Swifties acting like this is the first time Taylor has done anything wrong as if she wasn’t responsible for a 50% rise in horse euthanasia in Pennsylvania from 2002-2007
The fact that she was able to get what she did to those horses classified as euthanasia is bad enough
Huh, it’s for a script she wrote herself, that has promise.
(And it retrospectively shows that her expansion of All Too Well into a 14-minute version with an accompanying short film was essentially an audition to prove herself)
Like, you’ve got to understand that from my perspective, the whole of the 2010s was this mounting tension in like, the ~conception of society~ that I faced, permitted to pass over me and through me, assembled a not-insignificant coalition in the face of (that you’re part of), as it reached height with actual mobs on the streets of my town I fell into some sort of mythical slumber, and when I came out of the chrysalis not only had I been improved in several ways that don’t happen, but basically everything in the culture has churned through to be eerily ideal-for-me
Like, Matt Yglesias is playing the Michael Kinsley restorationist role (remember when it was gonna have to be Jesse Singal?)
Like, it has become a mainstream understanding that Taylor Swift, the artist of her generation, is using incredibly fine lyrical control to intertwine her persona with the zeitgeist through implication.
Like guys, I had one insult anon back in the day who I respected as a “thou too art mortal” in the ear but you crowd, you’re just bog-standard haters. Which Taylor Swift explained how to deal with seven years ago
She said she wasn’t sure what to make of the breakup reports. “They’ve been so private in their relationship that I don’t know that there’s going to be any sort of confirmation other than, like, she might make some comment at a show, or he’s going to show up at a show,” Ms. Chadwick said.
I mean I don’t know that she’s explicitly said it but she’s been revisiting her older stuff a lot lately – on the Taylor’s Versions, Evermore seeing high school drama through more mature eyes, Midnights and the Eras Tour – and she’s been quite clear in subtext that the “Taylor Allison Swift meets a new man, falls in love, has an intense relationship, breaks up intensely, processes intense drama into writing material, all on short turnaround, repeat CONSTANTLY” era was a matter of untreated BPD.
And that now she’s aware, and handling that stuff in a more mature and productive way, it would be weird if she didn’t channel the experience into one or a few songs somehow, but I doubt it would define the album.
These outlets [Paula Deen’s, Sarah Palin’s, Glenn Beck’s] share a basic form—online video network—and depend on relatively steep subscription fees (the comparison that always gets used is “more than Netflix”). They are fundamentally oppositional: to the mainstream media; to political correctness; to godlessness but also a very particular formulation of uptightness. They are nostalgic for a time when certain people could say certain things without worrying about controversy or shame—they feel like public speech is a minefield, so they’ve made theirs a little more private. Among friends, almost. They long for a wholesome past that they feel has been lost. They are not especially cynical. They are, in effect, a white ethnic media, writing and publishing and broadcasting and performing about the experience of American whiteness as understood by people who genuinely feel that whites are becoming a marginalized minority. Race is not addressed directly in these networks’ contents or containers—identity establishment is left to “urban”-style euphemisms and the projection of a sensibility that is neither explicitly nor assertively white, just inherently white, familiar to whites, deemed important or compelling or novel because it is no longer the norm elsewhere.
you could imagine Roosh-like mission statements for all of them: I aim to protect the interests of white Christian families, a category I’m in…
A gaming site for men is absurd and its potential is small; a culture empire for whiteness preservation is absurd and its potential is huge. But both behave in the same way: they respond to criticism by reflecting back victimhood, and adopting a received language of oppression. This was not their idea, they would suggest. It is what they believe the other people have been doing for years.
[Swift’s] idea of pop music harks back to a period — themid-1980s — when pop was less overtly hybrid.
And, in the same quarters, more overtly white!
That choice allows her to stake out popular turf without having
to keep up with the latest microtrends, and without being accused
of cultural appropriation.
Avoiding non-white “microtrends” isolates Taylor Swift from
charges of appropriation, because they have no specific and recent
non-white influence to refer to.
[In “Shake It Off”] she surrounds herself with all sorts of
hip-hop dancers and bumbles all the moves. Later in the video, she
surrounds herself with regular folks, and they all shimmy
un-self-consciously, not trying to be cool.
Who, exactly, would interpret those signals as not “cool” but
instead “regular?” Not everybody; specifically, somebody.
The singer most likely to sell the most copies of any album this
year has written herself a narrative in which she’s still the
outsider.
You know who else suddenly
feels culturally outside of the mainstream? (Besides, as
always, anyone over the age of 30?) People who are skeptical of
America’s demographic progress! Or who, at least, don’t feel
comfortable thinking or talking about it. If Jon Caramanica is
right, the promotional theory and marketing conversations around
1989, and an overarching influence on its music, can be
summed up as: Intentional, Performed Whiteness. It’s an
artistic manifestation of the old adolescent conversation:
