Taylor Swifts’s performance was somehow the most emotionally-interesting of the Grammys (Chris Brown was the most interesting performer to talk about but not because of his performance), especially once you hit the three-minute mark.

When I first heard “Mean,” I wrongly assumed it was just another generic You-Are-Special song, universally applicable to all teenagers who feel like other teenagers are being mean to them (I mean, other teenagers are being mean to them, that’s the Universal Teenage Condition, which is why songs like this play so well).  ”Mean” is widely applicable, like most of the best pop music, but it’s also a shout out to Swift’s specific bullies, which that Grammy performance underlined with a thick black Sharpie.

Here is the range of Taylor’s facial expressions after she sang “Drunk and grumbling on about how I can’t sing” -

And while she was throwing tons of shade at anyone who would be mean specifically to Taylor Swift, the audience was cheering like the lyric was an applause line in a political speech.  

Ten seconds later, she changed the lyric “Someday I’ll be living in a big ol’ [sic] city” to “Someday I’ll be singing this song at the Grammys,” even more specifically about Swift, and another applause line!  (Swift Clinton 2016!)

This song is so much more interesting when it’s about Taylor Swift lording it over the assholes she left behind in small towns, who apparently physically attacked her (“big enough that you can’t hit me”), because it hints at a darkness in her, not a Walter White darkness, but a relatable universal human desire to make the people who were mean to us get their comeuppance. 

No one ever gets their comeuppance!  No one who was mean to us is ever adequately publicly shamed, because we don’t have a big fucking Grammy stage on which to shame them.  

It feels more viscerally satisfying for us to live vicariously through Swift shaming her specific bullies by someday singing that song at the Grammys rather than trying to affix some vague sense of “all you’ll ever be is mean” to the dicks we now follow on Facebook (they are something other than mean, they are law school graduates or suicide victims or bank robbers, just to name a few of my own specific tormentors).  When we try to paste the “you are wonderful, they suck” message onto our own messy lives which rarely achieve any kind of traditional closure, it’s hard to feel that sense of powerful victory.  When Taylor Swift does it with a choreographed backing band, we get to adopt her power.

Plus, we get a hint that Taylor Swift isn’t actually a girl carved out of pure refined white sugar and brought to life by fairy dust.  ”Someday I’ll be singing this at the Grammys” is the anti Taylor Swift’s Shocked Face and it feels so good.

 

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2. wonderblood said: This is great! xo
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