- Anthony Easton the best thing about red is that it's Taylor pushing herself out of the nashville ghetto, the anti country positioning is fascianting.
- Alexander Ostroff Well, she's always been pushing herself out of Nashville and small towns. And she's always been an anti-country country star.
- Anthony Easton oh, of course--but this album, is fucking fantastic because she has taken every single ball and gone home. Also, this song is great.
- Alexander Ostroff Like, as far back as the self-titled when she was 15, small towns and small town boys and small town values weren't celebrated per normal country tropes but rejected as small-minded and clingy and undesirable (cf. 'Tim McGraw' 'A Place in This World' etc.).
- Anthony Easton Fullt conceded--but those were aspirational, and this is beyond aspirational--she has finally lived up to the potential Kanye saw in her.
- Alexander Ostroff By 'Fearless' she's writing 'Fifteen' which is explicitly about "in your life you'll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team" "back then I thought I was gonna marry him someday, but I realized some bigger dreams of mine."
- Alexander Ostroff And White Horse, "This is a big world / That was a small town / There in my rearview mirror, disappearing now"
- Alexander Ostroff Yeah, of course. I just meant that while Speak Now and RED have both been more sonically adventurous than the first two country albums (which I still suspect I will end up liking more) her songwriting/narrative/moral/personal values that she's been shi...See More
- Alexander Ostroff (Oh and if we're tracking the narrative, 'Mean' off of Speak Now, where small-town high school kids are the worst but "Someday I'll be living in a big old city and all you're ever gonna be is mean.")
- Anthony Easton That line has always struck me as really queer--it's the sort of thing i said to myself as a gay highschool kid--the rest of it not so much, but that one line
- Alexander Ostroff re: Miranda. Miranda lives in and loves small-towns but calls them out on what they are. Miranda is happy inhabiting the space of being the 'bad girl' in the small town who drinks and smokes and has sex that they disapprove of. On her solo stuff that f...See More
- Alexander Ostroff Taylor chafes against those constraints when she's stuck there but isn't invested in adopting the position of 'rebel' or 'bad girl' so much as just getting the hell out. IDK. (I guess Miranda gets out in 'New Strings' but it's not something she writes about a lot.)
- Alexander Ostroff Also, queering Taylor Swift songs is my favourite thing ever, because how *isn't* for example, You Belong With Me, totally queer in sentiment. All of Taylor's (and all of Robyn's) unrequited love songs are secretly about closeted teenage gay dudes in love with their high school best friends.
- Anthony Easton Okay, this is half a conversation i have had with a million people--but i think that the Taylor/Miranda dialectic is one of rural/urban--but small towns like the one Miranda positions herself as the black sheep don't exist anymore and Swift's discussio...See More
- Alexander Ostroff Well, because Swift never actually got to go to 'THE CITY' no? She went from small-town Pennsylvania to Nashville to start writing music, and while that's *a* city, it's not really an 'urban' space that she lived in in the way we (or she) would think of it and now she's too busy being famous, so the city is always aspirational on her earlier stuff or imagined in songs like 'Mine' about college romance and whatever.
- Anthony Easton True, of course. But don't you get the feeling that she has one great LA song in her--like full Joni ca Ladies of the Canyon
- Alexander Ostroff idk. Taylor skipped over the super-folky and/or narrative Joni of Ladies of the Canyon and right to confessional Blue. And her song-writing qua song-writing, sonics and arrangements aside have gotten less observational and detailed overtime, not more. She might have it in her, but not while she's chasing the pop charts (and that's fine, but it's not happening any time soon.)
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
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