What Attracted Taylor Swift to an 1830s Lifestyle?

I think it’s unjust to take apart a few words from a compilation of thirty-one tracks. I’ll own up to that. With over two hours of music on her new double album, The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift talks a lot—10,663 words, to be exact. (To get that amount, I had to copy and paste every song’s lyrics into a Google Doc and then select “Word Count.” This process alone took about 45 minutes or nearly 37% of a double album by Taylor Swift.) Shakespeare and she may both be poets, but their views on brevity are unquestionably different. However, it is undoubtedly a little impolite to read all 10,663 words and then choose to take offense at 39 of them. Nobody is arguing over a single line from Infinite Jest here. However, these are the 39 words in dispute, in my defense:

I used to play a game with my pals where we would choose a decade.
We wanted to live in the 1830s, if only without all the racists, as opposed to today.
and marrying the one who offers the best price

These few phrases alone will have you pausing “I Hate It Here” and racing to Genius.com to confirm that you actually just heard that. Yes, you have just heard that Taylor Swift once hoped she could live in the 1830s—that is, without all the dowries and bigots, of course.

There’s really just one word I can say to that: Wut?

Firstly, you really can’t make the entire argument that “but without the racists” since, well, it really covers a lot of the 19th century, let alone the 1830s. Are the sultry years leading up to the Civil War really that appealing? Is John C. Calhoun being stubbed? (The sound you hear is Taylor’s pal Blake Lively pleading with you not to talk about my wedding.) Alternatively, perhaps we want to see the Trail of Tears and the thousands of Native Americans who were uprooted. Alternatively, to really know what it was like to be alive during the period when the United Kingdom was “slaying”—that is, “laying claim to over a quarter of the entire world.”

But all right, I’ll let you pick this decade as long as you remove every negative aspect of it, just for the fun of the game and since I’m your friend and don’t want to ruin things. What remains? The Alamo? Did Andrew Jackson bring about a financial panic by demolishing the US Bank? An increase in Mormonism? enormous sleeve dresses? A civilization before sewage systems were invented?

The 1830s are undoubtedly among the least notable periods in history, provided that all racial prejudice is removed. Napoleon is no longer alive. The Industrial Revolution has essentially already taken place. Hector Berlioz’s compositions are the most noteworthy. The growth of organized baseball and soccer in the US and the UK is yet decades away. Romanticism has passed its prime: Coleridge is abusing too much opium, Wordsworth has written his final poems on how great trees are, and John Keats has passed away. The paintings are foolish.