After a more than hackneyed attempt at being an LGBTQ ally by trying to reduce right-wing hate with the simple (and somehow more anger-inducing) “request,” “You Need To Calm Down,” Taylor Swift emerges once again with an entirely different sort of single from her upcoming album, Lover. Like so many of her “personal” “self-reflections,” this track, too, is an examination of being a little bit fucked up in matters of love.
Drenched in an 80s instrumentation that seems to have been inspired by watching Stranger Things, Swift displays a strong fondness for well-used cliches and platitudes in lyrics that contain such “chestnuts” as, “Easy they come, easy they go,” “I cut off my nose just to spite my face” and “All the king’s horses, all the king’s men/Couldn’t put me together again.” It would all be very moving if it wasn’t so ripped off from the common lexicon. Then again, maybe these turns of phrase sound shiny and new to Swift’s audience, blithely unaware of much before the twenty-first century.
Humpty Dumpty, of course, being a prime non-twenty-first century allusion as Swift ties the use of a nursery rhyme to the notion that she “never grew up, it’s getting so old.” But surely, she must like some aspect of her Peter Pan Syndrome (Peter Pan, who also had a fondness for archery). For it allows her to engage in drama as intemperately as she wants, admitting, “I’m ready for combat/I say I don’t want that, but what if I do?” To transcend into “maturity” would also mean not baking cookies with one’s nemeses and making it a news item via Instagram. To not stoke the flames of drama so that a “brokering of peace” can make her seem like a cherubic (Cupid, if you will–also the archer) and angelic in her innocence martyr. Of being able to say that “all of my enemies started out as friends” through no fault of her own, but because she was “attacked” in the same way as Cady Heron in Mean Girls–“personally victimized” by Regina Georges like Karlie Kloss and Katy Perry.
What’s more, Swift (and her co-captain on the sonic tone of this single, Jack Antonoff) can’t help being a millennial ergo naturally prone to self-victimization. Thus, when she tries to see things from both sides of the bow and arrow with, “I’ve been the archer/I’ve been the prey,” she also feels the need to add in as a somewhat non sequitur pity party, “Who could ever leave me darling/But who could stay?” Anna Scott had the same problem in Notting Hill, too. And it would appear that, at least for the moment, Joe Alwyn is Swift’s answer to that question. Her William Thacker du moment that she’s claimed to be nothing more than “just a girl standing in front of a boy…asking him to love her.” A direct hit with her arrow.
