One of my favorite songs on the album, Illicit Affairs was the first track I gushed about with my friend the day the album Folklore dropped. Her and I are quite similar in thinking, as we are both avid Taylor Swift fans and bookworms – so you can imagine my surprise when, in the midst of my excited ramble about the lyrics of the song, my friend confusedly stopped me and asked “What? Illicit Affairs was about drugs?”
I paused. What else would Illicit Affairs be about? Aliens? The choice of words seemed clear as day to me: illicit affairs, i.e. illicit drugs; “Look at this godforsaken mess that you made me / You showed me colors you know I can’t see with anyone else“. My friend, however, insisted it was about a celebrity hiding her toxic relationship from the press. Through this exchange, I gained a deeper understanding of the song: Swift draws a comparison between falling in love with someone harmful and falling into drug abuse, using an allegory that refers directly to both experiences’ highs, lows, and secrets.
Background
The album Folklore is a ‘pandemic project’ by Swift. Unlike her other work at the time, Swift remarked that Folklore‘s songs mostly tell fictional stories “from the perspective of people [she’s] never met” rather than her own experiences; she said she let her imagination “run wild” to conceive them. So, when my friend explained to me that Illicit Affairs, with lyrics like “Make sure nobody sees you leave / Hood over your head, keep your eyes down”, is referring to the secrecy surrounding a celebrity’s relationship, I had second thoughts. If all the song entailed was Swift’s experiences with paparazzi and toxic partners, it would not have made its way to Folklore, an album bursting with imagination and characters.
Lyrical imagery
What does the above imagery relay to you? Reddened eyes; a quiet road; secret meetings in dark, empty places. This imagery that Swift uses in the lyrics is an allegory for both a secret relationship and a story of drug abuse, each gone bad.
“You’ll be flushed when you return”, “Take the road less traveled by“, “What started in beautiful rooms ends with meetings in parking lots“: these lines, respectively, speak of the “flushed” effect on someone after being intimate with their partner, but also the bloodshot eyes and reddened face of someone high on drugs. They speak of the “less traveled” paths preferred by someone hiding their relationship, but also the dark alleyways that serve as hotspots for the exchange of illicit drugs. Starting “in beautiful rooms” and ending “in parking lots” could mean a pleasant meeting and teary breakup — just as well as it could mean a first shot in a decorated party hall before a frenzied exchange with a dealer in their car. The repeated chorus drives home the theme of drug abuse: “And that’s the thing about illicit affairs / And clandestine meetings and longing stares”. Here, Swift’s lexicon is heavy on terms often used to refer to illicit drugs and serious legal offenses. To be clandestine, according to the Oxford dictionary, is to be “done secretively, especially because illicit”.
Takeaway
Literature is one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity
P.T. Barnum
Comparing love to drugs is a ubiquitous concept in the music scene, but Swift’s Illicit Affairs proves that art is not just about coming up with totally new concepts; it’s about carefully using literary tools like imagery, narrative and allegory to paint a fresh picture with colors as old as time. It is why stories of triumph, love, heroes, and villains continue to inspire us today even though they have been our main storytelling elements for centuries. This is why avoiding cliches can rob writers of incorporating some of humans’ most common experiences into their stories, a devastating consequence for “one of the most interesting and significant expressions of humanity”.
