Taylor Swift Glitchy Snake Gifs thread 2017 - Reputation

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?

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

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine), Wednesday, August 30, 2017 5:54 AM (twenty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ehhh ok

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).

As soon as she saw it, my girlfriend Kate made that comparison too. (She is a massive Kylie fan...and was not pleased with Taylor's attempt.)

the whole killing-off-the-old-you stuff was as far as i can recall first seen in the Freedom '90 video by George Michael, can anyone remember any earlier examples? anyway Taylor's graveyard version of same reminds me of Geri Halliwell's debut solo single Look At Me

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/31mlEEs9_Vk/hqdefault.jpg

Ziggy Stardust?

Xxpost Taylor's take is nastier (to herself) because even Kylie made sure that her caricatures of herself never seemed that reality-based. It's easy to reject a broadly drawn caricature.

Whereas the "shocked I just won an eleventh award" Taylor is so close to reality that by satirising it Taylor and/or the clip-makers can't help but make past-Taylor look ridiculous in fact.

This was one aspect (amongst several) of Keith's piece I thought was really smart: he captures how the clip is so focused on getting out in front of any possible criticism you might have of Taylor, that it creates this contradiction - on the one hand, it basically succeeds at pre-empting (lol autocorrect prefers "pre-emptying") any criticism, while on the other, investing so much energy and money into saying "you can't say anything to me that is nastier than what I have already said to myself" can't help but feel like a defensive strategem.

I would happily watch an entire video of past/present TS personas bickering with each other, love the part where Taylor Mk. 1 bursts into tears and is roundly ridiculed.

xp oh yes! hadn't thought of that.

citation needed

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine), Tuesday, August 29, 2017 4:32 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://decisiondeskhq.com/data-dives/how-the-2016-vote-broke-down-by-race-gender-and-age/

(not that it's meaningful anyway because Taylor Swift's fanbase is not a 100% overlapping venn diagram with "white women 18-29," but)

― sick, fucking funny, and well tasty (katherine), Tuesday, August 29, 2017 4:33 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the characterization I was responding to was of Swift as "pop-star exemplar of the white female Trump supporter". so it's a characterization of her, not her fans. Taylor Swift is an 18-29 white woman. I thought I was being pretty clear there.

that comparison has to be about the fans though or else it is completely useless. the reason Kanye talking about Donald Trump is not really relevant is because -- well, because he's Kanye and this is just the kind of thing he does, but also because I would hazard not many of his fans voted for Trump

You can't use statistics on one person... Taylor Swift didn't vote 52% for Hillary.

her head voted Hillary, but her heart went Trump

why does Taylor as "pop-star exemplar of the white female Trump supporter" have to be about her fans?

i know parsing this one phrase is a waste of time but I guess it depends on how you read the statement...I read it as "Taylor Swift is a typical example of the white female Trump supporter" which is, at least demographically speaking, wrong.

Well, she's too young, but she did grow up pretty rich which would help (the avg Trump voter brings in over 70k iirc)

I think on most metrics (age bracket, locale, etc.) that would not be true.

because it's the reason why "but Kanye *actually* supported Trump!" is an argument so stupid it approaches bad faith

http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/37187/1/nazis-love-taylor-swifts-look-what-you-made-me-do

“It is also an established fact that Taylor Swift is secretly a Nazi and is simply waiting for the time when Donald Trump makes it safe for her to come out and announce her Aryan agenda to the world. Probably, she will be betrothed to Trump’s son, and they will be crowned American royalty.”

wow, can't argue with the facts i guess

Perhaps all arguments about Taylor vs Kanye as being about Trump are bad faith.

If people want to talk about Trump, they should talk about Trump.

People who write about how Taylor should disavow Trump etc. are just compensating for not being able to write persuasively about whether single payer is a good idea or not or what the historical precedents for presidential pardons can tell us. Falling back onto pop culture as a metaphor is almost always a disservice to pop and to politics.

Sorry, I'm drunk, but I probably still mean the above.

her music video has her in a bathtub full of diamonds (which is pretty rad for hyper-capitalist iconography). pushing materialism/consumerism/self-destructive tendencies has always been a major part of pop life.

this image really struck me. you're absolutely right, but at this moment in time, the culture is not sympathetic to this sort of self-referential obnoxious flaunting of wealth, mostly because that's Trump's M.O. so along with the "media treats me unfairly" angle, Swift already has two things in common with Trump.

lol i love how when taylor approximates a Pen & Pixel CD cover from like 1998 it's interpreted as all #galaxybrain

but i admire the lengths being taken on ITT thread to avoid having to talk about this new jersey sized turd she just left in the punchbowl. also as usual fgti posts are great.

to be fair the "taylor swift is the official pop star of the alt-right" take that's been going around is also wrong and in bad faith -- they tried this exact same shit on depeche mode

She really is more comparable to Ivanka.

I'm still not understanding why Swift is responsible for the things she doesn't do but Kanye isn't even responsible for the things he does do.