A Saturday night in the 2000s. The smell of microwaved butter popcorn, clouds of weed smoke, finding a butterfly clip in your pocket, and an American Pie DVD playing on the TV in a suburban home. It’s not every day these documentarian American Y2K realities are discussed by the biggest household name pop star on the planet and yet, it might be the most important rare cinematic moment out of the entire The Tortured Poets Department Anthology album.

Taylor’s pretty popular girl in silver frost eyeshadow vocals blended with the Gregg Araki soundtrack vibes painted by Aaron Dessner’s insightful Shoegaze auteurship is masterful. It’s this gorgeous dogme 95 sound mixed with the painful reality of Swift recalling the grief of the normal high school experiences she sacrificed to pursue her dreams and career. It’s the ‘dark coming of age’ literary genre explored in song form, aiming to levitate the millennial listener to memories of simpler times but also is a great palette to titillate images of pre-internet world zoomers born in the 2000s who are only capable of piecing together this era through films, music, and their algorithmic powered fantasies.

“Touch me while your boys play Grand Theft Auto. It’s true, swear, scouts honor” has Swift stepping into the powerful agency of her own submission and trad femininity, positioning herself to experience the simple pleasures of basking in the masculine musk of an American jock. This teenage lust and confessional hunger from the sidelines over an anon football player reads like secretive queer poetry from the pages of XY magazine: “Your friends are around so, be quiet.”

The honesty in her vocal performance shows her on an emotional rollercoaster, as you don’t watch but listen to her bite her lips and blush, completely compelled by her own sexual awakening. “No one’s ever had me, not like you.” It’s a song her younger contemporaries would salivate for, and this is why she had to make it, to
remind us all as a seasoned writer in her mid-30s: she’s seen all the 90s cult classic movies we love, she’s just a weird artistic nerd like the rest of us, and it seems no throne can numb those fashionable aesthetic curiosities. DUH!