I gave away Taylor Swift’s new album, The Department of Tortured Poets (that I need to stop calling The Society of Dead Poets), a quick listen Friday morning, a few hours after its release. Maybe it was because I listened to half of the self-indulgent songs while walking my dog in a moody forest before I had any human contact that day, but for an hour and five minutes (I didn’t survived this long period). Anthology However, which adds 15 more songs), I was delighted. Tortured poets poignantly captures the collective third-of-life crisis we millennials experience together. What Swift doesn’t recognize, however, is what we all really need: not more romance, but religion. Taylor Swift needs Jesus.
I was prepared to not like the album. Its pretentious title made me roll my eyes
I was prepared to not like the album. Its pretentious title made me roll my eyes, the music receives mixed reviews. But song after song, I muttered to the trees: on the contrary, my brother! The music is typical Swift, in that the lyrics are very personal, but evoke universal themes, there is complexity and passion, some feigned introspection and that characteristic Swift touch of melodramatic and savory language ( “the saboteurs protested too much” – yes!
Yet, as someone who grew up with Swift’s music as the soundtrack to my life (cliché, but it’s true; she and I are practically the same age), I find this album deeper, darker, more desperate , more serious and more meaningful. . Even her voice sounds rougher (although that might be because she smoked a few of her ex Matty Healy’s cigarettes?) and more touching. This shows a side of Swift that is representative of our shared generation – a rudderless side. It’s not that Swift, or the rest of us millennials, aren’t trying, we just don’t know where to go or how to get there.
There’s a lot of vulture in this album, but that’s what we’re looking for in artists, right? Express your pain in a way that lets us know we are not alone. And Swift is far from alone. She captured the mood of a generation, and the sad thing is that the mood of that generation is generally one of misery. The woman behind the Tortured poets The lyrics do indeed sound tormented and sound very much like the generation that has a higher rate of anxiety and depression than any other, a generation that is extremely lonely and shuns the traditions of marriage, family and church.
She’s bored (“My boredom is deep”), discouraged (“All my mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless month of February”), disenchanted by wasted love (“I’m pissed that you let me give you all this youth for free”), depressed (she sings about crying “a lot” and laments: “I’m so depressed, I act like it’s my birthday every day”) and tries to cope by forcing her to work with a bad boy (“No, I’m not coming to my senses / I know he’s crazy, but he’s the one I want”) and through alcohol (‘I was supposed to be fired / but they forgot to pick me up / I was a functioning alcoholic) and “the miracle drug”, the effects of which she admits were only temporary.
Like so many other millennials, she is also lost between “adulthood” and perpetual childhood (“My friends all smell like weed or little babies”). Swift is also, by the way, the poster girl for women of childbearing age, in their late 20s and 30s., among which “excessive alcohol consumption and alcohol-related deaths are increasing at an alarming rate.”
However, from the sound of this album, Taylor Swift wants all the traditional things that made our parents’ and grandparents’ generations more content than us millennials. Yet such a life seems elusive. She sings about rings and cradles (in “loml”) and the difficulty of finding a stable man, free of some kind of personality disorder (“I can fix him, no, really, I can”) and who is not afraid of commitment (“He saw forever, so he destroyed it”). This is what also makes me believe that she will settle for Travis Kelce, who seems too simple to have many. any of them personality type, let alone a messed up personality.
Swift is criticized for her “vicious” new album and for her “bloody” songwriting. But what are people waiting for? She is the product of a generation that was raised largely without religion, with weak morals, and with parents who did not set a good example of love for life (Swift’s own parents are divorced) .
There are a few duds on the album, with the title track ironically being – with the exception of the Dylan Thomas reference – the worst of them. “You smoked then ate seven chocolate bars / We said Charli Puth should be a bigger artist / I scratch your head, you fall asleep / Like a tattooed golden retriever” reminds me of the torturous habit some people have take to tell you the dream they had. . Swift also another Kim Kardashian disses the album (“thank you aIMee” – decode those capitals). This “feud” has been going on for 15 years now, my daughter. Let go.
Fast East a tortured poet, and Tortured poets gives the impression that she is also losing hope and becoming bitter (“I was tame, I was gentle until the circus life made me mean”). But Swifties need their romantic, hopeless songbird to believe in love, even if she still sings masterfully about the pain of heartbreak.
Taylor Swift needs something bigger than her boyfriends (Matty Healy, seriously? Killer sideburns aside, the guy looks like he’s seeing the sun for the first time) and her vendettas. She doesn’t need to become a Christian artist, but a broader perspective on the world and the meaning of life would be helpful. And full of hope.
This article first appeared on The world of spectators website.
