Taylor Swift’s promotion of her new album, which the box my Amazon order came in tells me is called Lover, was going so well. She had advocated for the LGBTQ+ community, officially made it clear for the record that she believes Trump sucks, and finally put that whole boring Katy Perry drama to bed. And now look what no one made her do: commemorate the upcoming 10 year anniversary of that VMAs I had naively hoped we were not going to talk about this time around by reprinting her diary from 2009 in the liner notes for the deluxe edition of Lover.
The diary entry was seemingly written on September 18, 2009, when Swift was nineteen, five days after the VMAs we will never be allowed to forget. It reads, in part,
“Let’s just say, if you had told me Kanye West would have been the number one focus of my week, the media, and my part in the VMA’s I would’ve looked at you crossed-eyed…If you had told me that one of the biggest stars in music was going to jump up onstage and announce that he thought I shouldn’t have won on live television, I would’ve said ‘That stuff doesn’t really happen in real life..”
“Well… apparently…. It does.”
Is there an additional diary entry written by a 29-year-old Swift explaining how she might look at us if we told her that a decade later, both parties involved would still be trotting out that minute and a half every time they needed attention in a drama that would last at least as long as the Peloponnesian War and would eventually involve Kardashians? Surely there is a mot juste more fitting than “crossed-eyed.”