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Saturday, August 9, 2014

Bad Behavior

Before I officially begin this entry, I would like to emphatically stress that I don't give two shits about Taylor Swift. This is not an entry about her. So, if anybody from the Taylor Swift fandom happens to find their way to this little blog, I humbly request that they take a fucking chill pill before continuing with this entry. I repeat: this is not an entry about Taylor Swift.


What this is an entry about is the video for her song, I Knew You Were Trouble. I'll also save everybody the trouble of having to watch the entire thing and let you know the only parts that concern this entry are from about the 3:45 mark to 5:45.


Well, there are two sort of brief character development moments before the relevant minutes I'm talking about. It's important, apparently, for you to also know the love interest in this music video is the type of guy who goes to concerts that have mosh pits. It's also important for you to know he's the type of guy who will get a tattoo that says "LOVE" on his chest because he's spent a lot of time in a grimy hotel room with Taylor Swift. Whether he's in love with Taylor Swift or with the grimy hotel room is sort of a toss-up.


In any case, from 3:45 to 5:45 is when you really learn why this guy is so much "trouble." Mosh pits and poorly thought-out tattoos are just part of his boyish charm. Two things that really start to make the relationship look like a bad idea: he likes to get in stupid bar fights and apparently the police are after him. Why I wanted to write about this video, though, is that the penultimate reason Taylor Swift decides the guy isn't worth being with anymore is because he kisses another girl at some Burning Man-esque festival.

It's as though all his other questionable life choices are worth being there for, but kissing somebody else is the worst choice he could make with his life and definitely worth breaking up over. That's a really troubling viewpoint. Suffer through violent, law-breaking behavior because it's still sort of hot to be with a bad boy.


But see him making out with somebody else and it is definitely over!


I'd also like to question whether or not the making out with somebody else actually happened. They were at something very similar to Burning Man, so it's possible Taylor Swift was just tripping balls and hallucinated the whole thing. Or maybe! Maybe Taylor Swift is just tripping the entire video and the boyfriend never really existed. I Knew You Were Trouble is actually a coded tribute to Fight Club.


I'm also sort of angry at the implication that the boyfriend's other really bad choices make him more likely to also be the kind of guy that cheats. Like maybe if Taylor Swift had instead met a nice boy in a button-down shirt who took her to the orchestra and only brought her to restaurants without pool tables in them would never have cheated on her.

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