#darkbluetennessee

I don't mean to hijack @taylorswiftstyle's post and this is probably a different tangent and also not even fully formed but I have it in my head that a lot of the discourse about "privacy" is people conflating something they just personally don't care for with some sort of moral failing or gaucheness on the part of those they're judging. Like, people have lost the ability to say "that's not for me" and move on. Instead, every fucking thing becomes a thinkpiece about "this is wrong or unsavoury and here are reasons x, y and z why." It was never that serious, my dudes!

But I also have a half-brained thought about how it's also a reflection of the surveillance culture of the modern internet age and younger generations growing up being perceived online and therefore somehow confusing like, media coverage of a celebrity living their life with them and their friends sharing every moment of their day on tiktok or whatever. It's a very "old man yelling at clouds" rant from me and again it's not even fully formed in my head.

And then there's yet another tangent about how it's yet another thing people weaponize to try to put people like Taylor in their place. Taylor is the biggest star in the world, she's rich beyond belief, she commands attention without ever asking for it (and even more so when she does), and like it or not everyone is seated when she moves. So somehow, it's been spun that her every move being tracked on camera is her own moral failing, and is used as the stick by which some people measure every other celebrity or every other person, really.

Like the whole comparison between let's say, Taylor and Travis and Tom and Zendaya. Commenters have been praising Tom and Zendaya for keeping their wedding private and not confirming it themselves for like six months or whatever it was, whereas the same people might turn around and blast Taylor and Travis for the "spectacle" of their wedding. So firstly discounting that they're different couples with different preferences, and next discounting that again, the fame gap between the two isn't even comparable (I'm sorry, it just isn't)--imo Tom and Zendaya, for example, really aren't any more private than Taylor and Travis.

Sure, they seemingly had a tiny wedding that flew under the radar (good for them!), but they still had people talking about it FOR MONTHS. They didn't confirm their wedding, but people around them (e.g. Law Roach) did for them. Zendaya started wearing her wedding band. Tom finally confirmed it during their current press tour. THEY'RE ON A PRESS TOUR FOR A MOVIE THEY DID TOGETHER. Good for them for keeping everything as tight-lipped as they wanted, but really, we don't know that much more about Taylor and Travis' personal life as we do Tom and Zendaya's, but somehow they have become the paragon of "privacy" (read: some sort of weird internet moral purity) whereas Taylor and Travis are tacky or fame-hungry or whatever.

(also having people "tease" the engagement/wedding without coming out and saying it is its own form of publicity imo but that's a whole other conversation. And again I'm not saying this to judge one couple or another, I'm just using it as the example that I've seen most often used as a mirror to Taylor.)

People just have a really warped view of what privacy means and seems like, on a global scale, have started conflating privacy with secrecy. And that's the whole thing Taylor has pushed back against since 2023. There's a very good reason for it, which we don't need to get into here, but it's clear it's an issue that was weaponized for her for a long time and I think there's a growing trend of that in general in online spaces. Whether it's lack of critical thinking or social media rotting people's brains or the surveillance state being omnipresent and omnipotent, I don't know, but it's just a really weird evolution of modern-day society.

Kinda got influenced by watching the Werwulf trailer a billion times.

YAY LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP

I feel like this almost certainly connects to Taylor's reference in "Eldest Daughter".

As if maybe the "Eldest Daughter" isn't just birth order, but the women who step out in front and take the hits so the younger ones have more options later.

is this a safe space to say that i think the swiftologist guy is just. wrong. most of the time?

aaaa i'm so sorry it's taken me literal months to answer this 😭 this is just such a Fascinating song and i realized i did not have many pointed thoughts on it at the time, so i wanted to properly sit down and try dissecting it and put as many thoughts as i could into it

On its own, I think Suburban Legends tells a story sort of similar to imgonnagetyouback: this sort of undefined, on-again off again relationship that is sort of romanticized within the narrator's mind as being a "quest" to conquer. imgonnagetyouback feels like it has more history to its story, while Suburban Legends feels a bit newer and rawer, but ultimately, I think the gist of their arcs is similar.

I will admit, I don't particularly find this general interpretation of Suburban Legends to be all that interesting to me just on its own. However, I am extremely obsessed with how many lyrical and thematic parallels there are to other songs--especially to ones written after 1989. A few days before TTPD came out, I made a playlist chronicling a narrative that (at the time lol) I felt might be relevant to fathoming what we might hear about in TTPD. I also wrote up a breakdown of said playlist, because even though it included like 4 hours worth of songs, I made it in large part because I could not stop thinking about the sheer amount of parallels between Suburban Legends. I break them all down there, but some of my favorite ones are:

"You were so magnetic, it was almost obnoxious" vs "your magnetic field" and "it's gravity keeping you with me," in addition to this general idea of magnetism in the first verse also paralleling the themes of songs like Invisible String, Glitch, and Willow

"I didn't come here to make friends" vs "I don't want you like a best friend" and other friends-to-lovers type lyrics that tie into the magnetism theme ("I hate accidents except when we went from friends to this," "We were supposed to be just friends")

"I broke my own heart cause you were too polite to do it" vs "I broke his heart cause he was nice" and "I pushed you to the edge, but you were too polite to leave me"

The second verse using the setting of high school as a metaphor for becoming a public power couple trying vs the high school metaphors/setting of Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince and the Folklore trilogy

These parallels (among many of the others that are a bit too intertwined in the playlist to break down here lol) are a big part of what compels me about Suburban Legends in the context of her discography post-1989. It feels like it slots perfectly into the relationship breakdown that preludes TTPD, specifically in how it echoes the same sort of nature of how the relationship came together in Reputation and Lover. This sort of cat and mouse, will we or won't we undertone of behavior, coupled with an underlying sense of this inevitable, fated pull. We were born to be suburban legends. Our mismatched star signs would surprise the whole school. You were so magnetic it was almost obnoxious. Somehow, this was always destined to happen.

And that makes considering the ending of this song all the more interesting.

Because there's a sort of Cardigan-like premonition running throughout the entire song. You kiss me in a way that's gonna screw me up forever. I broke my own heart cause you were too polite to do it. You don't knock anymore, and I always knew it, that my life would be ruined. All of these feel very "I knew everything when I was young" to me. Which is definitely apt for this song; "suburban legends" as a concept in and of itself plays on the idea of an "urban legend," a form of modern folklore. They are propagated via word of mouth and the waves of popular culture, not tangible, scientific proof--which again highlights the inevitability of the central relationship. (Small additional side note about "urban legends;" though not all of them are inherently based around horror and the supernatural, those are still very common themes of many well-known urban legends. Which, taken in conjunction with how she is positing her relationship with this person as being a "suburban" legend, draws an implicit line between the gossip regarding their relationship, and the horror undertones of urban legends, indicating that there is some sort of component about the relationship which is to be feared. Which just! Food for thought next to songs like The Albatross, Blank Space, Slut, etc)

Ultimately, that Cardigan-like premonition isn't enough to deter the narrator from pursuing this relationship. Despite this story ending with her leaving, despite this only being a temporary moment in time and not something that would last forever, she still sought to pursue it. Because as depicted in the second verse, her fantasies about what could be consume her so fully, she is incapable of letting it go, even though she is well aware that she will likely be "screwed up forever." She simply cannot let any "what if?" come to pass. Which is just the quintessential theme of so much her discography, truly, and why TTPD ultimately became the powder keg that it is.

And if I may go on a bit of a self-indulgent diversion for a moment.... I once again must highlight how this feels like an evolution of the aftermath of the Speak Now narrative, and how the impact of those experiences affect the narrator's choices and behavior in the aftermath. Though I've been going insane about how well you can use Suburban Legends to analyze and enhance that storyline of Reputation through TTPD, I also think there's room for interpreting it in the opposite direction, and seeing how it reflects the mindset of the narrator at the time of Speak Now/Red:

"You had people who called you on unmarked numbers in my peripheral vision. I let it slide like a hose on slippery plastic summer, all was quickly forgiven" vs songs like Foolish One, Superman, Babe, Girl At Home; calling back to themes of infidelity/lack of commitment on the part of the muse, and the narrator's tendency to forgive and forget in the face of being personally hurt (you could also thematically tie Innocent into this, of course).

"You were so magnetic it was almost obnoxious, flushed with the currency of cool. I was always turning out my empty pockets." vs songs like Dear John, The Story of Us, Foolish One, Treacherous, All Too Well, I Almost Do; connecting directly to the prior themes of forgiveness and calling back to that running theme of being so completely taken in by someone that it feels like fate, or a gravitational pull. Comparing the muse to something rich and out of reach ("flush with the currency of cool") in opposition to her ("my empty pockets") in order to highlight how unaligned they are vs the age/experience/maturity gap explored in Dear John, Foolish One, and All Too Well.

The entire second verse being her living in a fantasy of being able to be a public relationship with this person, specifically in part because she gets to spite everyone who doubted her ("our mismatched star signs would surprise the whole school") vs Ours.

"You'd be more than a chapter in my old diaries with the pages ripped out" vs Foolish One and Superman, and the distance she depicts between her and the subject of those songs in contrast to the relationship she wants with them; the way the reality of the diary in Suburban Legends contrasts with the fantasy of the class reunion, and also how the association of a diary with childhood contrasts with the association of a class reunion as something attended by adults later in life. The way this yearning for a fantasy out of reach and pairing childhood with the yearning for adulthood is simultaneously depicted in Foolish One (and later, The Manuscript): "Maybe someday when we're older, this is something we'll laugh about over coffee every morning while you're watching the news."

"I know that you still remember [...] when you told me we'd get back together, and you kissed me in a way that's gonna screw me up forever" vs, once again Foolish One. And also the implications of "I know that you still remember" vs All Too Well.

This was a very broad spiel because I am completely incapable of ever doing anything succinctly, lmao. But ultimately, I think that Suburban Legends' story is generally straightforward on its surface. To me, it's a song about being consumed by the best possible fantasies presented to you by a relationship and indulging in them despite the shaky foundation of the dynamic. To me, it's shaking hands with songs like Treacherous, IKYWT, I Can Fix Him, etc. in how it depicts a scenario of someone seeing the red flags in a relationship, but choosing to pursue it anyway, because being haunted by the "what if" would hurt more than the actual pain of the relationship ending.