So High School
Mash-ups & Live Pairings
- Mary's Song (Oh My My My) / So High School / Everything Has Changed (Eras Tour, Amsterdam)
“Get my car door, isn't that sweet? (That sweet)”
Opening her car door as the small courtship gesture she notices; the chivalry is teenage in scale, offered and received as part of the game.
“I'll drink what you think and I'm high from smoking your jokes all damn night”
Infatuation is run entirely through the language of getting wasted, drinking in his thoughts and getting high off his jokes, the giddy crush rendered as a night of harmless intoxication.
“Pull me to the backseat”
Full analytical context awaits the So High School episode extraction.
“I'll drink what you think and I'm high from smoking your jokes all damn night”
The smoking metaphorised, the speaker getting high from the addressee's jokes rather than from a substance, the verb's normal object swapped out for words. The line works the song's intoxicated-by-each-other register: the smoking is figurative, the partner's wit standing in for cannabis. The motif here is collapsed into the simile, and the line's force comes from the listener's awareness that the actual smoking is also happening in the background of the relationship the song is documenting.
“The brink of a wrinkle in time, bittersweet sixteen suddenly”
The same title is used for its original sense here, a fold that collapses the distance between two ages: standing at the brink of it, the speaker is suddenly sixteen again. Where Hits Different shrinks the wrinkle to a line on a face, this one lets it work as L'Engle intended and travels through it.
“You know how to ball, I know Aristotle”
Set against the football imagery running through the song, the name of Aristotle plays the speaker's bookish, studious side off her partner's athletic one, two kinds of knowing set side by side.
the hand on the throttle, flight and full speed
“Brand new, full throttle”
“Hand on the throttle” — The Prophecy
Community readers hear the throttle recur across the catalogue as Taylor's image for a relationship taken at full speed: "Hand on the throttle" here, "Brand new, full throttle" in So High School. The same control surface that means surging forward, gripped tight, reads as exhilaration in the later song and as the white-knuckle effort to steer her own fate in this one.
American author (1918-2007), best known for A Wrinkle in Time, the 1962 children's novel in which a tesseract folds spacetime so travellers can cross it without covering the distance.