Taylor Swift - RED - October 22

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.

also she's just otm about how angry taylor swift is. whenever i listen to an entire taylor swift album, but esp. speak now, my impression is, don't fuck with this girl; she is terrifying.

xp yeah, that's the other thing; Lambert takes the role of critic seriously

i wish molly lambert were my friend and we could have lunch and she would talk to me in just the way she wrote her thisrecording posts, all sweeping claims and declarations.

she could even bring huge pictures and hold them up at intervals for illustration; i wouldn't mind

aaaanyway i guess i should listen to this new taylor swift song with the horrible title

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.

yeah, i do that though. i get caught on some irritating stray detail and miss the larger picture. basically, it seems to me that lambert's contrasting women/images of women who seem to have become ensnared in a misogynist narrative with self-defining, role-challenging rebels like curt cobain and courtney love (??? odd choices, but w/e).

personally, as a guy, i refrain from criticizing the "prissiness" that might seem to unify betty, taylor and gwynneth. i refrain because this quality is so explicitly feminine in its coding, and so frequently the target of intense male loathing. you know, the pretty but uptight & bitchy "good girl" who thinks she's better than everyone else. a massively misogynist construct in itself.

as a woman reading lambert, you don't have to worry about that, i suppose...

i just read that lambert article, it's AWESOME

also, i think taylor swift has already worked it out, but at times it's almost like she's trying to hide that she's worked it out

it's not really her point to critique them as people? (betty draper is not a real person! as a fictional character, doesn't she pretty much exist to dramatize the role gender plays in people's understanding of themselves? i mean, i don't watch that accursed show, i'm just saying. i don't think molly lambert claims to know much about the historical gwyneth paltrow, either.) it's more like critiquing a way of navigating patriarchy. if she were complaining about gwyneth paltrow's prissiness qua prissiness, it would read completely differently! (she's not complaining about gwyneth paltrow at all as far as i can tell.)

Cobain frenching Novoselic on national teevee – not a pop kiss but real tongue action – was even more subversive than the damn dress.

xp i know what you mean, lex; swift is definitely smart enough to have figured it all out, but those moments of lashing out at romantic rivals are the single most annoying thing to me about her songs. (yes, it's annoying to me when other women do this, too, particularly when they're like that other girl is a cheerleader! i'm smart! or that other girl is a slut! i'm good!)

xp

again, it's not annoying because it's mean to other women, it's annoying because it's like, you see how you just played yourself, right?

We want for Taylor Swift what we want for Betty Draper, which is for her to realize that the thing she has based her life around thus far is a fucked up lie.

WHITE HORSE! seriously, that song is precisely about admitting that you have based your life on a fairytale and realising it's a fucked up lie.

Swift won't claim her own aggression because it doesn't fit with her idea of what girls are like or should be like (pretty, docile, quiet) but she is already neither docile nor quiet.

this is interesting, because i hear TS claiming her aggression all over the place on her debut - the relish with which she sings "burn, baby, burn" at an ex on "picture to burn", the way the guitars crunch on the chorus of "should've said no" - and the further away from country she gets, the more she seems to lose this.

yeah i will say i don't think lambert gives swift enough credit in some parts of that post, or strategically ignores some songs to make her patented *sweeping claims.* but it's good. she's a force for good.

"white horse" may be one of the most masterful deconstructions of an artist's own aesthetic i've heard, actually.

she claims her own aggression in songs but not consistently in public presentation, i think is what lambert means. it was sort of hilarious to me that one grammys when swift won everything and every time she was like what? little old me? and i was like, come on lady, let your inner tracy flick out.

oh yeah the lambert piece was a+ and i think she knows that swift knows and she's just using swift as a jump-off point (and maybe a warning, because she's definitely correct that swift seems increasingly willing to play that down)

yes i think swift and paltrow and betty draper are jumping off points for that essay, which is why it makes no sense to me to criticize lambert for painting betty draper as a certain kind of person, or whatever. also, you and molly lambert and i should get brunch!

i don't know how to talk about music but why is the rhythm of the new taylor swift song's chorus so plodding? the chorus is terrible. i like the indie record line, though.

and on TS's last album, it was odd b/c the most outward aggression and meanness was directed at women, whereas the songs aimed at guys were weepy ballads - but really i think "dear john" and "innocent", far from being poor-little-old-me songs, were actually way more cutting and withering than "speak now" and "better than revenge", which were awkward attempts on TS's part to be funny (respectively, successful and very much not successful) (i don't think she's naturally funny at all, and "better than revenge" demonstrated all too well the bad comedian's quality of falling back on archetypes and hackneyed gender roles)

"dear john" is the number one taylor swift song to me that is super-terrifying, i would not want to mess with this woman. she's pissed. i like that song a lot.

i don't know how to talk about music but why is the rhythm of the new taylor swift song's chorus so plodding? the chorus is terrible.

yeah it seems very clumsy and basic - too much repetition padding it out, and pretending it's repetition-for-emphasis doesn't work. it's the chorus especially that reminds me of "my life. would suck. without you." - plodding is exactly it

not to beat a dead horse or jam up the love fest, but i get that the talor/gwynneth/betty triange was just a jumping off point, and i think it's a good piece overall. i don't reject the association of those three, but i am a little bit suspicious about the implications, about what's really being critiqued and the ways in which criticism of "traditional femininity" can reinforce misogyny. that's all.