What Your Taylor Swift Complaint Reveals About You
another humor piece
“She doesn’t deserve her Grammys”
In high school, you were just popular enough to wonder why you weren’t more popular.
“She hates other women”
You hate other women.
“She tries too hard, it’s grating”
You go to Urgent Care a lot. Birthdays aren’t a big thing in your family. You’ve made profiles on all the dating apps with fake pictures, in case someone you know sees you. You click on any news story about sorority hazing and keep an extensive mental list of reasons why you will never live in Los Angeles. You’re eager to share your reasons with anyone who so much as mentions a location on the West Coast, despite the fact that no one has ever suggested that you should or would move to California.
“She admitted that she borrows her hooks from indie artists she finds on SoundCloud”
You’re thinking of someone else. Taylor Swift didn’t do that.
“Well, I don’t listen to Country, or cookie-cutter Pop”
You secretly want a tattoo that says “cellar door.” You smoke half a cigarette per month. You have an online thrifting addiction, but it’s manageable. You heard a cover of “Cruel Summer” and loved it until you found out it wasn’t by Maggie Rogers. Every eighteen months or so for the past ten years you’ve made a list of prestigious graduate programs to apply to, but that’s as far as it gets. You never call your dad. You have a library card and you actually use it.
“What's with all the flowery writing? It's so confusing/pretentious”
You weren’t a horse girl but you knew a few and found them aspirational/obnoxious. You watch cop shows even though they’re preachy/fascist. You love/dread writing in your diary/newsletter. You will admit that “You Belong With Me” rocks/slaps.
“Why do I have to have a reason? Can’t I just not like her?”
You take a lot of stony-faced nudes. You consider yourself an activist, but you don’t like crowds, so protests are out, and you’re too busy to volunteer and too broke to donate, so mostly you sign petitions. The trait you most loathe in others is being into Halloween. The trait you most loathe in yourself is your inability to stop biting your nails. You have a Bookmarks folder devoted to fanfiction. You keep forgetting to ask your doctor for something to help with sleep paralysis.
“She used AI for her album art”
You’re thinking of someone else again.
"People just like her because she's pretty"
Your mom was a real piece of work.
“It’s not her, it’s her fans”
After throwing yourself into a grueling training regimen, you ran your first marathon six months ago and now you’re kind of like, “why did I do that?”
“She claims to be a reincarnation of legendary Lemhi Shoshone explorer Sacagawea”
Are you doing this on purpose? That wasn’t her. That wasn’t anybody!
“Her lyrics have the emotional maturity of a suburban teenager, so why do people talk about them like they’ve never read a poem or heard a song before?”
Your parents enrolled you in piano when you were six and you have always resented them for letting you stop after two years. Not that you would have been a professional, but when you’re at a party and you see a piano, you imagine yourself leading a singalong a la Groundhog Day. And everyone says, “I didn’t know you played!” And you shrug and say, “I dabble.” You suspect that, had your parents not forced you, you would have found an instrument on your own, maybe the drums. It has occurred to you that you could, as an adult, simply sign up for piano and/or drum lessons, but the idea of practicing an easy song, badly, makes your stomach churn. Maybe this is why you quit in the first place. You try not to think about it.
“It’s just a lot”
…you’re right.
Lizzie