Taylor Swift - Speak Now (Oct 2010) - hype, anticipation &c

I like her reservation, that it's "probably mindless dreaming", but that her rational objections don't stop the outpouring of emotion. "It won't work, but what if it did"

Favourite line is "...so if the chain is on your door, I understand."

ugh i forgot she dated taylor lautner

i'm with jordan, that boy is not attractive at all. i was going to say "apart from the body" but i can't even bring myself to care about that. he looks like an illustration in a fantasy novel.

good casting on the twilight people's part then

i just think that he looks like a mountainous feline in the face

Something about his face makes me completely uneasy. It's more animal than human.

http://pdxsx.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/lautner-llama.png

http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2007/09/14/svLYNX_narrowweb__300x434,0.jpghttp://blogs.bet.com/entertainment/whattheflick/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/taylor-lautner-b.jpg

swift has a ratface to be fair

she's gotten markedly less ratty as she's matured -- she might as well be nibbling on some cheese on the cover of her first album tho

now she's more mouse than rat -- p common

lautner's eyes are just waaaay too narrow, the rest of his face is almost like a parody of "good-looking features". then again i go for vertical faces, not horizontal ones.

I assume that the actress referenced in "Better Than Revenge" is Camilla Belle? Sort of strange, though natural I suppose, to blame the woman in this setup. Any other identifiers not mentioned yet?

My problem with this album is that Taylor appears blameless throughout. I'd like to see her turn her critical eye upon herself for once. Maybe a song about some of her faults, instead of the continual litany of how she has been done wrong. It was cute and Dawson's Creek-ish when she could write about riding around in pickup trucks and lusting after the quarterback, but I'm expecting a bit more self-reflection from her at this point.

"Dear John" is a very pretty song, but by posing as the victim Taylor relieves herself of any culpability, and the public nature of her self-identified victimization reads as a (passive) aggressive stance.

Um.. Back to December is about her faults. She dumped him, in a bad way, etc. And Mine too, in a different way. And in Dear John she also does get aggressive, warns of revenge with a "you should've known".

thought she was telling herself "you shoulda known" as well as telling John he shoulda known not to cradlerob

taylor is always more self critical than people realize

for instance, "fifteen"

Anyone seen the sales figures published the last few days?

Crazy.

Are they they same ones linked to in Nabisco's article? Are they expecting to hit 1 million?

uh if this doesn't go triple plat i'll be fuckin shocked

silly question, but is this out on vinyl? i'm curious.

My understanding is that a million is in sight

I had a dream last night that I bought this from a record store for only $8. O_O

there's pretty much no way that it doesn't hit 950k, will be super close to 1m too

or obv possibly over 1m

I'd like to see her turn her critical eye upon herself for once. Maybe a song about some of her faults, instead of the continual litany of how she has been done wrong.

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

oh we're talking week 1 haha

so how many songs are based on wikipedia synopses of shitty romantic comedies

0

thought she was telling herself "you shoulda known" as well as telling John he shoulda known not to cradlerob

Or "you shoulda known I would write a song about you".

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

silly question, but is this out on vinyl? i'm curious.

They're releasing a vinyl copy in a month or so, I think.

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

― salem witch bile (Tape Store), Wednesday, October 27, 2010 8:46 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

i don't understand your point

That the title track is about her stealing a guy at his wedding.

what, that biggie song is about cars and money? how uninsightful!

thought tape store loved taylor

another ciara song about dancing with boys?! where the hell are my jill scott albums!

if only taylor sung about being an android I would love her

Or "you shoulda known I would write a song about you".

― Tim F, Thursday, 28 October 2010 02:36 (4 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah, in the CD booklet she says: "P.S. To all the boys were inspired this album, you should've known.;)"

i was thinking that she might be running herself out of the dating game but then i remembered that she's taylor swift, and duh, the threat of having a scathing song written about you prob wouldn't stop any dudes

she's pretty even tho she looks like miss piggy

not that miss piggy isn't gorgeous

See, this is what makes me quite uncomfortable and why I think that Virginia Plain's criticism is quite valid. The whole lack of self examination shown by the contrast of

Title track is about her stealing a guy AT HIS WEDDING.

vs

A whole withering song of hate dedicated to some actress who STOLE HER MAN and the whole kind of slut-shaming thing and "pick on the woman in the love triangle because the man is blameless" not to mention this whole "stealing manz" thing makes me quite uncomfortable in the way that the man in question is treated more like a piece of property than an actual human being with, like, Agency of his own making decisions for himself... All of this makes me super super uncomfortable in a way that I can't just shove under the rug.

On the whole, listening to the album - yes, I think she's a good songwriter, she certainly has a way with a turn of phrase that reveals her to be very clever in a way her critics don't give her credit for. I find her voice emotionally expressive and charming. The music (I don't know what version I heard, I just listened to the regular version on Spotify) is 90% pop and 10% country - not really a problem for me (I don't really want to get into genre signifiers too much because whoa what a tangle of personal and political there) but without the twang it's really not that far away from a bigger budget jangly indiepop album at all.

But my problem is, that time and again, I am jerked back - possibly because of her skill as a wordsmith*? - to confronting gender roles and engrained ideas about "kinds of girls" and the infantilising view of men that make me really, really uncomfortable. To the point where I find myself not wanting to listen to the album to see if the other songs counter this dismal view of gender in any way at all. So sorry but, while recognising her skill, this album still gets a "no thanks" for me.

*is this a double edged sword? I'm able to write off bubblegum pop that holds more troubling ideas because of its lack of any kind of awareness. I get the feeling with Swift that she's smart enough to know better and I feel frustrated by that.

Way too much of the negative (or just ambivalent) writing about Taylor seems to be excessively based on "You Belong With Me".

She writes one song on the album about a boyfriend stealer (and another song where she's a husband stealer...) and people are ready to just assume that Taylor hates women or denies men agency or something.

Guess what: this is a pretty common theme in pop songs! (as I said upthread I think the first thing "Better Than Revenge" reminded me of was Madonna's "Thief of Hearts"; Missy Elliot's "You Don't Know" also springs to mind, though in that song actual physical violence is threatened). And it doesn't have to mean that much: sometimes when someone leaves you for someone else you just blame your ex, sometimes you blame them and the third person, especially (as is heavily implied in this song) you disliked them to begin with. It's not a song about who's right and who's wrong and who should be held responsible in a court of law or at st peter's gates, it's a song about a pretty universal emotional reaction.

I assume the reason that Taylor is held to a standard which Madonna and R&B mostly aren't is that people just assume the latter are dealing in tropes, whereas Taylor makes her songs sound literal enough that people can't help but assume she's sincerely advocating all of the things she says.

I have never heard "You Belong With Me" - I am basing my discomfort on the stated dichotomy of views expressed in "Better Than Revenge" and "Speak Now". The latter, being earlier in the album, made me squirm in discomfort when I heard it first. I wanted to just dismiss that and go "oh no, it's just a silly fantasy a la Busted's Crashed The Wedding with a gender switch" but the whole "kind of girl" thing gave me pause - Busted's wedding-crashing song seems to be just about a love triangle, while Swift seems to be taking sideswipes at the bride's family, the *kind* of people - no, not kind of *people*, kind of *women* that this situation makes them to be.

So by the time "Better Than Revenge" rolls around with its reduction of men to "toys" to be swapped or stolen and its slut shaming and its evisceration of a girl for doing the same thing she did in an earlier song - that's when it all got too much for me, and I started thinking "huh, so this is a *thing* for you."

I'm not familiar with the Madonna or the Missy Elliott songs so I can't comment on them. But this whole "woman steals your man, blame the woman not the man" thing is *rife* within popular culture and it always makes me uncomfortable.

Like I said, maybe I'm being harder on Swift than I am on, say Dolly Parton for "Jolene" (though that song is a lot more complex, conceptually than "you stole my man") - maybe it is because she makes her lyrics seem so personal rather than simply character explorations, maybe it's evidence of her skill as a lyricist that she makes the situations seem believable.

Yeah but surely the contradiction between the two songs is the point: emotions aren't consistent and they're not always right, that doesn't mean we should avoid basing pop songs around them.

The stuff about the family and bride in "Speak Now" is a case in point: Taylor loves dressing in dresses like pastries! But when you're out to steal the husband you (necessarily) don't see things that way.

Yeah, fine, I get it, Swift's emotions are tangled and contradictory -- but they are also deeply tied into a view of the world and a view of gender roles and relations that I find conservative and deeply harmful to women - and to men. Her lyrics and stories exist within a world and a worldview that I have spent my life explicitly rejecting. And it's a worldview that is so amazingly common and often goes utterly unexamined! I recognise that Swift has created or perhaps simulated a convincing and well executed emotional world - but do I want to spend a lot of time in Taylorworld? Really, no thanks.

Do you also think that "Dear John" and "Back To December" and "Last Kiss" and "Mine" denigrate women and deny men agency?

I think that my first listen of the album made me so uncomfortable that I don't really *want* to go back and listen to more of her songs close enough to find out if they go any deeper than the "oh no poor me, you took my innocence" thing they seem to be on the surface.

Which might be a shame, but, hey, there's a lot more music out there that I'm more interested in exploring right now.

As a gay Hispanic male 90% of love songs are explicitly closed to me, so most of my listening consists of relishing situations I'll never encounter. In other words, my agreeing with the sexual politics therein is irrelevant. Surely you can make an effort to listen to an album whose gender politics you find conservative an deeply harmful to women.