break down a little

Just...gonna...leave...this...here

I’m still in the early stages of listening to the album, but wanted to do a quick compilation of lyrics that stand out to me as particularly queer. Lots of folks have been asking me for this, so here they are, along with explanations geared toward people who don’t spend a ton of time on Kaylor tumblr for easy sharing with your more skeptical friends. ;) Enjoy! 

“Cruel Summer” 

“Bad, bad boy, shiny toy with a price, you know that I bought it” -- refers to bearding contracts where men are literally paid to be Taylor’s public boyfriends, whether in money or publicity, songwriting credits, etc. Tom Hiddleston and Calvin Harris are the most obvious examples of these. 

“I don’t want to keep secrets just to keep you” -- What about J*e is (or ever has been) secret? She’s been dating him publicly since October of 2016, the month after she supposedly broke up with Tom. He’s a straight white guy. No one has any objection to him except that he’s boring. If this relationship is real, what secrets, exactly, is Swift keeping? 

“And I snuck in through the garden gate every night that summer just to seal my fate.” -- Guess whose apartment has a garden gate? Correct. Karlie Kloss.

“The Man” 

“What’s it like to brag about raking in dollars and getting bitches and models?” -- The conceit of this song is not what Taylor would do if she were a man, but how she would be treated if she did the exact same things she does now. So…bragging about sleeping with models? Noted. 

“I Think He Knows” 

“His hands around a cold glass make me want to know that body like it’s mine” -- Leaving aside the male pronoun (sigh), the word “mine” has two meanings here: I want to know your body like it belongs to me, and I want to know your body as well as I know my own. The second thing could work for a male body, but boy does the lyric make more sense if she’s dating a woman. 

“He got my heartbeat skipping down 16th Avenue” -- This line refers to Music Row in Nashville (she’s writing songs about her lover, so good), but it’s also another street: The main drag (pun intended) of the fictional gay town from Taylor’s “You Need to Calm Down” video. Why would a straight guy make her heart pitter patter down a gay gay street?

(Credit @dixiechicksswift for this one)

“Paper Rings”

Not my fav song tbh, but it undoubtedly hits on several queer themes in Taylor’s work: going from friends to something more, picture frames (a motif from “How You Get the Girl,” a Very Gay Song), and substituting the public jewelry you could wear with a public (straight) partner for the symbolic jewelry you wear with a private (queer) partner, i.e. “picture of your face in an invisible locket,” a lyric from additional Very Gay Song “Dancing With Our Hands Tied.” 

“Cornelia Street”

One of Taylor’s three solo writing credits on the album, a gorgeous love song without a hint of no homo. Taylor’s Cornelia Street rental was frequently visited by -- you guessed it -- Karlie Kloss.

“Baby, I get mystified by how this city screams your name.” This could be a reference to any city where you have a meaningful relationship, but it’s another level when the city is New York and Karlie is regularly on billboards in Times Square. 

“Jacket ‘round my shoulders is yours” -- I absolutely love how this lyric takes a straight trope (a man giving a woman his jacket) and puts a queer twist on it -- girlfriends sharing clothes. 

“Barefoot in the kitchen” -- Taylor and Karlie famously love to bake together, and baking has been a big motif of this era, including sweet treats on Taylor’s insta and baking videos in the “Lover” lyric video. 

There are 13 seconds of silence at the end of this track -- to my mind, this means that Taylor is telling us there’s something she’s not telling us. 

“False God” 

This track continues the theme of Taylor’s lover being her religion that she began so skillfully on “Don’t Blame Me.” When you think about relationships that religion frowns upon, what kind of relationships do you think about?

“Religion’s in your lips...the altar is my hips” -- Um, guys. Guys. Hey. Guys. 

“You’re the West Village” -- If you’re wondering whether Karlie’s apartment (you know, the one with the garden gate) was in the West Village, do you really have to ask? (It was.) 

“Afterglow”

“Fighting with a true love is boxing with no gloves” -- Karlie and Taylor famously had a (very sexy) boxing match in the “Bad Blood” video.

“It’s Nice to Have a Friend”

This dreamy little track chronicles the progression of a childhood friendship into a mature romance. The song is very feminine, with moments like “Something gave you the nerve to touch my hand” (paralleled in “Gorgeous”), and as Jill Gutowitz pointed out, it literally replays the plot of Carol. Also, this:

“Have my back, yeah every day” (credit @karlies for this one) 

“Daylight”

-ORANGE: The GAME ROOM where they play UPSIDE DOWN CHESS I mean truly her mind. 

-PINK: The bedroom, ya know, a place for ladies.

-DEEP BLUE: The dining room, a public place for guests to see -- also a place where Taylor plays a sad tiny piano and a sad violin.

-CLEAR/PALE BLUE: The bathroom, a place where no one should be able to see you (unless that’s what you’re into, go off), is a fishbowl here, a symbol that the public feels it has a right to examine Taylor’s most intimate secrets from every angle -- and her lover climbs in beside her, because she’s worth it. (Who could stay? My heart!) 

-SCARLET: The living room where the New Year’s party is held, the color of inflamed passions and raging jealousy (interesting that this room wasn’t green with envy!). Interesting that this is the only room where Taylor and her lover’s outfits don’t match the decor. 

-GREEN: The music room, not one of the more symbolically rich rooms in the house. Could be connecting music to nature (the human need to create) as well as to money (never forgetting that music is Taylor’s business and her career as well as her art). 

-RED: The front hall, the beating heart of the home, through which Taylor and her lover can get everywhere they want to go.

-YELLOW: The closet, where Taylor takes her heart (deep blue) and dresses it golden, and climbs a ladder into...

-THE ATTIC: The only room in the house that isn’t painted, where Taylor can access her memories and see her true self, where she can be all different sides of her personality at once. The only way to reach this special place is to climb through the closet. 

-OUTSIDE: The rest of the world is black and white. But inside, Taylor and her lover are in screaming color. 🌈🌈🌈

She climbs through the closet to get to the attic, where her most private memories are stored. In every other room in the house, her outfits are monochromatic - one note, one side, one aspect of who she is - but here in the most private place in the house, she’s allowed to be her true self. 

This lyric sticks out to me in the world of the song: It doesn’t make sense on a literal level (you don’t need to call anyone to let your friends stay over, they’re already there), and “make the call” as a decision sounds a bit too serious, like you’re in the White House situation room instead of a living room.  

It’s been a MINUTE since Taylor has given us lyrics rife with layers of meaning to interpret, and I’m so excited to get IN! TO! IT! with the lyrics of “You Need to Calm Down.” I’m sure the MV will give us more visual clues to play with, but before we get there, I want to point out a few lines that are worth a second (or third) listen: 

Verse 1:

You’re takin’ shots at me like it’s Patrón 

This might be my favorite lyric in the song. This verse can feel naval-gazing and petty, like Taylor is venting her frustrations about being an ultra-rich celebrity who draws ire online. But this lyric speaks to something more systemic: the addictive, anesthetizing rush of Getting Angry Online, as toxic, violent, and numbing as substance abuse. This is a big idea to cram into an 8-word turn of phrase; for me, it’s elegant, perfect, vintage, Swift. 

Snakes and stones never broke my bones

There’s the easy wordplay here (snakes, KKW, got it), but I’m more interested in the “stones” part of the lyric. This takes me back to “New Romantics”: I could build a castle out of all the bricks you threw at me. And then we found out what happened to those bricks in “Call It What You Want”: My castle crumbled overnight. I think this lyric references not only the pain Taylor has endured due to online vitriol, but the deeper, more personal losses she’s suffered as a result of her intensely public life -- namely, the closet. We’ll get more on that in...

Verse 2:

This verse takes obvious aim at homophobic bullies, but I think it also alludes to the pain of life in the closet, using an ongoing metaphor of light and darkness.

Sunshine on the street at the parade But you would rather be in the dark age Makin' that sign must've taken all night

Sure, the dark age can refer to the middle ages, but it can also mean a literal dark age: a period in a person’s life when she’s forced to live in darkness, when she can’t, to quote a certain music book written by one Ms. April Heart, “Step into the daylight and let it go.” She punctuates this idea with the perfect exclamation point: 

Shade never made anybody less gay 

This line has THREE meanings (my favorite!!) the first being the most obvious -- that throwing shade on someone won’t change who they are. The second is an in-joke for LGBTQ+ people -- bench, we invented shade, and throwing shade is part of what MAKES us gay. But the third meaning here is shade as darkness, continuing the imagistic theme of “dark age” and “night” from earlier in the verse. Being in the closet and hiding who you are doesn’t make you less gay, and no one knows this better than Taylor. 

Bridge/final chorus:

We all know now  We all got crowns 

Several folks have noted two pointed Karlie references in the lyrics (Knockout and Sunshine); I think this is a third. The king/crown codeword for Karlie was riddled throughout Reputation, including in the CIWYW lyric I referenced earlier: My castle crumbled overnight / I brought a knife to a gunfight / They took the crown but it’s all right. She references the pain of that moment in verse 1, but here in the bridge, it sounds a lot like a happier turn to me? Which brings us to:

Can you just not step on our gowns?

“Gown” is an interesting, specific word. You wear a gown to graduation (a moment of transition/emergence, like a snake becoming a butterfly), to a red carpet event (à la Billy Porter or JVN, e.g. “can you just not step on his gown”), and to a wedding. And what kind of wedding would have more than one gown? Welp, one with more than one bride. 

This may be a reach, but I think this song resonates so strongly because it has a consistent undertone that layers with Taylor’s personal narrative: the pain of snakes and stones, of living in the darkness and seeking the light, of feeling like you’ve lost the person most precious to you, and of finding hope in the end. 

While I have you here, I also want to mention how much I love this song for 2019, a time when we’re seeing our government attack LGBTQ+ people in dangerous, unprecedented ways. Whether or not you buy ANY of this subtext, I think it matters that one of the biggest pop stars in the world is calling out homophobic, misogynistic anger, speaking directly to those who traffic in it, and saying she won’t stand for it. So proud of our queen, and (particularly after feeling quite let down musically and lyrically by “ME!”) so happy to stan.

P.S. Bonus lyric: You are somebody that we don’t know.

Living for Taylor referencing one of the gayest tropes of all: 

GLAAD made official YNTCD stickers and did a full-list email about @taylorswift and her commitment to LGBTQ equality and I! AM! SCREAMING!!!!