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[vogelmeister]

How are we feeling about Kot Kot after a few more listens now?

I still like it a lot.

[vogelmeister]

yeah that sums the song up

[vogelmeister]

happy april 29th!!! please put in the tags what you’re up to today so we can archive and remember where we were april 29th, 2023

[vogelmeister]

[vogelmeister]

the fact that im on a sydney train in a full vintage dress truly highlights i have zero fucks

[vogelmeister]

women's hearts are lethal weapons. did you hold mine & feel threatened? maisie peters performing history of man during her european & australian tours

[vogelmeister]

The more I think about ICDIWABH the weirder it is. I’m gonna be talking a lot about Taylor Swift as a brand and a celebrity here. That’s because I think it’s relevant, but rest assured that I know that she is also a real person with real actual feelings. In discussing the brand that she has carefully cultivated and works to maintain I am not implying that any of her feelings are fake or anything. I’m just speaking about a specific aspect of Taylor Swift.

Lots of celebrities have a thing where they cultivate a relationship with their fans. Taylor Swift is a bit more extreme than most, since closeness with her fans has consistently been a part of her brand. So when she comes out on tour and tells us that it’s great to see us, we believe her! We’ve built up this relationship with each other and it’s important to her brand that we maintain the idea of this relationship existing.

ICDIWABH shatters that illusion. It violates the contract we’ve formed where we mutually agree that we care about each other and we are all having the time of our lives at her shows. On the other hand, it also functions to deepen our connection with her, as she is sharing her “real” thoughts despite the fact that they go against the branding. This reinforces that we are allowed intimate access to her because we’re her friends and she chooses to share herself with us.

So the song itself is already walking this weird line. But then the lyric video is the lyrics about how miserable she is during the tour superimposed over images from the tour. The video is cut to make the tour look sexy and fun, because of course it is, because it’s in her interest to sell the tour as sexy and fun. And so the lyrics about her treating the tour as her job (instead of something that is actually fun for her) are being placed over this image of the tour as really fun. It’s a song about how the tour is work instead of being fun for her, but the song is fun, and the video is portraying the tour as fun, turning around and spinning this song that undercuts the branding into part of the branding.

There are also parts in the video that specifically cut to moments onstage when Taylor was looking sad or smiling or winking. And some of these are probably staged moments, like moments when she looks sad because she is performing a sad song (for example, “my tears ricochet”) and the performance of that requires her to perform an emotion other than joy. Given the lyrics of the song, these moments are being recontextualized as her actual feelings coming through instead of being part of the act. So using those moments, which are part of the act, as representative of her not performing the act, in a song that is about not performing the act but is being actively made into part of the act.

The levels of branding here are really dizzying to me. The song and especially the lyric video are layering meanings on top of each other quite thickly. It’s impossible to speculate where the real feelings of the artist lie in all this, which is why I haven’t tried. What is interesting to me is the presentation of certain feelings as real or performative and how those are renegotiated several times by the tour/the song/the video.

[vogelmeister]

my absolute favourite thing about these romanian age falsification scandals is the fact that some are still committing to the bit and then we have silvias who went “yeah my age was faked but i had no choice. also i got the years back”

[vogelmeister]

I do think my favourite part of the tortured poet's department is how unreliable the narration is. Like it's done purposefully from the very beginning. This is not from a moment in time where the writer is making sense of things in a way that is logical or connected to reality. It is contradictory, incorporates toxic behaviours, and the actions and reactions throughout different strands are based in feelings that are not grounded or even necessarily based on reality at all.

[vogelmeister]

cause baby now we got bad blood 🩸

[vogelmeister]

is this bit bitter? i think youtube has some but they’re all recorded off a record player…. literally

I only logged on to see if I could find an audio of maisie's new song that I can download but there's nothing 😔

[vogelmeister]

what i think this album did was separate people who treat taylor as taylor swift the human vs taylor swift the brand

[vogelmeister]

its joost groot

the existence of Joost Klein makes me worry about Joost Groß

[vogelmeister]

Europapa will never be the same once you translate the lyrics 😭

[vogelmeister]

this picture of joost performing florida 2009 lives in my head rent free

[vogelmeister]

id also like to say im not in the mental place to go through a friendship breakup again

been feeling mixed on some of my friends recently