It’s a line that reminds us that Taylor Swift is at her best when she balances her lighthearted lyrics with moments of complexity. There’s so much sadness laced in this one quick and breathy line-a moment of vulnerability reminiscent of the storytelling from her folklore/ evermore era. It’s impossible to hear the words “little kid” in a Taylor Swift song and not think of the devastating part of “Begin Again” from Red where she conjures the specific feeling of being young and carefree (“And you throw your head back laughing/ like a little kid”). We’ve finally reached the classic Taylor Bridge, which she often deploys to tell a revealing vignette, turn even more inward, or flip a narrative on its head. No one wanted to play with me as a little kid/ So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since/ To make them love me and make it seem effortless/ This is the first time I’ve felt the need to confess/ And I swear/ I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian ’cause I care One way to break the pattern of subservience, Swift seems to be saying, is to become the monster itself. On Friday, one of the most immediately discussed and memed lyrics on the album was “Sometimes, I feel like everybody is a sexy baby/ And I’m a monster on the hill,” from “Anti-Hero.” That lyric references 30 Rock and is a sly commentary on the long history of women being portrayed as little more than helpless sex objects in Hollywood monster movies. Swift continues to zoom outward: now the song is not just about a love story or a reflection on her own career, but a general feminist motivational call. In “I Think He Knows,” another song that might be about Joe Alwyn (off her Lover record), she’s explicit in this: “I am an architect, I’m drawing up the plans.” You see all the wisest women had to do it this way/ ‘Cause we were born to be the pawn in every lover’s game/ If you fail to plan, you plan to fail/ Strategy sets the scene for the tale/ I’m the wind in our free-flowing sails/ And the liquor in our cocktails “As long as they still find it fun and exciting, I’ll keep doing it.” It’s also not something she’s shy about. Swift recently admitted she’s been throwing secret messages for her fans in her lyrics since she was 15 years old: “It’s really about turning new music into an event for my fans and trying to entertain them in playful, mischievous, clever ways,” Swift told the Post. She loves giving fans the experience of connecting the dots between songs, albums and eras. Is Swift suggesting that she was already strategizing her next move? Was she trying to figure out how to end it with Hiddleston in order to pursue her next London boy?Īnd her scheming goes far beyond these kinds of playful, albeit petty jabs at the people who have caused her harm. We may never know the full details of what happened at the Met Gala between Swift and Alwyn, but we do know that she arrived that night with her date and former boyfriend Tom Hiddleston. (Yes, there are a lot of mixed metaphors going on here!) There’s no such ambiguity in “Mastermind.” Swift casts herself as a grandmaster toying with her opponent, effectively inheriting the position of power once held by “John.” And while many of her previous lyrics about hands have focused on the effect of a lover’s hand on her, here, it’s reversed: she’s the one wielding her touch to light a fuse. In “The Archer,” from 2019, she switches off between being hunter and prey. In “Dear John,” which she wrote near the start of her career, she’s a mere pawn: “I lived in your chess game, but you changed the rules every day,” she sings. Her romantic interests often turn into adversaries and then back again, with Swift casting herself in various roles in conflict. Here, she uses a hand touch to kick off another one of her favorite metaphors: love as a battlefield or a chess match. (From her 2006 debut album: “He’s got a one-hand feel on the steering wheel/ The other on my heart.”) “Hand” is one of Swift’s favorite words: she’s sung it over and over, often using it as a signifier of a blossoming romance.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |