In Taylor Swift’s song “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” Taylor talks about the similarities between her and Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. I’ve done some research on why she wrote this song and she wrote this song about eight years after Kanye West rudely jumped on stage after she won her first VMA and Kanye believed that Beyonce deserved it so he jumped on stage and interrupted her acceptance speech. This song was written by Taylor about her life by saying “It was so nice throwin’ big parties, Jump into the pool from the balcony, Everyone swimmin’ in a champagne sea” this is her describing her life before this debacle with Kanye she is saying that her life was all parties and fun as an up and coming artist. That line also sounds very similar to the big parties Gatbsy threw to get Daisy’s attention and also about the balcony that Gatsby had, and also there was definitely champagne at these parties too. Taylor describes herself as “Feelin’ so Gatsby for that whole year” and then she says “So why’d you have to rain on my parade?” we assume she is talking about Kanye in this line, but in a Gatsby sense you could say the one that rained on Gatsby’s parade was Tom. She sings “This is why we can’t have nice things darlin’, Because you break them, I had to take them away” if you look at that quote in a certain way it can easily describe many of the relationships in the Great Gatsby, like Daisy and Gatsby, Daisy and Tom, Myrtle and Tom, they all ended up kind of broken in the end and they all had such nice things to begin with but ruined it because of mainly selfishness and greed. In this song and many others, Taylor may intentionally or unintentionally write about the Great Gatsby but it shows us how celebrities’ lives can be very similar to the extravagant life that Gatsby had.
