Rogueish

notnadia:

Every complicated feeling I have ever had about Taylor Swift is described perfectly by the strange face I pull at the lyric, you’d find some piece of mind / with some indie record that is probably so much cooler than mine. Is she finally singing about something I can relate to - that weird I’m-indier-and-therefore-adulter-than-thou relationship vibe? (We’ve all met these assholes, come on, gender notwithstanding. The people who constantly want to one-up you on literally everything? No, just me? Got it.) Is it ironic? “LOL, I’m a pop star [note: is she?], and you think I’m stupid, but I’m not”? Or is it - and I fear this the most - a casual dismissal of the value of all other music outside of the modern pop/mainstream music canon, the one that is both self-aware and self-centered.

Why would you not read it as the first of these, though? All the lyrics are in the service of rubbing this boy’s nose in Taylor’s supposed “immaturity” (the “oo-oos,” the “likes,” the “never ever ever”); with a dash of the second option, because the Max Martin production reinforces her performance of “immature” in its poppiness. And why would you read that lyric in the sense of the third option? Has Swift ever given the impression of being dismissive of the non-mainstream? The opposite, I would have thought; she’s always seemed to have a bit of a chip on her shoulder about the exclusion of country from the mainstream (a chippiness which, given the relative sales and coverage in mainstream tastemaking media of country and indie respectively, isn’t entirely unjustified).

(Source: brettisnotboring)