Taylor Swift - RED - October 22

it's still true that that's a tendency in taylor swift songs, particularly wrt other women she regards herself as better than. i like her a lot (haven't heard this new song with the terrible title yet), but it's annoying. i chalk it up to being young, but it's nagl.

"hey stephen" doesn't fit that descrip, but "you belong with me" and "speak now" totally do

And like - the most superior she ever feels to me is when she's writing about small towns - see White Horse, big world/small town, etc. etc. etc.

it's her fallback topic so she gets the same pass from me that clipse does when they talk about selling drugs or when Merle sings about shitkicking or Death Grips screams about being probed by aliens or whatever

And that's less a 'superior' thing as much as a reaction to being the kid who wanted out of the small town.

sometime she's superior about sexual purity which is fucked up but also kind of interesting. there's an old epic molly lambert post about taylor swift that basically postulates that once she gets comfortable with the fact that she just wants to have sex with a lot of boys, not fall in love with them, she'll stop pulling that particular "she's better known for what she does on the mattress" bullshit

(again i really like the first three swift albums and thinks she's a tremendous songwriter)

lambert goes extremely hard: http://thisrecording.com/today/2011/2/28/in-which-your-ballroom-days-are-over-baby-they-got-the-guns.html

God, I just tried to read that. So many pictures. Jesus.

haha i love molly lambert on this recording, but she's not for everyone. lots of pictures, lots of extreme sentiments delivered in declarative sentences.

Yeah, I agree with her point, but that was just almost unreadable.

looking at it, i'm not even sure that's the lambert post i was thinking of :/ multiple gender studies through taylor swift lyrics posts on this recording.

idk why TS gets raked over the coals for employing tropes that PLENTY of other artists, male and female, do ALL THE TIME without the same reaction, or why TS adopting a particular stance in one or two or three songs means that people go right ahead to pronounce that as being "her deal" as though she - like any other artist - doesn't contradict herself from song to song

all of the problematic stuff is there, even give or take a few wilful misreadings, but there's also lots of stuff which is, like, the opposite of that

OMG, that Lambert blurt was incredible! Unreadable, but incredible! And then I clicked through to her Fleetwood Mac piece, and not only was it written the exact same way but it took 800 words before she even mentioned Fleetwood Mac. And then she just cut and pasted comments from youtube, which I had to skim to see if it ever reverted back to her authorial voice but I don't think it ever did? But I could be wrong.

just listened to this. not sure what to make of it. it's such a deliberate performance of stereotypical teen girl style that it puts me at a significant distance as a fuddy-duddy adult male listener. i felt the same way about kitty pryde, as though the persona is almost aggressively asserting the legitimacy of attitudes and styles of speech to which i can't easily relate. i don't like it, but it doesn't strike me as awful. chorus is undeniable.

it's funny that the "indie" line sticks out for so many, as much of the song is delivered in a similarly affected tone, but it's clearly an intentional provocation, so no big surprise. the air quotes teenspeak is equally theatrical on "you said you needed space - what", "you call me, i love you" and "like, ever". she's a big pop star in her mid-twenties ostentatiously playing at being "just an ordinary girl", but doing so in a way that seems quite knowing, even a bit self-mocking.

idk why TS gets raked over the coals for employing tropes that PLENTY of other artists, male and female, do ALL THE TIME without the same reaction, or why TS adopting a particular stance in one or two or three songs means that people go right ahead to pronounce that as being "her deal" as though she - like any other artist - doesn't contradict herself from song to song

i am asking for confirmation if that's her deal based on the songs I've heard

and while i think female singer-songwriters get more shit than men for regurgitating familiar woes, in general the problem with "why are people giving her grief, when so many guys get away with it?" arguments is that it could be argued that the problem is that guys are "getting away with it."

not that it's necessarily an apt comparison, but male artists who spend a lot of time complaining bitterly about relationship woes are often called "misogynist". so it's not like guys get an entirely free pass. tbh, regardless of gender, i think it's the quality of bitterness more than the fact of complaining that sets people's alarms off.

Are guys "getting away with it" or just being dismissed as dudes being dudes, as in, that battle has already been lost? Like, no one respects the gender politics of John Mayer or Adam Levine or whomever, right? They have no reputation to tarnish?

Just spitballing. Don't think TS deserves much deep thought, as much as she invites it as an easy target first-person singer public figure.

other girls get away with it too - when rihanna or nicki or missy take the "I am better than these other women" approach, which they all do A LOT, it doesn't get called out in this fashion

also part of the reason I think this song raises such hackles is that because she's conveyed the image of someone who's so above the norm in her hits that people are happy to dogpile when she descends into it, as well as the fact that her first single after the album that was uniformly reported as "taylor's letters to her exes" is a broad jingle about an ex.

xpost not saying guys "get a free pass" - and it's evolving (john mayer definitely gets more shit than say, tom petty) - but i can admit women get it worse. there are more guys in the media who scream "WELL WHY ARE YOU BLOWING DAVE COULIER/DAVID CROSBY IN THE FIRST PLACE?" than women who scream "WELL WHY ARE YOU FUCKING THAT MODEL IN THE FIRST PLACE?"

Rihanna and Missy are public ciphers though, and this is an age obsessed with celebrity and biography.

whoa now, who was blowing david crosby?

joni

missy IS better than these other women, let's not forget.

Im willing to suggest that pop music is inherently misogynistic, so in order to operate successfully in that world female pop singers have to "own it." The downside is going too far down the "own it" rabbit hole, which brings us to the Britney meltdown.

xps: gaaaaaaaah!

Unfair catch-22. Unless you're Missy, or Dolly, or one of the select few who is indeed superior.

tbf to Joni she wasn't sure she was blowing David Crosby or eating a hoagie.

Or lounging on a sweaty raft in a pool.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Qaqm69tkZXk/SEovpZhBxiI/AAAAAAAAAZw/JG022uDkZ3M/s320/barf.jpg

lex it wasn't my intention to rake Swift over the coals! Missy is a good comparison in terms of pulling the exceptional woman thing, for sure. I think their sexual politics are pretty different. I think about these things with Swift because I like her music and sometimes it frustrates me.

Rihanna doesn't mean much to me so I don't care if she does it tbh

I think the reason Lambert's been so hard on Swift in the past is because she's also invested in her fwiw.

haven't looked at the Lambert thing yet but I know from Twitter she <3s Swift

I am going to try not to get all full blown stan itt but I love lambert''s writing style >:[

on top of matters of privilege and sexual politics, TS is usually announcing her superiority in a hit ballad rather than a hit dance song. People are more apt to glaze over distinctions between confidence and smugness when there's a beat.

Again, I'm not suggesting Taylor is THE WORST. It's just you seem genuinely surprised/aggrieved she's taking heat for this stuff, lex.

I think Lambert's a great writer but I consider a putting a GIS find between each paragraph to be a near-unforgivable crime.

when I first started reading the this recording archives I was like are you fucking kidding me with these giant pictures, but after a paragraph I was like this woman can do whatever she wants afaic

i haven't read lambert much, but i didn't care for that piece. it jumped around too quickly from one attack to the next for my taste. by the time she got around to taking shots at gwynneth paltrow (for what? no way to tell), i'd lost interest.

maybe that's just cuz i lack sufficient understanding of gwynneth paltrow, i dunno

if you know who she is, that's pretty much sufficient imo

she's not really taking shots at Paltrow either, imo (though lord knows GOOP is p embarrassing). she's just talkin about gender.

read the rest of the lambert piece. it's quite good overall. still have reservations, though.

lambert starts off by drawing a "type of person" box around betty draper (a fictional "ice queen" apparently written by someone working through some hostilities), and the public personae of taylor swift and gwynneth paltrow (both of whom i regard as all but fictional characters, people i only know via mediated representation).

the language used ("prissiness", for ex) makes clear that the criticism of this type of person is inherently gendered. straight men are rarely called "prissy", unless their masculinity is being called into question. calling a woman "prissy" comes very close to calling her an "uptight bitch". it's a criticism that troubles me. i've liked paltrow in films, though she isn't one of my favorite actors. she does seem rather, uh, "prim and proper", lets say, but not in way that strikes me as a character defect.

that is the whole point iirc

i dunno, it seems to me that the "prissiness" in question is being criticized, is being related to the uncritical embrace of misogynist gender roles and sexual mores. that's seems to be why lambert is "enjoying" the schadenfreude of whatever paltrow's said to be going through atm. but i'm not sure i really understood that paragraph, so i defer to your familiarity w/ lambert's approach.

i love goop, it's so ludicrous

i mean obviously it's laughable but i haven't unsubscribed and i'm reliably amused by it

i don't know, that's just a weird reading of the lambert post to me, contenderizer. it seems clear that a deep sympathy for swift and paltrow runs through the piece because they, or at least their public personae, are caught in a thing lambert believes is not ultimately going to work out for them. "prissiness" is the single word in the whole thing that i think could be read as sexist if it weren't lambert's whole purpose to limn a "successful" performance of femininity and show how deeply unsatisfying it is from the inside.

i just want to repeat, swift's investment in those archetypes of femininity is part of what makes her an interesting songwriter to me, and to Lambert, too, i'd wager. a song like "love story" does really thoughtful, nuanced things with the kind of narrative a young woman might be inclined to fantasize about. sometimes it doesn't work out as well imo.

Ernest Hemingway grew up wearing a pink gingham dress and a bonnet until he was six. Charles Bronson likewise had to wear his sister's hand me down dress as a child, because he was so poor.

Lambert is interested in making Swift a better songwriter by forcing Swift to face the limits of her pov.