Controlling the Narrative: Analysis of Taylor Swift's "...Ready For It?"
I wrote a short personal essay about my time in the closet, the inherent queerness of Taylor Swift's Reputation, why I will defend the album to my last breath, and why I think that track one could be about bearding.
(2,186 words)
Personal note: Throughout this essay and analysis, I use the word “queer” to describe members of the LGBT+ community for ease of language. While I, personally, am not entirely comfortable with the reclamation of this slur in all contexts, especially by people who are not members of the LGBT+ community, I have found no better alternative for this purpose. This serves as a disclaimer and a warning for those who are also uncomfortable with its use.
When Taylor Swift dropped her sixth studio album Reputation in 2017, I was a nineteen year old Baptist seminary student coming to terms with my identity as a lesbian. I made a lot of strong choices that year; I went no-contact with my childhood best friend, I secretly dated a woman who was five years older than me and lived in a different state, and I ultimately dropped out of seminary college over a winter break. I felt like an outcast and I had trouble relating to straight Christian girls while I was actively losing my religion.
After Taylor dropped Reputation, I felt less alone. All of the gossip and personal drama that surrounded this tumultuous time in my life started to feel much less like a personal failing and a lot more like a Reputation Era.
I leaned into it. I blasted I Did Something Bad in my car after arguing with a conservative professor, posted lyrics from Look What You Made Me Do to my Snapchat story where I new my ex-friends would see it, and — though I wasn’t able to swing body guards carrying me out of my apartment in a suitcase — I became elusive on campus. Hiding in my dorm room, leaving home, and losing friends all while listening to Reputation, I was able to come to terms with the idea that being my most authentic self might cause some people to dislike me.
Because of this, Reputation has always been a queer album to me. It’s always been about building a life that you’re proud of despite hatred and judgement from people on the outside. It’s always been about telling lies and crafting narrative for the sake of one’s personal safety. It’s always been about secret, and often forbidden, love. Whether or not Taylor herself is queer (and I personally believe that she could be), she understands the experience of hiding her ‘true’ self and she understands the danger of being authentic in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I’m turning twenty-four this week and I am out to my friends and family. I am happy and surrounded by a bright community of people who I don’t have to lie to. Being that I am no longer Baptist and quite comfortable in my lesbian identity, one of the few things that connects twenty-four-year-old me to nineteen-year-old me (and thirteen-year-old me and sixteen-year-old me, etc. I am a life-long swiftie) is my love for Taylor Swift's music.
Out of excitement for Taylor’s tenth(!!) studio album Midnights, I’ve been listening to her music pretty constantly over the past month. And, due to a rise in #gaylor-ism online, I have been revisiting her old lyrics with a fine-toothed comb and a queer perspective.
To be fair, I did a bit of this when Reputation came out. Posting something to the effect of “dress is the gayest song on rep” to my close friends Snapchat story during release week. But my current life experience and knowledge of LGBT history and culture deepens my readings much further now.
To start, many of her love songs — even songs from her country eras, though these are sometimes overlooked by queer fans who prefer her pop — are gender-neutral. She uses the pronoun “you”, speaking directly to her love interest, more than any other pronoun. While this stands as evidence of queerness alone to some gaylors, it is, at the very least, a happy coincidence for swifties who don’t date men.
What I’ve become most obsessed with, though, lately, are the songs in which she switches between “you” and “he” or “him” throughout. I wondered if, as an experiment in lyrical-analysis, I could extrapolate some deeper meaning by imagining that these two sets of pronouns delineate between two muses. Track one on my beloved Reputation, “…Ready For It?” is a perfect specimen for this and is the subject of my experiment for the end of this essay.
Before I begin the analysis, a disclaimer. LGBT people who read their own experiences into Taylor’s work get a lot of guff online for doing so. Often, gaylors are criticized for “outing her” or “speculating about her sexuality” or “assigning labels to her”. So, before anyone gets mad, I am not doing that. At the end of the day, I don’t think Taylor Swift’s real life sexuality has anything to do with the experiment I’m about to do. You don’t have to know who any of her songs are about to relate to them. It is also my personal belief that alternate readings of texts are valuable, even if there is no objective truth to them.
For my purposes, though, I’m not going to name names or speculate about who I think these disparate muses are, and I am not going to tie anything to specific events in Taylor’s life. I don’t know her like that and I think it only complicates analysis here.
(However, in this vein, Taylor Swift is a multi-million dollar brand and I am not not doing these things out of some desire to protect her honor or maintain any parasocial relationship with her. Most of the time, speculation about her on the internet is harmless and serves as free publicity to her. People who shame gaylors for “speculating about her sexuality” are usually doing so because of an internal homophobic rejection to the idea of her being queer. I’m neutral to a little harmless speculation, when it comes to Taylor Swift.)
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[Verse 1]
Knew he was a killer first time that I saw him
Wonder how many girls he had loved and left haunted
But if he’s a ghost, then I can be a phantom
Holdin’ him for ransom
Some, some boys are tryin’ too hard
He don’t try at all, though
Younger than my exes but he act like such a man, so
I see nothing better, I keep him forever
Like a vendetta-ta
What’s interesting to me about this description of The Man (capitalized because I’m using The Man in place of a name, not to be confused with “The Man”, track 4 on Taylor’s album “Lover”) in this song is that it has nothing to with him on a personal level or how he treats her as a partner. It lacks the intimate descriptions of the relationship or individual’s characteristics that are present in most of her earlier love songs. She’s singing in a fast-paced lower register (we’ll come back to this) about how this man appears to other people. He’s a heartbreaker, he’s effortlessly cool, he’s independent and ideal.
Showing my hand, I want to analyze this song as if the relationship with The Man is a fake, public relationship formulated in order to hide some part(s) of Taylor’s true self and the relationship with The Listener (“you”) is a real, yet secret relationship. I think that this is, at least in some form, an intentional choice made in the song. Whether the listener and the man are the same person is up to interpretation, though. While I personally am going to be making the argument for the song being about bearding, I think it’s possible that the same separation could exist within a relationship between Taylor and one man with whom she has a clearly delineated private and public relationship with. (I’m not going to pander to this point because it’s probably been done, but I think that this is a valid reading.)
[Pre-chorus]
I-I-I see how this is gonna go
Touch me and you’ll never be alone
I-Island breeze and lights down low
No one has to know
I think the pre-chorus reads as a general statement and could be said to both The Man and The Listener interchangeably.
The line, “Touch me and you’ll never be alone” could speak either to her own loyalty in a private relationship or a material benefit of being publicly affiliated with a woman as powerful as her.
“No one has to know” speaks to the private nature of either relationship, that there is some planned duality or arrangement with The Man or a secret relationship with the listener.
[Chorus]
In the middle of the night, in my dreams
You should see the things we do, baby
In the middle of the night, in my dreams
I know I’m gonna be with you
So I’ll take my time
Are you ready for it?
The chorus is the first full pronoun switch, Taylor begins speaking directly to The Listener while singing at a higher register than the rest of the song. The delineation between each set of pronouns is accented by the production as well as the architecture of the song itself. The chorus is the most important part of any pop song, it’s also where she’s carefully placed her secret love.
The lines, “In the middle of the night, in my dreams/You should see the things we do, baby” speak to a private relationship that, for whatever reason, isn’t possible within her current circumstances.
In footage of the songwriting process, Taylor sings the original lyric, “In the middle of the night, in my dreams/That’s when I get to be with you, it’s so sweet”, which isn’t entirely relevant to analysis about the finished song but, I think, lends credence to the idea that this muse is an unattainable other relationship, different from the one referenced in the verses.
“I know I’m gonna be with you/So I’ll take my time” reads, to me, like Taylor is reminiscing on a past relationship with The Listener that was tumultuous and full of uncertainty. When she fantasizes about being with this person, she fantasizes about stability and asks them at the end, “Are you ready for it?”
Are you ready to commit to this, should I change my plans?
[Verse 2]
Knew I was a robber first time that he saw me
Stealing hearts and running off and never saying sorry
But if I’m a thief, then he can join the heist
And we’ll move to an island, and
And he can be my jailer, Burton to this Taylor
Every lover known in comparison is a failure
I forget their names now, I’m so very tame now
Never be the same now, now
This verse, in comparison with verse 1 places Taylor and The Man on equal footing, positions them both as killers and thieves, pulling something over on everyone else. I personally think that this is euphemistic language to describe that there is something fundamental about Taylor that she shares with The Man, she recognizes him as like her and he recognizes the same in her. Possibly, they are both gay, possibly they have some similar experience in the industry or shared feelings about fame.
With all of Taylor’s references in this era to her fame and success being a gilded cage, “And he can be my jailer” raises red flags to me. The Man being someone who keeps her inside the cage aligns very well with the narrative of a fake public relationship that hides her sexuality and keeps the status quo.
“Burton to this Taylor” references the volatile public relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who met on set of the film Cleopatra in 1963. The couple was married and divorced in 1964 before getting back together for just ten months in 1975. The relationship was a messy public spectacle and the reference in this song alludes to all of it: the acting, infidelity, and public drama included. The imagery is incongruent with the tender love song to The Listener of the chorus, but, in my opinion, this line is the most damning evidence of the idea of bearding in this song. Paired with the “jailer” comment, it fits perfectly the narrative of the spectacular public relationship between two actors. The relationship isn’t successful or ideal, it’s a distraction.
I think “I forget their names now, I’m so very tame now” references another frequent theme in Taylor’s work: a rejection of her ‘crazy’, ‘promiscuous’ image. She’s forgotten the names of all of her exes and we should, too. And while the Reputation era is anything but “tame”, she’s going to change the narrative that surrounds her dating life.
[Refrain]
Baby, let the games begin
Let the games begin
Let the games begin (now)
Baby, let the games begin
Let the games begin
Let the games begin
…
Are you ready for it?
It’s the opening song of an album that is about her Reputation in the media. She is playing with the media, controlling her own narrative. “Let the games begin” walked so that “Every bait and switch was a work of art” (willow, evermore) could run.
the most base human desire is just to do stuff with strings. weaving. cooking spaghetti. quantum physics. embroidery. uhh lacing your shoes to go on a run. a lot of instruments. knitting
Everyday I swear I am more and more in awe of Taylor Swift’s songwriting skills. She’s unreal, the best country/pop/folk singer/songwriter of our generation and beyond
Folklore is the fairytale album all y’all wanted Lover to be but she made it mature and whimsical and woodsy. Taylor’s not a mermaid or a princess she’s a fucking wizard
Do you think Taylor comes up with lyrics the way we hear them or she just writes things like look how my tears bounce and goes um no. I need something that gives more scrabble points?
Real talk the Taylor Swift documentary is GREAT but just proves how underrated SPEAK NOW is, it is her BEST RECORD and she wrote it ENTIRELY by HERSELF
prguitarman
turnnoffyourmind
janainaart
izzy806
discoholicmusic
