Black
Black is Taylor's colour for darkness in the usual senses, death, sadness and depression, but she also puts it to subtler work. At its most archetypal it signals despair, the bar named The Black Dog after the old nickname for depression, the "onyx night" of past suffering in Opalite, the sky turning black before the storm in Clean. It can mark a self, like the "black lipstick" in cardigan, which reads in part as a gothic, dramatic teenage persona, though that line invites more than one reading. And it works as part of a colour scheme, the "black and white" old-movie fantasy of loml, or the black ties and white lies of Getaway Car that set up a moral palette running to grey. Whether it's mood, identity or design, black marks the dark end of whatever scale the song is using.
Black carries its oldest associations, mourning, depression and death, so when Taylor reaches for it she's usually marking the low point of a feeling or a story. Used against another colour it becomes one end of a scale, light against dark, truth against lie, with the grey in between doing the moral work. As a personal style it codes a darker, more dramatic version of the self, often a younger one. The colour rarely sits neutral, it's where the song goes when it goes dark.
Appears in 15 songs
“Into some bar called The Black Dog”
The colour black carries its archetypal symbolic meaning of death, sadness, and depression throughout the song. Uncle Jerry identifies black as immediately signalling the emotional register: 'the word black has archetypal symbolic meaning, generally associated with being unalive or sad or depressed.'
“The rest of the world was black and white but we were in screaming color”
Black and white is everything ordinary and drained of feeling, set hard against the screaming colour of being with him. The monochrome stands for the flat life outside the relationship, sharpening how vivid the love felt by comparison.
“Sleepless in the onyx night”
Black as the colour of the speaker's past suffering, mourning, sadness, and death, set against the light and colour of opalite
“The ties were black, the lies were white In shades of gray in candlelight”
Black as part of the formal affair's colour scheme, the black ties of the Met Gala setting, paired with white lies and grey to create a deliberate moral colour palette where black marks the formal, potentially deceptive surface of the event.
“In your mind, you never beat my spirit black and blue”
Black and blue names the colours of a bruise, a phrase that stands in for old harm with no literal wound. The darkening is what the bully left behind, felt in the spirit rather than the skin.
“You cinephile in black and white”
Black and white represents the old-movie fantasy register, the partner is cast as a character in an idealised, fictionalized black-and-white film that is just 'a fantasy of light' rather than reality.
“Black and white, saw a '30s bride”
Black and white steeps the whole scene in the tones of an old photograph, the couple imagined as a thirties bride and groom. Draining the colour signals a love pictured as belonging to a more permanent, bygone era.
“Sequin smile, black lipstick”
Black lipstick as a marker of the adolescent, dramatic, gothic self, set in contrast to the implied adult red, with black representing the youthful persona's darker, more dramatic self-presentation.
“I once believed love would be black and white, but it's golden”
Believing love would be black and white means expecting it to be simple, a matter of plain right and wrong. The song raises that flat certainty only to replace it, love turning out golden rather than starkly divided.
“Phone lights up my nightstand in the black”
Here the black is only the plain dark of a bedroom after hours, broken by a phone screen. The colour sets the late, private hour, with the small glow standing out against it.
“Come here, dressed in black now”
Dressed in black, the lover shows up as something sleek and faintly dangerous, the dark clothing turning them into a figure of night-time allure.
“And the sky turned black like a perfect storm”
The sky turning black signals the onset of the emotional storm, the darkest point before the cleansing rain arrives.
“Now it's big black cars and Riviera views”
Big black cars belong to the glossy surface of fame, their dark paint signalling money and arrival. The colour makes success look sleek and enviable, just before the song exposes what it costs.
“After everything and that little black dress”
The little black dress comes back as the thing she wore on a night that mattered, the dark fabric holding on to how she looked when the relationship was still whole.
“When you think happiness, I hope you think that little black dress”
The black dress is the outfit she asks him to picture whenever he thinks back on her, one dark garment standing in for a whole summer together. Its colour pins a single image of her into his memory.