart, miley cyrus, ariana grande etc. (blake lively is a current example.) once they reach a level of overexposure and mass appeal, the vultures begin circling. one bad song, or thoughtless remark, or bad breakup, and they are public enemy #1. even when they do something truly problematic they are not allowed to learn and grow from it as men are. their purpose in society is immediately shifted from entertainment at their charm and success to entertainment at their suffering and demise.

this phenomenon used to be mainly sourced at the hands of media figures. journalists, talk show hosts, gossip sites, magazines. this highly visible upper echelon held all the cards and could sway the public in any direction they pleased in a pre internet monoculture, but now, with the rise of social media, billions of normal people have this power while being safely guarded behind a screen, or even wholly anonymous.

the recent years (and impact of younger generations growing up chronically online) have led to a sort of moral grandstanding, virtue signalling, victorianesque societal revolution. in this space there is no room for error. everything female artists do is taken out of context, twisted, and shamed. they are fully dehumanized and treated like a product belonging to the masses. a subject of discourse more than a person. they are expected to be perfect in every aspect, off the bat, with no room to make mistakes or learn. they need to be knowledgeable in every subject and never ever offend anyone, or do anything to bring anyone, anywhere, anything less than pure satisfaction.

there is no right move a female artist can make. if they take chances to further their career they are calculated, selfish, greedy, competitive. if they are content with the level of success they are at they are lazy, mid, a flop. if they are comfortable with their appearance and body size and aging, they are mediocre, not meant to be famous, a bad influence. but if they alter their appearance in any way they are fake, self obsessed, arrogant, and a bad influence. if they appear perfect, well spoken, kind, and generous then they are liars, manipulators, schemers. but if they appear blunt and not perfectly media trained then they are not cut out for fame, ungrateful, annoying, and spoiled.

( i am aware that i sound like the barbie movie monologue, but that doesn’t change the reality.)

the thing is, there have always been haters, trolls, liars who wanted to instigate the downfall of female celebrities. who couldn’t bear their success and admiration, and just wanted to burn it all to the ground. but today, in this social media generation, the call is often coming from inside the house. so often the ones to turn on famous women and treat them inhumanly, are their own supposed fans. people who are so obsessed with this perfect image that they project onto their fave. who feel so deeply entitled to their time, attention, and recognition that they feel personally slightly and attacked when things don’t go the exact way they want.

let’s take for example, the cancelling of taylor swift’s vienna tour dates.

these shows were cancelled by the venue management, due to a planned terrorist attack that was intended to kill 10s of thousands to 100s of thousands of people. due to the delicacy and danger of this whole situation, taylor swift decided to not mention the incident until after she had finished her european dates and was safely back in the US, as to not further endanger herself, her crew, and her fans.

this caused an unbelievable outrage. people who were both personally affected by the cancellations and those who weren’t, came for her throat. they were furious at her for not talking about it. for not coddling them and telling them how deeply sorry she was. for not grovelling at their feet and self flagellating to make it up to them. once she was back in the states she did in fact release a statement telling everyone how devastated she was over the whole experience and explaining how she felt it was important to stay silent until the right moment to speak on it.

now you’d think this would be enough to assuage the angry mob, but no. they doubled down and declared that it was too little too late, not enough remorse, and that they deserved even more of her attention and repentance. the whole behavior reeked of a desire to chain her to a post and throw bricks until she promises to do better next time and to give everyone their own personal concert and cradle them in her loving motherly arms, to make amends.

and these are supposed to be her FANS. people who were willing to spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars just to be in the same room as her. just to breathe her air.

now, taylor swift ultimately will be fine (i am talking career wise), she is one of the richest female celebrities in the world. no one can even come close to matching her music sales, fan base, legacy, and broken records. she can lose 10%, 20% of her fan base and still be on top of the world.

but now let’s look at chappell roan.

in the past 6 months or so chappell has rocketed to fame. as someone who has been a fan for ages, this explosion of recognition and admiration was both outstanding to witness, and deeply dread inducing. especially knowing that chappell stands out as a loudly queer artist, who is unique and deeply talented, who is open about her struggle with bipolar disorder and depression, and has no desire to whittle herself down for public consumption. all of this, while incredible and refreshing, was a clear warning sign for what was to come, given the history of female artist reception, even for those who check every box of being publically consumable.

in the past couple weeks there has been a massive wave of both “fans” and those who didn’t even know chappell previously, turning against her for sport. chappell roan released a statement after having nonconsensual interactions with crazed fans, having her family members stalked and doxxed, being yelled at and harassed on the street, and having her personal history, relationships, and childhood mined for exploitative content.

now this behavior may sound familiar. just the typical feral stan behavior that celebs often experience.

but one key factor here is that chappell is brand new to this level of exposure. her fame exploded before her income could from this success, far too suddenly to have taylor swift level security measures set in place around herself and the ones she loves. too sudden for anyone to adapt to their experience of existing in public, online, and even private spaces being permanently altered. she woke up to an entirely new world and had little time to figure out how to move within it without further damaging her own mental health and safety, and likely few people around her who had experienced even close to this caliber of success and could guide her through it. all with no major record label crafting her image or providing pr.

so, the statement. chappell has recently gone on social media and set boundaries for herself. for how she chooses to move within this new world. she has explained the way this rise to fame has impacted her mental health and filled her life with fear and anxiety. she has made her position clear that she is an artist professionally, but a human being when she’s off the clock. her career is just that, a job. an amazing job, yes, but she is still an autonomous person who is allowed to clock out. who is allowed to turn off the character that she puts on for performances, and be left alone when she is not at work.

this includes, (considered most egregious) fans not touching her without permission, coming up to her in public and asking for pictures or autographs, or shouting her legal name at her on the street and taking pictures of her. as well as not harassing the people in her life or sharing her personal information online.

now while these things all sound reasonable, and something any one of us regular folk would expect in our daily lives, this boundary setting is nearly unprecedented for female artists. anyone who has tried has been deemed a cultural blight.

celebrity worship and stan behaviour has lead to an extremely parasocial society.

fans feel it is their god given right to own every aspect of a celebrity. they “deserve” to know every detail of their relationships, their thoughts on politics and events, their secrets and shames and preferences and loves and traumas. they are “entitled” to their time, attention, and endless gratitude, no matter what they are going through or willing to offer up. female celebrities are solely there for the consumption of the general public, they are to be picked apart and chewed up strip by strip. fans “deserve” to touch them, take pictures of them, yell at them, just for a moment of recognition, validation of their obsession, a glimpse of heaven at the alter of their deity. this is just the way it is, has always been, and will always be.

but chappell roan has said NO. no, this is not the way it has to be. just because something has been tolerated in the past, doesn’t mean it’s not wrong. doesn’t mean the future generations need to abide by the tradition of stalking, harassing, and devouring. doesn’t mean that it should be the norm to accept the potential of home invasions, hacking, and assassination attempts.

this simple act of boundary setting has caused an absolute outrage. media publications, other artists, “fans”, haters, and causal media consumers have come with pitchforks and torches to burn her at the stake. they say she is entitled and ungrateful, despite her explaining how deeply grateful she is to all those who support her and also support her privacy. they say she is a nobody and hasn’t earned the right to set boundaries. that society needs to swish her like wine in their mouths and spit her out once they’ve tasted enough, before she’s allowed to say anything other than “thank you thank you i love you i am not worthy”. they say she is not cut out for fame, because this is what fame is and has to be for all female celebrities. they do not get to have autonomy or choice. how absurd that they’d even try, how selfish and greedy and self important to think they deserve it??

of course true fans are going to rock with her no matter what, but chappell is brand new to most. to outsiders she is a face that appeared one day already cemented in a superstar position, and was suddenly unavoidable, confusing, and suspicious. the court of public opinion and the power of negative discourse have a weight to them which can easily overshadow the newfound success of a niche, less easily marketable celebrity like chappell, who has only just gotten her foot in the door.

in the midst of this discourse something else has occurred to deepen the gash of public animosity. chappell roan was given the career and life changing opportunity to perform at the VMAs for millions of people. an opportunity to grow her critical notoriety and fan base, as well as bring queer representation to the live screen, that would be a massive career misstep to pass up on. in accepting this opportunity, chappell was forced to cancel a couple shows that had been planned for a while. she tried to make the situation work for everyone, but ultimately was unable to. she expressed her regret and apologies and assured everyone that she would be rescheduling those shows when she had the chance.

as we have seen with the taylor swift vienna situation, this was NOT going to go down well.

“fans” came after her with a vengeance. they called her selfish, greedy, fake, and wicked for choosing her career growth over their personal experiences. said she was an ungrateful hypocrite for asking the world for space and then choosing the option to be unhumble and promote herself to the masses. the tickets were refunded, but people had CHOSEN to book hotels and fly out to see her in concert and thus blamed her for their financial burden. just as taylor swift “fans” did with the vienna tour dates.

as if chappell roan should be obligated to recoup them for the financial choices they made, and give them the experience they wanted right the fuck now, with the right level of humility, or else be deserving of punishment.

it is understandable for fans to be disappointed that they didn’t receive the experience they hoped for. that the situation was so sticky and immediate that they didn’t have time to cancel plans and grieve the loss. i know when i waited two hours after the opener at sabrina carpenter’s tour last year, just to find out she wasn’t able to perform due to bomb threats, i was heartbroken and angry at the world. i was frustrated with how the situation was handled by management, but i was not angry AT sabrina. i didn’t evicerate her online and demand that she FIX my heartbreak at once. i sat with my feelings and knew that there would be other opportunities, and that

sometimes life isn’t gratifying, no matter how fucking unfair it feels.

it is becoming more and more rare for any degree of understanding and grace to be given to female artists. every success i witness for the artists i appreciate (like this year for sabrina and chappell) fills me with a deep foreboding dread. because they are considered disposable and easily replaceable in this instant gratification, tiktok algorithm generation. everything has to be right now, done perfectly, and hold up to high moral inspection or else they are slotted for obscurity or public crucifixtion.

meanwhile, every aspect of these situations is deemed frivolous by society. they say if you don’t like it, get out and go work at dairy queen, there’s a line waiting behind you who are willing to appease us more. they say that having income from success immediately delegitimizes any social commentary or personal issues. because celebrities are not human beings. they are religious figures. they are both royalty and court jesters. they are toys to be played with ad nauseam, and then discarded.

but why?

why does it have to be this way? why does wanting to share your art with the world mean giving up your safety, privacy, and peace? why is it okay for male celebs to be grumpy and brash and never interact with fans, but it is a cardinal sin for female celebs to do the same or to transparently ask for it? and why is any of this important to you and i, who are barely scraping by and unlikely to ever be famous? why does it matter when these women generally still have some semblance of their careers leftover even after mass disdain?

because all of this is indicative of a greater issue that pervades every aspect of society. it is simply that with famous people we can see it on a macro scale.

all women and femme presenting people are held to the same standard as female celebrities, but on a less publicly visible level. in our careers, our relationships, our expressions of joy, our community and bonds with other women, and our own calcified internal misogyny.

we are here for consumption, we are here for the pleasure and entertainment of others. how dare we ask for more? how dare we know our power and set boundaries for ourselves? how dare we think we deserve a seat at the table, even as we age and grow and expand beyond the bounds of charming ingénue? how dare we collaborate instead of seeing each other as competitors and threats to our own power and beauty and ability to be loved?

how fucking DARE we ever get the idea that we are worth more than our youth and beauty and service to others?

i don’t know how we, as a whole, address any of this when the matter at hand is so deeply pervasive and engrained in the foundation of society. but i, for one, will start by looking at my own role in the treatment of female artists.

i will take the time to ask myself why even the existence of certain figures sparks a feeling of rage within me, and why i feel such a deep desire to know every detail, action, and thought of the artists i appreciate. why i feel joy and satisfaction when female artists i dislike are taken down, or “beat” by someone i prefer. why i let drama that has nothing to do with me alter my perception of art created by people i do not know personally. why my black and white thinking and sense of justice only applies to those who don’t resonate with me on an artistic or personal level.

i will work on finding grace and understanding for those who are trying to grow beyond their mistakes and be better people, the way that i am trying to everyday. those who exist both in the public sphere and in my daily life.

because it’s never too late to rip out the teeth of the bear trap we were born in.

long story short: chappell roan did nothing wrong. but if she ever truly does, all you can do is ask for accountability, then take a breath, get the fuck over it, and see the bigger picture for once

thank you for coming to my ted talk

[itspileofgoodthings]

There are a couple of things those Online Taylor Swift Think Piecers Writers will never accept but will need to come to terms with before their takes have any merit. And they are:

1) Taylor is a talent. By the least emotional and most objective measure, she has talent, has not lost that talent, and has in fact only gotten better at it with time and practice. These are facts.

I always see reviewers dancing round and round and trying to come up with a million different ways to answer the question “but what is the reason for the success” and it’s like. girl it’s THAT! She’s talented. She keeps doing the thing she is talented at, thus getting better. The people who like the thing she is talented at keep enjoying it. It really is that simple.

2) Taylor is a songwriter and also the Biggest Celebrity in the World. Yes, her celebrity is connected to her work and yes you have to pay attention to it, at least in some measure, to kind of know what’s going on. But I truly believe that it’s not that important to enjoyment of her work and in terms of criticism/reviews it actively gets in the way. The songs do stand on their own. There is a body of work to be seen and appreciated (or not) but it exists apart from the Myth of her as a Celebrity. And I don’t even think it’s that hard to see that! I think it happens as a natural effect of time and being a grown up person who is not obsessed with celebrities. The furor around a Taylor album always dies down and with time the songs alone are left. And then the real work of seeing what’s actually there begins. If it never dies down for you, you cannot ever begin to see her work clearly. And that’s what I always see in online discussion of her work: people grappling—often in a petty and a mean way—with her fame. But that is not necessary or relevant in the way that they try to make it so. In part because, paradoxically, her fame cannot even be processed apart from her art. But you have to care about the art first, the Celebrity second. Because if you don’t, trying to speak on her and pronounce on her (and so on celebrity culture and Current Events and the Zeitgeist in general) will drive you mad and make you froth at the mouth and distract you and enrage you and amuse you, begrudgingly, by turns, and you will end up writing absolutely nothing about her music or her lyrics but a screed about her. With observations about the craft accidentally making their way in but more in spite of yourself than not. Or at least this is what I see happen most often.

And 3) if you can’t separate her work out from her Celebrity Life, that’s fair (I guess it’s fair, once again I don’t know why that’s so hard especially if you are a person old enough to realize that celebrities don’t have to have power over you and that celebrity culture is not something you have to care about but I digress) but if you truly can’t do that, it is fair. It’s also fully on you. You have to back away and recognize that you are not qualified, really, to speak on her work because everything else about her gets in the way of you being able to even see her work clearly. Because all she is doing is literally just releasing music, resting, then doing it again. Because she likes to. Because she is good at it. Because it’s her job. Because it’s fun. Because as an artist this is how she does her work most completely, writing and sharing. Because it’s her way of making it through this world.

If you can’t see that (or any of the above) you are incapable of writing not only a valid or insightful critique of her music but even a coherent one.

[ravenousgf]

saying "get help" is so condescending (unless its funny. and even then it could be funny because of that not despite it and now im getting caught up in technicalities) but really truly actually taylor swift needs some help from someone who doesn't like her recent music. and doesn't think all her decisions are great. the problem is she dismisses all crit by fans (fair enough, We Don't Know You) and loses respect for anyone bigger if they have anything not as peachy to say about her as the cultural zeitgeist does. sad! at least we'll always have love story 2008

[duncebento]

dude i listened to some modern taylor swift today that shit was terroristic and not in the cool way i’ve been making fun of her for her music in 2015 but she’s gotten so much worse relative to the zeitgeist

[woundjob]

my biggest hope for 2024 is that taylor swift makes a statement on gaylors with an obvious, unobstructed tone of deep disgust and i hope that disgust can't be read in any other way. i hope it's completely and utterly impossible for even the most delusional of blonde bisexual tiktok addicts to understand her comments as anything but condemnation. i hope she sounds like when ed helms found out about what they did to the once-ler. and most of all i hope that in that moment, all the people who banked everything on the straightest woman in history being some kind of secret queer look inward and realize that not only are they the belligerent, lobotomized jesters of the pop culture zeitgeist, clad finely in the most ridiculous, preposterous, parasocial relationship clown makeup, but also, most importantly, her music just isn't very good.

[foxes-that-run]

Taylor Swift: There is no happy ever after

BARRY EGAN MEETS TAYLOR SWIFT Sunday Independent (Ireland) -26 Oct 2014

“I think that the only way that I know how to process difficult and complex emotions that I can’t figure out how to navigate through in my own mind is to write a song about them and then they become simplified to me. It’s almost like ‘You and I are going to be best friends. We are just going to hang out! We are just going to go to Ireland and hang out in a pub’ I then know how to process them, when I write a verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/ chorus/out”, she explains.

To interview her is to pay a state visit. You know you’re dealing with a star of astronomical proportions when the record company sends a car to pick you up at the airport. And there is someone from her management team to bring you to a waiting room on the 10th floor of a grand hotel with a courtyard filled with flashy cars straight out of a James Bond movie.

What follows is almost ritualistic. You sign a confidentiality agreement form. Then, after a while, someone comes to take you to a suite where you are given an iPod. Then another person hands you earphones and presses play so that, amid much secrecy, you get to hear three songs from the star’s new album, called 1989, after the year of her birth.

Once that is finished you are brought to another, much bigger, much grander suite, where the star awaits your questions on those three songs and anything else that you might care to ask her. The correspondent from a Japanese magazine is leaving just as I am going in. “She is very talkative,” he says, as an English journalist sits down to his turn after me at the iPod. It is quite an operation.

“‘Star’ used to be reserved for a small number of people,” playwright Tom Stoppard once said, “and when the star category became so vast, they came up with ‘superstar,’ and then they came up with ‘megastar.’”

Taylor Swift — for it is she — is a megastar with bells on. Last year, the cover of New York magazine spelled out her contribution to popular culture’s zeitgeist: “Not Katy. Not Miley. Not Gaga. Why Taylor Swift is the Biggest Pop Star in the World.”

In person, Taylor Swift looks like a 1930s flapper siren, reimagined for a new age of pop ultra-stardom with a touch of the girl-next-door thrown in. She is extremely polite and almost impossibly normal and, above all, fun. Her girl-next-door, down-to-earth demeanour belies the vast scale of her jaw-dropping success.

The Guardian described Ms Swift’s supersonic rise from “ringletted country artist, teenage sweetheart of the American heartland, to feminist role model and the world’s most charming pop star” to become “the kind of culturally titanic figure adored as much by gnarly rock critics as teenage girls, feminist intellectuals and, well, pretty much all of emotionally sentient humankind.”

Pretty much all of emotionally sentient humankind appears to have bought at least one of Taylor Swift’s albums. She’s sold over 30m copies of them. And when you factor in world tours that sell out in the blink of an eye, and endorsements and what-have-you, it is not particularly difficult to see why Forbes magazine estimated that the 24-year-old woman sitting in front of me made something in the region of $64m last year.

“It’s not the hardest job to have in the world,” she says with disarming charm of this day of international media interviews, as I take a seat opposite her. “I try to remind myself of that. I’m sitting in a chair, talking about music. It’s not that big of a deal.”

Taylor Swift, however, is very much a big deal. Her every utterance and action is world news or at least trending on Twitter. Her lyrics are dissected by culture vultures as though they are the Dead Sea Scrolls of post-teen angst. Her 2010 song Dear John had the famous lines, “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”. It is about singer John Mayer, who was 32 when he and Taylor broke up in February, 2010.

The ballad All Too Well included the even more famous line: “You call me up again just to break me like a promise/ So casually cruel in the name of being honest”. The song’s reputed target is the actor Jake Gyllenhaal, whom she dated in mid 2010, and broke up with a year later. Scurrilous reports even had it that Jake took then 20-year-old Taylor’s virginity and then dropped her, abominably, on her 21st birthday.

Then there was the 2012 song, I Knew You Were Trouble, about One Direction’s Harry Styles, whom she was dating for a time in 2012.

Most memorably, perhaps, was when singer Joe Jonas broke it off with Taylor in 2008, and then began dating actress Camilla Belle: the song Taylor wrote, Better Than Revenge was nigh venomous: “She’s an actress/She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress”.

Swift’s lyrics are not so much autobiographical as heart-rending, and sometimes pure vicious lines ripped from her private diary — or what critic Robert Christgau described as her “diaristic realism.” Her new album does not disappoint in the heart-on-bloody-sleeve department either. I ask Taylor what goes through her mind when she wrote lyrics such as, “You look like my next mistake”. This is one of the three songs I got to hear from the new album seconds before our interview. “Actually, that song was a joke,” she smiles. “I wrote that as a joke. And I think people think I’m serious when they listen to it.”

I nod to the effect that I thought, too, she was serious.

“But the idea of that song is that I was sitting around, thinking about the media’s fictionalised, cartoon version of me,” she says, “where I’m like this jet-setting serial dater/man eater. I was thinking about that perception. And I was thinking about how interesting it might be to write from that perspective, if I was that way.

“Like, if I was that girl, exactly as they write about me, what would be my mission statement? What would be my life story, my life’s motto. So I just wrote that song,” says the singer, who was born on December 13, 1989, raised in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, and released her self-titled debut album when she was a mere 16 years old.

What emotions come up for the public when they hear the words Taylor Swift? I ask her. How do you think the world sees that person?

“That is such an interesting question, because I think about that all the time,” she says, adding that being her is sometimes akin to an out-of-body experience.

“I think we all wonder what the perception is of us to strangers,” she explains. “But I think there is no real right answer to that, because everyone has their own opinion based on how much of you they’ve been exposed to. Like, if someone has listened to all my albums then they’d have a different opinion of me than someone who has only heard one song.”

And if you could have an out-of-body experience and listen and watch yourself, what would you think of Taylor Swift?

“Ohhh. I don’t know! I think I would be,” she says sweetly, pausing, “I think I would like my lyrics.”

I say that for such a big star, the lyrics on the new album are almost novelistic — “I’ll end up in flames or I’ll end up in paradise”; “Boys only want love if it is torture.”

Asked what kind of books she reads, Taylor says, “Oh my gosh, I like to read historical things. I like to read biographies. I really like things that actually happen. I just read this book by Peter Evans called

The Secret Conversations, the Ava Gardner biography. It is not necessarily biography; it is a book he wrote about the process of interviewing her for her biography that she then decided she didn’t want to do. Did you read the book?” she asks.

Frank Sinatra threatened to kill himself if she didn’t come back to him, I reply. “You totally read the excerpts in Vanity Fair,” she gushes. Would your relationships be as, er, ... feisty as Ava’s? I ask.

“No — she and I are very different. We have very different personalities. But I love Ava Gardner,” she says of the American legend who had a tumultuous marriage to Sinatra from 1951 to 1957.

She seemed to revel in driving Frank literally mad, I suggest.

“Uh-huh,” Taylor Swift says, looking at me, wondering where this is going.

And you have the potential with your music and your lyrics to drive exes mad. She laughs. “I think that the only way that I know how to process difficult and complex emotions that I can’t figure out how to navigate through in my own mind is to write a song about them and then they become simplified to me. It’s almost like ‘You and I are going to be best friends. We are just going to hang out! We are just going to go to Ireland and hang out in a pub’ I then know how to process them, when I write a verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/ chorus/out”, she explains.

I felt like I had looked in your diary with some of these very raw lyrics, I say to her as the bottled water sits unsipped to her left.

“I feel like my diary has been public since I’ve been 16,” Taylor replies, “because that is true. And I mean, it is very interesting living your life that way because as things have progressed and as you get more known and more, I guess, recognised and all that, there are higher stakes to being vulnerable. Like, opening up your diary to the world; you know you are going to have some people go, ‘Hey, yeah, I relate to that. I felt that too’, and then some people are going to be, like, ‘She’s so annoying,’ You know?” she says.

“You have people who have really, really, incredibly, intensely positive feelings about you,” she laughs, “and then you have people who are giving you intense senseless criticism. I can always handle constructive criticism.”

Aren’t you worse for listening to the intense senseless criticism? I wonder.

“I do try to limit the amount of senseless criticism that I listen to, but I do read journalists’ take on my music, because I think that helps me grow. And, honestly, if someone whose job it is to study music has an opinion, then I think that’s valid. There have been times when I have read a review and thought, ‘ You know what, I could work on that for the next record.’”

But you’re the one who sells millions upon millions of records. You can do it; they can’t. They are the eunuchs in the harem.

“Yeah,” she laughs. “But it’s a fine line, because I love to watch other people’s careers. I love to study other people’s career arcs and things like that. And one thing that I do notice a lot is a lot of celebrities cannot handle constructive criticism. So they only listen to the positive feedback and then they exist only in this world where they surround themselves with sycophantic people who tell them everything they want to hear all the time. And that’s the opposite end of that pendulum swing.”

And then you’d be on medication, I say, by being in that world.

“I have a really high priority on staying sane. It’s a huge deal,” she says. How do you stay sane? “Well — I over-think a lot about everything”

You’re 24. If you didn’t over-think you wouldn’t be sane.

“Yeah! Exactly! And especially as a songwriter you have to stay open. You have to stay open to feeling things — like rejection and, you know, loss and disappointment; and reminiscing about things. It is just the same as you have to still feel joy and enthusiasm and excitement. As a songwriter, I can’t put up barricades and emotional barriers to protect myself.” Were you always so honest? You wrote

Revenge when you were 18. To be that young and write the lyrics, “She’s an actress/She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress . . .” “I just always wanted to be able to say what I actually felt, and put it into a song and put it out into the world,” Taylor answers. “What is interesting is that it is about my life when I write it and then I put it out into the world and it is about someone else’s life when they’re listening to it.”

You said something fascinating in an interview about that song Revenge: “I used to think people could steal your boyfriend . . .”

Taylor finishes the quote, “But no one can steal your boyfriend from you if he doesn’t want to leave.”

“Exactly,” she says, suddenly all girl power. “An interesting part about having grown up with all of my inner thoughts and lessons and doubts and fears and anger issues being put into these songs and these lyrics is, sometimes, you change your mind. Like, sometimes you handle things differently.”

“Like, two albums ago I had a song that I put out called Mean that was about this critic who would not get off of my back and wanted to end my career with his reviews alone. I felt very victimised by it. So I

wrote this song that was, ‘ Why have you got to be so mean?’ It came from a place of such hurt. Then fast-forward and the way that I now handle criticism is reflected in

Shake It Off,” she says referring to her new single, which is old-school pop in the mould of Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl, with Taylor, tongue-in-cheekily telling the haters to jump in the Hudson River:

“I stay up too late, got nothing in my brain/That’s what people say mmm, that’s what people say/I go on too many dates, but I can’t make ‘em stay/At least that’s what people say mmm, that’s what people say/. . . And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”

“Shake It Off is a much different way of dealing with it,” she explains. “Which is kind of like, ‘OK, you don’t like me for being myself? I’m just going to be myself more!’” And who are you? “Me? Wow! You are really . . . ” I’m Irish. We’re obsessed with death and sex and God.

“I am too! So this is like talking to myself. I think what’s interesting — and I have been thinking about this a lot — is the idea of celebrity and fame and all those strange concepts is that it affects people differently in every situation. I see a lot of people where it overtakes them and it becomes them. Then I think I’ve seen other people — I hope I’m in this group — where they remain in somewhat of a normal mind-frame and have sort of a self-awareness about the fact that their life is being . . . that there are all these completely weird and abnormal circumstances swirling around their life. And they are just trying to stay in a normal mind-space about all of it. So, I think, that’s the group I’m in.”

Isn’t it a slight dichotomy? In the sense that you have written a lot of songs about failed relationships and break-ups. If you meet Mr Right and the relationship is fantastic, will your creativity crumble? Does that worry you?

“Yeah! I think about that all the time,” she says.

Why don’t you just lie about your relationships then? You could be in a happy relationship and pretend not to be.

“I wish!” she exclaims. “God, if I didn’t have 40 paparazzi outside my door every day, then that would be a lot easier, but I do think about that a lot, because songwriting is the only reason I do this. Like, if I didn’t write my own songs I wouldn’t be a singer; I wouldn’t be on stage.”

Are you saying you have to be miserable in order to write songs?

“No. I am saying I have to write songs in order to be onstage. So if my inspiration ever dried up,” Taylor says. “It’s kind of like, you wonder if that can really happen. I think after a certain period of time, you have learned a skill; you know how to be open to inspiration at all times; you know how to catch ideas when they kind of land in front of you.”

As Taylor tries to suture her wounds, some of her critics are sharpening their long, bloody knives. They don’t know what to make of Taylor’s brand of l’amour. “Retrograde, a prude infatuated with white-knight romance,” went one criticism in the Noughties.

Dodai Stewart, in a post on the website Jezebel entitled, ‘Taylor Swift is a Feminist’s Nightmare,’ wrote: “For Taylor, 15 means falling for a boy and dreaming of marrying him. My 15 was more like: Flirt with this one, make out with that one, try a cigarette, get drunk, lie to your parents, read some Anais Nin; [Swift’s] image of being good and pure plays right into how much the patriarchy fetishises virginity, loves purity, and celebrates women who know their place as delicate flowers.”

Maybe a more important point that these critics are missing is that if Anais Nin was around today she’d probably be writing lyrics like those in Revenge or

All Too Well and putting them to music so we could tune in to MTV to hear about her tortured love life.

The question of Taylor’s tortured love life has become almost an international obsession. Last month, she was asked by Rolling Stone if she had ever been in love. The answer from the girl who has been romantically entwined to various degrees with Joe Jonas, Taylor Lautner, John Mayer, Jake Gyllenhaal, Harry Styles and Conor Kennedy, was typically Taylor in its Jane Austen melodrama: “Not real love. Not the kind that lasts.” Boo hoo.

I ask Taylor if she will ever run out of break-ups to write about.

“I would probably run out of break-ups to write about if I stopped having breakups,” she laughs, “because my music is very autobiographical. But, on this new album, one theme that you will see that has kind of faded is the idea of the guy, the boy, has faded into the background. It is not as much about writing about a boy or a guy or losing a guy. It is more reflective on relationships and the lessons I’ve learned and taken away from those relationships.” What lessons are those? “There are a lot of them,” answers the young woman who once called one of her songs We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together. “You heard a song called Out Of The Woods [on the new album] which is kind of about me realising that there is no happily ever after. It is a constant struggle. Every day is, ‘ Are we going to make it till tomorrow?’ What kind of guys are you drawn to? “Right now?” she asks “I haven’t been looking. I haven’t dated in a really long time.”

But, generally, some people when they are in a bad space will be drawn to partners who accentuate or reinforce their low self-esteem. Or if they are in a good space, they will be drawn to someone who brings them up.

“I don’t know,” she says, “I have always had that — you dream about the ideal situation, if you ever were to meet someone and it were to be right. I think if it were to be right, it would be someone who is very sunny and bright. I think that would be the ideal match. But then again, I have no idea. I don’t know. I don’t know anything! I haven’t been dating in a really long time. I haven’t been looking for a very long time. I’ve just been focusing on music and my friends. I think it is really important for twentysomethings to take some time to themselves and figure out who they are on their own terms.”

I say to Taylor that if all her lyrics — with the exception of this new album — are autobiographical, then she seems to be meeting the wrong guys on a regular basis?

“I think, I have thought about this a lot, I may have been mistaking my idea of always challenging myself in my career for always looking for someone who is a constant challenge in my personal life. If I was to put some sort of psychological spin on it, it would be that,” she says. “I had ambition in my career and, you know, you’re looking for someone who always seems like an obstacle, a challenge, and that is not necessarily what will end up making you happy.” Why not just fall in love, Taylor? “You’re full of these questions that have no answers! Would you be able to answer that question?”

Give me a glass of whiskey and I’ll have a go, I say. She laughs.

Did you really call Ed Sheeran a substitute boyfriend? “No! Who said that?” She roars with laughter again. “I never called him that. I called him my best friend. He is one of my best friends. But it has never occurred to either of us to date. We would never do it.” I ask her about All Too Well. “That was a song I wrote that was very brutally honest and kind of,” she pauses, “kind of hard to release because putting that out into the world is kind of exposing people to the fact that you’ve got your heart sort of ripped out when you were 19, 20. But telling the story of it from beginning to end was kind of like a way of saying goodbye to it for me.” And healing yourself as well. “Oh yeah! Ab-so-lutely.” I say that I used to love Jake Gyllenhaal’s movies but when I listen to the words of

All Too Well (all together now: “You call me up again just to break me like a promise”) I will never, ever, ever, watch Donnie Darko — the 2001 supernatural classic starring Mr Gyllenhaal, his sister Maggie and Drew Barrymore — again.

Although she has never publicly admitted that Mr Gyllenhaal was the subject of the song — until now, effectively, to LIFE — Taylor cracks up laughing for the trillionth time in the evening.

“Oh my god! You and I are going to be best friends. We are just going to hang out! We are just going to go to Ireland and hang out in a pub.” I’m 47. You’re 24. I’m married. “Bring the family We’ll talk about life.” Taylor Swift’s new album ‘1989’ is out tomorrow on Big Machine Records

[musigenic]

taylor swift’s fame feels like the zeitgeist chewed on the concept of girlboss and spat it out wrapped in sequins. okay, she’s a talented lyricist. okay, she’s got the whole “small-town girl makes it big” narrative people eat up like it’s their emotional comfort meal. but where do we draw the line between genuine admiration and turning her into this untouchable deity of pop? it’s not even her. it’s the pedestal she’s been shoved onto.

the tortured poets department. girl, you’re not sylvia plath at the typewriter. i’m not saying pop can’t be poetic, but there’s a difference between depth and slapping a title that feels like it’s been through an insta-poetry generator. there’s this constant cycle where every move she makes is dissected, hailed as revolutionary. her eras tour... i mean, it’s like the hunger games of tickets. people selling organs for nosebleeds. why? why does it have to be this obsessive consumerism spectacle where she’s not even just an artist anymore, but a cult leader for people to worship at the altar of vinyl variants and limited-edition merch?

and don’t even get me started on the chart fixation. like, did anyone even enjoy music this year, or did everyone’s brains collectively rot into a dopamine chase of streaming numbers and records broken? congrats, she’s the first human to sell out mars. can we breathe now? people act like if her single doesn’t debut at number one, the entire industry will collapse. and the stans… you say anything less than “taylor cured my depression and reinvented the wheel” and suddenly you’re enemy number one. like, chill, she’s good, but she’s not a god.

still, i get it. she’s calculated in the best way. she knows how to pivot, how to keep things fresh, how to sell relatability while staying untouchable. it’s a formula, and she’s mastered it. she’s the girl who gets dumped and turns it into poetry. she’s the boss reclaiming her masters. she’s the girl next door who somehow owns the block. there’s something magnetic about that. but can we talk about how shallow the pop landscape is if this level of obsession feels normal? like, shouldn’t there be room for more than one messiah?

maybe the issue isn’t even taylor. maybe it’s us. this endless need to crown someone, anyone, to obsess over. the numbers game, the constant need to validate our tastes through stats. music is supposed to be felt, not quantified. but here we are, measuring streams like it’s a pissing contest. maybe we’re the problem. or maybe i just miss when listening to music didn’t feel like being a cog in someone’s marketing scheme.

[blue-thief]

oh the wonders of realizing due dates are actually farther than i expected

@marcsnuffy this is all basically just based off how this guy is made up of twelve billion contradictions esp when we're considering gender expression.

i've gone over this before, but he's the type of guy who would read dazai, dostoevsky, kafka, etc in a male manipulator kind of way. this type of guy also goes in hand with the type of guy who watches fight club, american psycho, etc with zero self awareness (i'm not much of a film nerd so i can't really speak about his taste in films specifically).

his dad probably had a collection of old films he worked on, and kaiser watched them all on some old cd or cassette player in hopes of finding some with his mom. even though his mom showed up in more dramatic films rather than tougher serious ones, these ones hold a special place in his heart. he's not in denial about this, but he never brings it up to anyone. around the time he was a tween, he snuck into a movie theatre to watch one of his mom's films.

i believe it was mentioned that his parents started off in theater, and once kaiser became rich enough, he took time to see live productions at least once a month. his goal is to catch up on shakespeare since he never got a chance to learn about him at school (i had to check r/askeurope to see if shakespeare is taught there 😭😭).

as much as it's funny to imagine hamilton fan kaiser, i don't think he'd be drawn to musicals that much. he doesn't mind them, but they aren't usually on his radar. he's considered going to the opera though. for the sake of affirming to himself that he's now financially stable.

he canonically reads psychology textbooks, and i think he has read jordan peterson's books. (SCREAMING CRYING THROWING UP BECAUSE I HAVE PROBABLY WALKED ON THE SAME FLOOR AS JORDAN PETERSON ON MULTIPLE OCCASIONS GET ME OUT OF HEERREEEEEE) i don't think he'd care or agree with jordan peterson but he definitely has read him, maybe even bought some of his works shudders he also read the dictator's handbook + the art of war and has used this in ways that are disastrous for everyone involved

beyond the dazai, dostoevsky, kafka, etc vibe, i don't think there's much fiction he'd be drawn to. at some point, he decided to check out f. scott key fitzgerald, saw jay gatsby, and went "he's just like me fr" (again, zero self awareness)

as for music, i think he would listen to three days grace in particular (i have listened to exactly ONE three days grace song and that is "i am machine" and all i could think was "he would listen to this /neg" then added it to my own liked songs playlist). he might have stumbled across panic! at the disco and he probably vibed pretty well with a fever you can't sweat out. he would not care for any other panic! at the disco album. he also wouldn't care for ryden so he wouldn't read throam. but i need this guy to somehow read throam because throam!ryan ross is literally him.

he probably heard primadonna girl by marina but didn't care at first. it wasn't until he accidentally stumbled across oh no that he was like "i need to listen to the rest of this". he only ended up caring for the family jewels and electra heart, and electra heart is more feminine than most things he would allow himself to listen to, but this is just his way of going "whoa look i'm a feminist i like women i'm listening to a woman and sings about woman stuff". relates to the persona of electra heart once again because AGAIN. THIS GUY HAS ZERO SELF AWARENESS 😭😭 HE NEVER REALIZES THE ART HE CONNECTS TO IS TELLING HIM THAT HE SHOULD NOT BE THE WAY THAT HE IS 😭😭😭

but yeah. electra heart is his limit to willingly admitting to feminine art but this guy is subconsciously drawn to taylor swift but more like in the sense that he's fascinated with her presence in the cultural zeitgeist. which is a strange form of being a swiftie, but his relationship with famous women is strange considering his relationship with his mother. if his mother got big enough that she worked with americans on american projects, there's a chance that she would talk about/be publicly acquainted with a lot of young famous women for the sake of white feminism yk. he consumes their art just through cultural osmosis but his understanding of their personal drama and stuff is weirdly detailed

also these are all totally definitely absolutely not examples of me projecting 😁😁 because i AM self aware and i am better than michael kaiser in every way possible 😁😁😁

[thealogie]

Okay where is the Andrew/paul gay element to Taylor swifts new album? (I mean like which tracks, I haven’t listened to most of it yet)

It’s not really in the album, it’s more in the zeitgeist. The loose chain of thought is this:

in “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus” (a song on the new album) Taylor swift insinuates Joe Alwyn cheated on her with girls and/or guys -> Joe Alwyn bisexual confirmed -> Joe Alwyn used to hang out with Paul mescal a lot -> Joe Alwyn might have cheated on Taylor swift with Paul mescal -> Paul and Andrew seem like a thing and had a group chat with Joe -> Paul/andrew/joe love triangle?

I have to emphasize the earlier entries in the chain live somewhere in the realm of reality and by the end we’re living in a made up reality that’s just for fun. But it’s fun nonetheless

[thegreatimpersonator]

https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/jun/14/taylor-swift-may-have-captured-the-charts-but-charli-xcx-captured-the-zeitgeist?CMP=twt_a-music_b-gdnmusic

"To me, the most concerning aspect of Swift “wanting [success] more than anyone”, as Del Rey put it, is the idea that her commercial drive is outpacing the meticulous songcraft and image control that made records like 2012’s Red and 2010’s Speak Now era-defining classics. For Swift, it seems that creative success is no longer as satisfying as selling the most records and spending the most weeks at No 1. Part of the reason TTPD feels like one of her most enervated records – with the critical response to prove it – is that, at 30 songs, it is overblown and distended, its many bonus tracks seemingly only serving to juice its weekly streams." 👀👀

no because that's exactly it. when i read that quote by Lana (🤮) it didn't sound like a complaint, it sounded so ominous and a red flag for her intentions. because 'she wants it more than anyone'... what is 'it'? im assuming 'it' is attention? because it's really becoming noticeable and desperate.

"her commercial drive is outpacing the meticulous songcraft" and "creative success is no longer as satisfying as selling the most records" really hit the nail on the head. it's very obvious the music isn't important to her anymore, at least not the most important.