Taylor Swift sucks, and her music is trash
I have no investment in this or skin in the game, and there really is no reason why I should give a goddamn about Taylor Swift, but unfortunately, she is shoved in our faces every single day, so now I feel like saying something about it.
A little background: I was quite involved in church during my childhood and adolescence, for a variety of reasons, but 90% for the fact that it was one of the few settings that my parents didn't question when it came to interacting with and engaging with my peers, and that's where I'll leave it. I'd go to Sunday School and get into debates and arguments with my teachers and leaders; I got kicked out a few times, and often told, "You can't bring these ideas into the group."
I'd counter with, "Why are we reading these materials, taking notes, and you're asking us to come in and share thoughts if it isn't for us to bring ideas, questions, and concerns into this space for discussion?"
"Because it doesn't work that way." Okay, CHECK.
Why is that important? Because Taylor Swift's album - a string of white nationalist word vomit - which this 35-year-old woman produced and put out into the world, is nothing short of a weird Christian values dogwhistle, and the byproduct of a developmentally and emotionally stunted Sunday school student. Someone who has, their entire life, developed a personality around the notion that you are only as good as the man who picks you, and your personality is derived based on the partner that you have, and your worth comes from that environment.
Her music has always been fashioned around these concepts.
I've seen a few folks mention that she is out of touch because she's a billionaire now, or that she's forgotten her roots and where she came from. That is NOT the case. What she is doing is digging her heels, talons, and teeth, sinking them vampirically into these tenets. She has completely taken off the masks of the personas she was trying to fit before, maybe not taken them off, but she can no longer wear them because they never fit her. She did not come from a disadvantaged background, and some try to paint it; she came from a disillusioned background that supported this warped worldview. For folks to say, "she's forgotten her roots," "where she came from," "how she used to make music... the signs were always there.
Her womanhood has devolved into the persona of a 14-year-old Sunday School disciple. This has always been apparent through her lyrics, and I'm not an expert in songwriting, but I've lived this enough, seen it enough, heard enough and have had to against my own will digest her music ... that when you dissect and decolonize and extract yourself from those very environments you see the picture that sits in front of you especially now as you are outside of it.
I was never supported in these environments, and the minute that I started to show that I wasn't going to fall into these deterministic paths, I was excommunicated, not that I had any desire to be there to begin with. Once you don't follow the rules of what imperialism requires, white supremacy, and capitalism, you get shunned. You (ME) are thinking a little too hard, a little too much, and you (I) are starting to poison the minds of your peers. That's how these folks think and operate, and you become their enemy, and I was treated accordingly.
Taylor Swift has taken the pedestal that she's built, her tower, and instead of looking at herself and the environment around her and how she contributes to it, the way she benefits from it, and has privilege within it, rather than sit in it and be uncomfortable or look at any discomfort that she might have, she has tightened the grip around the lack of personality and persona and critical thinking that a woman her age should have. She has abandoned discernment.
She likely never had any desire to go there; the signs were always there long before this album hit the shelves of your local Target. And that's the other thing, her constant motion to appeal to a specific archetype, constantly commercializing herself, repackaging, reinventing her persona, her songs, her personality - yet always with the same threads: constant victimhood, what is she a victim of? Her struggle: what is she struggling with? The only thing this woman is struggling with is the cognitive dissociation and distortion of being devoid of empathy and compassion, and having no connection to the world around her. I sympathize with that; that's sad for her on a human level.
But to say that the songs, messages, and lyrics are out of touch is generous because what they are really are dog whistles.
Many of us see that, but what she is doing is trying to collapse her base and trying to appeal to the new generation of 14-year-olds. Which is how you get a middle-aged woman attacking other songwriters, teens, and 20-year-olds simply for the fact that they are more open, vulnerable, and more creative than she could ever imagine being.
She has chosen her side.
This is what these folks do, the entire swath of women who uphold patriarchy and white supremacy, they are going to go back and attack and try to discredit those who are a threat to them. And the threat is their way of life, which is dogmatic, prescriptive, restrictive, and controlled.
For those who are correctly interpreting her music, now, even if they weren't able to distance themselves from it before... you're not wrong. It's been this way for a very long time, the difference now being that as more people continue to decolonize their minds and see more of the reality for the way that it is, we all see reality through our own lens; we all bring our lived experience into this space, but we are all still sharing this space. There are folks who sometimes say, "you only see your own reality, you only view the world through your own lens" while that is not untrue, it's also very shallow and self-centered, egotistic because there are people who have the capacity, the want the desire and willingness to take in and learn from our shared lived experiences, understand that we all come from different places, understand the intrinsic and inherent value that we all have.
Now, I don't empathize with white supremacists and racists; I have sympathy for them, almost pity, but I don't empathize with them. If you're a fucking racist, get the fuck out of my face. But having the ability and the discernment to see that others also have their own experiences and being able to share that with them leads to collective progress.
Not an album that is all "woe is me", from a 35-year-old who is emotionally stuck in high school. And I don't mean to insult high school kids, as they still have the capacity to learn and grow.
And that's the key: what we are looking for here is growth. Her album is not that. It's shallow, boring, regurgitated slop that reflects a larger cognitive and social decline that this country has been experiencing for a very long time, a backslide.
Anyway, those are my thoughts, and I wanted to write about them because I am seeing a lot of weird celebrations around this release as it somehow climbs up the charts, and we need to stop giving these folks oxygen as they try to keep this capitalism machine going, especially as they fail to see themselves in it and their own destructive nature as they march towards their own destruction.