Bodies
Bodies and corpses show up when Taylor treats a hidden scandal or a dead relationship as a literal dead body. In CANCELLED! "everyone's got bodies in the attic", the showbusiness version of skeletons in the closet, everyone in the industry hiding something decaying out of sight. In How Did It End? the finished relationship becomes a corpse on the table, the speaker and the gossiping public both conducting a "post-mortem" to work out the cause of death. A close cousin of the Skeletons motif, but where skeletons are old secrets that rattle around for years, a body is fresher, something recently killed and now being hidden or examined.
Turning a secret or a break-up into an actual body makes it physical and grisly, a thing with a cause of death rather than just a feeling. It also implies a crime, because a body has to be hidden, explained, or examined, which casts the speaker and everyone around her as either suspects or investigators.
Appears in 2 songs
“We hereby conduct this post-mortem”
The body/post-mortem imagery frames the entire relationship as a corpse requiring forensic examination, the speaker and the public both trying to determine cause of death.
“Everyone's got bodies in the attic”
The domestic gothic of the entertainment industry, bodies in the attic as the Hollywood/celebrity version of closet skeletons, housed in a space associated with the hidden and decaying. Industry complicity figured as literal corpses; the collective plural implicates the whole system.