"There's a song called 'Father Figure,' where the first line of the second verse says, 'I pay the check / Before it kisses the mahogany grain.'"
"I'm like, That's my favorite type of writing, right? Where you have to think about, What do those words mean? Oh, somebody got the bill before it hit the table."
"Watching her explain the word mahogany, I knew I was doomed, both personally and as part of a larger species. I saw God himself signing the check for our obliteration (before it hit the table)."
"You call me up again just to break me like a promise / So casually cruel in the name of being honest"
Taylor Swift described a new lyric about paying a check before it hits the table and praised its supposed semiotic complexity. The narrator perceives the explanation as evidence of declining lyrical craft and of an audience less capable of nuanced interpretation. The narrator contrasts Swift's earlier, sharper lines with the new, more literal phrases and cites other recent lyrics as examples of awkward or overexplicit imagery. The piece also notes a separate cultural trend in streaming television, mentioning that Netflix dramas increasingly open with death as a normalized trope.
Read at Vulture
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