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

Still.

There's this running idea (both in Should've Said No - that "you might have still had me" and in Mine, the single of which is still playing on Spodify) of the people within relationships being things, being possessions you can own, and she uses this kind of terminology again and again. And I don't know if it's because she's young and still has naive ideas about what romance is, or if it's because of the culture she grew up in (women are chattel in the conservative mindset, etc.) but it sticks out and it bothers me.

OK, that all said...

Her vocal *tone* on the first couple of songs on Fearless is really amazing, like, she actually manages to capture, really perfectly that breathless, obsessive, OMGI'mGoingToDie sensation that is the simultaneously circumscribed and expansive world of the teenage girl in the grips of a crush. (Which is the best feeling in the world, really.) And her little breaths and whoops on Jump Then Fall are really quite amazing.

Yeah, OK, sorry to hijack yr thread with all this old news but I guess I do see what the fuss is about.

do you think she's consciously using that kind of possessive language, though? xp

There's this running idea (both in Should've Said No - that "you might have still had me" and in Mine, the single of which is still playing on Spodify) of the people within relationships being things, being possessions you can own, and she uses this kind of terminology again and again.

out of curiosity, do you have the same objection to "my girl," "my guy," "my sharona," "sweet child o'mine," "be my baby," "little t&a," "jolene," and about 25,000 other songs?

Kinda, but it depends on the context and use.

There's a difference between saying something like "my baby" or "my Sharona" where it's an adjective modifying an existent person, and refering to a person as "mine" which reduces them to thing-ness. Like there's a difference between introducing someone as "this is John, my boyfriend" and putting a label on someone that says "TAYLOR'S BOYFRIEND, PROPERTY OF MS. SWIFT NOT TO BE TAKEN AWAY."

But yeah, this is a recurrant problem of mine with lots of aspects of popular culture, so no, I'm not just picking on Swift. I don't like anything that reduces a partner to a piece of *property* rather than a human being with whom a relationship must be negotiated.

I dunno, outside of that one line "you are the best thing that's ever been mine" I just don't get that sense of ownership at all - I mean ffs the song is about struggling to pay bills together & staying together through tough times

"you are the best thing that's ever been mine" seems less possessory when the preceding line is "you made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter." possessions don't do that AFAIK.

I'll differ with most of y'all: "Enchanted" is one of the meh songs. The slow part is nice, but the power chords, in this instance, are abrupt and tacky.

what do you think of 'when you were mine' or 'be mine'

H8 H8 H8 the phrase "be mine" with a real passion. But I recognise this is personal prejudice.

how about 'i got you'

i got you . . . grocery bag

putting a label on someone that says "TAYLOR'S BOYFRIEND, PROPERTY OF MS. SWIFT NOT TO BE TAKEN AWAY."

ok. but, like i said, "jolene" -- "please don't take him just because you can." i mean, this is both a standard lyrical trope and also the way people in the real world (at least some people -- people i know!) think about relationships, at least at sort of a lizard-brain level. a sense of possessiveness is very much part of the dynamic of romance and relationships, and i think that runs very deep, it's not just some bible-belt social construct.

which is to say, it seems like a weird thing to single out in taylor swift songs.

yeah, I was going to try and articulate a post about how the language of desire in english is basically interchangeable with a language of possession - 'i want you' 'i need you' etc. it just seems really hard to express sentiments of love & desire w/o involving language that also suggests possession, at least in english anyway

the exclusivity inherent to most romantic relationships makes it really easy to think of such things in terms of possession

Yeah, I'm aware that it's a way that a lot of people, especially young people, think about relationships.

And it is very tied into and related to a view of one's partner (especially if that partner is a female) as being property, rather than an automonous human being with rights of their own.

And that makes me deeply uncomfortable. I think it's a view of relationships and romance that can be very dangerous - that maybe it is a grey area between *feeling* possessive towards someone you love, and thinking of that person as a possession, an object, a belonging. And the latter view is something that needs very much to be grown out of, and transcend one's lizard brain urges if one wants to act like a responsible adult in a non-abusive relationship.

But this is no longer about Swift's lyrics, so I'll stop there.

Going back to what folks were saying earlier, I saw this ad last night and was got very annoyed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jKcG86bNRs

I can't stand this idea of selling an album like it's an issue of US Weekly or Heat or whatever your cultural tabloid touchstone might be. It's just tacky.

I prefer not to know the context for which Taylor is actually singing about tbh. Someone upthread saying how she manages to relate these issues as IRL identifiable experiences is OTM. She's very impressive in that respect.

tbh i just think all the gossip stuff is sort of funny. it doesn't really interfere with the music. i think the songs are (mostly) standing or (occasionally) falling on their own for me. like, the chorus to "innocent" was stuck in my head the other day, and it wasn't conjuring kanye, it was just a good hook. which i think will be even more true as the buzz fades and the songs become just things you've heard a hundred times.

also, maybe the most under-mentioned song on this thread for me is "sparks fly," which i'm pretty sure is the one i've hit repeat on the most. it's a jam.

I've SEEN. Sparks. FLY.

S'thisisme
Swallowin
Mypridestanninin
FrontaYou
SayinI'm
Sorry for
Thaat niiiiight

I'll differ with most of y'all: "Enchanted" is one of the meh songs. The slow part is nice, but the power chords, in this instance, are abrupt and tacky.

― sandra lee, gimme your alcohol (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, October 29, 2010 11:25 AM (3 hours ago)

yeah part of me always wishes she kept going with that template for the full six minutes because the first minute and a half is pretty perfect but dude, that climax is right outta kelly's playbook! completely impossible not to love imo

On the issue of "Innocent" being spoiled for one listener because he or she knows that it's about Kanye West, I don't think the song is about Kanye at all. Like pretty much every song that Taylor writes, it's about Taylor. The "wasn't it easier in your lunchbox days" and "wasn't it easier in your firefly-catchin' days" sections are pretty clearly rewrites of the same sentiments that Taylor expresses in "Never Grow Up" - namely, that everything is simpler when you're young, and that growing up sucks.

Likewise the lines "Did some things you can't speak of / But tonight you live at all again" seem to me to be directed at herself, not at Kanye. I'm sure that Kanye was upset about the "I'mma let you finish" debacle, but I doubt that he was quite that upset about that he "lay shattered on the floor" about it. These lines seem to me to reflect Taylor turning the contempt directed towards the subject of "Dear John" ("your sick need to give love and take it away," "your dark, twisted games," etc.). I suspect that she is not solely the innocent who cried in the dress all the way home, and that "Innocent," although it may have been sparked by the Kanye West controversy, and does contain sections "about" Kanye ("32 and still growing up now") is primarily a song in which, consciously or not, she turns the poison pen of "Better Than Revenge" on herself.

I also think it's not a coincidence that the song that immediately follows the "slut-shaming," as someone put it, of "Better Than Revenge" begins with the lines "Well you really did it this time / Lost yourself on the warpath."

Meant to type above that "Innocent" represents Taylor turning the vitriol directed at "Dear John" on herself.

Just bought and listened to the whole thing. A bit disappointed really. Way too many huge choruses, too few memorable melodies. There are a few, to be sure, but on first listen I don't think this holds a candle to Fearless.

yeah I've made it through a couple of times now and it's just not as fun as fearless. don't know if its the midtempo speed or what

i think this is every bit as good as fearless

well, i'd say that it's slightly not as good, but it's dissimilar enough to feel exciting and like 'growth' and just 'fearless' but the songs aren't as good

Pretty convinced by now that this is better than Fearless, but it took a couple of listens.

i am pleased with thsi album but i'm pretty sure it's not as good as fearless, though the highlights here are just as high. i'm hoping i'll grow into them, but fearless doesn't have throwaways like "better than revenge" or clunkers like "haunted"

I love the chorus to "Haunted", her vocals sound so unhinged. I'm trying to think of a direct point of comparison, the closest things I can think of is Avril (circa second album) or The Veronicas (circa first album) covering Kelly's "Behind These Hazel Angels".

Or Kate Bush!1 Yeah, 'Haunted' is the most enthralling 'rock Taylor' experiment on this album for me. Still unsure about 'Revenge', but 'Haunted' is one of my faves.

i think this is not as good as fearless, but it's an album she had to make at this stage in her career. what makes it less good than fearless: it's more deliberately thought-through, from the concept on down, and for the first time her songwriting actively jars in a few places. jordan otm that it feels like growth, it's just that you can tell how conscious that growth is in places, it's not as seamless and perfectly formed as her teen/high school aesthetic was, and a lot of the new things she tries seem more forced into being.

all that is really more about isolated jarring moments than the album as a whole though, i haven't really been able to stop listening to it this week and the songs are still settling down for me - it's a much denser album than her previous. it'll be in my top 10 albums of '10, definitely.

Interesting, cuz I've concluded the opposite: Fearless was the gawky album showing growth, of which Speak Now is the culmination. I suspect she'll always boast some awkwardness (a good, charming thing, to my ears).

i'm leaning toward better-than-fearless (though not "twice as good as fearless" like rob sheffield said), but i'm happy enough to just call them the two best pop-rock records of the last 5 years. and the reference point "haunted" calls up for me is pink -- it's her kind of stormy goth-pop.

I took a while to wrap my head around Fearless because it was so different to the first album, then ended up adoring all of it. This one i clicked with instantly (because the leap is not so large). Not sure whether I'll end up liking it more or less though.

yeah, i know cis and frank were both sceptical about fearless because they were so into the debut. having heard fearless first, i didn't really have a feeling of the debut being SO different...

god, "long live"...this is one i keep coming to. i recignise that it's in the lineage of "change" but it's so much more than that, which was kinda throwaway and rote-anthemic - she just captures that feeling of being at your best, at your most yourself.

TAYLOR MADE: Drum roll, please. Taylor Swift's Speak Now (Big Machine/Universal Republic) will forever hold a piece of history. The album is now a lock to sell more than a million copies its first week, and wonderers are wondering how high that total could go. Swift is also set to break the mark for percentage of total sales in a single week, with 17-18%, topping NSYNC's record of 15.3% back in March 2000, when No Strings Attached sold 2.4 million. That means one out of every five CDs or download sales this week will be the Taylor Swift album. Whoa. (11/1p)

Swift is also set to break the mark for percentage of total sales in a single week, with 17-18%, topping NSYNC's record of 15.3% back in March 2000, when No Strings Attached sold 2.4 million.

I like how they're skating over the not so subtle shift in overall sales amounts between 2000 and 2010...

i've listened to this so much i think it's making me ill

yes i'm addicted. pleasantly so it must be said. i'm interested in that i felt after 3 listens that i'd heard it all, but that with subsequent listens it unfolds still more. it's a very accomplished piece of work.

going back to that yahoo exegesis -- bob lefsetz? really?

http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2010/10/19/that-taylor-swift-song/

I get e-mail every day telling me I’m an asshole. As a matter of fact, the same guy e-mails me every day to tell me I’m a shithead. Let me see, he’s e-mailed me 295 times so far.

ok fess up

Taylor Swift captured the teen zeitgeist better than anyone in this century. And the hooks in her songs made them catchy. Her material was sincere and honest.

But she still can’t sing.

And if this song is really about me, I wish it were better.

lol

wowowowow @ taylor's sales. surely she'll be the last person to cross a million in a week. & she's probably going to outsell the top 50 combined.

I really like her songs that are sort of directed at kids (Mean, The Best Day, Never Grow Up). She should totally do a children's album.

This record is growing on me, but slowly. I've got a laundry list of complaints, but don't really want to post them until I listen to this a few more times to see if I'll come around on them.

the grammy criticisms may have triggered "mean" but everything about the actual song refers to stuff from much earlier - the overt country feel (and gauche language) acting as a throwback to a younger taylor, the lyric about "someday i'll be living in a big city" (like, by the grammys she already was).

this album is kind of like love king in that objectively i have a ton of complaints and reasons why i prefer older albums, but in practice i just keep on listening to them over and over again - it was a real shock to me when i checked last.fm and found that i'd listened to love king WAY more than any other album this year, as i'd assumed it'd wind up as, like, my no 5 album of the year or something. same thing happening here.