NETFLIX Review: “Miss Americana” (2020)

Unfortunately, Taylor Swift’s cult-of-personality documentary is a little light on the “personality” part

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PROPAGANDA REVIEW: Devil Worship — Exposing Satan’s Underground (1988)

In the late 1980s, Geraldo Rivera hosted a primetime special about the Satanic Panic. And yes, it’s every bit as awesome as you’d expect it to be. 

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Taylor Swift and the Tragedy of the 21st Century “Ally”

By aligning with the so-called “LGBT Movement,” Tay Tay is indeed setting herself up for career suicide.

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CD Review - 'Reputation' by Taylor Swift (2017)

The year's most anticipated album just dropped, but does Tay Tay's latest live up to all of the heavily hyped hullabaloo? 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

A couple of months back I got an email from some broad that works for some shitty clickbait website nobody's ever heard of before asking for an interview about this Taylor Swift article I wrote. What she didn't know that I knew because I have a good eye for analytics is that she found out about the article by literally typing "Taylor Swift" in the Gab.Ai search box and clicking on the first link she encountered. The evidence of this is apparent in the screen shot below:

So naturally, I get a whole bunch of questions about why the alt-right thinks Taylor Swift is a Nazi and I responded by telling her ... well, you know what, I'm just going to publish our entire Internet communique for you, because it's that guldarn entertaining:

And if you can't read that, tough titties. I'm sure if you hit the zoom button up top enough you'll be able to, or even better, you can read this thing on an iPad and just stretch the thing out and read it in one fell swoop. The point is, there's a lot of people out there who have convinced themselves that Taylor Swift is some sort of undercover Republican and they'll do anything to smear her good name in the public eye.

I've already written about this once before. Long story short, a whole buncha' pissy liberal women are irked at Taylor for being a.) white, b.) prettier than them and c.) one of the few - if only - mainstream musical acts that ISN'T caught up in a vortex of endless virtue signalling on behalf of Democratic policy points. And since modern liberals are devoid of a sense of humor or the ability to pick up on even the slightest twinges of irony or sarcasm, when they hear people like Andrew Anglin celebrating Taylor Swift as some sort of subterfuge neo-Nazi princess, they think it's 100 percent legit. 

Let me tell you knuckleheads something. When alt-right trolls keep posting macros of Taylor Swift with Hitler quotes, what they're doing is satire. They're co-opting the most popular mainstream act of the day and branding their own message to her for the LOLZ. But somehow, a whole slew of dimwitted, inherently prejudiced people out there have made the cockamamie fantasy in their head pseudo-reality. Just take a look at this meandering screed from a shitty website made by trust fund communists that accuses Tay Tay of being an "anti-Marxist" and a proponent of eugenics and a Hitler wannabe just because in her newest video she stands in front of a podium in front of a large crowd - which, as we all know, is something ONLY white supremacists have done throughout human history. So asinine that character assassination attempt that Swift sent her lawyers after the website - which, naturally, drew the ire of the ACLU and even more demands from unemployed liberal arts grads that she publicly denounce white supremacy in all its forms.

Maybe it's never dawned on all of these dunderheads that maybe, the REASON Taylor Swift is so popular in the first place is because she's APOLITICAL. Her songs about falling in love and moving on after a relationship and getting into catfights with manipulative friends is something that resonates across the political spectrum, and get this - maybe Taylor's core audience of 14- and 15 year-old girls DON'T give a flying fuck about abortion or equal pay or "the patriarchy" or any of that other shit the mainstream media keeps shoving down their throats day in, day out, and since Tay-Tay is pretty much the only major act in show business that isn't using their stage as a political pulpit every night, perhaps that endears her even more to the masses? You see, that's something I could never figure out about liberals; for people who absolutely loathe religious types (as long as they're Christian, anyway) pushing their beliefs on others, they don't see a shred of hypocrisy in the fact they're actively shoving their beliefs on everybody else at every available opportunity - and in fact DEMAND even more dogmatic devotion to their convictions than even the most annoying-ass Jehovah's Witness.

But - asides. What we're really here to talk about today is, of course, the release of Tay Tay's new album Reputation, which already has four fuckin' singles released before the CD even hit store shelves. Now, before we get into this latest release, lemme talk about me and Taylor real quick. 

Back when she was doing that country shit, I didn't give a fuck. It wasn't until "Trouble" dropped that I started to take note of her work, and the inescapable wave of 1989 single after single pretty much turned me into a "Swifty" by default. Let's be objective for just a minute: with no less than seven singles from the album, 1989 is unquestionably one of the greatest pop albums in history. And all of the tracks are diverse - "Bad Blood" sounds totally different from "Wildest Dreams," "Shake it Off" sounds nothing like "Out of the Woods," and "Welcome to New York" doesn't even sound like the same artist who made "Style." Give it about 20 or 30 years, but we WILL look back on 1989 as being a watershed, pop cultural masterpiece on par with Tapestry and Purple Rain someday. And while her music is unquestionably overproduced, fuck, what isn't nowadays? Besides, unlike most of those hit songbirds out there today, Taylor not only writes her own music but plays her own instruments. At last check, Taylor can play the guitar, the piano, the banjo and the ukelele, which is about four times as many instruments that Beyonce and Rihanna can play, as far as I'm aware. For all the shit Swift receives, nobody wants to give her credit for being a hell of a musician, and more than anything - including her much derided "Aryan good looks" - is what I reckon has driven (and continues to drive) her popularity.

Alright, time to finally focus on Reputation. From the cover alone you know the mood is about to change. Tay-tay's abandoned her trademark tomato soup red lips for some dark and dangerous black lipstick, with the album title itself inked in a font that wouldn't be out of place on the latest Obituary or Gorgoroth release. Of course, the music itself is still light and frothy bubblegum electro-pop, but this time around we just know it's going to be a darker - and more cynical? - variety of light and frothy bubblegum electro-pop. So how about we pop this sumbitch in our CD player and give the album a fine track-by-track combing, why don't we?

Well, if she didn't have a red lipstick fetish before ...

Track 1

"Ready For It?"

Surely you've heard this one a time or two before. This is one of those songs that's a feature-length double entendre. Except it's in reverse. Canonically, she's explicitly singing about having sexual fantasies, maybe even the female equivalent of a wet dream thinking about some dude she desperately wants to bone, but it also doubles as a metaphor for the singer's quasi-radical thematic and genre shifts to follow on the album. Also, as you will soon see, about half the songs on this album are positively A-plus aural material to bump uglies to, so it's nice we have that motif established from the get-go here.

Track 2

"End Game"

"I want to be your A-Team, I want to be your end game, end game," Taylor begins this heavily hip-hop flavored track that features rapper Future and Ed Sheeran, because apparently, he's still trying to hit it. And yes, Sheeran does try to rap on the track, and it's goddamn hilarious. It's pretty much a thematic and compositional carryover from the opening track, with Tay Tay lamenting her negative media image and by the third stanza she's spitting rhymes herself and it's not that bad, surprisingly. Hell, she does that white girl trying to be black shtick better than Halsey, that's for sure. It's another cryptic "eff you" to whichever ex-boyfriend who screwed her over last with plenty of in-jokes about her "red lips," but on the whole, it's probably one of the weaker songs on Reputation. Not that it's filler or anything like that, just a track that's too similar to other - and better - tracks on the album.

Track 3

"I Did Something Bad"

Oh hell, Taylor Swift CURSES on this track! "Crimson red paint on my lips, if a man talks shit then I owe him nothing." I'm pretty sure this whole thing is a great big "fuck you" to Calvin Harris, as apparent by lyrics like "he says 'don't throw away a good thing,' but if he drops my name, then I owe him nothing, and if he spends my change, the he had it coming." You know, because she wrote that one Rihanna song for him and everything? Other publications say the song also gives the business to Tom Hiddleston and the Kardashians and yeah, they're probably right. As far as diss tracks go, it's pretty solid - I mean, it ain't "No Vaseline," but it's fairly decent musical revenge nonetheless.

Track 4

"Don't Blame Me"

"My drug is my baby, I'll be using him for the rest of my life," Tay Tay sulks in this downbeat, dare I say industrial sounding anti-ballad interspersed with brief piano interludes. After three fairly energetic tracks, this is the first truly dour, depressed-sounding song on the album and it's definitely successful at setting a pissy, pessimistic attitudinal shift. Also, this song has one of my all-time favorite Taylor one-liners ever - "I once was poison ivy, but now I'm your daisy." An aside, I know, but why not cast Tay Tay as P.I. in the upcoming Gotham City Sirens movie? I mean, judging from a couple of her red carpet ensembles, she DEFINITELY looks the part.

Track 5

"Delicate"

AUTOTUNE, YOU MOTHER FUCKERS. This one is a slower, quieter, and even more downbeat song than the last track. "Dark jeans and your Nikes look at you, oh damn, never seen that color blue," she remarks around the halfway point of the track. I have no idea who that's referencing, but if you're a hardcore enough Swifty you can probably figure it out. I'd compare the track to "Wildest Dreams," except a little more morose and reserved. And yes, this song is Taylor-made (har-har) for some bedtime sojourning, if you catch my drift. And by that I mean this is a good song to fuck to. Just as long as it's consensual.

Track 6

"Look What You Made Me Do"

I've already dissected this one a while back, so I ain't going to retrudge the same old ground here. All in all this is a TREMENDOUS song, probably one of the best pure pop releases of the 2010s. Yes, it's overproduced as fuck but it's still insanely catchy and one of the few modern day radio staples that doesn't get stale after ten hearings. And I STILL say Taylor didn't "borrow" the chorus from Right Said Fred - anybody with a working set of cochleas KNOWS this song's trademark refrain is indeed swiped from 2 Live Crew's immortal "Me So Horny."

Track 7

"So It Goes ..."

This one has a long, winding intro just like "Wildest Dreams" and it's definitely one of the better tracks on the album. Here, she recounts meeting some random dude and having instant guilt over her attraction to him. "You know I'm not a bad girl, but I do bad things with you," she laments, displaying an almost Catholic sense of sexual moral culpability. There's even some semi Fifty Shades shit going on towards the end, where she starts talking about wearing black and clawing her metaphorical lover's back (fuck, I can't wait to see that video!) The chorus is especially well structured, with even more lyrics about her lipstick (for which Tay Tay ruminates over the same way Sir Mix-A-Lot ruminates over large asses.) Shit, why this girl hasn't garnered a Kylie Jenner-like cosmetics contract by now, I just can't figure out. 

Track 8

"Gorgeous"

Now this track is just '80s as fuck and I love it. Somewhere between bubblegum pop and synth-laden power pop lies this track, which features perhaps Taylor's best overall vocal performance on the whole album. It's kinda like Pat Benatar singing a Matthew Sweet penned love song, or Paramore trying to wheel their way through a Raspberries track. It's probably the most 1989-like song on the CD, but that's far from being a negative. Hey - more of the same is never a bad thing when that "same" is already pretty fuckin' ace, is it?

Oh, what I wouldn't give to be her co-star in Nekromantik 3 ...

Track 9

"Getaway Car"

We have got to find a name for that really downbeat, wobbly, lite synth beat that underlies virtually every song on this album. Uh, Swiftwave, maybe? Anyhoo, this is another of those "doomed romance" odes, as evident by the oh so blunt title. "We were jet-set Bonnie and Clyde, oh oh, until I switched to the other side," she remarks, "it's no surprise I turned you in, oh oh, 'cause us traitors never win." It kinda' reminds me of "Into the Woods," but a little bit lighter and just slightly frothier. An alright song, I guess, but it's nothing transcendent or anything like that.

Track 10

"King of My Heart"

Fuck, I am loving that synth that's driving most of the tracks on this album. Well, if you're looking for vocal dynamism, this song offers a pretty good mixture of hushed singing, quick spurt shouts, deadpan dips and waves, quasi-serious white girl rap and - yep, you guessed it - an auto-tune assisted chorus. With lyrics like "so prove to me I'm your American queen and you move to me like I'm a Motown beat" and "up on the roof with a school girl crush, drinking beer out of plastic cups," it almost sounds like a Lorde track - if Lorde was a robot. By now, I think a bad break-up can be chalked up as the core theme of the album, not Taylor's one-woman war against the media (which, I believe is what most people were expecting, if not outright wanting.) Needless to say - there's going to be a lot of fat girls crying over this album in the near future, for a multitude of reasons.

Track 11

"Dancing With Our Hands Tied"

This is the best song Lana Del Rey could never make. It's fast, but downbeat, frenzied but whispy, anxious but emotionally subdued, and sentimental but not exactly optimistic. It almost reminds me of a combination of The Veronica's "Untouched" and "Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire" - two really unlikely tastes that apparently taste way better together than expected. Take out the electronic snare drums over the chorus and some of the autotune and this song wouldn't sound out of place on the soundtrack of a 1980s John Hughes movie. That, and it has some of the best lyrics on the whole album. "I'm a mess, but I'm the mess that you wanted," Tay Tay croons, "oh, 'cause it's gravity keeping you with me." Hey, isn't "Gravity" also the name of a John Mayer song? I mean, not that the two are related or anything like that, assuredly ...

Track 12

"Dress"

I can already tell you this is Taylor's 25 - a more low-key, more depressed (or is that simply less emotional?) paean to the pains of growing up and growing past failed relationships. "I don't want you like a best friend," she lilts, "Only bought this dress so you take it off, take it off, carve your name into my bedpost." And there's even these two parts where she kinda sorta pantomimes having an orgasm, and it WILL give you a chubby wubby. Another nice, breathy song for you and your other of significant other to have melancholic sex to, which, I am sure we can all agree, is the absolute best kind of sex any of us will ever have.

Track 13

"This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things"

The track starts off with air raid sirens, which has to be a first for a Tay Tay song. And yes, I know the title is an allusion to The Simpsons, but Taylor never really struck me as much of a Simpsons fan, but she did write the song (and every other song on the album, for that matter) so who knows. This track is pretty much the bookend to "Look What You Made Me Do," complete with Taylor breaking the fourth wall and bursting out laughing while phoning in a syrupy non-apology to whoever pissed her off so much (Kanye, I'm looking at your crazy ass.)  After a deluge of downbeat pseudo-ballads, this almost antagonistically playful, semi-cryptic "diss" track is a welcome change of pace; and oddly enough, the chorus sounds a lot like the part in Avril Lavigne's "Complicated" at the end where she's saying like 20 lines of lyrics really fast, which is something I don't reckon any of us expected. 

Track 14

"Call It What You Want"

Another downbeat song that kinda' combines the album's two most prominent themes - redemption from bad romances and bad blood with other celebrities - into a singularity. "All the flowers grew back as thorns," she says, "but he built a fire just to keep me warm." So, uh, who is she talking about here? That Joe Alwyn guy? Regardless, this is one of the simpler songs on that album, with a beat that remains relatively staid throughout. And it's a great bridge to the album's concluding track, which is probably one of the most haunting CD enders since "Butterfly" on Weezer's Pinkerton. Hey, speaking of which ...

Track 15

"New Year's Day"

And we wrap up the album with a stripped-down, scaled-back, piano-driven ballad. I hesitate to call it Tay-Tay's "Piano Man," since it's a.) nowhere near as grandiloquently verbose and b.) nowhere near as needlessly overlong, but I guess they are compositionally (and thematically, I suppose) similar. In a career littered with syrupy and schmaltzy love songs, this might be Swift's most bittersweet to date. "I want your midnights," she lilts, " but I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day." It's a song about longing, I take it, but it's a more adult kind of longing she's talking about here - not that hyper-dramatic teenager shit we're used to hearing from her and her contemporaries. The singer is sad about the circumstances of her relationship, but it's even sadder because she's realized and accepted there's nothing she can do about it and just has to live with it because, well, that's life, and just like New Year's Day itself, life goes on regardless. On an album produced to the moon and back, I really couldn't think of a better way to close the record - one girl, one piano and one mature broken heart, turning in a testament to disappointment and taking it on the chin like a real woman. This, my friends, is the "new" Taylor she's been going on and on about for months now; a singer-songwriter with legitimate musical chops who's more James Taylor than Beyonce. And just like a great movie that leaves the door wide open for a sequel, this is the perfect way to segue to her next album, and her next reinvented self. And, I for one, am on the edge of my seat seeing where that leads us.

Don't worry, Tay Tay. Your album is WAY better than Katy Perry's latest.

Alright, time to sum it all up. On the first listen I can't declare it an objectively better album than 1989, which I thought had better songs overall and greater aural diversity. A lot of the tracks on this album seem to be trudging the same territory over and over again and to be frank, a lot of times the beats on the tracks feel like they are practically interchangeable. Another - well, maybe not a problem, per se, but an oddity, I guess - is how the overall flow of the CD dips and raises from track to track. Like, you'll have three or four kinda' downbeat songs in a row and then one really energetic, tongue-in-cheek one and it really muddles with the emotional flow of the album. Maybe it would've been better if Taylor front loaded the album with the more upbeat stuff and then hit us with about seven or eight sadder, slower songs in a row, but eh - I guess songs like this are supposed to be taken a'la carte, so I reckon that isn't too likely to bug anybody else.

As far as the thematic content, it's pretty much a two-trick pony; you've got the songs lamenting Taylor's impressively long streak of doomed romances (whose tones range from slightly bubbly and effervescent to downright maudlin) and tracks in which Taylor gives her detractors what-fer. That double-fisted approach doesn't exactly produce the smoothest synthesis, though, and you kinda have to wonder if the overall album would've been better had she stuck to just one of those overarching thematics (or maybe even split them into a double album.) That said, with the final four songs on Reputation you do get something of a thematic merger and conclusion with the lovelorn "Dress" melding into the payback's a bitch, motherfuckerness of "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things" to the optimistic recovery of "Call It What You Want" to the half happy, half devastated self-prediction of "New Year's Day." So yeah, like any other album, it's going to take a couple of listen-throughs before you can give it a fair assessment, but on that preliminary hearing, I'd say it's a MINOR step down from 1989. So if her last album was Purple Rain, this is probably going to be remembered as Taylor's Around the World in a Day. Which, considering the structure and thematic similarities of the two, might just be the single greatest comparison I've never really intended to make, so, uh, go me, I guess?

Still, Reputation is some good shit, and I'd feel confident giving it something like an 8 out of 10. It's probably not good enough to make my annual top ten best albums countdown (sorry Tay Tay, but as good as you are you ain't puttin' out better material than Matthew Sweet, Mark Lanegan, Round Eye or John motherfuckin' Carpenter) but it's certainly worthy of an honorable mention. In all you've got probably six or seven really, really good songs - including "New Year's Day," which might just be the best song Taylor's ever released - about four or five that or just kinda' alright and maybe two or three that are fairly unremarkable. But to her credit, there are no bad tracks on the CD, which is something you can't really say about MOST mainstream pop releases these days.

So that's that, kids. Taylor's heavily hyped album is out, and while it's not as great as all of the buildup would lead you to believe, it's still a very good, WAY above average for its genre (and especially timeframe) release. The only question now is which direction Tay Tay will take for album number seven. Hmm - is she on the verge of crafting her Darkness on the Edge of Town? Hold onto your hats, ladies and gents ... something tells me Swift's next CD is going to REALLY blow us out of the water.

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My Five Favorite Things About Taylor Swift's "Look What You Made Me Do" Music Video (in GIF form!)

Dissecting and deconstructing the latest music video from the undisputed Queen of Pop ... in fully animated pictorial form!

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

August 27, 2017 - a date that will live in eternal infamy. For those of you somehow out of the loop, that was when Taylor Swift debuted the spooky, cryptic video for "Look What You Made Me Do," the first single off her upcoming album Reputation. And to say that it was a watershed moment for contemporary pop culture is a gross understatement. I mean, shit, when was the last time you remember the unveiling of a music video being such a big deal? You'd have to go back to 1991 when Michael Jackson debuted the video for "Black or White" - you know, the one where Macaulay Culkin is the kid and George Wendt's his dad and there's that entire six minute breakdown where MJ bashes a car with a crowbar and keeps grabbing his balls before turning into a panther, for some reason - on Fox to find a music video reveal as heavily hyped as Swift's latest. And needless to say, it did not disappoint. 

The media frenzy started a couple of days before MTV's annual Video Music Awards (i.e., literally the only time all year the station actually plays music videos) when Tay Tay released a typographical, animated video on the YouTubes that just featured the song's lyrics laid over a bunch of crappy looking Clip Art montages. Naturally, it broke page view records and every radio station in the country was spinning the damn song on the hour. But what really made this one something culturally transcendent was the mystery surrounding the meaning and intent of the lyrics. Within minutes of the preview video going live scores of people were already online trying to decrypt the song like it was The Da Vinci Code or something. Was it a thinly veiled jab at arch rival Katy Perry? An oblique "fuck you" to Kanye West and the Kardashians? Some sort of Illuminati mind control claptrap tied to PizzaGate? EVERYBODY had their own theory on what "Look What You Made Me Do" was really about (complete with some wayward individuals accusing the laconic chorus of ripping off Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy," when anyone with a working set of cochleas can yell you it's clearly ripping off 2 Live Crew's "Me So Horny" instead) and it made even the most jaded and apathetic media consumer at least somewhat curious as to what the full music video would reveal. In short, it was one of the most brilliant marketing ploys the music industry has pulled in a LONG time. This was no longer just another video being released; it had become a bona fide transcendent cultural experience, like the Mayweather/McGregor boxing bout or Starbucks' limited time only Unicorn Frapuccino.

To be fair, I haven't really been following all the Taylor drama over the last year or so, but one 20-minute dissertation from my GF filled me in on all the details of the whole "phone-gate" controversy with Kim K and Kanye - a pivotal piece of intel that makes the conclusion of the video (in which multiple incarnations of Taylor bicker back and forth about all the other Taylors being fake, manipulative and shallow) so much cattier and sassier. While there's a lot of stuff to digest and over-analyze, there were five things about the music video for "Look What You Made Me Do" that I found particularly interesting, and as a public service to the denizens of Internet-land, I've decided to isolate 'em in easily redistributable animated GIF form for more pageviews  - I mean, to give you a better comprehension of the audiovisual subtleties of the short-form film ...

Zombie Taylor!

And just like that, my opinion on necrophilia did a total 180...

Right off the bat the video hits a high note, with the sudden emergence of Taylor Swift's "reputation" crawling out of the grave in full Evil Dead makeup. It's a really deft directorial decision and gets about as far away from the goofy, wholesomeness of "Shake It Off" as they could have without stocking the video with ACTUAL Faces of Death footage and the whole thing is just tremendous pro wrestling booking 101. You want to recast yourself as something dark, ominous, edgy and pointedly threatening? Shit, you might as well go all in and transform yourself from something that looks like this to something that resembles the goddamn Castle Freak. We're barely 20 seconds in and we just KNOW this new incarnation of Taylor ain't taking shit from nobody no more; WWE executives, take note - THIS is how you frame the initial setup for an effective heel turn in the post-Facebook era. And yes, I will just come out and say it - even as a desiccated, reanimated corpse with black ooze foaming out of her mouth, I'd still tap it.

The Diamond Bath!

Yeah, it looks all fun and hedonistic - up until the first gemstone gets stuck in your cooter.

Well, if you need a good visual metaphor for opulent indulgence, I guess taking a page out of Scrooge McDuck's playbook and literally bathing in precious jewels is a pretty good way to get the point across. I like how her appearance here kinda' sorta harks back to the video for "Blank Space," making for a nice touch of continuity. She just looks so psycho bitchy and seductive at the same time, like you KNOW she'd kill you mid-coitus like Doogie Howser at the end of Gone Girl, but damn it, you'd beckon her sultry siren song regardless. Also, I dig how her makeup toes a 50/50 line between classic and trashy. I mean, just look at those razor sharp, blood red finger nails - those things aren't for showing off at ritzy galas, they're for manually milking prostates behind dumpsters and we all know it. Then there's that brief clip at the very end of the sequence, where she takes a bite into a big diamond necklace, which you just know had to taste pretty gross. I don't care HOW many times they wash that shit, there ain't no way you're getting the smell of African dirt miner off those things; I really hope Tay Tay is up to date on her shots after pulling such a biologically perilous stunt.

Tea Snakes!

Yeah, they probably should've spent a little less money on the wardrobe budget and just a wee bit more on the snake CGI ...

Don't ever say Taylor can't act. Her mannerisms in this video are fucking Lillian Gish-like, conveying so much emotion (primarily, cerebral ill intent) with just the slightest of facial twinges. With her leggy red dress and hair pulled back behind her ears she almost seems to radiate a semblance of coyness, perhaps even submissiveness. But like that one serial killer from that old ass HBO special that used to squeeze-spray poison into people's faces, that reserved demeanor belies absolutely sociopathic rage. It's just so incredibly subtle, but you can tell she's thinking downright evil thoughts. And what better way to make that blunt as a sledgehammer than by putting her on a royal throne, covered in snakes that feed her tea and start jiving whenever she punctuates her sentences with exclamation marks? Yes, it is incredibly on the nose, but you know what? Sometimes, you just gotta say "fuck you, subtlety, fuck you right in the ass," and I, for one, am glad Tay Tay and company took the very low road on this one.

An Homage to The Silence of the Lambs? 

In the original video, I hear she ate Katy Perry's liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

With everybody on the Internet analyzing and interpreting the video for hidden messages and clues into Taylor's psyche, I'm really surprised no one has picked up on this possible allusion yet. So there's this part in the video where Tay-Tay is inside what appears to be a giant golden birdcage. It seems innocuous enough, but at the very end of the clip we get the quick zoom-in above. Does this particular sight remind you of anything? Watching Swift nom-nom on champagne and lobster inside a circular panopticon while flanked by seven armed guards, I can't help but be reminded of the sequence in The Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lector has din-din inside a similarly shaped cell, also surrounded by police personnel. Does this mean there's a deleted scene somewhere where Taylor bites off a dude's tongue, pepper sprays another dude and wears his chewed off face to facilitate a getaway? My, we can only hope.

Be Still My Heart - GOTH TAY-TAY!

Sorry - I'm too busy fapping to come up with a pithy caption.

All guys have their specific aesthetic quirks regarding the female form (read: unapologetic fetishes) and my stylistic weakness has always been goth chicks. So imagine my sheer jubilance when halfway through the video Tay-Tay abandoned the bright red lips and flowing evening gowns for first-suicide-attempt black lipstick, clinically-depressed-high-schooler onyx nail polish and full body fishnet stockings! Even better, her gyrations and kinda-sorta Aquanet-overkill coif are eerily, eerily similar to the interpretive dance moves and ozone-depleting hairdo of Angela in the first Night of the Demons movie. Unfortunately, it looks like they cut out the part where she chewed off a fat dude's tongue or sucked face with a blonde bimbo wearing too much pink lipstick - but hey, she has to leave something for the next single, don't she?

I don't care if she's wearing lipstick made out of AIDS blood - I'd still snog her.

Of course, there a lot of other highlights from the video that are probably worth symbolically examining, but I'll let you draw your own illusions to what Taylor really means when she positions herself in front of a giant, crucifix-like "T" and starts kicking earlier iterations of herself into the hypothetical abyss, or the real message behind the part where the paparazzi snap photos of her behind the wheel of a crashed car while she's holding a Grammy and looking suspiciously like Katy Perry. Those thinly veiled messianic delusions and fuck yous to competing pop princesses aside, I think "Look What You Made Me Do" is just a flatout tremendous video and the perfect pop cultural burnt offering to officially kickoff the Halloween season. I absolutely LOVE how Taylor is embracing the heel role in the video - personally, I haven't seen someone do such a fanciful job of playing up their pseudo-megalomania since Hulk Hogan joined the N.W.O. back at Bash at the Beach '96.

Indeed, there is a very weird totalitarian vibe I get from the video, almost as if Tay Tay is channeling her inner Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S. Seeing as how Swift is the kind of gal who likes to shitpost on 4Chan and hang out with dudes who wear swastikas on their shirts, it wouldn't surprise me one iota if she was secretly a total nihilist or maybe even a proponent of The Dark Enlightenment (do note that she was pretty much the only major female singer who DIDN'T spend all of last fall deriding Trump and figuratively fellating Clinton on the campaign trail ... how interesting.) Don't let her (relatively) desexualized, family-friendly appearance fool you, her pop songs are anything but lighthearted "take thats" to her romantic rivals - indeed, they are actually Iliads dedicated to her own cerebral barbarism. In a way, I almost feel as if Taylor is secretly embarking upon the plot of God Bless America in real life, only instead of shooting up the live finale of American Idol herself, she's slowly but surely molding an entire generation of 14-year-old girls to utterly despise liberal pop culture icons like Katy Perry and Kim K. Like Ah-nold in Pumping Iron, she's an absolute master of psychological warfare; shit, just by standing next to Lena Dunham in a posed photo, she literally makes her (possible) ideological rivals look like literal retards. Like The Joker in The Dark Knight, maybe the past ten years have been carefully plotted out as part of some impossibly grandiose scheme to decimate the pop music landscape, and this darker, edgier Tay-Tay is just the first metamorphosis before she turns into a full fledged anarchic powerhouse. From some jailbait country cutie that wore too much lipgloss and always said thank you to a red-lipped crossover pop-tart to a futuristic militarized music video vixen in fetish gear to a vindictive mass media empress, there's really nowhere else she can go that doesn't involve overthrowing entire conglomerates or throwing genre adversaries out of helicopters.

If Red represented Taylor's transition from country to pop and 1989 represented her ascension from pop novice to pop queenpin, the next logical step is that Reputation will represent her full-blown immersion into cult of personality politics. In that, the music video for "Look What You Made Me Do" could indeed foretell a major, MAJOR shift in the causa sui of Swift's career.

While other pop stars want to be bigger than Madonna, Tay-Tay wants to be bigger than Mussolini. And hey - if her critics are going to call her an "obnoxious Nazi Barbie," what better way to get 'em back than by transforming herself into an actual fascist? Forget bubblegum pop - if the darker, more sinister tone of "Look What You Made Me Do" is any indication as to what the rest of Reputation resembles, methinks Tay-Tay's about to drop the world's first Buchenwald pop album. Hey, don't say I didn't warn you, either - I KNEW that girl was trouble when she walked in.

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Ten Famous People I'd Love To Make Out With

An ode to the celebs I've wanted to suck face with for a long, long time.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

I'm pretty sure I've already told you kids this, but I don't think there's anything I enjoy in this world more than a good old fashion, hot and heavy, super sticky and slimy, mascara and lipstick smeared all over the place make out. We're talking the kind of all-out snog-fests where your uvulas get tangled up and your tongues wind up somewhere around each other's lower intestines, with your mutual bacteria surfing in on the wave of saliva and plaque build-up like a bunch of refugees making a bee-line for a person-sized hole in a border fence. I so enjoy having the mucus membranes of my mouth poked and prodded that, many times, I'd actually prefer having a steamy Frenchin' session instead of actually doing the nasty. Shit, at least I can swap spit without wrapping a plastic sack over my tongue that cuts off all feeling to my tonsils.  

With surplus Valentine's' Day candies still making the bargain bin rounds (and me really grasping for straws to come up with relevant, seasonal material), I decided to crank out my own top ten list of famous actresses, musicians and models I would most enjoy playing bicuspid lacrosse and ookie-mouth with. There's no real numerical rank here, so I just decided to do the whole shebang alphabetically. Of course, your mileage may vary and I did my best to make the thing as diverse as possible, so if you have any complaints - well, to be honest, I don't give a shit. And without further adieu, onward to the countdown of celebs I definitely wouldn't mind getting mono from!

Adele

Yes, your girlfriend would go gay for this.

I can pinpoint the exact moment I fell in lust with Adele. It was the 2012 Grammys, and it was her first major performance since having surgery on her larynx (or whatever was in her throat that needed fiddling around with.) She came out wearing about 20 layers of Spanx, so it looked like she was going to pop out of her dress like a tube of canned biscuits at any minute. Her hair and makeup looked on point as always (ever notice how the chubbier chicks always seem to have prettier faces than the skinnier ones?) and then, she started making the sexiest "crazy eyes" I've ever seen. Hers was an intense glare that went so far beyond the usual "fuck me" stare that I almost started dry humping the TV right then and there. We've all seen the "I want dick" expression, but this - this - was an "I need my ovaries pressure washed with semen PRONTO" face. Not a "make me come" face, but a "come inside me I'm oh so fertile" primordial face upon which the very survival of the species hinges. Any girl can make you want to have sex, but Adele's focused, hyper-sensual stare? It makes you want to repopulate the planet. She may not be the traditional embodiment of mass marketed sex appeal, but she just exudes a sense of sheer animalistic sexuality, from her mascara-caked, Black Widow eyes to her super-sharp, predator-like fingernails. I'll just tell you folks what I told my girlfriend after Adele's performance was over. "You know, I love you girl, but if Adele started putting the moves on me, I am going to get her pregnant." And perhaps the ultimate testament to the songstress' inherent sex appeal? She didn't even get mad at me - rather, she just shifted her weight on the couch a little and meekly replied, "well, yeah, I couldn't blame you."

Amelia Kinkade

When you type your name into Google and one of the very first images that pops is a a photo of yourself performing fellatio on a firearm, you know you've lived a life well worth living.

An obscure choice that pays homage to my seventh grade fantasies, for sure, but I'll stand by it. For those not in the know, Amelia Kinkade is the actress who portrayed the demonic antagonist of the three Night of the Demons movies (we've already covered parts 2 and 3 in-depth, if you need a little background.) In hindsight, I'm pretty sure she was the origin of my goth chick fetish, and I can't tell you how many times I churned my man butter while thinking of "Angela" writhing around in tight black fishnets and cramming her devil tongue inside other girls mouths to turn them into Satanic sluts. As I've already stated, the thing that got me is how different Kinkade looked in each movie - in the first NOTD, she looked like an anorexic mallrat whose body weight was about 50 percent hairspray and in the second, she looked like a really svelte and spicy Latina chick. My favorite incarnation by far, however, has to be her performance in Part 3, when she had a perm and a couple of extra pounds on her. She wasn't quite MILFy at that point, but she certainly had a more "mature" tinge going on in that one - yes, even when she was performing blow jobs on handguns and turning skanky girls' hands into evil snake sockpuppets. The funny thing is that in "real life," she's actually the opposite of the character - this now very MILFy blonde gal who wears a lot of pink and claims she can psychically communicate with animals (that part, I swear I am not making up.) And yes, she still has that strangely sexy oversized forehead, which - for reasons I can't even begin to describe - still gets me peculiarly antsy.

Amy Paffrath Seeley

Modern science has determined that there's nothing hotter than a psycho bitch wearing way too much berry lipstick. Absolutely nothing.

It's not often that one role instantly besots me, but by Job, Amy Paffrath Seeley (back when she was just plain old Amy Paffrath) managed to pull it off with her stellar work in the Paramore music video "Misery Business." In that MTV staple circa 2007, Paffrath played your stereotypical high school mega bitch, who strangely enough, looked to be about 10 years older than everybody else on campus (indeed, one YouTube commenter threw out the intriguing fan theory that she was actually a psychotic teacher, not your routine teenage queen bee.) My first semester in college, Amy pretty much made my mornings whenever the video was played (and yes, MTV was indeed still playing music videos that late into the aughties ... even if it was solely during a one hour block at 6 a.m.) She just conveyed this strangely sultry demeanor, stalking the hallways in her devil-in-a-blue-dress ensemble, joyously hacking off other girls' ponytails and slamming kids in arm slings against the lockers. But the highlight, of course, is a scene where she waltzes on up to a loving couple, shoves the moon-faced girlfriend out of the way, and then proceeds to plaster her dark red lips all over her poor victim's face - complete with a copious amount of what relationship experts call "breakup tongue." (On Pop Up Video, VH1 said Paffrath wanted her co-kissee to go even further, and start grabbing her posterior and chesticles - alas, he was too chicken.) As it turns out, Paffrath has had a pretty successful career, hosting a couple of one-and-done shows on E! and playing bit parts in straight-to-DVD offerings no one's ever heard of, but her biggest claim to fame is portraying a customer service rep in a Kindle ad from a few years back. Regardless, I'll always remember her as perhaps the most sexily sinister antagonist in the history of the music video medium - and she can still make out with me in front of my girlfriend anytime.

Annett Louisan

No, for the last time - that ISN'T Kirsten Dunst.

I'm probably going to hell for this one, but I don't care. The German songstress makes my list because she's the celebrity who most looks like my current girlfriend. The eyes. The hair. The same heart-shaped facial structure. The first time I saw a photo of Louisan, I thought it was my girlfriend - with the only giveaway that it wasn't being the smoldering cancer stick betwixt her fingers. Though my bizarre desire to bone two of my girlfriends simultaneously is at the heart of this selection, I feel it's important to note that Louisan certainly deserves a spot on the countdown irrespective of any similarities she may bear with my romantic partner. She really is a drop-dead gorgeous woman, whose simple, less-makeuppy aesthetics is a nice throwback to the women of the late 1970s, who as we all know, are the hottest women to have ever walked on God's green earth. Of course, I don't know German so all the songs she's singing could be about Hitler or something, so she may or may not have some skeletons in her closet (and trust me, petite girls who smile a lot always do.) Still, if I'm ever in Deutschland and she ever feels like twisting my tonsils around with her tongue, I am certainly game for it. 

Helen Mirren

I think it was around this point in the movie that I first became aware of the full potential of my own gonads.

It's a dubious distinction, I know, but Helen Mirren is the oldest woman I've ever pounded my knob to. Remember her at the Oscars in 2006? That, my friends, was the night the term "GMILF" entered the global vernacular. Who cares if her breath smelled like Polident and if you stuck your tongue in there you might catch a strand of measles scientists thought went extinct 40 years ago, when a woman on the plus side of 70 STILL looks this baggable, who are you and I to let a little ageism cloud our judgement? Granted, a lot of my reverence for the woman stems from her performance in Excalibur, where she donned a metal bra for half the movie and fucked her on-screen brother so she could give birth to a King Arthur killing machine, so like with Amelia Kinkade, this is at least partially a nostalgia-informed pick. Factor in her puberty-accelerating performances in Caligula, Hussy and the Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu, and we've got an all-time champion contender on our hands - hell, ol' Mrs. Tingle here can still teach me whatever the hell she pleases.

Kelly Clarkson

Crazy eyes, too much pink lip gloss and biceps beefier than Hulk Hogan's? PLEASE WE NEED TO MAKE OUT RIGHT NOW I'M NOT EVEN JOKING I'LL DIE IF WE DON'T.

Honestly, I never gave a damn about the American Idol singer until AFTER she gained a good 80 or 90 pounds. As a regular old skinny broad, Kelly Clarkson looked like every other brunette gal in Hollywood, but once she started packing on the pounds, I sure as sugar started taking note of her. It's almost like her intrinsic sexiness was activated the moment she crossed over the 200 pound threshold; back in the day, she was just another twig-thin pop-tart singing songs written by creepy ass 50-year-old men, but with all those rolls on her, she overnight turned into some sort of irresistible Greek fertility goddess. Watching her waddle around on stage, trying to catch her breath while sweat turns her eyeshadow into a Picasso painting, it's almost like I can smell her reproductive prowess wafting over the Internet. Her flabby arms and quadruple chins aren't just indicators that she's been mowing down Hot Pockets like a Viet Cong turret, it's also a secret physiological ploy to let you know her hormones are raging and her ovaries are ripe for a nice semen shower. Hey, with hips like these, I for one wouldn't mind renting out a timeshare in Miss Independent's baby hanger - y'know, if you catch my drift (and if you don't, that means I want to engage in saliva-intensive kissing with her as prelude to inseminating her.)

Monika Schnarre

Oh, what I wouldn't trade to get some sweet, sweet forehead from this Canuck.

And here's another obscure C-tier genre actress who really gets my big forehead fetish fuel a goin'. She's this Canadian model who's been in a million-billion B-movies and C-TV shows over the years, running the gamut from Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal to The New Addams Family. Seeing as how she never turned down a role and practically every syndicated sci-fi show in the late 1990s and early 2000s was filmed in Ontario, she was typecast as a super-hot seductress in scores of long-forgotten programs that certainly made my dateless Saturday afternoons as a teenager a lot more bearable. Just look at this resume:

• An evil pirate wizardess on The Adventures of Sinbad
• An interdimensional sex warrioress in a chrome corset and white lipstick on Nightman
• An android sex wizard in a translucent rain coat wearing crucifix earrings who casts spells on Arnold Schwarzenegger stand-ins so they think about boning her while they're doing their wives on Total Recall 2070
• An intergalactic space vixen who convinces Kevin Sorbo to PG fuck her brains out on Andromeda

And that's not even counting the 29 separate appearances she made on Beastmaster playing an evil sorceress with a hideous British accent that you never noticed because her boobs threatened to explode out of her leather ensemble at any minute. If I had to pick a favorite Schnarre role, though, I'd probably go with her one-and-done appearance on the crappy Sci-Fi Channel series Codename: Eternity, where she played this alien model who seduced another autistic alien with top secret pheromone sex juice and made sure she got her cobalt brown lipstick smeared all over him so his female human partner would get jealous. Do yourself a favor and scope this one out on the YouTubes - it's probably about as close as to a live action version of the old B:TAS staple "Pretty Poison" we're ever going to get.

Sarina Valentina

I wouldn't mind having her tongue in my mouth - and maybe her penis, too, pending I'm drunk enough.

SWERVE! That's right, homophobes, I'm including a legitimate male-to-female transsexual on the list, because by golly, we here at The Internet Is In America believe in LGBT rights. But more than than that, we believe in our dicks, and when somebody looks as hot as legendary transgender porn queen Sarina Valentina, we can certainly overlook the fact that there is a secondary Johnson in the mix. With her milk white skin and medically augmented curves, there's really no way around it: Sarina is way more beautiful than a good 99.999 percent of the "biological females" walking around God's green earth these days. And trust me - when you see how hot this guy-turned-gal looks in midnight black latex bondage gear, you WILL call the "certainty" of your heterosexuality into question.

Taylor Swift

Goddamn, white privilege has never looked so good.

Taylor Swift is an absolute outlier in 21st century media. Off the top of my head, she's the only mega-huge pop music star out there I can think of whose commercial success can't be attributed to market tested skankiness - unlike your Demi Lovotas and your Ariana Grandes, whose sexuality is crammed down our esophagus at every turn. Rather, Tay Tay gets by on her subdued, almost stereotypically Aryan good looks - accentuated, of course, by a dazzling array of bare midriff blouses and enough hooker red lipstick to supply half a dozen clown supply shops for at least full year. Tall, lanky, small-breasted and no-assed with mesmerizing, cerulean blue eyes, Swift is a throwback to the old pre-fashion industrial complex takeover of beauty, a gorgeous, statuesque, dignified lady who exudes a strong sense of class and poise instead of your usual desperate prefab overt-sexuality (why, hello there, Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry!) With an awe-inspiring ruby pout like this, I certainly wouldn't feel an ounce of remorse locking lips with Taylor - yes, even in front of my GF. And it was at our wedding.

Tess Holliday

I don't know about you, but I would positively love having that body all over me. Get it, because of "body positivity" and all that hippie shit?

By now, we all know I do love me some thick girls. 200 pounds, you say? Amateur hour, hoss, I've actually dated more than one girl who was north of 300, and lemme tell you something - these lardy lasses are a godsend. It's kind of top secret intel shared between guys offline, but morbidly obese women are scientifically proven to give the best oral sex, and from personal experience, I can firmly attest to that old maxim "the more cushion, the better the pushin'." As such, I've been absolutely besotted by one Tess Holliday/Tess Munster for quite sometime - yes, in spite of her obnoxious SJW tendencies and the fact she routinely commits fraud to go on vacation at DisneyWorld. For fuck's sake, she has an absolutely gorgeous face and don't even try to tell me you don't have just the teeniest, tiniest kink to have all that adipose tissue flowing over you like a plus sized riptide. This girl is big, she's beautiful, and like everybody else on this countdown, I'd swap spit with her until both of us are half dead from dehydration - and from the looks of her, you know that's going to be a hell of a long time.

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