Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department has not landed well. This is maybe the first time in Swift’s history where it feels like a new album is being scoffed at, that the reaction almost across the board is a massive eye roll? Even from her fans, there’s a sense of “wait, maybe Taylor didn’t need to share this much.” What I keep coming back to is how unnecessary this was too – Midnights was well-received, even if some critics quietly noted that Taylor should get out of her Jack Antonoff-produced comfort zone. Still, it won the Album of the Year Grammy (another eyeroll) and there were several good songs on it, even I’ll admit that. It feels like she didn’t take the time in between Midnights and TTPD to really figure out what she wanted to say about Joe Alwyn and Matt Healy. It was supposed to come out as raw, hyper-emotional poetry but instead it’s come across as Taylor trauma-dumping on her fans about a really sh-tty guy (and her fans already knew the guy was a total sh-thead).
The American edition of Rolling Stone gave TTPD a rave review, and while they might mean it, as I read RS’s piece, I was struck by how dumbed-down the review was, as if the critic was trying to give 13-year-olds a history lesson on “who is Patti Smith?” RS Germany had an even more disconcerting take on TTPD – critic Ralf Niemczyk claimed that TTPD shows that Taylor is “the better Adele.” Y’all. Leave Adele out of it – she’s literally in a totally different league. Meanwhile, Paste Magazine’s review was so scathing, it’s served as some kind of seminal moment in the critical examination of Taylor Swift’s cultural impact. Whoever wrote this didn’t get a byline, apparently because that person doesn’t want to get doxxed by Swifties, because that’s where we are in this world. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:
Taylor’s TTPD announcement at the Grammys: Sylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this! When Taylor Swift took the Grammy’s stage last month to claim her award for Best Pop Vocal Album for Midnights, she saw that spotlight as an opportunity to announce her 11th studio album: The Tortured Poets Department. The follow-up cut to audience members—Swift’s music industry peers, mind you—told us all that we would ever need to know, and the collective disinterest across the crowd echoed through our TVs.
On the use of “tortured”: In terms of popularity—certainly not always in terms of quality—no musician has been bigger this century than Swift, which makes it impossible to really buy into the “torture” of it all. This is not to say that Swift being the most famous person in the world makes her immune to having multi-dimensional feelings of heartbreak, mental illness or what-have-you. But, she has made the choice—as a 34-year-old adult—to take those complex, universal familiars and monetize them into a wardrobe she can wear for whatever portion of her Eras Tour setlist she opts to dedicate to the material. Torture is fashion to Taylor Swift, and she wears her milieu dully.
This is brutal: This album will surely get comparisons to Rupi Kaur’s poetry, either for its simplicity, empty language, commodification or all of the above. And, sure, there are parallels there, especially in how The Tortured Poets Department, too, is going to set the art of poetry back another decade—as Swift’s naive call-to-arms of her own milky-white sorrow rings in like some quintessential “I am going to take pictures of a typewriter on my desk and have a Pinterest mood-board of Courier New font” iPhone fodder. 2013 called and it wants it capricious, suburban girl-who-is-taking-a-gap-year wig back! Soaking our book reports in coffee or having our moms burn the edges with a kitchen lighter cannot come back into fashion; the cyclical notions of culture cannot make the space for such retreads.
Open the schools: The Tortured Poets Department does begin with a shred of hope that, just maybe, Swift knows what she’s talking about—as she sneaks in a cheeky “all of this to say,” textbook transitional phrasing for poets, on opening track “Fortnight.” But “Fortnight” unmasks itself quickly as a heady vat of pop nothingness, though it isn’t all Swift’s fault. “I was a functioning alcoholic, ‘til nobody noticed my new aesthetic,” she muses, attempting to bridge the gap between a behind-the-scenes life and on-stage performance—only for it to occur while propped up against the most dog-water, uninspired synth arrangement you could possibly imagine. Between producer Jack Antonoff’s atrocious backing instrumental and the Y2K-era, teen dramedy echo chamber of a vocal harmony provided by out-of-place guest performer Post Malone, “Fortnight” chokes on the vomit of its own opaqueness. “I took the miracle move-on drug, the effects were temporary,” Swift muses, and it sounds like satire. This is your songwriter of the century? Open the schools.
When Swift is at her best: Swift is at her best either when she is clawing upwards (Reputation) or faced with nowhere to go but into the studio and noodle with the bare-bones of her own sensibilities (folklore). You get something like The Tortured Poets Department when the artist making it no longer feels challenged, where she strikes out looking.
TTPD is mid: The mid-ness of The Tortured Poets Department will not be a net-loss for Swift. She will sell out arenas and get her streams until she elects to quit this business (a phrase decidedly not in her vocabulary, surely). She will sell more merch bundles than vinyl plants have the capacity to make, and rows of variant LP copies will haunt the record aisles of Target stores just as long as Midnights has—if not longer. Perhaps, in five or six years’ time, we will speak of this record just as we now do of Reputation. But right now, it is obvious that Swift no longer feels challenged to be good. The Tortured Poets Department is the mark of an artist now interested in seeing how much their empire can atone for the sins of mediocrity. Can Swift win another Album of the Year Grammy simply because she released a record during the eligibility period? The Tortured Poets Department reeks of “because I can,” not “because I should.”
Moral nothingness: On The Tortured Poets Department, there is a striking level of moral nothingness. The stakes are practically non-existent, and the album sounds like it was made by someone who believes that they had no other choice but to finish it, as if Swift fundamentally believes that her creative measures are firmly embedded in the massive monopoly her name and brand currently hold on popular music.
This is starting to remind me of another piece of Swift’s oeuvre, one which she would probably like to forget: Cats. Remember how Taylor was a cat in Cats, and remember how much fun critics had reviewing that bomb? Sometimes, when an artist makes a terrible piece of art, it brings out the best in reviewers and critics as they try to explain why the art is so God-awful. The thing is, even Swift-skeptics will probably find a few songs in TTPD that they like, but the overall feeling is one of apathy, partly driven by oversaturation. Taylor is going to do what she wants and right now, she wants to do too much. That’s her right. Just as it’s our right to say “meh.”
Photos courtesy of Backgrid. Covers courtesy of Swift.