Studying for a degree that demands six hours of reading for
each hour of contact time, I’m no newcomer to procrastination. Until about ten
days ago, in fact, I thought I’d seen every manner of dilly-dallying known to
man, from the mildly remissible to the downright gratuitous (one chancer twice
claimed the crumbs under the keys of his MacBook had made typing unthinkable).
Last week, though, I unearthed a couple of avant-garde ways of not-working that
I thought might just make it into time-wasting testaments everywhere. ‘It feels
like the perfect night,’ warbles Taylor Swift on her latest album, Red, ‘to dress up like hipsters, and
make fun of our exes, oh oh, oh oh’: surely better than fishing bits of bread
out from beneath the spacebar, no? Alas, apparently not. Once I’d donned my
best hipster garb (not my finest hour), it took me all of about twenty seconds
to poke fun of bygone beloveds. Peeling off the tattered loafers and denim
waistcoat (£3.75 I’m never getting back), I felt more cheated than R-Patz. What
went wrong, I’m guessing, is the difference between what Tay-Tay and I would
each thing of as ‘exes’. For me, it’s a pretty exclusive category: female
prime-minister exclusive. For Ms. Swift, however, it’s a tad more inclusive.
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| Subliminal messaging: Taylor makes no secret of her quest for love |
Taylor, now 23, strummed her way to UK favour in around
2008, long after trumping Shania Twain as the poster-girl for ‘country’ music
in the States. Since, she’s stroked more chiselled chins than a Gillette
advert. Kicking off with Joe Jonas, Taylor has enjoyed trysts with all-American
teenagers Taylor Lautner and Connor Kennedy, as well as with the more seasoned
Jake Gyllenhaal and John Mayer. Most recently, she’s rumoured to have parted
ways with One Direction heartthrob Harry Styles (a Harry is for life, Taylor, not
just for Christmas). What separates her from other young twenty-something serial
daters, though, is that Taylor just doesn’t come across as the tarty type.
Aside from the fact that her catalogue of former flames is more wholesome than
an Abercrombie and Fitch campaign, there’s her instant affability (she’s the
dorky-to-dream-girl type we all remember from school), her barefaced preference
for commitment over steamy fumbles (‘He knelt to the ground and pulled out
a ring and said…’), and her aversion to the rowdy melodrama of young celebhood
(when Kanye West snatched her award away at the 2009 VMAs, she was gracious to
the power of Kate Middleton). Indeed, it’s quite problematic to reconcile the
weight of Taylor’s little black book tome with the somewhat diffident
girl we get in interviews.
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| Coming on a little strong? Taylor has been known for her intense relationships |
Whilst her good-girl image has thus far remained impervious
to the string of Adonises (Adoni? See: procrastination), it seems progressively obvious that Taylor will soon have to compromise one or the other. First
up, she said herself in an interview last October that she felt the level of
pressure on her dating life was ‘abnormal…like a telescope lens’, and no
wonder; with specific, often personal lyrics like ‘you made a rebel of a
careless man’s careful daughter’, ‘what you’re looking for has been here the
whole time’, and ‘today was a fairytale’, Taylor has never kept her love life
off-limits. Second, there’s that giggling, gaggling core of schoolgirl fans,
who no doubt want to see their spokeswoman get and keep the guy, and who can only be feeling a bit miffed that she
keeps casting aside their pop-boy pinups. Then there’s Taylor’s own trepidation
about coming to be known as LA’s answer to Katie Price (which probably wasn’t allayed
at all when Selena Gomez recently branded her ‘experienced’), and the
apparent effect it’s having on her ability to tie a guy down: rumours were rife
that the split with Harry arose from her reluctance to, ahem, induct him into
her hall of fame.
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| Exposure: Taylor sometimes encourages love-life attention |
The snag, for Taylor, isn’t that she falls for guys
fervently and frequently; her supposedly zealous, hard-and-fast attitude to
love might be a little bunny boiler at times, but it’s surely preferable to the
casual sexuality flaunted by the majority of her music-scene contemporaries.
Plus, falling Swiftly doesn’t always mean falling stupidly (looking at you,
Khlomar), and Taylor’s unbarred optimism makes her a much healthier role model
than those who cultivate the screwed-up, contentious good-girl-gone-bad look.
Where Taylor might be going wrong, instead, is the way she makes her private
life more public than a Jubilee. Whilst penning (and even profiting from)
tracks about teenage heartache might even be positive exposure for her fans, scrawling
out numbers like Dear John mere weeks
after ending it with Mayer and detailing specific breakups on chat shows (as Taylor
has been known to do on The Ellen DeGeneres Show) might not be the wisest move
for a girl keen to move away from documenting her high-profile dalliances. She
can court and reject men all she wants, but when she courts media and fan
speculation about those men, she’s
asking for a messy breakup.
Taylor touched down in London earlier this afternoon, ready,
people are either hoping or fearing (dependent on whether they’re a Taylorist
or any other ten-year-old girl), for a ‘showdown’ and possible reconcilement
with Styles. Whichever way it goes, let’s hope Taylor leaves this one off the
next album; What Makes ME Beautiful might
be a bit more than we can take.
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