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.

Read More

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.

Read More

MOVIES THAT MAY NOT HAVE SUCKED: 'Predator 2'

The Internet Is In America reminisces on the nearly three-decade old sequel. Audiences were pretty ambivalent about it back in 1990, but has Father Time treated Predator 2 a little bit kindlier?

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

Growing up, we all had our favorite movie. For some, it may have been a random Disney offering, or perhaps some other family-friendly action-adventure romp, a'la The Goonies or E.T. Alas, my favorite movie as a kid wasn't Beauty and the Beast or Rookie of the Year or even Jurassic Park - rather, mine was that all-time classic of children's cinema, Predator. 

Oh yes, Predator. I'm not sure how old I was when I first saw it, but I couldn't have been older than six or seven. Even now I'm not entirely sure how I heard about the movie, or how I wound up seeing it for the first time. Maybe it was something my mom rented, maybe it was something that came on late-at-night on WATL-36 or maybe it was something I saw at a friend's house. Regardless, I absolutely fell in love with the movie and had to have seen it - no joke - at least 20 or 30 times before I graduated from elementary school. 

Considering how much I loved this movie as a kid, I'm beginning to wonder why I never wanted to become some sort of elite U.S. commando as an adult (with the ulterior motive of fist fighting aliens in the jungles of Mexico, naturally.) There was just something so manly about this fucking movie, from Jesse Ventura chewing on Redman and calling everybody "slack jawed faggots" to that fuckin' epic handshake between Ah-nold and Apollo Creed to that climactic kung-fu battle in the jungle. It was just an expertly paced and scripted movie, and even now, it stands out as one of the very best action movies of the 1980s. There's not a whole lot of movies out there I'd say are worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Aliens and Robocop, but Predator certainly deserves such a prestigious distinction.

As great as Predator was, I suppose its 1990 sequel was destined to disappoint. For one thing, Ah-nold didn't reprise his role, and really, having a movie about the fuckin' Predator without Dutch Schaefer running around is like an Alien movie without Sigourney Weaver, or a Death Wish flick without Chuck Bronson in it or a Halloween movie without Donald Pleasance chewing up the scenery and screaming "I shot him nine times!" to anybody and everybody on the set. Secondly, the sequel wasn't going to have the same awesome ensemble cast. To be fair, Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Bill Paxton and the dude who played Petey in Mo Better Blues all being in the same movie is pretty awesome, but it's nowhere close to being an all-time awesome line-up like the Terminator, the Body and both Action motherfuckin' Jackson and the police chief from Action motherfuckin' Jackson  (although I would love to see that four on four match, WWF Survivor Series style, somewhere down the line.) And thirdly, there was the general concept of the movie, which proved once and for all just how full of shit we all are as film-goers. You ever notice how people bitch and moan and complain when Hollywood makes a sequel that follows the plot of the original movie and call it stuff like "generic" and "formulaic" and "half-assed?" Well, the people who scripted Predator 2 came up with a wildly unique idea(*) for a follow-up, and sure enough, one of the biggest complaints about the flick from the general movie-going public was that it was - you guessed it - too different from the original. And if that wasn't enough, you even had eggheads like Roger Ebert ripping the movie for being subliminally prejudiced. "All they can give us in the way of an alien is a street mugger with intestines for a face, pincers around his mouth and an Afro-style braided hairdo," the rotund film critic condemned the flick. "The creature in this movie is a work of subtle racism. Subliminal clues are slipped in to encourage us to subconsciously connect the menace with black males."

(*) And yeah, I know the script for Predator 2 was prolly based on the 1989 Dark Horse Comics series Predator: Concrete Jungle, which is something I should prolly review in-depth at some point. And no, that series isn't the same thing as the Ps2/Xbox game Predator: Concrete Jungle, either ... although it was apparently greatly influenced by the second movie, which was greatly influenced by the aforementioned comic series, so then again, maybe it is. 

Yet sadly, not once does he get to say his trademark line about "pablum pukin' liberals."

OK, so Predator 2 ain't anywhere near as good as the first movie. That, we can all agree on. That said, while it's a movie with a LOT of problems, I still think it's a pretty enjoyable little creature feature that deserves slightly more respect and appreciation than it gets today. The good definitely outweighs the bad here, and had a few tweaks been made here and there, it really could have been a superior, standout sequel a'la Halloween II or Batman Returns. Of course it never could have been on the same page as Terminator 2 or anything like that, but as far as early 1990s sci-fi gore-fests go, this thing certainly used up more of its potential than squandered it. Let's dissect the ins and outs of the movie a little bit further, why don't we? 

The movie starts off with a pretty brilliant transition/callback from the first movie. The camera zooms over a swath of what looks like the rain forest, but what do you know, it's actually the shrubs on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Its the year 1997, and the local S.W.A.T. team is engaged in a bloody shootout with Colombian drug dealers and MORTON FUCKIN' DOWNEY JR. is on the street giving us live play-by-play (as far as loud mouth conservative trash TV talk show cameos go, this one definitely outdoes the brief audio appearance from Wally George in the fifth Elm Street flick - which, incidentally, was directed by the same guy who directed THIS movie, the Jamaican-born honky Stephen Hopkins.) So cops Danny Glover and Maria Conchita Alonso show up and then the Colombians (who I'm pretty sure Downey calls "Caribbeans" in the opening sequence) go to their top secret armory to snort mounds of cocaine and pull out military-grade weaponry. Naturally, that's our cue for the Predator to show up in invisible space jelly camouflage mode, and a whole hell of a bunch of drug runners soon find themselves getting their skin peeled off like the flaky golden crust on a KFC drumstick. Then Bill "Game over man, game over!" Paxton shows up as the other cop and here comes Gary Busey from the feds, saying the local P.D. needs to keep their noses out of this one because it's a matter of national security. 

Up next, this Colombian drug kingpin is fucking the shit out of his gal pal, but OOPS! Here comes the Jamaican Voodoo Posse (yep, that IS their canonical name in the movie) to interrupt his intercourse, string him upside down from the ceiling and carve his torso open like a blow-trafficking birthday cake. Of course, Predator is lurking in the shadows and he (it is a he, ain't it?) then gets a chance to show off all of his cool new toys, including a trident, a spear and even this razor sharp spider-net thingy that peels people's skin down to their skeleton. The cops show up, the lone survivor says the devil himself killed everybody and the feds take one gander at the 19 de-skinned Rastafarians hanging from the roof and go "yeah, we think we're going to seal this little parameter off for a while, so vamoose, ya'll."

At this point, we're nearly 45 minutes into the movie. The pace here is really, really tight and the build-up - thus far, at least - has been quite effective. Now Glover's other, other partner (he's the guy who played Carlos in Safe House, but he's probably even more famous for being this Panamanian salsa singer that's recorded a good 50 albums) decides to snoop around the crime scene and gets killed by Predator, than Glover yells some curse words at Gary Busey and there is this HILARIOUS scene that had to have been ad-libbed where Glover holds out his fist in front of Busey's face and slaps it to let him know he's really pissed about all this federal investigative meddling. Glover and the gang take a Predator artifact to a lab and the scientist woman says this shit isn't made out of anything on the periodic table and then Glover hops in the Jamaican gang's ZEBRA-colored dope smoke party car and he talks to their leader in the slums and he tells him he knows what the Predator is and after Danny leaves, sure enough, Predator shows up and it and the Jamaican drug lord have a sword fight and there's this half-great/half-lazy transition scene where you hear the drug kingpin scream and then there's a quick cut to Predator holding his severed head. Yeah, it' a bit ghetto, but it DOES lead to a scene where the Predator breaks out his alien skull polishing kit, and for some reason I just LOVE watching intergalactic killing machines buffing things. 

Don't you just hate it when you're smoking a joint in a rolled-up tampon and then some buzz-killing space alien warrior has to show up and blast your sternum out your asshole with a laser cannon?

Now here is where the movie kinda' starts to go off course. The whole thing is about an hour and forty minutes, and we've damn near hit the sixty-minute mark and our main man Danny hasn't even encountered the Predator up-close yet. That means we've got to blow through the final thirty minutes and skip out on a lot of character development and plot exposition just outta' time constraints. Or, to put it another way, Predator 2 is like a goalie that plays really, really well in the first two periods of a hockey game, but just starts letting everything pass through the net beginning in the third.

So Danny first encounters the Predator in translucent jellyfish mode when he's visiting his old partner's grave. Then the Predator decides to hi-jack a subway train (yeah, people always forget about L.A. having a subway system, don't they?) where EVERYBODY is packing heat but since all the killing is done in strobe light mode, you really can't see anything at all happening (I guess that was done to thwart the scissors-happy M.P.A.A., but it just don't work either in concept or execution.) Anyhoo, Bill Paxton gets killed (but not before throwing a golf ball at the Predator, in what has to be the movie's stupidest scene) and then Alonso gets killed but not before Predator's heat-vision lets us know she's pregnant (which has to be prolly the movie's gutsiest and most disturbing moment - and one I am SHOCKED the suits at Fox allowed to remain in the flick.) The problem, however, is that we have NO time to mourn the characters' deaths; in fact, I'm not even entirely sure Glover is AWARE his partners are dead, because he's too busy racing against the clock to finish this movie.

So we have this weird scene were the Predator stands atop a building during a thunderstorm and gets electrocuted by lightning (of course, instead of frying his gizzards, all it appears to do is re-energize his space monster batteries), and Danny starts chasing after him but his car is side-swiped by a pick-up truck and he's carried into Gary Busey's Predator-monitoring van and we FINALLY get some exposition to link this movie to part one. So apparently, the feds are well aware of what happened in the original movie, in particular the ending scene where the Predator blows himself up and created a giant smoking hole in the rain forest the size of 300 city blocks. Apparently, Gary and pals have figured out that the alien warrior is attracted to heat and armed conflict (he name drops places like Iwo Jima and Cambodia, which automatically makes me want to see a movie about the Predator fighting kamikaze pilots and the Khmer Rogue) and also, we learn that the Predator is a pretty big fan of eating raw beef (a weird thing, I know, but I always wondered what the Predator normally eats) so they decided to stake out a local meat locker and send in the Predator capturing death squad. They THINK they know how to take advantage of his heat vision weakness (how Busey knows this, however, is never really explained) but LOLOOPS! The Predator can apparently use all kinds of different light spectrums to see shit, and it's not too long before he's picking off gubberment storm troopers left and right. Oddly enough, Danny manages to wound the Predator pretty good in an ensuing gunfight, only for Busey to come in before he can head shot that crag-faced motherfucker and attempt to freeze it for "science." Predator responds as you'd assume he'd respond - by pulling out a giant saw blade and bifurcating Gary right at the pelvis. Bonus points for the callback to the original, when the Danny finally sees the Predator unmasked and the Predator calls himself "one ugly motherfucker." Actually, that's kind of an annoying plot device throughout the movie, with the Predator just randomly saying things he's heard other people throughout the film utter. I mean, does anyone think it is eerie or intimidating to hear a giant crab monster with dreadlocks sputter "shit happens?" or "want some candy?" before ripping a dude's spinal cord out?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they just borrowed a few corpses off the set of Hellraiser II and expected none of us to be the wiser.

And now we've hit our 20-minute footrace to the finale, and yeah, the movie REALLY falls apart here. So Glover calls Predator "pussy face" and they fight on top of a roof and the Predator tries to turn on his arm detonator so Danny grabs a Predator razor-disc and hacks his hand off. Then he chases him through an apartment complex, where the Predator makes Jell-O healing paste out of stucco and he makes a woman holding a broom and watching Jeopardy! piss her undergarments and she tells Glover "I don't think he gives a shit" when he reveals himself to be a cop. Yeah ... the "humor" in this one needed some work. 

The climactic battle inside the Predator's subterranean spaceship is a pretty big disappointment. It's cool getting to look at all of the trophy skulls all over the place (shit, watching Glover look legitimately confused by the xenomorph and dinosaur bones all over the place might just be the best scene in the entire movie), but the final battle between Danny and the Predator is just woefully uneventful. Watching all of the other Predators teleport in to retrieve their fallen comrade is a nice touch, but that whole subplot about the gun from 1715 is just WAY too enigmatic to allot for a satisfying conclusion. Oh, and in case you're wondering what all that shit is about, apparently, it's a gun that belonged to a pirate a Predator once fought in a comic book. Yeah, what a bang-up job they did explaining that one, eh?

And so, the spaceship flies off and Danny emerges covered in soot from the underground chambers. His police chief yells at him, and he doesn't really say anything because fuck, who would believe him, right? And that's precisely how the movie ends - no sequel hook, no callback to the original, nothing. It's just one cop getting chewed out by another cop in the dirt - basically, the shittiest way to end a movie like this imaginable.

Get it? Because Jamaicans have dreadlocks and the Predator has dreadlocks, too? Golly gee, these Hollywood writer types sure are insightful.

In that, there's no mystery why people tend to look back on Predator 2 as a disappointment. After all, the movie's third act is so rushed and underwhelming that you kinda' forget about how good the first two acts were. So basically, you have a movie that does a REALLY good job of building up the story and characters for the first hour, and then the thing hops the train tracks in the last thirty minutes when it comes time to turn all that mounting tension into kinetic energy. 

I think the suits at 20th Century Fox really misjudged the audience for this one. I reckon they THOUGHT people wanted a grim and gritty, Robocop-esque blood and guts-filled action comedy, but what people who loved the first Predator really wanted was some exposition on the monster mythos. Just where do the Predators come from and what's their motivation for yanking dudes' heads off? How old do they live and how LONG have they been in contact with humanity? Are they planning some sort of alien invasion of Earth at some point, or are they just the intergalactic equivalent of big game hunters? What's general Predator society like? Clearly, they are an advanced life-form, considering their technology, so why do they just cruise around the galaxy trying to pick fights with military musclemen and cops that say the "f-word" a lot? Does Predator World have hospitals and schools and grocery stores? We all know what kind of tech they created for killing shit, but what does their day-to-day technology resemble? 

Y'see, Fox created a really, really intriguing monster with the Predator, which unlike something like the bugs from Aliens or Jason Voorhees, actually has some sort of high-grade intellectual quality. Since they've mastered intergalactic transportation, clearly, they're much, much smarter than us as a species. Well, audiences want to know how they got so smart, and really, exploring the Predator civilization would've have lent itself to a more enjoyable cinematic romp than what was tantamount to "Predator Meets The Black Dude from Lethal Weapon." Now, I haven't seen Predators yet, so maybe that kinda leans more in that direction; as is, though, Predator 2's greatest flaw is giving us all the questions we don't care about with absolutely none of the answers long plaguing us since the first flick came out. 

Now, all of that said, I still think Predator 2 is a pretty fun and moderately underrated movie. Like Robocop 2, it's one of those movies that resides in that weird pop cultural vacuum that's not quite the 1980s but not really the 1990s, either. The cinematography is really good, the ensemble cast is decent (or, as decent as they had to be) and the special effects were rather memorable, especially all of that high-tech Predator weaponry designed to kill people by getting as much blood out of 'em in two seconds as humanly possible. It's a far, far cry from the intrinsic greatness of the first movie, but for what it's worth, it isn't a bad little side story spun off from the main series arc. And lest you haters forget: it WAS responsible for inspiring a pretty awesome isometric Sega Genesis game, which in my eyes, MORE than justifies the totality of the film's existence.

Read More