You're a cowboy like me 🤠
We're deep diving "cowboy like me" on this week's new AP Taylor Swift podcast episode
This week we deep dive a fan request: “cowboy like me” from evermore. This song compares love to a dangerous game, something based on deception, yet also something as beautiful as the gardens of Babylon. Is this a love song? Is this all just yet another con? Tune in to deep dive into the song and try to figure it out along with us!
🎧 Listen above and ⬇️ scroll below to read Jenn’s extra credit about cowboy culture and how that could have influenced Taylor!
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🎒This Week’s Extra Credit - Brought to You by Jenn
Ah, cowboys. I’m conveniently writing this Substack as I travel home from Austin, Texas where I spent a week for work. Because marketers can’t resist a theme, we all decided to double down on the Texas vibe and everyone wore their best Western wear, did some parking lot lassoing, and even did a Western-themed photoshoot (sidenote: are all marketing teams like this, or am I just drawn to these kinds of people naturally??). So needless to say, this is the perfect extra credit for me!
While I love all animals, I certainly was not specifically a horse girl while growing up. My sister, however, is a different story. She was a hardcore horse girl (and still is, to be fair), meaning I grew up around horses my whole life. In fact, I believe the story goes that I took my first steps in a horse barn during one of Amy’s lessons. As a result, I’ve been around a lot of cowboy stories and culture for my whole life.
Growing up, I was exposed to a lot of the more romanticized versions of these stories. Then in grad school, we studied some cowboy literature in my American Lit class, and I started to learn more about the reality of what it meant to be a cowboy. I think both of these narratives can help us unpack “Cowboy Like Me” even more, so let’s get into it!
The Romantic Cowboy
If you go back and listen to our Animal Theory episode, I talked about “White Horse” and shared how the modern version of a knight in shining armor is the result of the Victorians wanting to romanticize the Middle Ages. For Americans, cowboys have a pretty similar history. Our modern sensibility of cowboys is incredibly romantic. They are often seen as these lone heroes who wander the beautiful, untamed west doing incredible things and experiencing fantastical adventures. We millennials grew up with songs like “Cowboy Take Me Away” by The Chicks and “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” by Toby Keith. Both songs position the cowboy life as one of escape, especially from societal expectations and the burden of modern living.
One of the more niche cowboy stories I grew up with is the film The Man From Snowy River. Long story short (wink wink), this film follows a young man, Jim, whose father dies in a freak accident. Deemed not old enough to take over his father’s role out on the range, Jim is forced to go live in the city and work for the wealthiest rancher in town until he can prove himself. And surprise surprise, this wealthy man has a beautiful daughter who is rebelling against the expectations placed on her. The ultimate message of the story is that Jim is a hero because, unlike the wealthy man, he realizes that nature and women can’t be forced into submission. By accepting and embracing the wildness around him, Jim ends up with the best horses, the respect of the people, and the love of a woman.
Apparently the actor also actually did this insane scene below. Growing up, this scene was THE epitome of a badass cowboy:
In “cowboy like me,” we also get this distaste for society. We have lines like “Telling all the rich folks anything they wanna hear” and “And the old men that I've swindled.” It’s abundantly clear that for the protagonist of this song, society is only useful for the things that it can give her. In fact, it’s really a means to an end. She is “hustling for the good life,” which implies that what she is currently doing is not the good life. But she is hoping to get to the good life and the freedom it offers.
While Jim is not a swindler in The Man From Snowy River, the idea of society as being limiting and false is definitely a crossover. In both the romanticized versions of cowboy stories and in Taylor’s version though, finding love is a path to freedom that wasn’t planned but is still a core part of the happy ending (depending on how you interpret the song I suppose!).
The Real Cowboy
The desire for freedom still runs true in the real history of cowboys but for a very different reason. The historical setting for westward expansion was rooted in the concept of Manifest Destiny which was fraught with racial divides and a whole lot of violence. When you think “cowboy” you may imagine someone who looks like John Wayne, but in reality, cowobys were a wildly diverse group of folks. The one thing they all had in common though was that they were all quite poor. Being a cowboy did not pay a whole lot, and it was incredibly difficult exhausting work.
In “cowboy like me” though, Taylor doesn’t just paint the portrait of a cowboy that clocks in, clocks out, does a good job, and that’s all they do. Instead, she uses other terms such as “bandit, “swindled,” and “con.” The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta is my reference point for the realities of being a bandit during the era of cowboys. Written by John Rollin Ridge, a.k.a. Yellow Bird, this fictional biography is considered to be the first published book written by a Native American. While it is fictional, Ridge certainly had plenty of experience with racially incited violence, so I would argue that the brutality of the novel is not gratuitous. Rather it is representative of many real scenarios that Ridge personally experienced or witnessed. Wikipedia actually has a really good summary of the novel, so if you are interested but not ready to commit to the book, check it out.
Joaquin Murieta is an incredible con man, to the point that no one knows what he even looks like. He’s able to walk around towns to eavesdrop and learn about potential banditing opportunities without being caught. While Taylor’s “cons” imply more social engineering and Joaquin is a little more violent-forward, they both share the necessity of the con. For Taylor’s fictional persona, perhaps it is due to gender differences that she needs to con these men. For Joaquin it is definitely racially motivated (content warning: the beginning of the novel is BRUTAL but sets up his motivations very effectively).
The Modern Cowgirl
While “cowboy like me” certainly has a romantic tinge, there is also a sadness to it. With lines such as “skeletons in both our closets” and “hustling for the good life,” the song implies that this cowboy/bandit life isn’t her first choice. While her tale is much less violent than the reality was, I think that the real history of cowboys does add some weightiness to this song.
While the Wild West wasn’t actually a fully lawless land, it also kind of was a lawless land. By that, I mean that there were laws and some people to enforce them, but there was so much land that it was easy to avoid the law and hide out as needed. For some people, that meant they could do horrific things without consequences. For others, it meant that they developed their own codes. Joaquin Murieta has no problem killing, but he comes down hard on a member of his gang who kidnaps a young girl. He has his own code.
While Taylor isn’t developing a new code of ethics, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that she is rewriting the unspoken rules of the music industry. In that way, she is a bit of a modern cowgirl. Fame is absolutely a lawless land. On one side, famous people (women in particular) have a lot of rich men who are looking to take advantage of them in many different ways.
On the other side, they have fans who don’t respect personal boundaries or space. Taylor is one of a relatively few people who are in this uncharted land, and she is forging ahead and making her own way the best way she can. The violence is more emotional, but as we see in “thanK you aIMee,” the metaphors of violence still ring true. Battered and bruised, our favorite cowgirl is out here fighting her battles and carving out her own path.