Being an eclectic chap, Cockburn has sampled his fair share of music. And he’s not ashamed to admit, contrary to Al Michaels’s suggestion that Taylor Swift only appeals to teenage girls, that he considers himself a “Swiftie” — not least of all because Swift makes repeated reference to one of his favorite activities: drinking alcohol.
Swift just released her new album, Midnights, along with an official music video to accompany her catchy and oh-so-clever song, Anti-Hero. The video tells you all you need to know about Swift’s preferred method for dealing with her problems. Though she never mentions booze by name, she appears in the video taking shots and desperately shaking the last drop from a bottle of wine directly into her mouth.
If Al Michaels thinks such twenty-one-plus imagery and metaphors are for “teenage girls,” he obviously hasn’t listened to much beyond Swift’s 2014 album, 1989. In studying her catalog — casually, of course, and not at all because Swift is his go-to Spotify station — Cockburn noticed that alcohol started to become a recurring theme in her music with the release of her record Reputation. This also came shortly after Swift met her now-longtime English boyfriend Joe Alwyn, and, boy, do those Brits know how to drink.
