A Few Age Related Observations & Easter Egg Clownery

There was so much theatricality in the darkness of reputation. It was a love story, but it was also filled with angst, rebellion and this vengeful taking back of your life.

Sappho (trans. Anne Carson), Fragment 147 // Taylor Swift, “Long Live”

so swiffers really don’t get that when Taylor says “you know i love a london boy” she doesn’t mean 🦶 at all. she doesn’t mean a specific british boy, she means “you know i love a British beard to promote my music in the uk ;)”

like.... it’s a hilarious song. nothing romantic abt it. if i were someone’s boyfriend and she wrote me a song like this i’d be confused af. “he likes my aMeRiCaN smile” like girl? what do you want 😪

and can we talk about the line “iN tHe pUb wE aRe wAtChInG rUgBy wItH HiS sChOoL fRiEnDs”? ummmm tfu taylor i came here expecting a love song but you’re being funny

SHOW ME A GREY SKY LOOOOOOL A RAINY CAP RIDE LMAO ok it’s more of like “you make me f***ing depressed boy”

and like she mentions Stella McCartney for no absolute f***ing reason??? in a song about her bf? she is like “imma mention my girl stella cause i luv her”

I absolutely love London Boy it’s the funnier version of Blank Space

Swifties won at the Grammys this year, let’s be honest

Kaylors Reblog

I want EVERY SINGLE Kaylor shipper/supporter to reblog so I can have an idea of how many we are.

“New Romantics” is the queer anthem we need right now.

One of Taylor’s best songs ever is also one of her gayest: “New Romantics” employs some of her most brilliant lyrical tricks to construct a narrative that’s clever, moving, and, for lack of a better phrase, hella hella gay. First, let’s talk about the structure of the lyrics: The verses all end in couplets (ABABCC rhyme structure as opposed to the pre-chorus and chorus, which are both ABAB) – in poetry, you use a couplet to draw attention to something, to emphasize a point. Let’s see what she has to say: We’re all bored We’re all so tired of everything We wait for Trains that just aren’t coming

When Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone named this the second best song of 2014, he called boredom “the least Tay of emotions.” But if this is a song about breaking the cycle of bearding – as Taylor did in 2014 – this verse sets up the dreary monotony of being in the closet, pretending to be someone you’re not. She brings the point home in the couplet:

We show off our different scarlet letters Trust me, mine is better

What’s Tay’s scarlet letter? Her love ‘em and leave ‘em inability to keep a man? No – that’s the character she parodies in “Blank Space.” This song is about her real scarlet letter, the one we don’t know about: her queerness and all the lies that come with it. Let’s skip ahead to the third verse to see why:

We’re all here The lights and boys are blinding We hang back It’s all in the timing

Something is already off here: The rhyme structure is broken. Instead of the perfect ABABCC of every other verse, verse 3 gives us ABCBDD. This could just be sloppy writing, but that’s not Taylor – this verse is meant to undermine our sense of stability in the song, to prick up our ears. This works in the context of the lyrics – Taylor being blinded by the boys and lights (presumably media attention/camera flashes?) – but it also serves to make us pay close attention to her next couplet:

It’s poker, he can’t see it in my face But I’m about to play my Ace

What’s her Ace? Her scarlet letter, of course – her bright red A, the Ace of Hearts. And she’s about to tell us exactly what it is:

We need love But all we want is danger We team up Then switch sides like a record changer

“We need love, but all we want is danger” can read like she wants danger instead of love, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. What if we read the line like this instead: “We need love, but everything we want is dangerous.” That fits thematically with Taylor’s other work in songs like “Treacherous” and “Style,” and it also makes sense in the context of the next line. What exactly does it mean to “switch sides like record changer”? What even is a record changer? There’s a vague allusion to turning over a record on a turntable here, but Taylor is making up words because she’s telling us something else: that she’s teaming up with someone to change the record about her dangerous love life. And “record” here is a triple meaning – it also alludes to the songs on this record, which can literally change sides as you flip the LP over, but can also change sides in terms of who she’s singing about depending on whether you know the truth about her scarlet letter, her Ace.

The rumors are terrible and cruel, But honey, most of them are true

Taylor punctuates this verse with a wink to those of us who’ve heard the rumors about her: She’s heard them too, and she wants to tell us they’re true. 

This brings us to the second pre-chorus and chorus, and to the essential question of the song: Who is “we”? Is this a platonic song about Taylor and her girlfriends (and, by extension, single people everywhere), or is this a romantic song about Taylor and her girlfriend (and, by extension, queer people everywhere)? 

Baby, we’re the new romantics Come on, come along with me Heartbreak is the national anthem We sing it proudly We are too busy dancing To get knocked off our feet Baby, we’re the new romantics The best people in life are free

We’re too busy going out with our friends to fall in love, we sing proudly about our heartbreaks, the best people in life are single. Yep, that works! But it ignores the broader context of the song – let’s take a look at the bridge, where everything slows down a LOT (again, Taylor is telling us to pay attention):

Please take my hand and Please take me dancing and Please leave me stranded It’s so romantic

The rhyme structure here (AAAA with lots of word repetition and proximate rhyme, a trick often used by noted lesbian Emily Dickinson) is like a big flashing sign: HEY, THIS IS WHAT THE SONG IS ABOUT. And it doesn’t sound platonic at all – it sounds like dancing with your girlfriend in public, only to have her leave you alone lest she confirm those terribly cruel rumors. (This bridge is also a prelude to “Dancing With Our Hands Tied” as surely as “Every day is like a battle, but every night with us is like a dream” is a prelude to “…Ready for it?”.)

The song is called “New Romantics.” She’s telling us, as clearly as she can, that this is a song about romance. Taylor has taken all the bricks people have thrown at her – at this point, still largely about how boy-crazy she is – and built a castle where she can be free with her girlfriend. Read this way, we can see a new meaning for the first verse of “Call It What You Want”:

My castle crumbled overnight I brought a knife to a gunfight They took the crown but it’s all right

This verse reads like it’s about the Kimye controversy, but I think it’s also about kissgate. Taylor built a glass castle of safety for herself and Karlie, and when it collapsed, her crown (i.e. the king of her heart) was taken from her. They had to go back into hiding (“nobody’s heard from me for months”), but they found a deeper, truer love all on their own.

“New Romantics” is one of Taylor’s best songs ever – not just because the melody is amazing and the lyrics are killer, but because it takes the language of heartbreak and turns it into an anthem of strength for Taylor and for every queer person who has ever had to hide who we are. She opens 1989 by telling us we can want who we want, and she closes it by telling us the same thing: The best people in life are free. 

i was looking at the awe website at that unbelievable duo necklace taylor wore in her autumn tiktok and i realized today that there are different versions of the design.

this is one of them.

a bit of resonance with the universe...

i’m just gonna leave this here...

Submission:

Please keep anonymous.

Hello fellow tinhat.

Something I saw on Reddit yesterday has sent me into a spiral of wonderfulness about Gold Rush.

A reminder of what Taylor said about Gold Rush, that it: “takes place inside a single daydream where you get lost in thought for a minute and then snap out of it.”

I had a theory from very early on that Gold Rush was about kaylor meeting at the Met Gala in 2011. I didn’t have any solid ‘evidence’ of this, but some stuff stuck out. As a refresher, we know that they met and had an interaction at the 2011 Met Gala because a year and a half later Karlie said that this was when the baking date joke first started. They joked about it, Taylor then mentioned it during her Vogue interview Sept 13, 2011, and then Karlie saw it when Vogue was released in January 2012 and tweeted ‘your kitchen or mine?’ Karlie wore a gold dress that year to the Met Gala and then 8 years later, she famously wore another gold dress and captioned her insta post “Gold Rush”.

What really made me think Gold Rush was about the 2011 Met Gala was just the whole way it vibes with the toe storyline, because I think the Toe fanfiction was invented to mimic Kaylor’s actual truth, partly to allow Taylor to write about her experiences and attribute them to joe in a believable way. It’s easier to lie when it’s partly true. So if Taylor first developed a crush on Karlie at the Met Gala 2011, it just smoothly fits into this toe thing, in a way. This is especially true when you add in the fact that Dianna was also there, and then Taylor and Dianna may have started something within days of when Taylor shouted out Karlie in the Vogue interview in Sept 2011, and both Karlie and Dianna tweeted about the Vogue cover in a flirtatious way. You end up with this messy bit of a love triangle type thing going on, not too far off from the mess that was Calvin/Tom/Joe (Karlie) in 2016. Not that I think we can say that anything really was going on between kaylor at this time, but you can definitely see flirting and crushing going on, which fits the toe narrative about them being friends and texting while Taylor secretly had a crush while dating Tom. Not exactly the same of course, but if this was all happening back then it gives her this ability to write about real situations and feelings while being able to attribute it to the boyfriends. And the whole message of Gold Rush is that it’s just a dream and it could never be. And so it was for another 2 years (in the toe fantasy it was just 3 months of her daydreaming about it and thinking it could never be.)

So this was just a silly, fun idea I had until yesterday when I saw this excerpt form her Vogue interview on Reddit. Keep in mind the spring 2012 show took place in Sept 2011:

👀 What are the odds? She was even wearing an folkevermore-style cottagecore dress!

I also realized that in August 2011, in the same sort of timeframe all this was going on, Taylor wore a Philadelphia Eagles shirt during Speak Now tour 👀

And on top of all that, at this time karlie was getting what I consider to be her first real chance at fame outside of the fashion world, because she got a cover story for Life Magazine, released Sept 10, 2011 (all this going on at the same time is kinda crazy!) And this video was part of that photoshoot:

W Magazine

W Magazine

Karlie Kloss by photographer Gabrielle Revere. See the story here. 

Very ‘gleaming twinkling’ if you ask me. Plus Daisies!?!

So I hope you will join me in this wildness. It seems right up your alley.

———

👁👄👁

Easter Egg = Hatched

I screenshot these IG stories from Karlie on September 10th and 14th (before and after the Met gala).

I captured the first one because I thought the “double bubble” gum was suspicious and was even chatting with a mutual about it.

When the second one came out, we knew the first was Karlie teasing the inspiration for her Met gala dress before it was revealed. But why she included the “double bubble” gum was still a mystery.

I think I understand it now, though. Karlie was dropping an Easter Egg that Taylor would eventually wear a similar dress. And she did it over a month before Taylor shared her version with us.

In conclusion, that smirk on Taylor’s face makes a lot of sense.