#Yes this is about people going to bat for Taylor Swift's Time interview | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dingoes8myrp · 2 years

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Space Asks, Redux

I have a bad cold, so I'm doing one of these things. I'm gonna fill it out like a MySpace survey because that's how old I am.

Comet- What are you currently frustrated about?

My job.

Black Hole- What are you most afraid of?

How little control I actually have over my life (i.e. whether or not someone nukes someone, the economy, the weather, etc.).

Galaxy- Do you have any nicknames? What are they?

I have a few online aliases. Dingo and Ruby are my most used. In real life I just get called the wrong name a lot.

Star- What song(s) do you feel describes you?

Currently, Numb Little Bug.

Moon- Are you currently reading any books? If so, what book(s)?

I'm reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and listening to Bram Stoker's Dracula as a audiobook.

Planets- If you could go anywhere, where would you go?

Somewhere cozy, like a cabin with a fireplace or something. I usually like a warm beach, but it's Fall, so I'm in the mood for cozy stuff.

Mercury- Describe your aesthetic.

Uh, 90s grunge (think Winona Ryder) with a dash of Victorian gothic (i.e. Eva Green in Penny Dreadful). Unless I'm at work. Then it's all business casual or whatever. Lame. In that case it's Jennifer Aniston from Friends with a dash of Zooey Deschanel in New Girl.

Venus- What’s your favorite tv show?

Of all time: Buffy the Vampire Slayer Currently airing: I am LOVING the new Interview with the Vampire show. Yeah, I'm very into vampires.

Earth- If you could be anyone else for a day, who would you want to be?

Nicole Kidman. I just love her, and I'd love to know what her day-to-day is like.

Mars- If you could change one thing about yourself, what would you change?

Get rid of my clinical anxiety.

Jupiter- If you had to pick one color to use for an entire week, what color would you choose?

I mean, use in what context? Probably teal. Or purple.

Saturn- How far would you go for those you care about?

Wow. Heavy question. Depends on how urgent the situation is, I suppose.

Uranus- What would you say is your greatest achievement?

I don't think I've achieved it yet.

Neptune- Describe yourself in one sentence.

I am very anxious but very creative.

Pluto- If you could meet anyone, alive or dead, who would you meet?

Betty White.

Constellations- If you could have one talent, what would you want it to be? (can be magical or not)

Teleportation.

Asteroid- When you die, what do you want to be done with your body?

I don't really care. Donate all my organs. Do whatever is less burdonsome financially. Just don't donate me to science. I don't want to be getting embalmed by some poor mortician, get possessed by some weird demon, and wreak havoc on people.

Aquarius- What’s a topic you enjoy learning about?

Space. I love space (obviously). Also cultural practices and mythologies different from mine.

Aquila- Do you prefer to read books or watch movies?

Yes.

Aries- What is something you enjoy doing?

Writing.

Auriga- If you had to pick one villain from any media, who would you rather have to face and why?

Beetlejuice. I think I could take him.

Bootes- If you could have any animal, wild or not, fake or not, which would you want?

A bat. They just look super cute.

Cancer- How do you want to be remembered?

As someone who left the world better than I found it.

Canis Major- How many friends do you have?

Close friends? 3 - 5

Capricornus- What’s a song lyric that you relate to?

This is me trying (from This is Me Trying by Taylor Swift)

Cassiopeia- What’s your favorite quote?

"I heard 'Copper Boom'". It's a line from Gilmore Girls and me and my dad use it all the time when we can't hear someone across the house.

Cygnus- If you could go back to any time period for a couple days, when/where would you want to go?

Ancient Egypt. I'd say Mesopotamia, but I'm terrified there'd be like alien gods or something there.

Gemini- Do you have any siblings? How many?

No.

Leo- If you could change the way any movie was made, which movie would you change?

The Mummy with Tom Cruise. There needed to be more Annabelle Wallis and more Sofia Boutella, less Tom Cruise Tom Cruise'ing.

Libra- If you could talk to your past self, what would you tell yourself?

It will get worse. BUT, after it gets worse it will get so much better. Toughen up. Don't take any shit.

Lyra- Would you rather be feared or loved?

Loved, wtf?

Orion- What’s your favorite type of weather?

Early summer when it's warm but not sweltering. Bonus if it rains.

Pegasus- What’s your favorite music genre?

Rock - classic, 80s hair, or grunge.

Perseus- What’s your favorite movie genre?

Horror.

Pisces- Describe someone you love without saying their name.

Kind, playful, always well-intentioned, sometimes goofy.

Sagittarius- What do you do when you don’t feel well? What do you eat/drink?

I drink a shit ton of Oolong tea. I usually don't feel like eating much unless it's broth or something cold.

Scorpius- If you had to pick someone to betray you, who would you pick?

That friend from high school you think has changed as an adult, but really hasn't.

Taurus- What makes you feel comfortable?

A cozy blanket, a good book, a hot cup of something, and a cat.

Ursa Major- If you had to pick any job to have, what job would you want?

Novel writer.

Virgo- What do you value the most- artistic ability/creativity, musical ability, athletic ability, intellect, or work ethic?

Work ethic. It's necessary in any profession.

Neutron- Are you more of a leader or a follower?

Depends on the team and what role I need to fill. I tend to be a follower who does what I ask, but if no leadership is happening I tend to take the lead to get things done.

Supernova- How do you feel about yourself?

I could feel better, but not bad.

Supergiant- What’s something you like about yourself?

My creativity.

Red Giant- Would you get into a debate/argument with someone if you heard them saying something you disagree with or know to be wrong, or would you stay silent?

I frequently get into these debates, mostly to understand their point of view.

Red Dwarf- What’s your favorite smell? What smell makes you feel most comfortable?

Lavendar vanilla.

Protostar- Give a random fact about yourself.

I love true crime. Not "The Thing About Pam" true crime where it's kind of campy and weird. I like things like Cold Justice - they're gonna find that fucker.

#dingo asks #dingo gets personal

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fatimazahramalik · 4 years

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e-Portfolio in Media Lit

Task #2

Malik, Fatima Zahra A.

12 - STEM Abequibel

A.) Choose 1 photo from a magazine, newspaper, or website and analyze what it is trying to tell readers. If it’s a photo for an advertisement, describe what the photos are doing for the product sold.

The picture above is from a magazine, it is a photo for an advertisement. In the photo you can see that the model which is known as Gigi Hadid launched “Gigi Hadid x Maybelline collection” in her collection there are a lot of matte liquid lipsticks with a lot of shades and it says in the picture that the lipstick last for 16 hours which is amazing for me and by the fact that this lipsticks has 30 shades in all because I got to choose what color is really suitable for me. Gigi continued on to share the inspiration behind her line, revealing she named the red lipstick “Khair” after her little sister Bella’s middle name because,”Bella’s favorite color is red and it’s kind of the red she has worn her whole life.” Therefore this photo encourages people especially teenager girls like me who loves to wear make up to buy this lipsticks because beside that it is not that expensive like any other lipsticks it is also very pigmented and can last long in your lips.

B.) Choose an existing pop song and interpret its lyrics. Decipher what the song is all about and list down the situations being narrated in the song.

The song that I chose is “Me!” By Taylor Swift featuring Brendon Urie. For the verse one of the song she’s listing all of the negative, which is something that I tend to do a lot, it’s like if I’m going to try to sell somebody something, or try to convince them with something; I’m going to list all of the negatives first, so I empathise with that. Then in the chorus and the pre-chorus she lists the positives, then for the verse 2 Is which is a thing that made me think that it’s funny, it doesn’t really fit into the spirit of the song, I thought the idea was that we’re all okay just the way we are! So now all of the sudden we’re playing in a comparison game? It doesn’t seem to me that Brendon Urie really got the spirit of this song, which doesn’t seem off character from him anyway. Then Taylor continues on saying, And when we had that fight out in the rain. You ran after me and called my name, I never wanna see you walk away (And there's a lot of lame guys out there) Many speculate those "lame guys" are definitely in reference to Taylor's past, where she used to have a reputation for dating various famous men - Harry Styles, John Mayer, Joe Jonas, etc. The lyric "I will never bore you, baby" could specifically be in reference to Tom, though especially considering tabloid reports hinted that Tom dumped Taylor because he got bored of her. Lastly what Taylor Swift is trying to communicate through the song is the message of “Yes! Go and be yourself, and whatever kind of version that you are, just be that version” And so we go to the bridge, and this is probably the part that I enjoyed the most, but also had the biggest question about, Girl, there ain't no I in "team" But you know there is a "me" Which is a common cliche that we hear a lot; and it’s not in the sense that they're doing bad, they’re obviously doing a bit with it. Then they go into the chorus and an outro and it’s this pretty happy fun anthem-like thing; and I think that this song accomplishes very well what it was set out to do, which is to be sort of like a party rousing song; “It’s nice and fun to be just you, because you’re unique. The song 'ME!' is a song about embracing your individuality and really celebrating it and owning it, with this pop song, we have the ability to get a melody really stuck in people's heads, and I just want it to be one that makes them feel better about themselves. The lyrics were also trying to tell us that we should really appreciate ourselves because we are who we are and no one or nobody can be like you because you are you and you are unique and one of a kind. The hype about this song is that it’s about “me”, and the way that I am is okay and great, but it’s all in the context of a relationship; which makes it a little more complicated, and it’s not necessarily bad, as I think that it’s really good that this song establishes the value of the individual. Taylor Swift has said in an interview talking about how there are all of those advertisements that tells you how you should be to look better, and how you should be wealthier, or healthier, or whatever; and to an extent, you just have to say “Yeah, I am who I am, and that’s great, there is only one “ME!”, right?”; and that’s the main gist of these lyrics, this emphasis of the individual.

C.) Pick a music video and watch it several times. Study it closely to see if the visuals are affecting the song. Or is the song helping the visuals in a way?

The music video that I chose was “Look what you made me do” by Taylor Swift. After watching her music video I have noticed that the song is helping the visuals because it is so accurate like the lyrics really matched the visuals in the music video. The music video begins with a zombified T-Swift digging her own grave so the old Swift is dead, resigned to the graveyard of pop culture history. First, we see the aforementioned tombstone, where Swift’s reputation lies, but also a second one, reading “Nils Sjoberg”, the pseudonym Swift used as a co-writer on her ex-boyfriend Calvin Harris’s song, This Is What You Came For, a collaboration widely assumed to have contributed to their breakup. Swift’s writing credit was supposed to be kept secret, but when her team revealed that she had, in fact, written the Harris-Rihanna hit, her ex went on a tweetstorm about how Swift was looking for “someone new to try and bury”. So she buried the fictitious Mr Sjoberg.

In the next shot, Swift luxuriates in a tub of diamonds, where there sits a single dollar bill, a possible reference to the symbolic dollar she earned in last month’s sexual assault case against the radio DJ who groped her in 2013.

This next part of the videl was a dead giveaway, Swift sits atop a throne as dozens of snakes slither at her feet. One even serves her what we can only assume is piping hot tea, the kind Kim Kardashian dished out when she released audio of Swift, who publicly disputed Kanye West’s lyric about her in Famous, appearing to sign off on those same lyrics in a phone conversation with West. Afterwards, Swift’s reputation as a snake in sheep’s clothing took off; Kardashian helped further that image by tweeting a bunch of snake emojis on international snake day. More than a year later, it seems Swift’s ready to embrace the title: ahead of the single’s release, she dropped cryptic reptilian teaser videos. And now, the snake has shed her skin.

So in the next shot, as the chorus begins, Swift rams a shiny gold car into a storefront where paparazzi are lurking. She opens the door, a cheetah in tow, to show off none other than her Grammy award. She proceeds to display and caress it in one of the video’s most bewildering moments.

Swift’s love of cats is well documented. Here, she’s surrounded by stacks of cash and a Girl Squad of masked felines, wielding a baseball bat and a sweater that says “Blind for Love”. In the next scene, the masked marauders can be seen robbing a music streaming company. Swift, if you remember, boycotted Spotify for years due to its dismal compensation of artists. She also wrote an open letter to Apple Music in 2014 arguing on behalf of increased artists compensation and then took to Tumblr, in June 2015, blasting Apple’s decision to give users three-month free trials. And now she’s back to rob them, cat imagery to boot.

The next part of the video was made waves for its apparent resemblance to a shot from Beyoncé’s Formation video. But the real hidden gem is the backup dancers’ belly shirts, which read “I Heart TS”. Tom Hiddleston, one of Swift’s ex-boyfriends, was caught in a similar shirt when splashing around the beaches of Rhode Island with Swift.

Finally, the last part is when the Swifts both old and new assemble before an airplane, where the word “reputation” appears again. Overall I think that the song really help the visuals in a way that it was really created beautifully (the music video) and for me the music video is a masterpiece becausr I have also learned the real meaning behind it, the song song is also about her struggles in the past and how she handled herself.

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ts1989fanatic · 4 years

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Taylor Swift And The End Of An Era

Love her or hate her, Taylor Swift embodied the contradictions of the decade in pop music

“I’m so sick of running as fast as I can,” Taylor Swift sings in the chorus of “The Man,” a song from her latest album, Lover. She chose the up-tempo tune to open her “Artist of the Decade” medley at the AMAs last month, and it’s a return to familiar Swiftian themes; she claps back at unspecified, sexist critics who fail to acknowledge her “good ideas and power moves.”

Whatever one might think of Swift’s underdog complex, it’s not surprising that the end of the 2010s finds her exhausted. Her transformation from tween country sensation to tabloid-friendly pop star to polarizing Twitter talking point and, finally, to celebrity supernova, required — at the very least — plenty of stamina.

There’s no question that straight white femininity still occupies a privileged place in the cultural landscape, which helped pave the way for Swift’s rise and decade-long pop dominance — even as she became a zeitgeisty symbol of that privilege and a target for those seeking to contest it. Yet as many of her similarly situated peers have faltered, she has endured as one of the last pop behemoths of her kind.

Time and again Swift strategically read and rode the decade’s cultural waves, deciding not just which trends and genres to jump on but, perhaps more importantly, what to pass on. As pop music became feud-centric reality television, there was Taylor; as stan culture transformed the way listeners interacted with performers (and each other), there was Taylor; as artists’ rights in the streaming era entered the conversation, there was Taylor; as politics infiltrated music, there was (sort of, eventually) Taylor.

There are definitely plenty of other contenders for Artist of the Decade (a title both the AMAs and Billboard recently bestowed on Swift) — artists who have hugely impacted pop music over the past 10 years and managed to ride out the seismic, industry-wide shifts they’ve contained, from Beyoncé to Lady Gaga to Kanye West. But you don’t have to think Swift was the “best” or even most significant artist of the decade to acknowledge that her cultural domination, and her ability to pivot and reinvent herself, captured many of the defining tensions of pop music over the last decade.

It’s hard to remember (in internet years) that before 2010, Swift was just a teen pop star and not yet a cultural lightning rod. She was already taken seriously as a musician and had plenty of cultural capital coming into the decade; in 2009, having already won Artist of the Year at the AMAs, she was about to accept a Video Music Award for Female Video of the Year when Kanye infamously interrupted her speech. In early 2010, she won Album of the Year for Fearless at the Grammy Awards, beating out Beyoncé and Lady Gaga.

Her early stardom revolved mostly around the fact that she was a precocious young country artist who wrote her own songs, without the risqué edge or sexy-but-wholesome cognitive dissonance of someone like an early Britney Spears to worry white parents and inspire pearl-clutching tabloid magazine covers. And it wasn’t really until Speak Now — when Swift was already a mainstream star but still categorized as country — that she began teasing the media and her fans about the ways her autobiographical lyrics mapped onto her real life, especially regarding the men she was dating.

People are still wondering whether Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know” is about Uncle Joey, so it was startling for a young woman songwriter and musical celebrity of her commercial reach to use her songs to consistently craft such intimate stories about such equally public men, including Joe Jonas, Taylor Lautner, and John Mayer. And there was something uniquely bold about the way Swift started using her confessional songwriting and melodic sensibility to “get the last word” on her relationships, as People magazine framed it in her first cover story.

People hardly batted an eye in 2018 when Ariana Grande’s first No. 1 hit, “Thank U, Next,” literally name-checked her list of ex-boyfriends, and that’s in no small part because of Swift. Because even as reality TV stars like the Kardashians and Real Housewives were figuring out how to create multiplatform storytelling through social media, Swift was already pioneering the strategy in the big pop machine. Yes, she opportunistically used this to shame exes, create fodder for talk shows, and garner magazine covers; and even then, it raised some hackles about the way she was using her power. But it was undeniably compelling theater, and even nonfans were watching.

That multiplatform mixture of music and drama wouldn’t have succeeded without the undeniably catchy earworms Swift’s diary entries were wrapped in, or without the devoted fanbase of Swifties that she cultivated online. This all helped her break chart records with her most explicitly pop albums, including 2012’s Red and 2014’s ’80s-inspired 1989. The latter garnered the biggest first-week sales for a pop album since Britney Spears in 2002, helping Swift keep the tradition of the monocultural pop star alive.

But as Swift’s music saturated airwaves, and her willingness to tease behind-the-scenes details of her life in her songs moved beyond ex-boyfriends like Harry Styles (“Style”) into swatting at other pop stars like Katy Perry (“Bad Blood”) the public began to sour on Swift’s strategic use of her personal life in her music. (To Swift’s credit as a performer, no other pop star could sing the lyrics “Band-Aids don’t fix bullet holes” about a dispute over a backup dancer with a straight face.)

Juxtaposed with Swift’s self-celebrating “girl squad” feminism, her opportunism — and seeming hypocrisy — started to rankle. By 2015, even racist sympathizer and critic Camille Paglia came out of the woodwork to anoint Swift a “Nazi barbie,” calling out her tendency to treat friends as props. And all these contradictions of Swift’s persona would come to a head when Swift’s seemingly buried feud with Kanye came roaring back the following year.

It makes sense that her clash with Kanye and Kim Kardashian West became the first time she experienced a real backlash. Unlike the drama around her dating life or with Perry, it was the first time Swift was up against equally savvy adversaries — celebrities who, like her, were professionals at merging their public and private lives.

The fight was a meta moment by design, inspired by West’s song “Famous,” where he raps: “I made that bitch famous.” In retrospect, it seems clear that West, as much a publicity-seeking pop diva as Swift, was trying to get the last word after going on an apology tour about the interruption heard round the world. Swift claimed to be annoyed over what she saw as the song’s credit-taking message, and she tried to make it part of her own narrative. “I want to say to all the young women out there,” she intoned in her speech accepting a Grammy for Album of the Year in February 2016, “there are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame.”

In another era, Swift’s storyline might have won the day. Her publicist denied that she had approved the line in the song, despite Kanye’s claim that he had checked with her before releasing it. But celebrity narratives, to some degree, were no longer being decided just by white-dominated mainstream media. Black publications were the first to tease out the racial undertones of Swift’s lie in the ensuing “he said, she said,” specifically as a white woman playing on the ingrained sympathy and benefit of the doubt that white women are given in US culture.

Still, it wasn’t until Kim’s Snapchat leak that July — where Swift could be heard approving the song — that the Swift-as-victim narrative became a framework for understanding her entire career. Contemporary white pop stars like Grande and Miley Cyrus had faced musical appropriation backlashes, but this time it was Swift’s entire persona — not just her music — that were under scrutiny.

Swift’s memeable response to the leak — “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative” — was followed by her own disappearance from the media landscape. By the time the 2016 election happened — amid the chatter about white women’s complicity in electing Trump — Swift’s refusal to take a political stand solidly cast her as a cultural villain, and her symbolism as an icon of toxic white womanhood was sealed.

If the clamor of social media (especially Twitter) was central to the Swift backlash, it was also central to her eventual resurgence. Over the past decade, social media (especially Instagram) has tipped the scales in celebrity coverage and helped celebrities tell their stories on their own terms, almost without intermediaries. Swift knew how to use that to her advantage and decided to play the long game.

By refusing interviews for 18 months, wiping her social media clean, and focusing on cultivating her Tumblr fanbase, Swift removed herself from the cultural conversation for a beat. This kind of brand management helped her keep an ear to the ground while in a self-imposed exile. But it’s as if the culture couldn’t stop conjuring her; rumors about her absence spread, including that she had traveled around inside a suitcase.

In August 2017, she wiped her social media clean and reappeared with a snake video — reclaiming the serpent emojis — in what was ultimately the announcement for her Reputation album, and which remains one of the most iconic social media rollouts ever. “Look What You Made Me Do,” the lead single, was endlessly memed — Swift couldn’t come to the phone, a perfect metaphor for her cultural disappearance and, perhaps, a kind of ghostly remake of the Kanye call. The album succeeded because it seemed as though Swift was finally open to owning her melodrama and messiness. She subsequently broke records with the tour and album sales.

Still, her political silence was affecting her image and music. By 2018, insipid corporate wokeness had become the order of the day, and Swift Inc. again pivoted musically and culturally. Swift came out for the Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterms, framing her support in terms of LGBTQ rights and racial justice. And this year, the second single from her latest album, Lover — “You Need to Calm Down” — was a perfect encapsulation of her politics of messiness, conflating anti-gay prejudice with Twitter drama. (And somehow turning the video into a celebration of pop queens supporting each other). This fall, she has made sure to include über-stan–turned–pop star (and video coproducer) Todrick Hall at her awards show moments, attempting to expand the range of racial and sexual identities included in what used to be her mostly straight white “girl squad” feminism.

For all of Swift’s success at updating her persona, she’s never quite regained her massive radio dominance — but no pop star can depend on the success of singles for over a decade. In fact, Swift is one of the most interesting figures of the decade because her stardom is caught between the old-school era of album buying and our current streaming moment.

And, inevitably, Swift has turned her own industry issues around streaming and artistic ownership into a wider commentary on artists’ rights — which happens to work as a canny form of further brand management. She framed herself as an ethical businesswoman when she called out Apple for not paying artists, and she battled with Spotify over streaming royalties but without really pushing for wider systemic industry change.

Earlier this year, Swift started a new artist-versus-industry fight about her music masters being bought out from under her by nemesis Scooter Braun. It’s a complicated story, one that Swift has framed as being about “toxic male privilege,” and the fact that Braun mocked her during the Kanye era — once again blurring, in her trademark mode, the personal with the public and the systemic with the individual.

Instead of being seen as opportunistic, Swift seems to have succeeded in framing her campaign as a fight for unsigned and less powerful artists’ rights, which has resonated at a moment where content creators are all pitted against the 1% of the tech and corporate worlds. This time, even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — a squad member any star would envy — backed her up.

Swift’s response to being anointed Artist of the Decade by the AMAs and Billboard provides interesting insight into how she sees herself now and where she thinks the next decade is going. She chose Carole King, one of the preeminent symbols of pop music authenticity, to present her AMA, squarely placing herself in a genealogy of great women singer-songwriters. She also enlisted shiny next-gen pop stars Camila Cabello and Halsey to join her during her performance of old hits.

In her Billboard speech, Swift name-checked newer stars like Lizzo, Becky G, and Billie Eilish as the future of the industry. Tellingly, they are women who, so far, have not played into the tabloidy pop dramas that dominated the 2010s. If this decade has shown us anything, it’s that blurring public and private through music can reap big rewards, but it also opens up stars — especially the women of pop — to more intense scrutiny and a higher degree of personal accountability.

In a Billboard interview looking back on the decade, Swift spoke about her relationship to fame and learning to hold things back. “I didn’t quite know what exactly to ... share and what to protect. I think a lot of people go through that, especially in the last decade,” she said. “There was this phase where social media felt fun and casual and quirky and safe. And then it got to the point where everyone has to evaluate their relationship with social media. So I decided that the best thing I have to offer people is my music.”

Like Lana Del Rey denying she ever had a persona, or Lady Gaga stripping down with Joanne, there seems to come a point when white pop divas need to declare themselves authentic and all about the music — as if their ongoing narratives aren’t part of the show. But the way Swift used her image and the never-ending soap opera that swirled around her to make space for her music in an increasingly saturated attention economy was itself a kind of art. ●

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radioleary-blog · 6 years

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Hef Tragedy Jam

Hugh Hefner died yesterday. When the news was announced, over fifty women said they were dismayed. No, wait...over fifty women said they were “Miss May”. Fifty more were Miss June, and, well, you get the picture. If you were lucky you got their pictures.

Few of you reading this are old enough to remember that Playboy magazine was about the only place you could see a naked woman, and I say that because there are probably few of you reading this, period. But hey, my column gets more readers than the average suicide note, statistically speaking. Although I’m trying to increase my readership, and the average suicide note is more of a stand-alone project. I bet if George Lucas ever wrote a suicide note, he’d follow it up with three prequel notes. Each successively worse than the last. People would be like, “Why did he have to ruin that original suicide note, which I loved, with those awful prequel-suicide notes? I don’t care why he got depressed, but clearly only a manic depressive could make such a desperate cry for help as introducing Jar-Jar Binks. If I ruined a billion dollar franchise by coming up with an offensive racist caricature like Jar-Jar Binks, I’d probably consider putting a lightsaber in my mouth too.”

I grew up with Playboy magazine, and my early knowledge of female physiology was less from a volume of Grey’s anatomy or sketches by DaVinci, and more from volumes of Playboy magazine. It was like a reference guide, one that you would hold up with one hand. In fact, the first time I had a girlfriend who got naked, I wondered where her staples were. Of course, today, I’m the one who should have his stomach stapled, but that’s another story. Ah, sweet irony!

I’m sure Hugh Hefner went to Heaven, but whatever gleaming Mansion in the sky awaits us, no matter how glorious, for Hugh Hefner it’s going to be a pretty big step down from the Playboy Mansion. It may actually be Seventh Heaven, but Hef has been living on Cloud Nine since 1956. But, hey, he’s already wearing a robe. You know when you see depictions of Heaven, everybody is always wearing white robes? That’s because they were wearing those white robes in the hospital when they died. And they make you wear those awful robes that don’t close in the back because that’s where your wings will come out when you get to Heaven. It’s all part of God’s plan. I bet you’ll still have that plastic wristband on too, St. Peter just scans it at the gate to let you in. <beep> “Cardiac arrest. You’re good. Check in at the registration desk. Have a valid photo ID ready.”

Hugh Hefner was such a consummate pussyhound, I wouldn’t be surprised if he made a deathbed conversion to radical Islam, just to get the 72 virgins in Heaven. God would be like - I mean “Allah” would be like, “Pretty tricky Hef, pretty tricky. But...technically it counts. You old horndog!” Of course, you know what Hugh Hefner calls 72 virgins? A slow Tuesday.

The Playboy Mansion was famous for its out-of-control parties, and the mansion had a natural cave-like grotto on the grounds where everyone would go to snort coke and have sex. I guess Hef was a lot like Bruce Wayne, a millionaire with a mansion and a cave. And didn’t they call Bruce Wayne a millionaire playboy? Hef was a Playboy millionaire. But the difference is, Hef would rather do coke and fuck super-models whereas Batman would rather do-good and fight super-villains. Plus, Batman slides down the Bat-pole, and crazy hot chicks slide down the Hef-pole. In other words, Hef was sane, and Batman was, well, not so much. Batman is basically a billionaire who just wants to hurt people and not get sued for it and pretend he’s a hero. Kind of like Trump.

The grotto cave on the grounds of the Playboy Mansion had a huge, heated Jacuzzi pool, where movie stars, rock and roll gods, and celebrity athletes were eagerly humped by groupies, star-fuckers, and aspiring playmates. Unprotected 1970’s sex was messier than Michael J. Fox eating an ice cream cone, so the pool was probably 60% water, 2% spilled cocaine, and 38% James Caan’s jizz. The lifeguard got syphilis just from giving mouth to mouth resuscitation. At least that was her story. But that was about the same time Grand Funk Railroad was in town, so who can say? I do think ‘grotto’ must be the Italian word for ‘gross’.

I hear some of the more politically correct crowd, or as they’re more commonly known, nitwits, complaining that Playboy exploited women. And I guess it was exploitation, in the same sense that Vogue magazine is exploiting the mostly-naked teenage anorexic girls slash super-models in their magazine. And I say slash because that’s what these girls often try to do to their wrists. Unlike Vogue magazine models, at least the Playboy women didn’t have eating disorders. They’re a lot less likely to stick their fingers down their throats. I’m not saying they’re any less likely to have something down their throats, but not their fingers.

Exploiting women. As if Hugh Hefner was hanging around the Newark bus station looking for a girl down on her luck and fresh off the turnip truck from Topeka. That sounds more like the plot of a 1930’s movie than the way his business empire was run. I think what Hef did was have his photography editors, both men and women, spend endless hours going through duffel bags of mail sent in by thousands of women from all around the country who wanted to pose for Playboy. The staff would narrow it down to probably a few dozen, and then get Hef’s opinion on who was not only the most beautiful, but who had the look that would be right to feature in the magazine. That’s exactly what the editors and publishers do at Elle, and Vogue, and every other magazine that holds up a particular brand of beauty as an ideal.

And I don’t know any women who haven’t worn out the related links on their favorite porn sites jilling off to whatever their particular porn flavor might be, so who exactly are these people that still have a problem with Playboy? Because without Hefner’s decades of battles against governmental and religious censorship, there would be no porn sites. Hef made it possible to look at porn sites without pretending you go there for the articles. Without Playboy, people would still be saying, “Did you read that insightful article on the humanitarian crisis in Darfur? And that recently-found short story by J.D, Salinger?” “Why, yes. I particularly liked the profile of Jazz trumpeters from the post-bop era. And I did notice some delightful porn as well, between the articles, of course.”

The reason Hef could get away with putting in naked chicks is his magazine is because Playboy was a serious, respected literary magazine. The greatest writers of the day were in Playboy:

Ray Bradbury wrote original content for Playboy, and serialized Fahrenheit 451, which was coincidentally the exact temperature of how hot the playmates were.

The Beat writer Jack Kerouac wrote for Playboy, and that cat was cool as hell. Beat, Jack, that is exactly what Playboy readers do.

Ian Fleming published short stories in Playboy, and the James Bond novel “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” was published first in Playboy. We all know James Bond got enormous amounts of pussy. But compared to what Hef was getting, James Bond looks like a bible salesman with erectile disfunction. Or a guy who works in a comic book store. Think about that for a minute; the world’s sexiest pussyhound spy still gets less women than the guy who published the magazine his story is in. And Bond is fictional!

Roald Dahl wrote for them, too. The author of “Willie Wonka” writing for people who wonka their willies, sounds apropo.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote for them all the time, and that dude was cooler than Ice Nine. There’s a reference for ya!

Joseph Heller published a lost chapter of “Catch-22” in Playboy. I think the title Catch-22 might be the number of social diseases you’d get if you had sex in the grotto.

Margaret Atwood, author of “The Handmaid’s Tale” started writing for Playboy in 1991. I would imagine one of her stories was called “The Handmaid’s Tail”.

Hunter S. Thompson. Gabriel García Márquez, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Truman Capote, they all wrote for Playboy. This magazine was the real deal, kids, it was smarter and cooler than absolutely anything you know today. You see, all of these stories were longer than 140 characters. Or even 280.

I actually learned quite a bit about culture from Playboy, between rounds, if you know what I mean. By middle school I could discuss the literary feud between Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer in English class and sound like a friggin’ genius, I just couldn’t tell the teacher where I learned it. “Where did I learn that? Oh, you know. Around. Literary journals, and the like. At that building that has all the books. Yes, exactly, the library! That’s the one! I frequent that establishment, I‘ll have you know.” What was I gonna say? My father’s sock drawer?

The Playboy Interview was legendary, they were deep, involved discussions, frank and uncensored. Here are some of the people they interviewed: Salvador Dali, Patty Hearst, Groucho Marx, Ansel Adams, Stanley Kubrick, The Beatles, Albert Schweitzer, Buckminster Fuller, Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, Abbie Hoffman, Tennessee Williams, Erica Jong, Allen Ginsberg, and Bertrand Russell. Then there are the so famous they’re known by just one name: Fellini, Castro, Brando, Nehru, Sartre, Bowie, Nabokov, Hoffa, Carson, Antonioni, Mastroianni, Gleason, and Sinatra. And Playboy was woke, they interviewed Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Alex Haley, Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali, Eldridge Cleaver, Dick Gregory, and Huey Newton. Holy shit, right? Who do you see interviewed today? Kardashians? Ryan Gosling? Taylor Swift, but interrupted by Kanye West? This time we live in today has less culture than a petri dish.

Hef lived so long that most people today have no real idea how influential he was, what an important cultural icon he was, and that he somehow talked Marilyn Monroe into posing naked on the cover of the very first issue of his magazine way the hell back in 1956. That’s a dude with the Kavorka, big-time. And nobody was naked back in 1956. Not in this country. In 1956, people showered wearing a suit and tie, and apart from time shampooing, a smart fedora. They say people were more cultured back then because they went to art museums, bullshit, I think they only went to art museums to see the nudes in the oil paintings. You would too, and you know it, don’t even try to deny it. You’d say you were admiring the Titian, but you were really just admiring the Tit.

Nearly every issue, Playboy featured a very prominent celebrity with a well-established career and respected in her field who actually wanted people to see how beautiful she was without any clothes. Starting with Marilyn Monroe. And she was smoking hot, too, an icon in her absolute prime. Future historians will be more grateful for that photo shoot than they are for the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts. Where do you go from there, Playboy? Well, how about Farrah Fawcett, the biggest sex-symbol of the entire 1970’s! The list of gorgeous, talented, famous, successful women that wanted to pose for Playboy might be hard for you to imagine, as you live in an age where women pose in magazines like Maxim with their clothes on! And men today pay to see that? Wtf? Man, I can see women with their clothes on just about anywhere I go. I can see that in line at the deli counter, I don’t need to pay for it.

Here are just a few, a very few, of the already-famous women who chose to pose with no clothes:

Daryl Hannah. Olivia Munn. Kim Basinger. Charlize Theron. Drew Barrymore. Denise Richards (she had kids with Charlie Sheen, so posing for Playboy was comparatively a relatively sound decision). Shannen Doherty. Belinda Carlisle. Jayne Mansfield. Mariel Hemingway. Margaux Hemingway. Nastassja Kinski. Sharon Stone. Rosanna Arquette. Vanna White. Elle MacPherson. Brigitte Bardot. Uma Thurman. Kate Moss. The list is almost endless. I almost said bottomless, but being Playboy, “bottomless” goes without saying.

Sure, the last decade and a half weren’t great for Hef, but who stays cool past the age of 75? Only Bob Dylan and Picasso. Hef couldn’t let it all go, and at the end it was pretty sad. It was like Sunset Boulevard with viagra. But I’ll miss the Hef of fifty years ago, that man was at the forefront of political movements, cultural progress, gay rights, equal rights, reproductive rights, and the right to take your goddamn clothes off if you feel like it.

This may be the first funeral where you should bring condoms. In lieu of flowers, please give blowjobs. So long, Hef. Thanks for the mammaries.

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classic-rock-roller · 6 years

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1. You’re in the studio with your band one day and for this particular song, Daryl came up with the music and Bonham’s phrasing is really hard. “There’s no way I can play this how you wrote it!” “Well you better figure it out quick, I’m not transposing shit for you again.” You leave for lunch and Bonham stays behind to try to figure it out, and when you get back you hear her coughing really loudly. “What’s going on?” you ask. “I remembered that circular breathing is a thing, and then I learned why I don’t do it; it’s because I can’t!” How do you and your band respond?

Me: Are you ok? Daryl stop being an ass and transpose the music for her.

Daryl: Fine, Jeez!

Erik: What is circular breathing?

Linus wasn’t in the room, he was still shoving his face at lunch.

2. Your band is getting ready to go onstage one night and Bonham refuses to leave her dressing room. After a while, security unlocks the door for you and you see that she’s in the bathroom. You knock on the door. “You okay in there?” You hear her throwing up heavily, and when she finally catches a breath she chokes out, “Go away!” before it happens again. How do you respond, and what does the band do about the show?

Me: No, I’m not going away, you clearly don’t feel well. Now you better open this door so I can see what’s wrong with you. I’m not leaving you like this.

We cancel the show and reimburse people because I am not going on without Bonham and I’m not going on with her that sick.

3. Your band and Crue are sharing a bus for your tour, and Bonham is staying awake talking to Mick when everyone else decides to try to get some sleep. When you wake up, you see that they must have fallen asleep talking, because they’re exactly where they were, and they’re both asleep and leaning on one another. You don’t think anything of it until about 3 days later when a paparazzi photo of them sleeping is on the front of 4 different magazines. “New celebrity couple?” read the headlines. How do you, Bonham, and Crue respond?

Me: They will use anything to sell a magazine won’t they.

Bonham: I hope Randy doesn’t take this the wrong way.

Nikki, Tommy, and Vince think it’s hysterical and laugh.

4. You really want to get a dog but Kevin is vehemently against it. “Why? It doesn’t make sense. All that’s going to happen is it’s going to cost us money and soil the carpet and eat all our food and then die.” Without missing a beat, Bonham says, “You do all that stuff too; we kept you and you don’t hear us complaining.” How does he react and how do you respond?

He’s offended and goes, “I do not.”

Me: Why can’t we get a dog? Do you want me to get another cat and name it Nikki the third?

5. Bonham and Randy are over at your house one day and Bonham’s sporting a new tattoo of a heart with a knife through it. “What do you think?” Your 5 year old son Mal comes out and says, “I don’t like that, it’s ugly!” Bonham just kind of frowns, and Randy says, “Kids are like tiny alcoholics, they’re too honest.” How do you and Kevin respond?

Me: Mal! It’s a very nice tattoo, Bonham. I like it.

Kevin: It is a nice tattoo but Randy does have a point.

6. You and Bonham stop in to a corner store while on tour and when you walk in, a young girl shouts, “You’re famous!” She has you sign her WA shirt, and then another girl comes up, “I heard, you’re famous, sign this.” Bonham says to her, “You don’t even know us.” The girl says snarkily, “I don’t care, sign it!” Bonham takes it and signs as Kim Kardashian just to spite her. The girl looks at it before handing it to you and says, “Oh my God you’re Kim Kardashian! I just love you!” How do you respond and what do the other store patrons do?

I’d giggle and then sign it with Taylor Swift. “No way you’re Taylor Swift!” The other patrons kind of laugh at how she’s acting and that she has no idea who we are.

7. Your band is on a plane and flying through a storm on the way to your next venue. There’s an interviewer on the plane and he’s going around conducting interviews with each of you individually. You’re listening in while he’s interviewing Bonham. He asks her, “Are you scared of any aspect of your job?” She smiles and says, “Nope, nothin’.” On cue, the plane is hit by lightning and drops 600 feet straight down. Everyone and everything is fine, but you all are a bit scared. Bonham screamed when the plane dropped, and the interviewer says sarcastically, “Not scared of any aspect of your job? Riiight.” How does Bonham react and how do you respond?

She doesn’t know what to say and I roll my eyes, “Of course we’re all going to be scared of that. You think for a split second you may die. I bet you were worried a bit too.”

8. Paparazzi photos soon appear in magazines of every member of your band when they’re at their houses and unsuspecting. There’s one of Daryl asleep in his yard, there’s one of Erik up on his roof, Linus in his pajamas, Bonham in sweats and a t-shirt without a bra, and you in one of Kevin’s shirts not wearing pants. The captions all read something to the effect of, “Are the members of War Angel washed up? Have they given up?” You and Bonham are beyond pissed. How do you and your band go about this?

We give an interview and say that we are working on a new album and that these photos are very misleading because they are taken on our days off.

9. You and Bonham are asked to do a water commercial since your band is really popular. You film it, and when the producer shows you the final cut, it looks great. “All that’s left is some logistical stuff, this will be airing everywhere in a week.” You wait, and in a week, you see the commercial exactly once before it’s nowhere. Bonham calls up the producer. “What the hell?” “Oh, the numbers for that water aren’t doing so hot, so we took the commercial off the air. People are saying you two are too heavy to sell water.” Out of anger Bonham hangs up the phone. Just before she says anything, your phone rings and it’s the producer. You put him on speaker and he says, “The company thinks that your sax player is dragging the ad down, we want you to come in by yourself to re-shoot it, then we’ll all be happy campers.” How do you respond?

“No, go fuck yourself you arrogant prick. You use the one you have or you shoot with someone else. I’m not interested.” *Click*

10. Bonham is with you when you’re visiting your family in PA, and she’s recently gotten engaged to Randy. Your family compliments her, but once she’s out of the room your mom starts asking you all sorts of questions. “Why don’t you have a ring? When’s Kevin getting you a ring? Are you still together? What’s wrong with him?” Before you can answer, your sister pipes up with, “Yeah, Bonham got a ring and she’s a bitch.” Bonham comes back and sits down just after your sister says that. How do you respond and what do Bonham and your family say?

“What have I talked to you about with your comments? That’s not nice, stop being an ass.”

Bonham doesn’t say anything but I know she’s pissed. She doesn’t want to go through what happened the last time her and my sister got in an argument.

11. You’re sitting with Kevin on the couch watching a stand up comedy special. He’s leaning on you and seems to be asleep, but whenever the comic hits a punch line he laughs a little in his sleep. How do you respond?

I have this huge smile on my face because of course he has to be so fucking cute and I try my hardest not to laugh too loud or hard so that I don’t wake him up.

--------------------

1) You and your singer are going on tour with your band and Kevin and Randy are staying behind with the kids. Right before you get on the bus, Randy hugs you tightly and kisses you deeply before saying, “Why are you leaving me again?! Why do I say yes to this?” How do you, Kevin, and your singer respond?

2) On your very first tour with your band, your singer brings this girl with her. When you, Kevin, and Randy ask who it is, she goes, “Oh, this is my high school friend Brit. I promised her a wild trip because she didn’t believe this was going to happen.” The girl looks over at her and goes, “Yes, you did fucker.” How do you, Kevin, and Randy respond?

3) Your singer’s friend has been with you for a couple weeks and helps set up and tear down the stage before and after every show. One day, your singer is trying to do something and her friend screams across the stage, “Come on, BabyCarrot!” Your singer whips around and screams back, “And what exactly do you want me to cum on, hmm?” How do you, Randy, Kevin, and the rest of your band respond?

4) You visit your singer at her serving job and she has just gotten off so she eats dinner with you, Kevin, and Randy. You and her go to the bathroom and find a congregation of her coworkers. They don’t know what to do. Apparently, a little girl locked herself in the bathroom with the broken lock and can't get out. Your singer says, “move,” and shimmies under the door before fiddling with it to get it unlocked. When she opens it, she goes, “Now was that hard?” How do you respond?

5) You’re babysitting Mal and Eddie for Kevin and your singer. You didn’t sleep that well so you’re really tired. Eddie’s sleeping with his head in your lap while watching a movie. You keep dozing off and every time you do, Mal lightly hits your arm and goes, “You’re supposed to be watching us, Auntie Bonham.” He does this one time as Kevin and your singer come through the door. What do you say and how do Kevin and your singer respond?

6) You, Kevin, and your singer are out and your singer is being super pissy to Kevin. You stop at a Starbucks and Kevin looks to your singer and says, “Do you want your iced coffee or are you still being a bitch?” How do you and your singer respond?

7) You and your singer are out for the day and this paparazzi guy constantly follows you. You’ve tried to ignore him but he won’t stop screaming at you for a picture. Finally, you singer goes up to him and poses for a picture and when he least expects it, she grabs his camera before taking off like a bat out of hell and as she passes you she screams, “Come on Bons!” How does the paparazzi guy react and what do you do?

8) Mal’s just turned sixteen and he’s been using the fact that both his parents are in popular bands to get out of doing things. Once your singer finds this out, she gives him a whole lecture on it and at the end, Kevin says, “I would have probably done the same thing at his age.” How do you and your singer respond?

9) After the attempt on your singer’s life, she slowly gets better. She’s still not one hundred percent but you guys have to go on a tour. You want to postpone but she says no. “We have to do it. Just because I suffered a flesh wound doesn’t mean we cancel the whole thing.” Randy pipes up with, “I wouldn't call being shot in the abdomen and thigh a flesh wound.” How do you, Kevin, and your singer respond?

10) Your singer’s friend is still with you guys and your singer and you are getting ready for a concert. Once you’re done, you’re standing with your singer, Kevin, Randy and your singer’s friend. Your singer's friend pulls out her lighter and holds it dangerously close to your singer. She jumps and then punches her, “Knock it the fuck off. You’ve been doing that all day. I really don’t want to be on fire.” How do you, Randy, and Kevin respond?

11) Kevin and your singer want to have a really small wedding with just their family and friends. On the day of the wedding, it’s going smoothly until your singer is about to walk down the aisle, you hear a helicopter. The paparazzi want to get a picture of the newly married couple. The priest is about to start the ceremony when your singer goes, “Can you hold on a second? Thanks.” And then flips the helicopter off with both hands and screams, “Fuck you.” She then turns back to the priest, “Ok, I’m good now.” How do you, Randy, and Kevin respond and what does her family do, especially her mom and sister?

@osbournebemydaddy your move, Bonham, love

#tag game #tag war

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yowetremmle · 7 years

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oh my god not another lwymmd thinkpiece

I haven’t even posted on this account in MONTHS, but (fun fact!) I used to be a pop music writer and watching all the discourse around Look What You Made Me Do has me amused, so HERE I AM.

I think most analyses of the song and video completely miss the point, which is that Swift isn’t actually playing the victim. She portrays herself as a zombie clawing her way out of a grave, then burying her old self in it, but the old self is smiling and perfectly okay with being in there. Plus, “[she] rose up from the dead, [she does] it all the time,” right? Right. Okay. This is the theme for most of the video- she’s not actually positioned as the victim in most of the depicted situations. This is important, because it provides context for the times when she is framed as the victim- specifically in the car crash scene.

Let’s get something straight here- cheetah-print Taylor in the car is not Katy Perry. She is also not Kim Kardashian. In fact, she goes out of her way to show that she is, in fact, Taylor herself- first by holding up a Grammy (Katy and Kim don’t have Grammys, so why would they hold one?), and second by hanging the number 13 around the cat’s neck. 13 is Taylor’s lucky number, it’s a number she identifies with herself and with good luck- why would she plaster it on someone else? If you slow the video down right before the crash, you can see the initials TS on the front of the car- why would someone else be driving Taylor’s car? Furthermore, why would there be so many Taylors and just one non-Taylor in the final scene of the video? I’ll admit that I don’t fully understand the reciepts/editing comment at the end in light of that character being Taylor herself, but the idea that she’s playing a character other than herself in that costume doesn’t make sense. Much like how Taylor’s played with duality in the past- for example, by playing both the “cheer captain” and the girl “on the bleachers” in You Belong with Me, she’s playing with her own image, not someone else’s.

This scene is about the danger of the paparazzi, and their power. The fact that she holds up her Grammy the first time she says “Look what you made me do,” while the paparazzi snaps a million pictures is kind of the key to the whole video- they did this. They gave her the massive press coverage that allowed her to win a zillion awards and rise to the top of the food chain. The “what” that Taylor “does” is become massively successful. She’s not playing the victim, she’s winning the game. Later, when Taylor walks away from the accident unscathed, they’re so busy watching her walk away that they forget about the danger beside them, which literally blows up in their faces.

With that in mind, I want to draw a parallel between the line “Look what you made me do,” and The Weeknd’s “Look what you’ve done” in Starboy, another song in which the singer points a sarcastic finger at the media for giving them a platform only to complain that the singer got popular. Similar to LWYMMD, Starboy’s video opens with a current version of the singer murdering their past self, then destroying stuff (including things related to their own fame), only to drive off in a ridiculously expensive car with a jungle cat riding shotgun. Now combine that with the fact that some people see Taylor’s crash scene as an homage to Madonna’s “What It Feels Like For a Girl” video, a song about how men and women are held to different standards... go ahead. Draw your own conclusions. I’m not here to think for you.

I know I’m going out of order here, but now I want to jump back to the bathtub scene. Again, Swift is not being Kim Kardashian, nor do I think she’s mocking Kim (and anyone who says she’s mocking Kim’s Paris robbery- you do realize what a heavy accusation that is, right?). The hair and makeup makes it really obvious she’s playing her Blank Space character- which, as she’s explained in interviews, is a character she invented based on the media’s portrayal of her maneating ways, and which she’s always called a joke, saying that her fans understand that it’s just a parody. It’s almost like she wanted a litmus test to see who’s really paying attention- here’s this super well-known fictional character I’ve not only played in the past, but who I’ve point-blank explained was fictional and is representative of a media portrayal of who I am and not my real self. Let’s see who did their homework.

And this is the point where I as the author of this essay jump in and say I’m not exactly a Taylor megafan. I was into country music when she first debuted- I remember the first time they played Tim McGraw (her song, not the person Tim McGraw) on my local country radio station, actually- but I’ve never paid a whole lot of attention to her, and I’ve never owned any of her music or merchandise. I don’t say any of this to distance myself from her- I just want to point out that I know all this stuff about her without actually trying very hard. When I saw the big number 13 on her hand in the final scene, I Googled “Taylor Swift 13″ and found out very quickly what it meant. Her whole professional life is out there and easy to research, so anyone who’s written about her and misses major stuff like this... why are you writing about her, exactly? What purpose does it serve when you write what you don’t know?

Ahem. Back to the main attraction.

So people keep accusing the video of ripping of Beyonce, which I almost don’t want to address because it seems pretty groundless to me? If anything, the initial teaser images were maybe supposed to give the illusion of ripping of Beyonce (playing with the idea that Taylor somehow “stole something” from Beyonce by winning that infamous VMA over her), but the actual performance isn’t very Lemonade-like at all. I don’t know- maybe it’s just because I’ve been into K-Pop for so long, but the image of a bunch of dancers in a V-formation dancing in heels and crop tops just doesn’t really belong to Beyonce in my mind. To me, it seemed like another Madonna reference. As far as the bat in the heist scene? I mean it might be a Beyonce reference, but it seems a bit far-fetched- it could probably just as easily be argued as a Harley Quinn reference? I don’t think it actually is a Harley Quinn reference, I just want to point out that bats as weapons are, you know, everywhere. Other than the fact that she’s using a bat as a weapon, I don’t see anything else in this scene that calls back to Lemonade at all. (I believe the scene in the bridge where she stands on a pile of past Taylors is also a Madonna reference, with a capital T standing in for the crosses Madonna has hung herself on and and danced in front of, etc. I feel like this is also a reference to an old painting of Jesus hanging on a cross with demons or people or something crawling up the bottom of it, but for the life of me I can’t remember who the painter is or what it’s called and Google isn’t helping but I can’t be the only one who sees this, someone help me!!! Ahem.)

People also seem to read this scene as a dig at Tom Hiddleston- just like they took the Nils Sjöberg gravestone at the beginning to be a dig at Calvin Harris. Look, I mean- it’s possible. It’s all possible. I’ve seen some convincing posts about how the positions of the necklaces on the floor beside the bathtub and an empty ring box in the heist scene are also references to her relationship with Harris, and I’m not going to say there are no direct references to her famous rivalries hidden in the video. I mean, the dollar in the bathtub is VERY CLEARLY a reference to the dollar she won in her recent legal battle. But, it still seems to me that the gravestone and shirt have more to do with her own image than with the guys she references. Taylor reportedly wrote “This Is What You Came For” under a pseudonym to see if she could write a hit without having her name attached to it- and yes, while having Calvin Harris and Rhianna on the track definitely tipped the odds in her favor, she’s still proven her point to herself and she’s done hiding behind a fake name.

The idea that she’s be “calling out” Tom Hiddleston is a bit funny- as far as anyone knows, that was an amicable breakup, right? She’s not mocking him, she’s mocking the assumptions people made about their relationship, which reached peak ridiculousness when he wore the “I <3 TS” shirt. Now, while I didn’t draw this conclusion myself (believe it or not, I don’t pay enough attention to Taylor’s love life to know how many famous exes she has), some people have mentioned that the eight dancers might be a reference to Taylor’s eight publicly known exes. That, combined with the “I <3 Taylor” shirt as a symbol of peak ridiculousness in relationship speculation, may be a dig at the media for caring so much about her love life.

I’m not a Taylor apologist- like I said before, I’m the most casual of fans. I could be all kinds of wrong about this. That said, people have this weird thing where they think everything Taylor does is a ploy to both make herself the center of attention while putting everyone else at fault for her problems. I think LWYMMD is Taylor turning the camera around on the media and reminding them that if they’re so sick of hearing about her narrative, they could put an end to it any time they want- they just won’t.

#taylor swift #look what you made me do #i came back to tumblr for THIS???#i miss music writing but i also don't #it's 99% shouting into a void of nothingness and haters #and 1% people actually getting anything positive out of your work

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