What if I told you none of it was accidental?
Show and tell "Satire" out now!
In case you haven’t noticed, we’re getting extra nerdy this year. We kicked off the year with literature in our The Great Gatsby Show & Tell, and we’re following up with a literary genre theme this week: Satire. It’s a teaser for the kinds of discussions we’ll be having this year - you could say our resolution is to push ourselves and the boundaries of the different perspectives we can take when listening to our favorite Taylor Swift tunes. This week we bring three songs that we felt leverage satire and do it well. Our discussion involves talking through a “first read” of the lyrics, but then also doing a “second read,” where we accept the lyrics as being sarcastic, deliberately humorous, or satirical commentary. We start with the most obvious example of satire in Taylor’s catalog, “Blank Space,” and then wade through murkier territory as we discuss “I Did Something Bad” and “Mastermind.” The result is one heck of a discussion.
Today’s extra credit — brought to you by Maansi
What I love about studying any kind of art or literary piece is understanding how the creator of that piece works to achieve their goal. I would love to believe masterpieces are just the result of just raw talent (and so much of what differentiates the good from the great IS raw talent), but more often than not, masterpieces are the results of deliberate choices that creators make. Understanding their tools and techniques allow us to more fully appreciate the work in question because it gives us an understanding of the complexity involved in the creative process.
Analyzing Taylor’s music through the lens of satire was inevitable. We had to do it. She’s so clever, snarky, fun, and hilarious — it was a given that her songwriting would have satire woven throughout it. And sure enough, once the “planets and the fates, and all the stars aligned,” it made for one of my favorite discussions.
We kick off our episode with a simple, googled definition of satire.
Satire is a literary genre, but more importantly, it is a very deliberate choice that any writer makes when they choose to incorporate it into their work. You can’t accidentally create a work of satire— you have to sit down and say today, I’m going to “use humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule” in this work. Which begs the very obvious question: why?
So as someone who is applying this lens to Taylor’s music, I approached my own analysis of my song, “Mastermind” in two parts:
☑️ Qualify: (When choosing the song) Does Taylor actually use humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule in this song?
❓Question: Why does she do this? Who is she criticizing or exposing? What are some topical issues she’s addressing?
Part 1: Qualify
Without going into too much detail about “Mastermind” (because SPOILER: we have a whole DEEP DIVE on this one coming next week), it became pretty apparent to me that Mastermind checks a lot of the qualification boxes for satire:
☑️ Humor: Lyrics like “I'm the wind in our free-flowing sails and the liquor in our cocktails” are cheeky. It’s not the most hilarious thing she’s ever written, but this song is penned with a light-hearted humor, which shines through especially towards the end when she admits, “all you did was smile.”
☑️ Irony: The line “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid” is one of the most amazingly ironic lines coming from an incredibly popular (understatement of the year) woman who is literally smashing records selling out stadiums on one of the largest world tours the world has ever seen.
☑️ Exaggeration: The woman compares herself to Machiavelli, I mean…..
☑️ Ridicule: This song is overflowing with “intelligent” language. We share examples in this week’s episodes, but she references everything from clockwork to chess, uses professional words like “design,” and then (once again), references Machiavelli, famed philosopher, diplomate, historian. These are references that all deliberately rate high on the nerd-meter. And in referencing these things, she’s ridiculing those who do not speak this language. She’s a mastermind, and those who don’t understand these things are fools.
Part 2: Question
So why does she do it? What’s she trying to tell us? Who’s she making fun of? I started getting into this a bit with the ridicule, but she clearly differentiates the speaker from everyone else. The speaker is a mastermind, and everyone else is not. In the context of social commentary and “topical issues,” she is leaning into an image of her that already exists out in the public eye: that she is a “schemer” — that she’s planned everything years and years in advance, that she’s always dropping easter eggs for her fans. To an extent all of these things are true, but she goes all in, claiming “it was all my design.”
Satire often does expose the truth, so Taylor’s not necessarily shying away from the image she’s commenting on. But by leaning heavily into it, through the exaggeration, the humor, she does manage to actually do the exact opposite of establishing herself as an actual mastermind. She humanizes herself. Rather than actually establishing herself as the ultimate genius of our time, Taylor Swift manages to give us a song that every person can relate to on some level. Yeah, sure, she’s intelligent and has been a deliberate schemer, but haven’t we all? We realize that we’re all masterminds in some capacity. Maybe it was that moment when you first locked eyes on that girl in your 10th grade lit class and realized you were going to be best friends, maybe it was that boy you went out of your way to see until you dreamt your marriage into existence, maybe it’s the “overnight success” of the career you have been carefully building over the course of a decade — whatever it may be, she’s given us a way to see our own masterminds in this song that was very clearly a nod to a reputation she herself has earned over the years.
That is the power of satire. To hold up a mirror and make people realize some truth that was hidden in plain sight. It’s the ability to comment on a reality so intelligently that you make the consumer of your content question their own understanding of that reality and learn something more.
There’s so much more we have to say about “Mastermind” specifically, so if you feel like I’m glossing over a lot and not doing this song justice, don’t worry — listen to this week’s episode, then tune in for the deep dive episode next week, where we really sink our teeth into this song and juice it for all it’s worth.