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swifties : taytay is the greatest songwriter of the century!!!

kendrick lamar, holding his pulitzer prize : am i a joke to you?

#shit swifties say #anti taylor swift #anti travis kelce #the tortured poets department #ttpd #kendrick lamar

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it's 2025.. taylor swift has released the third deluxe gold edition of her new album "prom king". scientists study the last living neanderthal on earth.. olivia rodrigo is being sued for 3000 billion dollars for thinking of a similar album concept once in a dream 4 years ago..

#taylor swift has finally “bought” kanye west #shit swifties say #anti taylor swift #anti travis kelce #olivia rodrigo #the tortured poets department #ttpd #taylor swift #anti capitalism

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can’t help but feel weird about some reactions to ttpd. sure, you can say it’s raw and vulnerable, but that won’t disguise the fact that it’s clunky, overwritten, boring, unedited and bad. taylor has raw and vulnerable and good songs — the entirety of folklore can be seen as raw and vulnerable and that’s its success, it’s part of the reason so many people think it’s her best album.

people shouldn’t feel the need to defend everything she puts out because then we end up with shitty songs with poor images (like literary images that we analyze in poetry). and what swifties don’t realize is that no one would be complaining this much about ttpd (or her writing in general) if they didn’t spend their whole time saying that she’s the writer of the decade. she’s not.

whenever they say she writes better than shakespeare, that her work is connected with classic literature, that she talks about important women’s and society’s issues… my only thought is “you’re describing hozier”.

maybe if they tried listening to other artists and tried understanding the critics instead of attacking everyone that dares say even the littlest negative thing, they’d see she can and should do better than this. and it shouldn’t be controversial to ask artists to make art.

sorry for the long rant but for real, i can’t with people thinking she’s the reincarnation of virginia woolf when ttpd sounds like it’s composed by a teenager who thinks it’s wrong to use “basic” words lmao

!!!

#exactly this

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Two months prior to its release, would-be doyens of Swift’s Tortured Poets Department have taken its barbed track listing very literally, leading to intense, often nefarious speculation regarding Swift’s six-year relationship with the British actor Joe Alwyn, which seemingly ended in early 2023.

The album’s title, revealed onstage at the Grammy awards, was quickly linked to a December, 2022 interview with Alwyn and Paul Mescal in which they revealed that Andrew Scott started their group chat, the Tortured Man Club. (“It hasn’t had much use recently,” Alwyn said: you wonder if it’s undergone a recent revival.) Swift revealed the leading track list a day later: My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys, So Long, London, I Can Do It With a Broken Heart, The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, to name a few, sending fans wild with speculation.

Swift, obviously, has every right to sing about her relationships however she wants to (no apologies to Eamonn Holmes). But in the absence of any music, some fans have spread baseless, dangerous and even libellous allegations about Alwyn’s conduct (which, for obvious reasons, I can’t repeat).

Last month, a brief fan-shot video of them dining in a New Orleans restaurant in December, 2022 was recirculated online with AI-doctored audio that made it sound as though Alwyn is saying “you don’t get to tell me about sad,” a line printed on the back of one of the new album’s four physical editions.

When Swift recently told a crowd that she was “lonely” when writing her 2020 album Folklore – some of which was co-written with Alwyn during the pandemic, a lonely time for most – fans took that as further confirmation of their theories. A live medley of three songs that all appear to reference cheating threw petrol on the fire.

Swift could make this stop. She is no stranger to airing her displeasure with the likes of Ticketmaster, Scooter Braun, Spotify and Apple Music, and, occasionally, politicians. Before she released Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) last year, she gave a veiled speech at one Eras tour date effectively asking fans not to go after John Mayer, whom she dated when she was 19 and he was 32 and is understood to be the subject of that album’s Dear John.

“I am not putting this album out so you should feel the need to defend me on the internet against someone you think I wrote a song about 14m years ago when I was 19,” she said in Minneapolis.

But for whatever reason – and obviously, no member of the public has any idea what transpired between her and Alwyn so far – this time she has opted to stay quiet.

Establishing a baseline for conduct is neither commercially risky nor unprecedented: just last week, Ariana Grande said, after the release of her post-divorce album Eternal Sunshine: “Anyone that is sending hateful messages to the people in my life based on your interpretation of this album is not supporting me and is absolutely doing the polar opposite of what I would ever encourage”.

It feels like the endgame of a cat-and-mouse act that’s gone too far. Swift’s gestures towards meaning have led every single thing she does to be considered a kind of marketing, a clue to be solved. It leaves a superstar who’s usually hot on her messaging open to misinterpretation: hints about her personal life are turned by some fans into witch-hunts for anyone perceived to have wronged her; her current silence on politics allows politicians to invoke her name, from the New South Wales police commissioner quoting Swift’s anti-haters lines while defending police to Joe Biden joking that the matter of her apparently much sought-after endorsement is “classified” on Late Night With Seth Meyers.

When Swift made a blandly neutral handwritten post encouraging US citizens to register to vote on Super Tuesday, some fans speculated that her unusual left-leaning handwriting was the real indication of her loyalties – suggesting they’re so starved of substance that they’re reading into empty messages because of this dynamic she has established. (The more likely explanation is the insane way she holds a pen.)

For Swift to only direct fans as to her wishes when it suits her, it weakens her status as a truth-teller. If the comparisons with Dickinson mean anything, she might remember that nothing in the world has as much power as a word feels like the endgame of a cat-and-mouse act that’s gone too far.

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Chen Chen

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Some good comment on this 1830s line from reddit thread about swifties harassing Maitreyi Ramakrishnan:

As someone with a masters in poetry, who has analyzed, graded, and critiqued poems, lyrics, and lyrical prose, it 💯 seems like the work of a younger white student just starting out, romanticizing a random decade bc it would make them seem deep. During workshop someone will mention that time period wasn’t so great for POC, and then the writer will stick on “but without all the racists” and think that solves the whole problem, when that’s only part of the issue to begin with.

ETA I’m getting a lot of messages from people who are supplying me with the lyrics in context, which admittedly I had not seen before. I took a look and I remain unconvinced at the assurances that the lyrics are doing the opposite of what I had first interpreted.

If this song were in front of me during workshop, I would absolutely inform the writer that because of a lack of clarity, this could be interpreted in a variety of ways. I would then ask:

“Nostalgia’s a mind trick” for whom, and why?

Because nostalgia isn’t a mind trick for marginalized communities.

It’s whiteness and privilege that allows for nostalgia in the first place. It’s whiteness and privilege that would write about “the highest bid” as referring to marriage and not chattel slavery during a time of literal chattel slavery while referencing the time period’s racists in the same stanza/verse. (If marriage as the highest bid is a metaphor for sexism and transactional marriages, the metaphor fails in context).

It’s whiteness and privilege to tell a story about a speaker being supposedly so aware of their whiteness and privilege that they educate their friends on it during a game (which also implies they never played this game with someone who was a member of a marginalized community, a game that with the lyric “used to play” implies it was played fairly regularly for a time), but concludes that “nostalgia is a mind trick” without adding that it’s only a mind trick for those immersed in privilege.

This is emphasized by “Seems like it was never even fun back then.” This line implies that at one point, it seemed fun to the speaker.

“If I’d been there, I’d hate it.” I would let the writer know that I as a reader am not convinced of this conclusion due to a seemingly lack of comprehension on the speaker’s part. I would let them know many readers would interpret this lack of comprehension as willful ignorance. If that is the writer’s intention, then proceed, if not, a revision is in order.

!

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The Greediest Woman Who Ever Lived.

#is the tortured poetry in the room with us?

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LANA DEL REY Coachella 2024

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I’m so sick of the “if you’re a hater just ignore her” argument because!! I can’t!! She’s being shoved down my fucking throat every moment of every day! She’s on every magazine in every store and on every ad in my phone!! Not only am I forced to endure her music but all her ads are about how good a person she is!! She’s holding me hostage! Im mentally tied to a chair being force fed and I’m expected to just sit still and take it! I will not! Fuck this tone deaf racist I hate her!

whats so funny is that i got hate mail right before this saying i was an obsessed loser LOLLLLLL

it really does feel like we’re being cultural chokehold by her suffocating stardom. she is EVERYWHERE and its artificial!! all the attention on her its manufactured by her team!! & swifties don’t understand why she’s facing severe backlash its because all new sources focus on her when literally NO ONE CARES THAT MUCH!! its literally just swifties who care 😭

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I have no words…

Edit: I have to admit that reply to the stupid stan was funny af.

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taylor swift could explicitly say that she’s only attracted to men and have sex with a man on live television and swifties would still insist that she’s a lesbian icon and that her generic ass discography (which is the musical equivalent to eating plain oatmeal) is the epitome of gay music

#her music is revolutionary for ppl who think water is spicy

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#parasocial relationships kinda die out when u get real relationships

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Of course! Telling a man with clinical depression to kill himself or else they are gonna bust in his head with hammers is super fucking funny! Circulating vile rumours about him is funny! Shaming Someone who has NEVER said a word against your fave even though he has been targeted REPEATEDLY is funny! My bad! My sense of humor must be broken :)

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Your whole blog is about TS at the moment. I understand that when someone is a huge artist and you don’t get the appeal and don’t think it’s deserved it is baffling. For me I have that feeling with a fair few artists but I’ll remark if it comes up but not devote so much negative energy to it. I follow many people who are huge fans of hers but they still have varied opinions about her song and personal life and I follow multiple people who feel the need to bring her up all the time. Do a post or two then give it a rest

thanks but i’ll do wht i want on my personal blog i think