A Note on Taylor Swift

The NYT sort of panned Taylor Swift's most recent album--which was striking, because (a) people generally loved (or claimed to love) this album and (b) the NYT is generally in Taylor's corner.

One song the "Times" *did* like, and one that delights me, is called "Illicit Affairs."

It's a standard country-song setup. The speaker is "the other woman" within a triangle. As in "Style," or "All Too Well," the speaker is painfully ambivalent.

God is in the details, and Taylor really lets loose here. Her speaker conceals herself with a hood, for her walk of shame. She takes shadowy back roads. She tells her friends she has gone out for a run--to account for the post-coital flushed face!

Also, the speaker buys fancy perfume, but then abandons it, because she can't leave olfactory evidence in the guy's car! The speaker feels irritated by the guy, who is presumably older: "Don't call me kid, don't call me baby; look at this godforsaken mess that you made me...." Still, "you know damn well....for you, I would ruin myself....a million little times...."

And: Let form match content. Taylor understands that a bad affair can be a kind of addiction, and she recreates the sense of relentlessness with her syntax: "Longing stares....they tell their truth one single time.....but they lie...and they lie....and they lie.....a million little times...."

Obsessed. After "Betty," this one is the song to turn to, if you have the album.

https://www.google.com/search?q=taylor+illicit+affairs&oq=taylor+illicit+affairs+&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i457j0l2j0i22i30l2j69i61j69i60.4240j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

P.S. A while ago, I wrote that Elizabeth Debicki will be Diana in "The Crown." This is true. However, Debicki's tenure will begin in Season Five. In Season Four--starting this Sunday--we will have a younger Diana. I had thought, wrongly, that Debicki would begin in CROWN IV.

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