#kimberlysversion

[academicallygroves]

Rewriting "Better Than Revenge"

In her original song "Better Than Revenge" on Speak Now, Taylor's lyricism cuts deep as she belts a line that talks about a girl stealing her boyfriend, "she's better known for the things that she does on the mattress". The lyric is slut-shaming and misogynistic at its finest, but represents the core of the album being that of not holding back, speaking up and out about things you didn't say. However, given Swift's own slut-shaming experiences, this line doesn't represent who she is now and what she believes in, or her identity as a feminist. In rerecording, she's able to rewrite how she talks about certain experiences. Rather than the original (pictured on the left above) focusing and blaming a girl for Swift's wandering boyfriend and reducing the girl down to her sexual behaviors, the rewrite (pictured on the right above) shifts the focus back to the interaction of this specific situation and the boyfriend's behavior of wandering. The girl becomes more of a passive actor than one that stole or directly impacted Swift's relationship. This song remains what it was originally, a song written from a type of raw emotional that you may only feel in your teenage years, but now it holds Swift's identity as a feminist and a writer who stands next to and uplifts women rather than participating in the same slut-shaming she experienced.

[academicallygroves]

Resisting hetero-temporality

In "Lavender Haze" on Midnights, Swift talks about the feelings you experience when you're falling in love and wanting to stay in that feeling as long as possible. It's a vibe of honeymoon phases and is inspired by a line from Mad Men to describe the desire to focus on love rather than be influenced by others. She describes this music video as the one that "helped [her] conceptualize the world and mood of Midnights, like a sultry sleepless 70's fever dream" (@taylorswift on instagram, January 27, 2023).

In it, there's a lyric "all they keep askin' me/is if i'm gonna be your bride/the only kind of girl they see' is a one-night or a wife". This is a message on society's view of women as a binary: a Slut! (iykyk) or respectable, wife material. This is a rejection of this normative binary by Swift. It's not the first time she makes remarks or addresses marriage and societal expectations regarding women getting married either. In her "Bejeweled" on Midnights she has sarcastic criticism of this ideal (see Bejeweled Easter Egg breakdown post on my blog).

[academicallygroves]

"All Too Well (10 minute version) [from the vault] [taylor's version]" is the long title to one of the vault tracks on Red (Taylor's Version). This song holds a special place in the hearts of Swifties and Taylor because it originally was written for 10 minutes but the label wouldn't release a song that long so it was cut down. She originally mentioned, offhandedly, that the song was 10 minutes long in 2020 and since then Swifties have been begging for it. "All Too Well" is a song that was Taylor's favorite but it wouldn't be a single or a video. Taylor talks about "All Too Well" and says, "what was so crazy is that when it went out into the world, the fans just among themselves decided it was their favorite too. They just sort of ... claimed it as the most important song from Red...over the course of the first six months the album was out". Now, having released her version of the album and song, she says that the song is no longer about a terrible heartbreak she experienced but now it's about her and her fans, and what they did for the song.

"For me, this song has turned into a story of what the fans did for [it] really," Swift said. "It's such a special thing to look back on for me and sort of get to relive. It is pretty cool."

[academicallygroves]

Rewriting stories, and polyvocality

Queer time encompasses the ability to rewrite stories or memories or experiences, often to heal from past grief or trauma, due to the ability to flex or bend time and hold space to have multiple identities or perspectives all at once (Halberstam, 2005). Swift's Eras era, Midnights, and the nature of the Eras Tour concept bends time to bring albums back to the present in new ways and bring us back to the past to reminisce over those stories and memories, but with new perspectives. In the work to reclaim her albums, Swift's songs that were originally her way of expressing big feelings; heartbreak, love, grief, anger, betrayal, become about something different. #rewrite

Queerness has "the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space" (Halberstam, 2005, p. 2) and in doing so, opens the ability to flex time so moments exist both in the past and present simultaneously, holding two identities simultaneously, speaking back and forward simultaneously, writing and rewriting simultaneously. In rerecording her albums, they're brought forward while bringing Swifties back to a time they lived in that era with Swift but also what that era held for themselves. They experience the music for the first time in many ways, as the sound, production, sometimes lyrics, but definitely vocals are different, but also experience it again because of the nature of releasing again. However, Swift also drops the curtain a bit for each album and adds "From The Vault" tracks which are songs that didn't make it originally on the album. These tracks are often more honest, more obvious about what they're referencing, as Swift often writes from her own experiences. Sometimes they provide insight or fill in pieces the album was missing in terms of stories that clear up the basis of other songs, and sometimes they give us a clearer look at what happened leading up to that album's original creation. The rerecorded albums hold their original identities, the nature of the original era, the version of Swift (and Swifties) at that time, but also they hold the idneitity of who Swift is now, who the Swifties are now, and the memories and feelings that are rewritten with reclaiming this work and releasing it again. #rewrite #polyvocality

[academicallygroves]

Living for the now

Taylor Swift released Ms. Americana (2020) a documentary style film that follows her career for a couple years. The title is based on her song "Ms. Americana and the Heartbreak Prince" from her Lover (2019) album. This album, notably, is the first album in the original recording process that she owned her work. In the film, she's candid about her desire to speak out on politics, finding her voice as a feminist, dealing with mental health issues following the manipulation and trauma of her VMAs win for Album of the Year in 2009, sexual assault, and toxic internet culture. She specifically talks about how young women have to constantly reinvent themselves in order to stay relevant and wanted in the entertainment industry, "As I'm reaching 30, I'm like, I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful". In this moment, we can see Swift's fear of her future diminishing due to society's tendency to want young women in fame rather than women who are experiencing age. This idea of what womanhood looks like and when women are desired as they age is a symptom of "the middle-class logic of reproductive temporality" which is valued in our Western society and means that, for a woman, "time... is ruled by a biological clock ... and by strict bourgeois rules of respectability" (p. 5). Swift feels as though her career may be fleeting, she's not imaging a very long future left in the industry as she ages into her 30s.

"Women in entertainment are discarded in an elephant graveyard by the time they're 35."

[academicallygroves]

living for the now

In Halberstam's In a Queer Time & Place (2005), they explore the concept of queer time and discuss how it emerged in the 1980s after the AIDS crisis experienced by the gay community, namely gay men. This resulted in members of the LGBTQ community to face death very early on in rapidly spreading ways. The community at large was facing the loss of their futures, or compressed life, because there was a very likely chance they could die from the disease. In these ways, queer time emphasizes the present and encourages folks to live freely and as hard as they can because the "threat of no future hovers overhead like a storm cloud" (p. 2). In this need to live right now, because there might not be a future to do so, comes the "potentiality of a life unscripted by the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing" (p. 2). Hetero-temporality is the way that life progress and milestones are determined or valued in a particular order because that's the traditional, heterosexual way of aging. There's this idea that you're supposed to move through life in this particular way-

childhood

adolescence

teenager, where you may be an angsty, rebellious pain in the ass

graduate college and get a job

find a partner

marriage

raise kids of your own

receive inheritence from your parents

die and give your children their inheritance

However, with queer time and queer lives, this progression, these milestones aren't valued in the same way. Queer folks might not hit these milestones in the same order, or even at all! this freedom, the ability to live outside of these "paradigmatic markers of life experience" (Halberstam, 2005, p. 2), resists normative time and in doing so allows for a flexing of time itself.

[academicallygroves]

Swift's fans named themselves "Swifties" which pulls together millions of fan from unnamed, abstract idea of a fan into a collective force. Taylor herself acknolwedges the name in 2012 during an interview with Vevo. She's made it a point to engage directly with her fans on social media, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, and doing so has allowed her to connect with them on a one-on-one level in a way that's unlike other musicians. Prior to her release of 1989 in 2014, Swift hosted "Secret Sessions" where she invited many Swifties to her home to play her unreleased album for them. In 2017, Swift trademarked the term Swifties and since then the fandom and songwriter have fostered a relationship where Swifties stand behind, encourage, and support Swift in a symbioic relationship. Swift has thanked the Swifties and credited them with her ability to successful change genres, continue her career, and do what she loves to do because of their undying support for their favorite musician.

[academicallygroves]

This Tumblr page serves as a final project for my Queer Rhetorics course. This project aims to explore and engage with the concept of queer time through Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, and her rerecording era, or Eras era. The goal of the project is to see how Swift's Eras era enacts queer time to challenge hetero-temporality and the normative ideals of life progress and flexes time to speak to moments as they hold space in the past, present, and future simultaneously.