Taylor Swift '08: The Hype, Anticipation & Appreciation Begins Right Here

I am secretly an advertiser on that site and this is all a ploy dedicated to getting you to click through.

But if anything, I think he's a Type II who thinks he's a Type I and can't figure out why the two are in conflict.

No I think Type II does exist and you described it fine, but the writer is blurring the lines between Type I and Type II - like a revolutionary socialist seeking endorsement from Alan Greenspan for their ideas.

ha ha xpost.

Seeing Taylor live again tomorrow night!

― Tim F, Tuesday, February 9, 2010 10:27 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

jealous!

The author of that Autostraddle piece is a woman, btw.

i think the problem with the whole grammys part of the argument is that pushing gaga as some sort of transgressive outsider is lolworthy garbage by any standard

apparently the transgressive outsider is Adam Lambert?

Sidenote: I could write a whole new essay about what Adam Lambert is bringing to the table right now for male sexuality

lol

what Adam Lambert brings to male sexuality: shrieking on pitch, eyeliner

i just think it's terrible the way taylor is disempowering girls by becoming gigantically successful on her own terms and writing and singing songs about being a girl. WHAT KIND OF ROLE MODEL IS THAT?

yalls reactions seem just as retarded to me tbh

Seeing Taylor live again tomorrow night!

Pleaseeeee get a live review up on Pfork for this one! Would be awesome.

yalls reactions seem just as retarded to me tbh

― plaxico (I know, right?), Tuesday, February 9, 2010 1:56 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^^

how can people listen to the horrible arrangements/production on this shit?

(and that is literally all i have to say about taylor swift. aside from wondering why she appears barefoot in every video i've ever seen.)

the arrangements are shit hot you fool, and the production is just on the right side of glossy.

amateurist do you like the production on any commercial country music?

seldom

Maxim: unless you can find something to enjoy in >50% of a particular musical style, don't waste time passing judgment on specific examples of it.

that's probably a good maxim.

"Listen up; if I ever get my life together enough to reproduce other life forms, they will not be joining Taylor Nation – they will be brave, creative, inventive, envelope-pushing little monsters who will find a pretty, skinny white blonde girl in a white peasant shirt strolling through nature-themed screensaver-esque fantasylands singing about how “when you’re fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you’re gonna believe them” not only sappy, but also insulting to their inevitable brilliance."

http://images.quizilla.com/M/MichaelJFoxFan/1048637160_lexPKeaton.jpg

one day ilm is gonna be ashamed of this period

hahaha

do ilm taylor fans think this is accurate? http://boompix.com/viewupdate.php?id=48

not meant to be a troll -- i'm sure i never would have discovered "you belong with me" if it hadn't been on the singles poll. think some coworkers know me a lot better since i've been going around singing "she wears short skirts / i wear t-shirts"

i admit i haven't read through this whole thread yet, so apologies if this is retread.

idk what "accurate" means - it's super reductive for sure. i think some of those themes show up in her music but they're done in an interesting way, and i think the people who would cite that as a reason why she's no good are basically saying there's no value to be had in songs that are ostensibly ABOUT those things, which is dumb

The song is about as anti-feminist as Buffy the Vampire Slayer is.

― Tim F, Monday, February 8, 2010 8:02 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm

I reckon that chart is accurate and kinda funny, but it shouldn't be seen as some kinda KO blow (I suspect it's by a fan anyway - who else would sit through all her songs in order to work it out).

Think of those motifs like you might think of the following references in R&B songs:

- being in a club
- dropping by for a booty call
- making love until dawn

etc. etc.

And as with R&B, what marks out Taylor is not the use of particular motifs but the way in which she assembles and redeploys them, the way the songs hang together etc.

Like recently i've become quasi-obsessed with "Hey Stephen", even though it's got one of the most cliched and Taylor-Bingo-Scoring choruses ever ("'Cos I can't help it if you look like an angel / can't help it I wanna kiss you in the rain, so...") - I still feel like it's a really clever, well-constructed, interesting song.

always thought the "i can't help it" innocent shrug of a line was taylor being kinda self-aware about that - i love that song too

yeah, I figure a lot of my problem w/ Taylor is I'm just simply not interested in country or teenpop tropes

It's interesting to hear people reject music based on its lyrical tropes, though (and I mean that without being snide)---I have no interest in clubs or booty calls and while making love is awesome, going on until dawn just sounds tiring and/or drug-induced (which tbh also sounds tiring), and yet I'm interested in contemporary R&B b/c it's full of great *songs*. Ditto for Taylor Swift. If I were to reject music on its lyrical tropes I doubt I could enjoy any non-backpacker hip hop post-Chronic, and that would mean missing out on lots of great songs.

rap's lyrical tropes have changed a lot in the past 18 years and backpacker rap has plenty cliches of its own

sure, but I mean, if I wanted to avoid songs about drug dealing it would reduce the amount of rap I could enjoy by a lot---if that's wrong, let me know, b/c it's something I have to overcome when listening to rap.

right, but that's an ethical issue with a specific trope, not an issue with tropes in general

Right; I'm just saying I'd miss out on a lot of songs I love if I rejected them on their lyrical tropes.

credit or blame for this goes to nerding out on REM records in my earliest musically obsessive years, b/c the lyrics were nonsensical. My friends who grew up on classical say the same thing: they just don't notice lyrics.

I can sympathize more with rejecting contemporary country based on its production (though I don't do that at all).

Oh, I like some contemporary country, I'm just not at all invested in it.

This past year I liked "Need You Now" and "Moustache" and "Welcome to the Future" a lot

"Need You Now" is a jam, it is true. I await a version with Taylor Swift at the next CMAs.

can't really imagine her singing that one (wait weren't we mentioning booty calls as an r&b trope?)

booty calls are also a country lyrical trope! Hell, so are clubs.

but wrt Swift, she's going to be up for an image makeover with album #3 I suspect.

oh totally, she almost has to

she's probably going to have go through an awkward "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" phase

one tricky thing there is that her songwriting is so meta, which deflects attention from "her" as the one being written about. Will she turn into a more confessional songwriter? I hope not b/c I suspect her life is pretty boring, and she doesn't have a wealth of experience to draw on.

What's a confessional songwriter? If she isn't one now, what would you call her songwriting?

By "confessional" songwriting I mean songwriting that's about the songwriter, and moreover "really" about the songwriter: its truthfulness matters. Maybe this is nonstandard usage or there's a better term for what I mean? Swift's songwriting, it seems to me, is more "fantastic", in that it's about imagined happenings. We know that she's had very little happen to her, and so her songs have to be about fantasies---and Swift's meta tricks remind us of this if we forget.

But all fictional scenarios are confessional. I really don't understand the distinction, or why it should matter. When a novelist or songwriter sits down to write, I assume it's all made up.

Don't know if that (the idea that Swift's stories are based on fantasies) is true at all really. For "Love Story" or "You Belong With Me" or "Mary's Song", sure, but "Teardrops On My Guitar"? "Fifteen"? "Picture To Burn"? "The Best Day"?

It was interesting how, in her live concert the other night (which is the second time I've seen her live, but the first time with multimedia) there was a massive amount of emphasis on how she writes songs about actual boys she's gone out with. There was this really corny fake tv special investigation into all of these guys whose lives she's ruined.

e.g. apparently "Hey Stephen" is about the Stephen Liles from Love & Theft (though in that case obv it's a nice song)

My sister turned to me toward the end and said "she must have gone out with a lot of guys already..."

But yours is an attitude toward the text/song that would ignore the text/song's aspiration to truth even if it did matter. In what I'm calling "confessional songwriting", I'm claiming its aspiration to truth does matter, in that it's part of the song's intention: I intend to communicate to you, confessionally, what actually happened.

As a listener/reader I don't typically care about this either.

yeah euler i have no idea the distinction you're trying to draw, or if the former would even be in any way preferable to the latter

xp o ok

But Tim, I take it your sister's reaction is that of course Swift isn't telling the truth. But it mattered enough live to present the songs as if they were true. As I hear Swift, she's writing with a wink, in case we're not as quick as your sister.

No, actually my sister meant it seriously!

Don't know if that (the idea that Swift's stories are based on fantasies) is true at all really. For "Love Story" or "You Belong With Me" or "Mary's Song", sure, but "Teardrops On My Guitar"? "Fifteen"? "Picture To Burn"? "The Best Day"?

But, again, who cares? It doesn't enrich our listening to find out that she really dated a guy named Stephen or cried on her guitar.