Who will have the longer post?

While Gab has thicker paragraphs, mlwaski has more. Pound for pound, word for word, they overthink pop culture to a level it probably doesn’t deserve. In the end, mlawski breaks his personal record, but Gab overcomes with 695 words to mlawski’s 625 words. You can see the follow up on ESPN Ocho! Leave comments about who you think should take the crown next on “Dueling opinions”. And now a word from our sponsors.

Round 1 of longest post ever

When I first heard the song, I had a pretty surface-area-interpretation of it (Taylornerd and the boy had been friends forever but he never “saw” her the way she “saw” him, so she’s pleading for him to do so). I listened to it more and then started to wonder if maybe the guy was using her or something, dropping hints to make her think she may have a chance so he could keep her around as a backup of sorts for whenever he and his actual girlfriend were having problems. The video reaffirmed this for me when I saw it the first time a while back. So the question on my mind has been:

Is the guy really worth it? If you take the lyrics and video together, I see a few interpretations of him.

1) Still from before, he’s using her. That little notebook message system they have going on seems cute and all, but the way HE is passive aggressive with it, “wishing” she were going, asking IF she’s going but not actually asking her TO GO could be him covering his bases so that he still has options by guilting Taylornerd her into it- yet giving him deniability later. And how are we to know his relationship with Taylorcheerleader really as bad as Taylornerd makes it out to be up until the football game we see? She could be totally blowing it out of proportion in the lyrics to convince him, but he could also be doing so in order to keep her interested. Obviously Taylornerd and Taylorcheerleader don’t get along, so we have no way of knowing if Taylornerd is hearing anything but negative things about the relationship between the boy and Taylorcheerleader. What if he’s stringing her along for a sort of booty call? Not sex, but someone else to get that kind of emotional treatment when he and Taylorcheerleader are fighting. “Hey, we just had a fight, can you come over?” Emotional booty call. The way he brushes her hair away on the bench is totally inappropriate for a platonic friendship, but exacerbated by her having romantic feelings for him. Yet little things like that are exactly what a girl would hang onto for a glimmer of hope. Unless he’s a total moron, he’d know this, so why do it?

2) He’s a wimp. He lets “norms” decide what’s best for him and Taylornerd rather than his own conscience. And the car thing Tim brought up is important: given the little world being set up in the video, it seems like he doesn’t have a car because he chooses not to. He’d prefer to be literally along for the ride rather than make decisions for himself. The notebook message can also fit in here, too: instead of taking the initiative to ask her to Homecoming (that’s what it looks like, anyway), he just shrugs it off, “I wish you were going,” making no other effort to make the wish come true.

3) He’s superficial and vain. It takes a very public breakup (or at least reason for one- it isn’t like nobody else saw what Taylornerd saw) AND Taylornerd getting all dolled up for him to be out in the open about any romantic feelings he has for her in order to protect his persona. He’s a jock, and dating cheerleaders is What Jocks Do. He can’t let anyone else think he’s different from that, otherwise his status and entire image will be shattered. And I think this is different from the second option in that here it’s more of a conscious choice to look a certain way to others, while the other is more about a lack of decisiveness and inherent inability to be original. Here, he *wants* to look cool, and this trumps any other aspirations or desires he may have. He carries the piece of paper around with him, but he doesn’t show it to her until he knows it’s safe and would be accepted by everybody else.

I also really like the song’s seamless mixture of country and pop-punk. (I find it kind of interesting/instructive to listen to this one and Blink 182′s All the Small Things back to back.) Oh and hey Trevor, screw you for getting it stuck in my head. Seriously, though good post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg59q4puhmg

For my money, Lavigne’s sneering at the boring girl comes off way meaner, which is slightly leavened by her dual role in the video, but mostly the song revels in its snotty meanness. Interestingly, though, she presents a different female dichotomy, based perhaps in gender stereotypes than clique/subcultural identification: “Girlfriend” (particularly the video) pits the rebellious punk/goth/bad girl against the preppy, who, fascinatingly, embodies both nerdiness and snobbiness. Somehow she stands at both ends of the traditional teen hierarchy, while the rebel girl narrator stands outside it completely.

She is boastful rather than insecure (“Hell yeah I’m the motherfuckin’ princess”) and has no qualms about stealing a guy from another girl. Even the preppy girl’s snooty look at the beginning of the video hardly justifies the campaign of coordinated bullying that rebel girl and her friends proceed to wage on her.

For its audience, “Girlfriend” may be more escapist wish-fulfillment: Even though we know it would make us jerks, don’t we sometimes wish we had the brash confidence to steal someone’s guy, to take whatever we want? One hopes that it’s not just helping awful people rationalize their selfishness.

Prepare to have this song, and many others by her, stuck in your head.

For the rest of your life.

Seriously, this may be one of the catchiest songs ever written.

Not that it’s on my iPod or anything…

Oh, and, nice use of the “œ.”

Oh, and good article. I’ve always thought the song was a little creepy.

Trevor, you posit that the “other girl” in this song is actually a character that the narrator makes up. It’s an interesting theory, but I’ve got another one: Supposing the other girl isn’t made up, but the narrator herself is?

Not, of course, in the Usual Suspects sense, but in that she defines herself (at least, to him) solely in terms of what his girlfriend isn’t. Why is it important to Taylor (or to the boy) that she listens to “the kind of music she doesn’t like?” Like some political opposition, every phrase that Taylor’s character uses to describe herself places her in direct opposition to the incumbent (in many cases, the contrast is implied but definite – for instance the chorus’s “Been here all along” implies that the other woman hasn’t). The contrasts are so stark, and so convenient for Taylor, that I can’t help wondering whether she’s exaggerating her case, tweaking her image where it makes her look even less like the woman he’s already with.

But that was not the point I intended to make when I started typing…

Yes, the comparisons to this song’s musical ancestry (“Under My Thumb,” “Every Breath You Take,” &c) are apt, but I’m actually a lot more interested in a compare-and-contrast of this with a song in a similar genre that came out a scant three years ago: Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend.”

“She’s like, so whatever,” Avril sneers. “You could do so much better.”

It seems to me that Avril and Taylor are telling two variations on the same tale. In Swift’s version, the guy is already dating “Avril,” and she wonders what he’s doing with someone above what she perceives as his social class, bemoaning “Avril’s” architypical cheerleader character. In Avril’s version she plays the cheerleader (note how the chorus of “Girlfriend” borrows from Toni Basil’s “Hey Mickey”), the guy is already dating “Taylor,” and she asks (less eloquently, for obvious reasons) what he’s doing with someone for far below what Avril perceives as his social standing.

In this manner, the punk princess and the country girl engage in a debate ages older than either of them, and one that they may be only vaguely aware of themselves. Now let’s see ‘em collaborate on a cover of “The Boy is Mine.”

Also, a caveat: Swift does say in the song that she’s in the room when the girlfriend calls to bitch at the boy. Still, it’s a little creepy that she gets absorbed in the lover’s tiff without thinking of leaving the room so he can have some privacy (though an alternate theory is that she’s in the room, but hiding in the closet with her iPod set on shuffle to “music she doesn’t like”).

I see some visual symbolism going on with The Rival driving a convertible. The expectation in our culture is that the guy is going to have the car, which he will use to drive around his lady, and it’s even better if the car he has is a sexy one. But in this case, he’s the one getting a ride from his girlfriend. This could mean that he’s not too attached to traditional gender roles; or that he’s a guy who is okay with taking a subservient role from time to time, and letting someone else be in control. (And, of course, it could be both.) One presumes that these are qualities that Taylor Swift looks for in a mate.

And of course, the “wedding dress as prom dress” symbolism is probably not lost on any Overthinker.

For the song and video as a whole, one alternate interpretation I see here is that Taylor Swift wants people to like her for the bookish nerd that she is on the inside. Though she has a “hot cheerleader” side she shows off in public–probably because that is the only way for her to sell millions of records, rather than mere thousands–if you are drawn to her because of that cheerleader side, she is going to hurt and abandon you. If you are appealing to her hot cheerleader side, she will never understand you in a way that appeals to her bookish nerd side, and even if you belong with her, neither of you will ever know it. Your attraction to her is only a superficial one, and thus the relationship cannot be anything but superficial.

That may be the most charitable interpretation of this one could muster. I can’t say whether one could actually read it as her authorial intent, because this is the first song I’ve heard by her, and it’s the first time I’ve heard it. Maybe I’ll go listen to the rest of her œuvre so that I might overthink it.