When Taylor Swift announced her new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” earlier this year at the Grammys, I was both curious and indifferent. Even as a longtime fan, I didn’t like his previous effort, “Midnights,” because I found it to be extremely uninspired for the most part – even though it won album of the year.
Still, Swift’s mastery of the zeitgeist makes her unmissable, and as a fan of most of her work, I’m compelled to engage with her offerings regardless. The quality and success of his previous works made me hope in vain that “Midnights” was just a fluke. Everybody makes mistakes. Everyone has those days.
But that hope was extinguished as soon as I saw the album credits.
Much to my dismay, Swift keeps her usual creative ensemble on “The Tortured Poets Department”: Jack Antonoff, every indie-pop girl’s go-to producer, and The National’s Aaron Dessner, who previously worked with her on her ” Folklore.” and “Evermore” and “Midnights (3 am Edition)”. She also brought in Post Malone and her longtime friend Florence Welch as new collaborators.
Swift is known for writing songs based on her own life experiences. This artistic choice made her synonymous with a certain brand of relatability and brought her both scrutiny and praise. His fans in particular, “Swifties” to the uninitiated, use this to justify the fact that they acclaim and sometimes unjustifiably discredit artists who choose a more collaborative approach to creation. “The Tortured Poets Department” further complicates my feelings about the pop star and proves that Swift could greatly benefit from a more communal and creative approach.
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The writing of the song “Tortured Poets” has lost its directness
If one were to suck up the pulsing synths of “1989” and the narrative storytelling of “Red” or “Folklore,” you’d end up with “The Tortured Poets Department.” Everything here feels like a shell of something better, and we know she’s capable of so much more.
His usually dynamic lyricism comes across as unusually juvenile, superficial and pedestrian. “You smoked then ate seven chocolate bars / We said Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist / I scratch your head, you fall asleep / Like a tattooed golden retriever / But you wake up in fear,” sings she says on the title track.
“I’m so depressed, I act like it’s my birthday every day,” she sings on “I Can Do it With a Broken Heart.” “I cry a lot, but I’m so productive, it’s an art.”
She sometimes throws out swear words jarringly to demonstrate her access to a thesaurus (e.g., “moralistically interpret soliloquies I’ll never see”), but they often end up clunky, contrived, and even cringe-inducing. She seems to have abandoned her straightforward storytelling for something more dramatic, like a student using grammar to embellish an already silly essay.
The endings remain the same. What made Swift so special were her direct lyrics, compelling storytelling, and clever abstractions. Now it seems like she’s trying to insert the flowery metaphors of “Folklore” and “Evermore” into pop sensibilities. It just doesn’t work.
Melodically, most of the songs sound like diluted, unimaginative versions of songs she’s previously released. It’s obvious that her mission wasn’t to reinvent the wheel, she doesn’t have to, but her usual ability to connect lyrics and melody seems to have all but disappeared. Perhaps Swift, at the height of her cultural omnipresence, became complacent. Perhaps her billionaire status has eaten away the hunger that once motivated her.
Taylor Swift has already won. Swifties don’t need to ban critics.
But it’s not all bad. Moments of her past genius find a way to break through every now and then, particularly on “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology,” the second installment of what appears to be a double album, which she released Friday at 2 in the morning. .
“The Black Dog” fades into a roar of sorrow as she complains about why memories of her don’t mar a lover’s mind as he visits the places they shared. In “The Albatross,” she makes clever allusions to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), depicting herself as both the saboteur and savior of her past relationships.
As a singer-songwriter, Swift is often seen as a “singular” artist with her personality at the center. Much of his discography resembles diary entries. The fact that she is so singular, often considered the sole author of many of her songs, and that her life is so vast allows fans to decode her songs as scriptures and attach them to moments in her life and of his relationships.
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The beauty of her older music is that listeners can take her stories of going out late to tap on a lover’s window, her journey out of the woods, or the regret that takes her back to a fateful December night and apply them to events specific to them. lives. This is why I admire “Folklore” and “Evermore” so deeply. The way she blurred the lines between fact and fiction, making it difficult to determine whether she was recounting her own life or one she had concocted, offered universality in its specificity. Today, it seems that her fame has eclipsed her.
“The Tortured Poets Department” will undoubtedly be the best-selling album of 2024 and will be nominated for, and perhaps win, the big prizes at next year’s Grammys. The record was universally praised by publications like Rolling Stone. His previous album broke almost every record imaginable and won every award. She embarked on one of the most lucrative tours of all time.
By most standards, she is the biggest pop star in the world, perhaps of all time. Taylor Swift won.
But much of the discourse around Swift exists in extremes. Anything less than unabashed praise is avoided. And some of its most ruthless dissidents are clearly doing so in bad faith. Engaging in any art without nuance is a fruitless endeavor.
She keeps her ink and pen tight to her chest, but this individualistic, self-centered way of creating has led to an uninteresting product, unless you’re obsessed with the innards of her personal life. I doubt she’ll ever run out of stories to tell. Life always gives us new inspiration. The question is whether she will find interesting ways to tell them.
However, I still love Taylor Swift. I went to see the Eras Tour in New York with my best friend. I have countless memories of a younger me singing “Mine” and “Our Song” out the windows of a car on I-95. I remember the first time I heard “Cruel Summer” in my friend’s bright red Honda Fit and I knew I would be obsessed with this song forever.
I spent so much time in quarantine broken and painstakingly introspective because of the beautiful prose of “Folklore” and “Evermore.” My heart broke with hers on “All Too Well,” first in 2012, then again in 2022. Swift recorded the lives of so many, chronicling the beauty of falling in love and the pain that comes with it. then. My only wish now is that she sees beyond herself and surrenders her powerful pen to someone new – someone who can reignite the fire within her.
Kofi Mframa is a music and culture writer and opinion intern at the Louisville Courier Journal.
