As a compendium of 21st century pop, Swift remains relentlessly prolific and unwilling to edit for length, this extended version of her new album, The Tortured Poets Division: The Anthology, seems miserable and bottomless. It feels like. The big surprise is that a good deal of that misery is intentional. In contrast to the good times she had in the public eye, her concert tours were the highest grossing in the history of the species. It was the highest-grossing concert film ever. Kissing on the field with her boyfriend after winning the Super Bowl—Swift’s new ballad clings to memories of the wronged and stuck, awkward, convoluted, samey, purple, hacky It’s lyrical, sour theater. Song titles burn hot like flares of pain (“I Hate it Here”), lines feel waxy with Freudian gaffes (“I know I’m just repeating myself”), and slow with soft edges. There are a lot of songs. The moving melody, produced by Swift, Jack Antonoff, Aaron Dessner, and Patrick Berger, doesn’t do her lyrics much of a favor. As she unloads every last item from her complaint archive, it will be hard for any listener of her sensibilities not to want to reciprocate.
That being said, did this album finally give society permission to say that Swift is not a great lyricist? Her greatness is not a part-time job, though she may be at times, and the flimsyness of her words can make big emotions feel empty. Plus, the objects of affection that appear in these mid-tempo flashbacks all sound really creepy. “At dinner you take the ring off my middle finger and put it on where people wear their wedding rings,” sings the most famous songwriter of his generation on the album’s title track. . Her heart explodes. ” Hey, you. On “The Manuscript,” she sings in the third person, portraying a woman on fire who once said, “If sex was half the conversation, she’d be pushing a stroller in a heartbeat.” In “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” she stares at a fictional juvenile delinquent and describes how “his pistol-hard hand gently traced the heart of my face.” ChatGPT will get you when you ask her to hook up with Lana Del Rey. In an attempt to further showcase her maturity, Swift deploys awkward, unrelenting profanity in far too many of her songs in an attempt to convince the wider public that she is actually 34 years old. , sounded like a child trying out illegal new vocabulary.
Her music has no problem walking on the precipice of self-examination. Hmm, if not then why did I want to live in the time of slavery? Does that all fall into the slavery part? Hey, why didn’t I get mad when that guy was playing that awkward ring game? — but Swift mostly retreats into the shallows, blunting her ideas with reflexive platitudes. A lightning bolt appears inside the bottle. Wrinkles appear over time. The ship is either abandoned or sunk. It’s best to have a plan. My heart is cold, cold. The script will be reversed. Poison is collected. To spice things up, she tweaks certain words in figures of speech she’s memorized, or turns into more melodramatic phrases until the finished lines begin to resemble the cathartic poetry of her teenage years. I like to graft them. She said, “They say what doesn’t kill you makes you. know,” she sings on “Cassandra,” a piano ballad that nudges vaguely in the direction of Tori Amos. (Please stay as you are.) screaming” she sings, meandering methodically during “The Black Dog.” In “Loml” she feels “safer.” starry eyes”, but ultimately laments “The Field of Our Dreams” Surrounded by fire.In “How Did It End,” she turns her old playground marriage upside down and sings, “Sitting in a tree, Dead.”
sufficient. These are extremely embarrassing combinations of words created to provide an even more embarrassing story. In other words, it’s a childish idea that we should feel sorry for the world’s most famous singer, living alone on a mountain of gold, feeling sad and in pain. We should all do our best to forget the manipulative underdog attitude that Swift refuses to let go of with each album. Especially when there’s a true sense of tragedy in all of these songs, and almost every Swift song ever released. — that Swift traded adulthood for superstardom.
She hasn’t been an anonymous person since she was 17, and when it comes to art, much of her vision seems to stop there. This helps explain why at least three of her songs on this double album of hers take place in the playground. And why another song is set at a high school party (the sexiest lyrics of her career sound like additional AI-generated Lana worship: “You know how to throw a ball?”) I know Aristotle…Touch me while your brother plays Grand Theft Auto”). Perhaps that’s why her songs rely so heavily on make-believe concepts of fate, prophecy, and destiny. She has never lived a normal life. She doesn’t make normal choices. In her creative and professional world, everything happens on epic heights that are difficult to understand, from which there is no coming down. Where are the songs that sing about deep sadness?
Besides, who cares what I want? you are a middle-aged manyou are saying: this music is not for you. The first part is true. But I would argue that pop music is for everyone. You’re here, I’m here, I’m writing, you’re reading, we’re living this life of listening to music together, and probably the most in our lifetimes. Widely distributed music is more imaginative and less self-obsessed. I’ve been waiting for a Swift album that makes me even a little more curious about the world she rules.
