(x)

🎃 Imagine this. A diamond heist. Dressed in your wife’s black leather and the mask of an illusionist, you’ve impeccably plotted your way into the museum. Somersaulting past ancient artifacts, stopping only to admire a statue or two. On silent feet, you arrive at the display you’ve come for. Encased in glass, there lies a mirror. The reflection inside is rightly yours, and yet you’ve had to immorally earn your chance to claim it, to have and to hold it. Your team works quickly and quietly. You’ve made it unscathed. Almost. Mere feet away from the light of freedom, someone you recognize steps from the shadows, and cruelly removes your mask, revealing your true identity before you intended. Threatening to reveal it to a wider audience before you intended. For all that you are a mastermind, it seems you are not unoutsmartable. And yet you cannot bring yourself to give the mirror back. Your getaway bike begins to leave without you, sparks flying as the tires try and fail to slow down for you. You have frozen in this moment of indecision. But your hesitation was a decision all its own. This person may try to beat you to the punch by revealing your true face to the world. Or perhaps your best laid plans will still fall into place like dominos after all. However, that’s a risk you no longer have the luxury of taking. And so, it’s a good thing you always keep a pack of matches on you. 🎃

@9w1ft alert alert 🚨 👁️ 🚨

folklore is the pivot point between Taylor Swift the pop star and Taylor Swift the legend. Before folklore her career had been in an objective "decline", much in line with consumption changes in the industry, with her seeing slowly diminishing success with each successive single and album she'd released after 1989, and that trend halted and reversed with folklore. US pop radio was increasingly reluctant to engage with her singles unless they were perfectly suited to the zeitgeist of the time, like Delicate was in 2018. Her streaming numbers were not terrible, but she was consistently getting out-streamed by the top new names in the industry, much of which was due to her catalogue being absent from platforms which put her on the backfoot. If she had been following a normal pop star path, then that would've been fine and it would've the beginning of her fade from the A-list. Instead, she took a hard left turn and put out folklore. It did unexpectedly massive numbers (including setting the record for the most streamed female album in the first 24 hours, which she broke two more times after that), sure, but what made folklore different was the entire narrative surrounding it. Taylor was no longer just a 'pop star', she was an indie rocker, and for the first time in a very long time, she was at the center of the celebrity discussion because of her music, and not just as a very famous person taking swings at Kanye or jet-setting with Tom. The pitchfork-indie rock dad demographic, who are the ones in the position of deciding which music is legitimate art and not just "pop music" fawned over folklore, and shifted the narrative from 'Taylor makes pop songs' to 'Taylor makes good songs' in communities that would've never seen the light otherwise. Folklore gave Taylor a massive career-jolting shock, and it set her on the path she's currently following.

In the years since, Taylor has clawed her way back to the very very top of the music industry, and with each release she widens the gap between her and everyone below her. Yes, evermore and Fearless TV didn't have the most stellar numbers, they did continue to develop her career arc in an incredibly positive way. Evermore proved to everyone with a toe in the industry that folklore wasn't a fluke, that she was capable of making "artful" music that would satisfy both pretentious indie rockers and her own fans at the same time. Fearless TV proved that Scooter had royally fucked up in his calculus when buying Big Machine, and that Scott Borchetta had royally fucked up when he assumed Taylor's career had peaked and he'd made all the money there was. It proved to executives that the re-recording project could be a success and that she could convince people to seek out the new versions, which is something we take for granted now (just look at the daily streams of each original album versus its re-recording), but was not a guarantee back then. Plus, it was Fearless TV that really lit the match and set the fire under her back catalogue, and got tens of thousands of people who probably had never listened to the original Fearless to go back and listen to her other albums from that era. The numbers weren't huge then, but that was when casual fans and locals started to re-evaluate the depths of her back catalogue. Obviously, Red TV was another step in her career progression, where she proved that a re-recording could be more than just new versions of songs for people to stream in place of the originals. She turned Red TV into a full-fledged era with videos and talk shows, and that a re-recording was able to spawn a ten minute #1 hit that wasn't just driven by fan consumption. Red TV did also act as a catalyst for her massive catalogue growth, but it wasn't the start of it. Finally, Midnights and the Eras Tour have been the true peak of Taylor's career. She's outstreaming the next 4 most popular female acts on Spotify combined. She got an album debut so ludicrously large that it exceeded even the most optimistic of predictions by a significant degree. She was even able to repair her relationship with US radio and turned Anti-Hero into her biggest and most successful song on the Hot 100 since Shake It Off. Taylor can play the pop star game and get the pop star hits and have the pop star tour, but Taylor writes lyrics that appeal to indie rock dads, wields significant power on the indie/alt music charts, and is playing stadiums with crowds so big they're more in line the biggest rocker performances ever than they are with any other pop girl stadium tour. Taylor has moved so far beyond the pop star that she was at the start of the Lover era, thanks to the pivot that happened with folklore. She can be the pop star on the micro-scale, which is seen in how well Midnights is holding up as a current pop album, but she can also be the music legend on the macro-scale, as is seen by the 14 million+ people in line for her concert presale or the immense, immense popularity of her back catalogue that complements the demand for her new music. There's a reason people have started calling this SwiftMania 😉

4° of Agust 2023 this video is now private in Vogue YouTube channel. But, this artifact will not be erase. We will always remember, we were there...

“And now I send their babies presents” 😭

(x)

The way she’s once again including herself in the lgbtq community. She’s literally a friend of dorothy (x)

Lover's second surprise song

Soooo, I’m sure a lot of us have heard You’re Losing Me by now, if not here is a link…

So, like a lot of us here on gaylor tumblr, I have been quite invested in deciding 🎃 anon’s messages. Well, after I heard You’re Losing Me, I had a weird feeling, so I went back to look at the massages. The tagline in the song in Stop, You’re losing me / Stop, You’re losing me / Stop, You’re losing me.

She repeats it three times.

Stop stop stop.

A call back to 🎃 anon’s first message?

Here it is if you want to read over it

I thought of the connection between Stop stop stop, but also the other words that are repeated three times throughout the 11 messages e.g blow, blow, blow (7th message) and human, human, human (10th message).

🎃 Imagine this. You are on the balcony of an ice castle. Pushing and pushing against the railing, slowly trudging toward a horizon that never seems to get any closer. Smashing against the frozen structure that is so solid it feels like glass, so solid it feels like it will never break. The time draws near, springtime sunshine causing small drips and fractures. You strike a match and blow the smoke toward the structure that shelters and protects you. Suddenly, you hear a crack, a crunch, a whoosh. There is a sudden give beneath you, and you tumble through the broken, melting hole in your palace. You have FINALLY smashed through the ice castle! It was so slow, and then suddenly so all of a sudden! You'd thought it would take much longer to arrive in this moment! However, in this suddenness you find yourself still somehow underprepared, kicking yourself for the time you squandered by wallowing in the seeming endlessness of your predicament. All this time spent inching toward a finish line. No time at all spent readying for an end. Shit. In midair, you scramble for a parachute. You will reach the ground either way, whether you float like a feather or freefall like a meteor. But after all this time, you decide you'd like to land softly, rather than crash in a tangle of broken limbs and fiery shock. Dear reader, I'm sure this tale has raised a question...? Why would someone you believe to have wings need a parachute? 🎃

Here is 🎃 earlier message today.