Taylor Swift Glitchy Snake Gifs thread 2017 - Reputation

evol, you mean white women without a college degree

Flopson otm. Clearly Kanye is the quintessential white female Trump supporter.

if white women went 53% for Trump overall the 18-29 figure quoted above sounds about right

it's funny that Kanye actually supported Trump irl yet TS is 'pop-star exemplar of the white female Trump supporter'

― flopson, Tuesday, August 29, 2017 4:18 PM (thirty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

taylor swift is white tho

I'd make some snarky post ITT about the ridiculousness of Kanye vs Taylor as a political frame, but I don't really want to be part of this narrative.

ya the point is not to debate whether or not TS is or is not a Trump supporter, any more than it's useful to debate whether or not that-woman-in-a-pussy-hat-is-or-is-not-a-TERF...

"Presenting oneself as a victim" is a tactic used by lots of established songwriters once they've achieved some level of success, and they seek to maintain the cultural capital that they've accumulated. I don't think there's functionally anything different between what Taylor is doing here than there was when George wrote "Taxman", or Pink Floyd did "Pigs", or Dire Straits did "Money For Nothing", or [redacted] did with [redacted]. It's people-in-positions-of-comfort-and-privilege building a world in which they are victims. And (instinctively, to my aesthetic radar), it's the same mechanism that turned comfortable white people (and Kanye too I guess) into momentary Trump supporters.

this isn't a "tactic" newly employed by Swift, though ; listen to how she sings the last chorus of "Tim McGraw".

fighting the urge to defend Money For Nothing, which I don't think really fits with those other songs at all

xp Mmm I see what you're saying but I'm not talking about writing cathartic relationship songs as being the same vein of this kind of "victimhood chasing".

Sorry my mind is in overdrive but I've spent the last few years analyzing the lyrics to "You Belong With Me" as a song sung from the perspective of somebody with paranoid delusions, and about how "Wildest Dreams" has enough poorly weighted stanzas to conclude that a Swede was in the room when the lyric was written, I really think a lot about Taylor Swift I guess

Even more obvious to me than white rockers from the 60s and 70s are all the subsequent alternative rock heroes who pretty much all traded in victim-narratives. Somehow complaining about being oppressed by the system gets more of a free pass though, even if the cage in which you are a rat is dripping with gold.

If the frame is victim-narratives then Swift's got lots of others. Why is the new song worse in this regard than "Mean" or even "Picture To Burn"? I'd accepted long ago that victimhood is a key narrative device for her ("Better Than Revenge", etc.). It doesn't make for her finest moments (though "Tim McGraw"...), I agree.

I don't really know how to say this, but the ugliness about Taylor pursuing this beef, and Kanye too (to an extent), to my eyes, is that it implies a kind of Identity Politics Cold War in which both parties (a white woman, a black man) are seeking to define each other as oppressed by the other. The fact that race/gender isn't explicit in this beef doesn't matter-- (neither party would dare have such persistent or vociferous beef with a black woman or an LGBTQ entertainer). It feels as if there's a power struggle at play from both parties that seeks to capitalize on stereotypes (Taylor is a lying snake, Kanye is a misogynist) and definitively label the other party as the aggressor. Does this make any sense at all? It's the OJ trial except with shitty songs

I confess I know nothing of her "beef" with Kanye; I am generally ignorant of pop culture news.

We'll see if the rest of the album ruminates on beef. It seems like each album's had one of these and they've been singles. She knows her audience.

Does an artist have a responsibility to lead her audience past trifles into deeper subjects? But maybe the idea is that she could try, and (it seems) isn't, and that's disappointing.

It's people-in-positions-of-comfort-and-privilege building a world in which they are victims. And (instinctively, to my aesthetic radar), it's the same mechanism that turned comfortable white people (and Kanye too I guess) into momentary Trump supporters.

― fgti, Tuesday, August 29, 2017 5:11 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago)

honestly man this is just a meaninglessly simple lens through which to view art, imo. rich and famous people have struggles, failures, embarrassments etc too, and it can be the basis for genuine expression and art. i get the feeling this is more of a proxy fight (taylor and "her fans" vs kanye and "his fans") rather than an actual criticism of her as an artist.

one thing ilx is good for is watching dumb culture emerge in real time... i forgot i started this thread!
Kanye vs. Taylor Swift: Dumbest beef of all time

If the frame is victim-narratives then Swift's got lots of others. Why is the new song worse in this regard than "Mean" or even "Picture To Burn"? I'd accepted long ago that victimhood is a key narrative device for her ("Better Than Revenge", etc.). It doesn't make for her finest moments (though "Tim McGraw"...), I agree.

Agreed. This is why I'm not put out by this song; it's a mediocre first single using familiar Swiftian tropes.

Where I disagree: I'd consider every song you mention among her best, especially "Tim McGraw."

I don't really know how to say this, but the ugliness about Taylor pursuing this beef, and Kanye too (to an extent), to my eyes, is that it implies a kind of Identity Politics Cold War in which both parties (a white woman, a black man) are seeking to define each other as oppressed by the other. The fact that race/gender isn't explicit in this beef doesn't matter-- (neither party would dare have such persistent or vociferous beef with a black woman or an LGBTQ entertainer). It feels as if there's a power struggle at play from both parties that seeks to capitalize on stereotypes (Taylor is a lying snake, Kanye is a misogynist) and definitively label the other party as the aggressor. Does this make any sense at all? It's the OJ trial except with shitty songs

― fgti, Tuesday, August 29, 2017 5:37 PM (nine minutes ago)

ok great, we're saying what we mean now. i struggle with this sort of analysis because it's so ubiquitous among the types of intellectuals i tend to follow, but i find it to be reductive and essentialist. to me, implying that kanye and talyor are equally at fault in this "beef" -- given the ugly, inexcusable things kanye has done, like call her a "bitch" on one of his tracks and saying she "owes him sex" -- or even that it is TS who has crossed the line, is unacceptable. what drives this? because we're sensitive to the optics of criticizing the black artist and defending the white one? fuck that, imho

Let's say the song is about what y'all say it's about: revenge on Kanye. Is her insistence on exacting musical revenge as terrible as what Kanye has said about her in public and his material?

We plunge into the rabbit hole of biographical criticism.

important to note if the artists themselves didn't capitalize off this beef (however real or fake it is) then it would be monopolized by the media/industry as usual which doesn't seem a whole lot better. at least this way they have some agency in driving their careers.

honestly man this is just a meaninglessly simple lens through which to view art, imo. rich and famous people have struggles, failures, embarrassments etc too, and it can be the basis for genuine expression and art. i get the feeling this is more of a proxy fight (taylor and "her fans" vs kanye and "his fans") rather than an actual criticism of her as an artist.

Not at all even remotely in the slightest. I've seen in real time hungry musicians turn comfortable (or old!) and then struggle with a literal changed identity and how might they find a nice place in the room to build a songwriting world. More often than not there is some manner of invented hardship at play.

I'm also not trying to imply that Taylor doesn't ~deserve~ to feel victimized by "Famous"-- that song is execrable trash and everybody who heard it felt victimized and even Nina Simone came back from the dead to complain

lol

haha

Wait, when did Kanye ever say Taylor owed him sex? That's horrible!

he sent an invoice iirc

It's cos he "made that bitch famous" iirc, the solipsism of which is worthy of Trump. And there's no comparison between West's public sexual harassment of Swift and her reaction imo, "biographical criticism" doesn't enter into it.

Ok lol xp

"You Belong With Me" as a song sung from the perspective of somebody with paranoid delusions
otm

Okay so I kinda adore the video and it has made me reassess the entire meaning of the chorus.

Kanye's fame-granting assertion in "famous" isn't as much solipsistic as it is evidence of pre-platform filter bubbles emerging in late-00s pop consumption. Way before that song even came out, I read comments and tweets from Kanye fans saying that he put Taylor on the map, that "nobody" knew who she was before the 2009 VMAs. Obviously the sweeping-generalization nature of those statements was false - she was selling more than Kanye by that point! - but she wasn't on the Hot 97/Nah Right radar at all.

sad because Kanye was just trying to make Beyoncé famous

neither party would dare have such persistent or vociferous beef with a black woman or an LGBTQ entertainer

so that whole nicki minaj thing didn't exist, I guess

Funnily enough, Taylor's swift backdown from her argument with Nicki probably supports that proposition, at least on the surface. Although Occam's razor suggests the better explanation is she immediately realised she had misunderstood Nicki and was barking up the wrong tree, rather than because she considered Nicki would beat her on identity politics points.

Taylor Swift also began the LWYMMD campaign by uploading a video of a snake, which is a reference to Kim Kardashian.

Though, again, she seems to have immediately pivoted onto Kanye after that.

Or was she referencing
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/a3/1c/5e/a31c5ec5588d47a82c362b56f25aec7d.jpg

The Taylor-Paula feud is ON!

Seriously though the video (esp. the ending) makes me think that the emergent consensus hot-take on this song ("Taylor tries to do execute a heel turn but fails because she can't resist playing the victim") misses the point a bit, though understandably.

The clip gives the chorus refrain a slightly different narrative thrust: almost, "thank you for giving me the opportunity to do this". At the very least it's ambivalent about causal agency: the implication is almost that the world gave Taylor no option but to do what she secretly wanted to do, which was to kill off her nice girl persona. It places the chorus in scare quotes, makes "playing the victim" the foil that no one is supposed to believe (least of all Taylor), just as "look what you made me do" as a line always lacks credibility in reality.

The ending in particular seems to hold both Taylor's critics and Taylor's past public personas in equal contempt, which gives the chorus yet another slightly different spin: "you kept pointing out how fake I was until eventually I agreed with you". It strongly resembles (an even more cutting, self-abnegating take on) Kylie Minogue's video clip for "Did It Again", which similarly came out at a time when Kylie appeared to be disdainful of aspects of her earlier public persona(s).

You might say "if it takes the video for all this to be apparent then it fails as a pop song", but given none of the hot takes appear prepared to judge Taylor without drawing on extraneous material like Kim's snapchat feed and social media Bernie vs Hillary madlibs from mid-2016, I think it's reasonable to take the video into account.

Um, I think the snake might have been a reference to how others perceive her, but I can't be sure. If only there were some clues in the video or album title. xps

I think Frederick meant that Kim/Kanye's fans flood Taylor's twitter with snake emojis after Kim posted the snapchat video.

Kim appeared to endorse that by tweeting something like "Did you know that today is National Snake Appreciation Day? They have a special day for everyone, I mean everything these days!"

agreed with tim that the video is good and like all good videos adds as much subtextual depth to a song as a good piece of criticism; as soon as the chorus was juxtaposed with taylor infinitely crashing her own car it was like a lightbulb appeared above my head

Snake is clearly a Harry Potter reference

Of course Keith already had all these realisations already:

http://www.citypages.com/music/taylor-swift-would-very-much-like-to-exclude-us-from-her-narrative/442076423

that part of the video is just a cheap shot at katy perry https://youtu.be/XjwZAa2EjKA?t=2m58s

Brad I also liked how the car crash motif is an inverted callback to "Red". Rather than being crashed by Jack Gyllenhaal she's just deliberately crashing herself. There's nobody else in the car - maybe there never was!

Xpost eh I think car crashes are too common a motif (including for taylor, per my post above) for that link to be persuasive.

yes, but the specific filming of it, plus the context of everything else about this single, makes it more likely than a ~~~super-deep~~~ callback to "Red"

(for his part, Joseph Kahn's suggested the video is a take on 2NE1's "Come Back Home")

Haha apparently we are both correct:

http://www.citypages.com/music/taylor-swift-would-very-much-like-to-exclude-us-from-her-narrative/442076423

Wait that is the Keith review (which people should read). I meant a different piece.

There we go:

http://metro.co.uk/2017/08/28/each-and-every-single-dig-that-taylor-swift-makes-in-the-look-what-you-made-me-do-music-video-6883910/

I think the 2NE1 thing is just a callback to being accused of ripping that video off for the "Bad Blood" video?