Hey guys welcome back to my channel and today we're going to be talking about
Taylor Swift. So it's that time of the month again, where I listen to all of
Taylor Swift songs from all of her old albums. Some of my favorite songs being
Our Song, Love Story, Speak Now, and The Best Day. I listen to them around once a
month every month and I started to ask myself why that was. Well the first
obvious answer is is that I listened to all of these songs on the bus ride to
school. And those were 15 quiet minutes I had to myself before being thrusted
into the cesspool that was high school. A lot of these songs like, You
Belong with Me, Back to December, Fearless, were my all-time favorite songs during
my freshman and sophomore year of high school because they let me escape into
this alternate reality where my childhood crush finally noticed me and
we'd spend long summer nights together dancing in the rain. Even nowadays when I
listen to Wildest Dreams I imagine myself at the glamorous 1950s movie star
and a dreamy Marlon Brando look like as my co-star. And you know for just three
minutes and 40 seconds I can pretend that the abusive Hollywood studio system
didn't exist and that Marlon Brando is not a rapist, and kind of just escape
into this bubble where everything's perfect. And of course Swift does this
purposefully. In her Wildest Dreams music video she dresses up as Elizabeth Taylor
and pretends to be an old Hollywood movie star and she does this because she
knows that she's just a stand-in for her audience and their fantasies. And in
reality I bet that she to fantasizes about the same thing, of being this old
Hollywood movie star. And that's what I really like about her music and her
songs because they're so vague that you can kind of just put yourself in them.
They're just this kind of nice simple wish fulfillment. And going beyond
wish fulfillment these songs really helped me cope with a shitty
relationship. Listening to Taylor's breakup songs really helped me
cope and deal with my first breakup, so maybe that's why Taylor has this kind of
special place in my heart... and by Taylor I mean her music not her. Her songs
transport you into a world where you stand up to your ex-boyfriend or where
when you and your ex-boyfriend makeup or where a boy finally realizes how important you
are to them after friendszoning you. And yes friendzoning is problematic, but girls
can get friend-zoned too due to the fact that we're always meant to connect with
the male protagonist who gets friendzoned by the girl, and never the girl who's
friendzoning the guy for obvious reasons. Not to mention the fact that
girls and boys are fed the same message that they can't just be friends. Anyway,
because her songs are mostly about boys she gets a lot of undeserved hate and
she even gets another added layer of hate because her songs are meant to
appeal to teen girls and everything that a teen girl likes apparently sucks.
However, whenever she tries to do new things she gets shit for that too, so
there's really no winning. She has made a few songs about her haters and I think
that that just makes her more unappealing to people who already don't
like her, but that's just what I think. And now we get to the crux of the video,
which is separating the art from the artist. Personally, I don't have any
strong feelings towards Taylor Swift. I don't hate her I don't love her,
I just like her music and I'm able to make that separation. I think I'm
able to make that separation because I never had strong feelings about her in
the first place. And of course this separation is a lot harder to make
depending on what the person has done, depending on your own beliefs, and you
need to draw that line for yourself, but with Taylor, I know she's done some very
problematic things in the past and in the present, but I can still really enjoy
her music even now, 10 years later after I first listened to it, and it's kind of
concerning, but at the same time I'm just able to do that because I never stand
her...I never stand her... is that the right conjugation?... I don't know because I never
stood her. I don't really have any feelings about her, so I think that's why I'm able
to separate her political views with her art. You know sometimes this is really
hard. Sometimes it's hard to listen to Taylor's music
and feel like I'm losing feminist points are not progressive, and you know that's
just something I've learned to deal with. I feel like I'm in that Onion article I
think it's about like, woman turns off being a feminist for 30 minutes in
order to enjoy a TV show, and yeah, you know sometimes we all have to do that,
and it's sometimes it's even necessary to do that in order to just enjoy things
because we know everything's problematic. To enjoy things we need to
kind of turn that part of our brain off and sometimes it's easier to do that
than others, and sometimes you just can't do that with some sort of things. So like
I said, you need to make that call for yourself. I personally don't think that
female celebrities need to be good role models for young girls, but at the same
time she does have a lot of power, influence, and money, but at the same time
again, I don't think that she's using those things for anything negative?? I
personally think that her best songs are about boys and tend to be the less
progressive songs, but again that's just me.
And the reason why I never really stood her or was a stan was because I was
constantly inserting myself into her songs, rather than trying to dissect them
and try to gain hints about her personal life. I never really cared about that I
just cared about the narrative of the song itself and then living that it out
in my mind. I wasn't one of those people that were like trying to
dissect her Style video for little pieces of Harry Styles, for example. And
sometimes it's hard to listen to her old songs because I know that she probably
doesn't really like them as much because these were the songs that kind of got
her made fun of or not taken as seriously as she wanted to be because
they were kind of fluff songs, but you know they're great songs in my opinion.
Taylor if you're watching this don't be ashamed of your old stuff it's really
good and I don't know if she's actually ashamed of it or not but I do think that
she's trying to create a new image of herself and these songs aren't as
promoted as much or maybe they even bring back bad memories about about you
know being with that former company that basically controlled all of these songs,
so yeah that could be another reason why she doesn't like thinking about them. I
don't really know. I'm not here to try to dissect her life or anything so we'll
just leave it at that. And as for her new stuff, I stopped listening after her 1989
album came out. I do like Delicate from her Reputation album, but really after
1989, I stopped listening to her new stuff because you know I've changed
she's changed, whatever, but I can still really enjoy her old songs. And before I
end the video, just a little piece of advice to everyone, try not to like stan
people because you never know what kind of shit they're hiding or that's gonna
come out. And obviously again, people are just people. No one should be held up on
a pedestal. No one is free of criticism. So that's it for the video. It was a
short one. If you want to listen to her songs I'm going to leave some
recommendations in at the end of the video. So that's it. Thanks for watching
and I'll see you in the next one bye :)