just before christmas last year, one of my two sisters confessed to a sketchy fondness for taylor swift's "teardrops on my guitar" and promptly lost consciousness under a heap of sibling disdain (i think i countered at the time with hamster on a piano). about a month ago, our gym added miz swift's "love story" to its in-house audio/video rotation. last week i started noticing that i actually prance when i hear it while working out. listen, the tune is very catchy, and she has (cough) a very pretty princess dress. i texted the sisters:
L: Another sister has fallen: i too like a taylor swift song.
E: Gross and hilarious. whatsit calld?
J: Wait, has em already fallen? cuz i know my sorry ass is down.
J: shit did i unnecessarily out myself right now??
apparently this is going around. in this month's esquire, chris jones describes his initial exposure (in "who the f#@& is taylor swift?"):
Somewhere there's an African tribesman perfecting his dance to "Teardrops on My Guitar"; a heartsick Thai fisherman floats on his skiff somewhere off Phuket humming "Love Story." Me? I didn't even know whether Taylor Swift was a boy or a girl.has this taylor swift thing happened to you, too? how about unconscious prancing related to other songs? do share, you're in a safe space.
[...]
I went on YouTube and saw that there had been no mistake: More than twenty-six million people had listened to "Teardrops." I clicked on it, about to break my Taylor Swift cherry, ready to be taken to the moon. Instead, I watched a moderately attractive girl — her teeth are admittedly spectacular — with a moderately good voice singing a new country funeral dirge. What's the matter with people? But then came "Love Story" — and with that song, I could see what was happening here. No one ever went broke catering to the hurt feelings of wounded teenage girls or Thai fishermen.
But what about me? Who's to say that thirty-five-year-old chubby Canadian men don't occasionally get their feelings hurt, too? Why did no one deliver Taylor Swift unto me? No e-mails, no TV commercials, no billboards. It's as though I'd been purposefully neglected, ignored, cut out of the clique. I was suddenly back in high school, trying to pretend that my spot on the cross-country ski team was just as cool as being quarterback, even when the quarterback banged my Juliet in the weight room after a dance.
I'm going to go listen to "Love Story" again.
5 comments:
Given my love for the sport, I have grown acclimated to bad hockey-arena music. And perhaps even fond of it.
I am not proud of this.
(In other music news, Morrissey is turning 50 this year, I learned earlier today. Which means that all of us are now officially old.)
so i went and listened to this taylor swift person. played the love story track several times.
i don't know what the fuck is wrong with all of you.
several times
(cough)
i was being THOROUGH.
as in:
i am thoroughly surprised that anyone likes this crap. i must be missing something. let me listen to this again.
nope! still crap.
and "several" may have been a bit of an exaggeration. it was actually twice, plus the first 10 seconds of a third attempt that my body rejected by closing the browser window whilst saying "GAAAAAAAAHHH" at considerable volume.
see, that's the pain of a new self being born. down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger cues up the youtube.
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