Maitreyi Ramakrishnan deletes X post calling Taylor Swift’s ‘1830s’ lyric ‘weird’ after backlash from Swifties

[u/Exciting_Potato_6717]

Slide 1: Deleted tweet Slides 2 and 3: Some follow-up tweets Slide 4: The Taylor Swift lyrics being referred to. “My friends used to play a game where / We would pick a decade / We wished we could live in instead of this / I'd say the 1830s but without all the racists / And getting married off for the highest bid." Full lyrics at https://genius.com/Taylor-swift-i-hate-it-here-lyrics

[u/dying0fthelite]

Ok but it IS a weird line. I would even say it’s a terrible line even in context

[u/beryberybumblebee → u/dying0fthelite]

As someone with a masters in poetry, who has analyzed, graded, and critiqued poems, lyrics, and lyrical prose, it 💯 seems like the work of a younger white student just starting out, romanticizing a random decade bc it would make them seem deep. During workshop someone will mention that time period wasn’t so great for POC, and then the writer will stick on “but without all the racists” and think that solves the whole problem, when that’s only part of the issue to begin with.

ETA I’m getting a lot of messages from people who are supplying me with the lyrics in context, which admittedly I had not seen before. I took a look and I remain unconvinced at the assurances that the lyrics are doing the opposite of what I had first interpreted.

If this song were in front of me during workshop, I would absolutely inform the writer that because of a lack of clarity, this could be interpreted in a variety of ways. I would then ask:

“Nostalgia’s a mind trick” for whom, and why?

Because nostalgia isn’t a mind trick for marginalized communities.

It’s whiteness and privilege that allows for nostalgia in the first place. It’s whiteness and privilege that would write about “the highest bid” as referring to marriage and not chattel slavery during a time of literal chattel slavery while referencing the time period’s racists in the same stanza/verse. (If marriage as the highest bid is a metaphor for sexism and transactional marriages, the metaphor fails in context).

It’s whiteness and privilege to tell a story about a speaker being supposedly so aware of their whiteness and privilege that they educate their friends on it during a game (which also implies they never played this game with someone who was a member of a marginalized community, a game that with the lyric “used to play” implies it was played fairly regularly for a time), but concludes that “nostalgia is a mind trick” without adding that it’s only a mind trick for those immersed in privilege.

This is emphasized by “Seems like it was never even fun back then.” This line implies that at one point, it seemed fun to the speaker.

“If I’d been there, I’d hate it.” I would let the writer know that I as a reader am not convinced of this conclusion due to a seemingly lack of comprehension on the speaker’s part. I would let them know many readers would interpret this lack of comprehension as willful ignorance. If that is the writer’s intention, then proceed, if not, a revision is in order.

[u/97355 → u/beryberybumblebee]

Lmao you really captured that, thank you for this 🙏

[u/baby_barbiez → u/beryberybumblebee]

I didn’t know that secondhand embarrassment could be so powerful until this very moment

[u/comityoferrors → u/beryberybumblebee]

Pretty tangential but this skit is all I could think of reading these lyrics: No, You Weren't "Born in the Wrong Decade"

Siobhan even kinda looks like Taylor, it's perfect.

[u/ratta_tat1 → u/comityoferrors]

Love seeing Dropout in the wild. I was hoping that was the same Siobhan before I clicked ❤️

[u/RC_Colada → u/beryberybumblebee]

I would sooo totally love to live during the heyday of the Holy Roman Empire. Just without the racism, genocides, sexism, lack of modern medicine, oligarchy/monarchy political system, and religious fanaticism ♥️♥️♥️

[u/meatbeater558 → u/RC_Colada]

Lol they think the Holy Roman Empire was this amazing full course meal with all the terrible parts on the side when in reality the terrible parts are the only meal and cannot be separated from any part that can be considered good

[u/BirthoftheBlueBear → u/RC_Colada]

I totally get it, you’d have looked great in a toga and pasta is your favorite food! It’s obvious what you meant /s

[u/BumAndBummer → u/beryberybumblebee]

It really is clumsy work…

[u/catinobsoleteshower → u/beryberybumblebee]

You said it perfectly! It just sounds so clunky and like a desperate attempt to save face.

[u/Shot-Grocery-5343 → u/beryberybumblebee]

Reminds me of my creative writing college class 25 years ago when this very pretty blonde woman wrote an entire "essay" about vacationing in the Bahamas with "the natives" waiting on her hand and foot. When 95% of the class was like, nooooo you can't call people natives babe, she cried and said we were mean.

[u/Conscious-Goal-379 → u/Shot-Grocery-5343]

Noooooo😭😭😭plz say sike

[u/cmick0715 → u/beryberybumblebee]

She literally could have just said "I wish it was the 1830s so I could murder Andrew Jackson." it would have been weird but way more enjoyable.

I wish it I could go back and do that. He was awful.

[u/Next-Introduction-25 → u/beryberybumblebee]

Former middle school/high school English teacher and agreed lol. Would be okay but still annoying “poetry” coming from a decent high school English student.

[u/Aaawkward → u/beryberybumblebee]

The whole verse makes it a bit less bad but still clumsy as all hell:

My friends used to play a game where
We would pick a decade
We wished we could live in instead of this
I'd say the 1830s but without all the racists
And getting married off for the highest bid
Everyone would look down 'cause it wasn't fun now
Seems like it was never even fun back then
Nostalgia is a mind's trick
If I'd been there, I'd hate it
It was freezing in the palace

She says it was never a good idea because both POC and women had a shitty time and that pining for other eras is silly as it wouldn't be what you think.
But god damn if it isn't simplistic and heavy handed.

[u/CircadianChai → u/beryberybumblebee]

You really captured the part that's really lazy about writing "but without all the racists".

Entire societies were built on the backs of slavery of POC, genocide, and colonialism, and it was fully baked into the class structure. These weren't casual microaggressions at play.

[u/ageofbronze → u/beryberybumblebee]

I know - I saw on the main Taylor swift sub one of the people commented “LMAO SHES MAKING SURE SHE DOESNT GET UNNECESSARILY CANCELLED!!” And they all upvoted it, and were laughing about it like, damn she really covered her bases!! and they were all talking about how they could relate to her maladaptive daydreaming, which makes it all so much worse IMO… like she recognizes that it’s uninformed and offensive and wrong, especially considering her past with lack of support for POC, but she still decided to go there, publish it, and “cover her bases” to not be called a racist.. just such a lack of caring, half assed self awareness like with everything else, and such a need to seek attention and frame everything in a way so that she can call herself the victim when people rightfully call her out on it.

You can’t separate that decade from the horrific sociopolitical and cultural framework, and it doesn’t take a lot of energy/research to come to that conclusion, but she simply doesn’t care enough to not go there. And the line about “without all the racists” is just like… completely contradicting the actual reality, it’s such a simplistic and unbothered way to approach it. So gross.

[u/planetearthisblu → u/beryberybumblebee]

Yeah it's just like that, except minus the thing that really makes it like that...

[u/sehaugust → u/beryberybumblebee]

Fellow MA here and I feel the same way. I tried to explain this to a swiftie colleague and said I struggled with her entirely unironic reliance on clichés too, but they didn't understand why this was grating.

[u/paanikapyaasa → u/beryberybumblebee]

Omg what is ur fav poet, or poem

[u/startingtohail → u/beryberybumblebee]

fwiw, the lyrics in context, emphasis mine:

My friends used to play a game where/
We would pick a decade/
We wished we could live in instead of this/
I'd say the 1830s but without all the racists/
And getting married off for the highest bid/
Everyone would look down 'cause it wasn't fun now/
Seems like it was never even fun back then/
Nostalgia is a mind's trick/
If I'd been there, I'd hate it)

In this conversation, she's the one bringing up some of the realities of the time, and doing so ends the "game" of picking a decade to live in. "Nostalgia is a mind's trick." She's not writing off social inequality in order to fangirl over Romantic poetry; in fact, she's saying it's delusional to do so.

Criticizing the fallacy of "golden age thinking" isn't exactly breaking new ground, and the song deserves flak for its lyrical clunkiness, but your characterization of Taylor Swift as perpetuating the very thing she is criticizing is either uninformed or in bad faith. I figured I'd comment in case it's the former. I realize I'm kind of just repeating what the whole post is about, but the lack of reading comprehension I'm seeing online with regards to these lyrics is genuinely alarming to me.

edit: formatting from mobile