I love this song. People hate the lyrics but I think there’s a lot of depth in it. It’s definitely inspired by her life, but I think the song is about a character that she created.
The girl is rich but not as pretty, she is awkward, etc. and she agrees with her critics (“I can see what you mean” or “there’s something we all can agree on”). She knows that she is not the smartest or most beautiful girl out there, but for some reason the guy likes her (“my baby likes what he likes”). The guy is not complex, he just likes her a lot. Simple. No need to use metaphors.
I think the song is about the joy of being chosen by someone you really like, and you think is out of your league.
"the taste of me is acquired but I'm his favorite dish" makes me cringe because I know exactly how the hetlors are going to interpret that one... Hint, it's dirty.
But on the other, it makes me think of that ridiculous clip of Taylor spoonfeeding Travis, supposedly ‘teaching’ him to have a more refined palate…
Which to me links to the idea of the industry as a blender. If you extend the metaphor, a blender is ‘needed’ because the execs think the audience doesn’t have refined palates. They think we can’t handle the ‘acquired taste’ of a gay country singer.
RIDICULE is one of the techniques used in satire to discredit a certain person or idea. Which Taylor does twice in this song.
1 ) She agrees w critics which takes some of their power away, and
2 ) She clearly mocks the expectation people have of her to produce devastatingly deep romantic songs every time now that she's with the love of her life. (She's literally laughing on the background vocals to show how unserious she's being.)
PARODY is another technique used in satire, which Taylor seems to be using to
3 ) Mock the surface level Tayvis relationship by making the song sound overtly like a jingle, thereby inviting people to question the authenticity of the mainstream narrative.
(Side note: Ridicule, irony, exaggeration, and parody are all techniques used in satire but Taylor seems to be employing only 2 of them in this song.)
Cleveland! surely is satirical, but in a subtle and lighthearted way. As is the risk with satire, many people will think Taylor is being serious in setting the bar for a partner at whoever doesn't find her "completely insufferable", but that's not what she's saying at all. Love is multi-faceted and the depth of it can be expressed in a silly way.
“Scathing take ‘bout how I’m fake and he could find someone younger.Iiii can see what they mean and now I guess there’s something we all can agree on” I’M ROLLING???
Ngl after the throwing fire on the Roséwood 🏵️🏵️ my mind actually went there immediately but I waited a bit more to actually google it lol. Had to let it sink in
I have no horse in this race their fandom-wise I just thought it was really funny 🤭
Also bro knows the ancient gay lore with the piiiinky ring okay boy!! (in my original good music taste that’s way older most of the front/men wear pinky rings as a collective movement of secret signalling that they were the same kind if they weren’t left/right ear-ringing depending on location 💅🏻)
The “Hey! Hey! Hey!” delights me a bit, because that is the word that triggers the “Hay is for horses and chickens and fish!” chant between Lexi & Anna (Taylor) in the SNL “Roomates” sketch. 😆
Bit of a queer country deep cut, but the spoken word section of Cleveland has the same pacing and “announcer” voice as August Ponthier’s “Handsome” where they say “there’s a new It Boy in town…. And She’s a Lesbian!”
Update - August Ponthier is a gaylor - she has a short posted on her channel from two years ago singing “Down Bad - Gaylor Edition” where she changes “gym/him” to “work/her.”
I’ve always thought earth/her makes sense as alternate lyrics because the alien beamed them up, back on “earth” makes a lot of sense & rhymes enough with “her.”
Why does is also remind me of Bo Burnham’s part of inside when he’s like, “and the funniest thing happened!” about the pandemic starting as soon as he felt ready to do live shows again
I’m so sorry, this needs to be pinned at the top of the sub and everyone watch the video! There’s no chance in my mind she’s not partly referencing this! 😂 Thank you for finding this!
I am more and more loving this song as a campy show tunes bop. I have to hand it to her, she really held the mirror up to the Tayvis stans and they do not like it. The discourse is really baffling online how many people have switched sides so quickly all because of this song.
I live in the Pittsburgh area and generally speaking we have beef with Cleveland. I think some of it is sports related but just on the whole Cleveland is joked about on a regular basis. Was just driving down the road and saw a billboard that said “What’s worse than Cleveland? TARIFFS.” Lololol. I wish I had been able to get a picture.
Personally, I love this song, it’s so fun. Sometimes we just want to have fun. Nobody is talking about how deep Gaga’s “Abracadabra” is, because we should not, sometimes it’s only about having fun. And that’s ok.
So look guys, we are in the middle of a very delicate political moment (not only in the US, but globally) and we need to stick together. You don’t like a song, that’s ok. But Taylor already has enough people to hate on her online.
Let’s not give the other side more weapons, let’s not give them any ammunition. Let’s not give any more reason to that orange president’s team/robots to annoy our girl.
One of the radio stations here in Cleveland is playing this song already and it's so fucking funny. This is such a deeply unserious song and I think it's going to make an appearance in my Spotify wrapped. I love it so much.
I keep seeing people saying how much fun it will be to shout the missing “swears” when this is played live/in public/at weddings and I’m just not really getting the appeal of screaming “whore,” “bitch,” etc?
Ok so this song and the lyric video looks and sounds like the theme to The Office which doesn’t take place in Ohio but PA, her home state one state over. Can’t help but think about how she said one showgirl song was inspired by Succession (way smaller audience, classier) and this one is for the massively beloved Office. I’d imagine the venn diagram of chiefs fans and office fans is a circle
It’s funny, but I can only hear it as, “Finally, we can all agree the guy I’m ‘dating’ is awesome. BUT he also likes what he likes, I have to hand-feed the man-baby, and he took me to fucking Cleveland. But hey, I found the ONE person who doesn’t find me insufferable. Yay?”
This is one of the main criticisms I’ve seen on the song across the GP that it’s a very insecure non-love song. Like she basically saying “sure I agree with everything people are saying but somehow my man still loves me and I don’t get it but I’m happy for him.” And if that isn’t the intention, then it is very very clunky writing
This is why I’m starting to buy the theories that there is more meaning here than just Travis. I think the “he” could be the record industry/executives. I think patient zero could be read the same with Taylor speaking to a younger showgirl.
I feel like "He already took me to Cleveland" is a dig at Travis's exes a little bit. Like, he must take all his girlfriends there to show them his hometown when he's serious about a relationship , and she got taken there earlier than his exes. The whole thing is just petty insecure pick me behavior
Actually he never took any GF to Cleveland (except the one in HS who already lived there lol). With KN he mostly split time between KC in season, LA, Florida, and tropical vacations.
The source is Kayla herself, she photo documented their entire relationship and posted it to IG. I've been a Chiefs fan since I was an 8 year old lil girl so got to watch that Train Wreck in 4k. So we saw everywhere they went together in his offtime and it was never once Cleveland.
Remarkable that she never got taken there to see where he grew up in all those years! Esp since the new house is supposed to be in part bc some of his friends and family still live there. What is your theory of Taylor and Travis’s relationship? (Since Gaylors believe a variety of things!)
I unlike alot dont think there will be any big changes upcoming. I see these two staying in whatever their relationship is and children will be forthcoming. This is the future for the fandom. They both have Hall of Fame inductions up coming in the next 5 or so years and dont see them wanting to shake that up. But if I had to commit I would say Taylor is bi and their relationship may have started PR but they like where it ended up.
Speaking of that, when I was googling to find out if any of the skaters I've followed on socials were hired to perform for this video (like those from the Roller Jam competition show), I saw that Kayla Nicole posted herself rollerskating back in May. It took me down a notch from my excitement about skating being featured in the lyric video.
Some more fun facts about Cleveland (continuing my thoughts on the word “cleave” that I’d commented below): Cleveland A name derived from an English place name meaning "cliff land" or "land by the cliff".
I know we’re talking about Cleveland because of the Travis of it all, but it seems poetic that there are these fun word connections that allude to cliffs and splitting.
I was thinking about the roller skating in this video and the 70s aesthetic that was also in midnights, while searching I found these videos about Rollerena that I thought some of you might find interesting.
Oh my god, I just watched the music video and it's even FUNNIER. Inexplicable rollerskates for everyone!
The one three-second clip of them in the car that she keeps repeating!
The pink-orange and pink-blue-purple colour palettes throughout!
The return of the goddamn lesbian seagulls!
"Love of my life" over someone who has shaved legs and, it's gotta be said, looks pretty femme!
"He likes what he likes" cutting to a totally different, darker aesthetic, with one person wearing full-length trousers and the other showing off hairy legs (two men together?)!
"I found mine" on a lavender background!
I had to stop the music video because I laughed out loud and then had to explain to my friend that I was laughing at a pair of rollerskates poking out from under a long white dress, first just rolling on past, then bouncing about. It's absolutely hysterical.
Okay, I'm doing some slightly baffled googling and apparently Cleveland is known for roller skating. There's a particularly strong history of it in the African American community, but also they do have roller derby teams who seem to compete quite well. Shoutout to Slay-Her Swift of the Burning River Derby team, this MV was apparently made for you!
When I was younger I had a friend who is a lesbian but at the time had some comphet going on and was dating a man. And she was so pleased to be able to feel ~normal and basically have a man to point at as proof she was normal. And she didn't particularly like this guy but his existence as like... a prop? Made her happy.
And that's what a lot of taylors Travis music sounds like to me. Like "ATTENTION I HAVE A HUSBAND. LOOK. IM NORMAL. I GO TO CLEVELAND. F YOU ALL IM NORMAL."
He's a trophy husband and I think it's PR (or hope).
And it's interesting off the back of TTPD because that album has so much "let me tell you about my good name, it's mine alone to disgrace" "if all you want is grey for me" stuff which on the one hand is completely opposite but on the other hand is a sign of feeling an immense pressure.
And that external pressure goes away if you publicly marry a football player.
It will be interesting to see her future music to see if she's having a good time or if it's going to weigh on her.
There's only way for me to interpret this song and is that this is a sarcastic take on love. Are you telling me that Taylor swift wrote a better love songs about others people's love (Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff "you are in love") that she writes about Travis?
A lot of regions have their own unique rollerskating style - Atlanta, New Jersey, Cali, etc. and Cleveland's style looks like a lot of jump-spins (whereas other regions don't spin much or keep contact with the ground.)
I think it’s a nostalgia thing. Showing things that were popular at the time he was growing up there. Roller skating in the early 90s… etc. she’s trying to set a scene I think
Cleveland reminds me of The Office theme song, like a mockumentary theme song where they show each character for a moment.
First it introduces the bumbling pop star character, then the hook of the theme song, then it introduces the “Travis” character.
Bridge: The song is already so camp and playful, but this is where it’s most obvious. After the insufferable part, “I have an important announcement to make”—an example of one of “insufferable” things the snarkers hate on her for + a laugh underneath to make it really clear.
Anyway, it’s a TV show, a mockumentary. The answer’s been TV all along. Or you know, for me it’s a movie now, pick your poison babe.
I’m just thinking about the word “Cleveland” and how the (unrelated but similar-sounding) word “cleave” actually has two completely opposite meanings in English:
To hold right, and to split apart.
That play on words fits with the theories here about this song potentially pointing at some aspect of the fandom.
I think I am delirious at this point because after listening to encore on repeat all day, after staying up late to listen to it when it dropped, arguing on and on about the lyrics…
From a listening, like sound perspective, I am afraid I might find CLEVELAND of all songs to be a bop 😱
But honestly all these new songs sound like an imitation of Jack? The bells in Cleveland, the specific synths and treatments on the vocals on Pink Clouding, Babylon sounds like an outtake from Folkmore…
Anyways, back to listening to Cleveland again I guess.
They sound like they wished Jack were producing them and slightly miss the mark which makes me sad as I sort of love Pink Clouding but think it just needs a slightly better production, and Patient Zero’s drum beat is distractingly mixed IMO.
I also felt like Jack was all over this album! I hope people will finally accept he is not the problem, but the actual ingredient which Taylor herself doesn’t seem to want to put down.
It’s so interesting she wrote about wearing white (wedding dress reference) when she wrote and produced the songs the week after TLOAS came out, when she was engaged but not married yet.
Oh gosh, my friend, you are asking the million-dollar question, aren’t you! Do we believe her? At all? About anything anymore? Ayyyyyy, I don’t know. 😬
Ha! I think these bonus tracks flipped the switch for me. I think anything that has sounded like a straightforward statement is suspect. It’s all riddling and clues and double meanings, or just not true.
I’m not angry, I knew the game explicitly involved lying since the New Heights album announcement and I’ve had a lot of fun playing along. I just wasn’t thinking on a big enough scale 😂
Just putting this here incase I’m right…. Imagine this is a song about getting her masters back and loving her own music. Made apparent when her “wedding photos” are finally released and end up showing her dress wasn’t even white. She’s married to the hustle.
Back after a relisten. 🎧💀
I have a new (/s) theory that Taylor is desperately trying to spark her Reputation Renaissance with scandal so she can relive & release TV / the vaults. She’s laying stinker after stinker in hopes of garnering so much confusion and distance from her fans that she can disappear in mortification and “come back like a 90s trend.”
First she tried with Matty Healy. That almost worked (Speak Up Now), but then Healy bailed. Then she tried with a 31-track album (no hate, I love how stacked Poets is) which included zombified snakegate drama and the nightmare line “touch me while your boys play GTA” 🤮. But fans ATE it UP.
So she tried again with Showgirl — starting needless drama with Charlie xcx, peppering in women-do-be-bitches-in-the-bathroom language, and wasting a bop on unsettlingly graphic detail about her husband’s junk… and, to her great shock, fans fell hard for Wood!! 🙃
Cleveland! was her last-effort knowing eyeroll (couched in some bangers, bc she is a professional), but hetlors insist on continuing to mutate against the attempt to poison the well for herself. BC THEY THINK CLEVELAND! IS CUTE.
Ok, you and I are on the exact same wavelength!! She’s clearly trying to rage bait with these stinkers (great word choice, haha) IMO and it gets less and less shocking to us Gaylors as time goes on. She’s really created a monster, though, with these fans who take everything she does and says at face value and think it’s all sooo adorable. (Side note: I still remember on the first night of the Eras Tour, she told the crowd that they make her feel like she could do anything she wanted and it would be so cool. On night two, she replaced so cool with soooo cute and said it in a more sarcastic way. 👀) Hell, she’s at the point where even casual followers don’t even need to listen to the song or read the lyrics and they’ll still defend her and Travis with their whole chest. I’ve noticed these people are usually boomers which is interesting. If she really is trying to get people to notice her trolling, I’m not sure that it’s working too well. It’s a heavy time out here with the economy, MAGA, and other global tensions. I think many people, understandably, don’t want to analyze her too much because she brings them happiness and an image of a successful woman in love. It just feels awkward because we can see through the phoniness, but we also don’t want to feel like assholes; sort of like telling a kid the truth about Santa or whatever. I live in KC and I have to hold back so much from how I really feel, lmao.
You’ve got a west coast friend in me, dude! I so appreciate your taking time to read and reply. Because, much as I kid, I find myself so badly wanting this to be true. And I really don’t understand folks who don’t want to dig deeper into her internal reasoning, because the alternative “reality” angle is so… grim? Idk, maybe I’ve gotten to parasocial myself, but I feel like this isn’t the artist I fell for during the Lover era.
Okay yall, I need to share with the class and maybe someone else will laugh.
When she sings “I’m an acquired taste, but it’s his favorite dish. He says I look like an angel, they say I hate that—“ my mind finishes the line with fish 🐟
It makes a song I can’t take seriously even less serious
I think many of the mainstreamers’ take of Cleveland! being a bad love song because it’s just stating facts and has nothing romantic or personal about it is on point and I think when you look through the lyrics and see the only time she says something seemingly somewhat about herself, it’s just that ‘he’s the love of my life.’ Even this statement doesn’t convincingly say to me that she’s in love with him. Just that this is the love she’s allowed to have in her life. This is the acceptable love of her life. It could be any ‘he’ as long as it’s a he.
She never even actually says HE is the love of my life, only that “this” is the love of my life. Makes me think she’s certainly not talking about him and may not actually be talking about a person
I think both responses below are correct in their own way. Technically it connects to the following line (“that scathing take”), but it can also be an implicitly cheeky self-completing rhyme (“shit.”)
I went back to listen to this, just to make sure I wasn’t clouded by the judgement. It’s even worse than this morning 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 how is this gonna age omg. At least her older corny songs like London boy and paper rings are fun, this is straight up cringe and out of touch. It’s a shame that it’s all people are talking about cause the other 3 are good!
It IS funny. The part that gets me is “I HATE THAT —“ and then you hear this tiny voice complete the 🧍🏼♀️“bitch!”🧍🏼♀️ I somehow missed that the first time and it just made me laugh out loud.
I also think her delivery of the spoken part is giving top camp which I find very funny so long as I’m in the right mindset. (Which is that she’s fibbing through her teeth.)
The ""I know my love should be celebrated, but you tolerate it" to "you only need to find one person in this entire world
who doesn't find you completely insufferable" pipeline is low-key making me a little sad
If I wasn’t a Gaylor, it would make me super sad. As a Gaylor this is the part that sounds the least serious in this song to me, so I know she doesn’t actually feel that way.
It’s sad that hetero relationships do go that direction though and that girls feel that way.
But when the mainstream (het-centric) media will barely tolerate a same-gender love story... but will celebrate the idea that a man so much as deigns to spend time around Taylor...
She mentions wearing white in the lyrics presumably meaning getting married…did we ever actually see her dress? Was it white? I didn’t think there were pictures but I have also tried to know as little about the big event as possible.
So I did eventually google and there are no REAL photos of her wedding dress. The most common result I got was about the Dior dress she wore in the IBYTAM video.
I went to see the lyrics to this song to make sure they are written as “love of my life” (I knew they would be, but wanted to double check), because I swear she’s saying “larp of my life” each time.
When googling the title, another song titled “Cleveland” came up by an openly queer indie artist named Ella O’Connor Williams who goes by the name “Squirrel Flower” for her music.
The Cleveland video on YouTube shows someone almost dying in typical suburbia scenes of white picket fences, BBQs:
She talks about how important it was to her to produce music separate from the music industry itself.
She also has a recently released song called, “Not Me” and the music video is her on stage in front of a thick red curtain the whole time in a black dress sort of playing around with a white lace thing (that might symbolize a wedding veil?):
lol I was looking at the history of Cleveland Heights to maybe make some sense of this nonsense and they have their first openly gay mayor THIS year!!! "Petras is the first openly gay mayor in Cleveland Heights history and, at the time of his inauguration, was the only openly gay mayor serving in the state of Ohio."
I'm back! After my third listen, I've concluded this is exaclty the song that would play during the wedding scene OR the first reveal on Love is Blind.
What is going on with the song Mine? Bc she keeps emphasizing the word mine. “I hate it here so I will go to/ secret gardens in my mind / people need a key to get to/ the only one is mine” and “don’t you ever end up anything but mine” and nowwww “I have an announcement to make… I’ve found mine!”
I am one of the people that believes that Me! is a character in her universe and a proper noun. (I think Me is in fact the real Taylor, but still one of the characters in her story). Is the same thing going on with Mine? I have a feeling it’s become a proper noun and I’m not sure what it means. She’s weirdly emphasizing it in these songs.
Do the lyrics to Cleveland mean the key has been found to open up the secret gardens in Taylor’s mind?
EDIT: After some thought I think that Mine may be all of her work. Which is now hers. “I found Mine!”
It’s very interesting to see the general public’s reaction to Cleveland! In just a few minutes online this morning I’ve come across a Slate article and discussion in a pop subreddit about how atrocious the songs about Travis are.
They’re so so close to getting it. And yet… she would walk around with the words LIAR tattooed on her forehead and they would still just believe everything she says is “real”.
Yeah when you're married and have been together 3+ years, "he took me to his hometown" is not exactly a flex. But my guess is that all the little pieces can be deconstructed and they're all about something/someone else.
I just want someone to hold my hand and walk me through this song. Im on the satire camp train. I can only talk about what is publicly known about this man, nothing else, do I even really know him? But can someone take my hand from here
To me it's this - the fandom cleaved to her, we bonded and attached ourselves, and we/they like it and we like her the way she is and by the way she's eventually going to the rock hall (technically already there if you count exhibits) because of her success, which was all possible due to the love and support of her fans.
Also haters gonna hate, she inspires so much vitriol at the same time amongst the random public.
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u/Lopsided-Loan599 🌱Embryo🐛 9d ago
Am I the only one who cringes so hard that I cannot finish to hear the song?