Taylor Swift has spent the previous two years on prime of the world.
Her worldwide Eras tour is the highest-grossing music tour of all time. It’s made her a billionaire. Her 2022 album, Midnights, gained Album of the 12 months on the Grammys, making Swift the solo artist with essentially the most wins of all time in that class. Her high-profile romance with soccer star Travis Kelce has delighted her followers whereas retaining her within the highlight. She’s defeated all her haters; her followers are legion; virtually everybody admits, now, that she’s excellent on the job of being a pop star. Proper now, Taylor Swift exists at a pinnacle of fame and success that few can ever even dream of reaching.
But Swift’s newest album, The Tortured Poets Division, leaves listeners with the distinct impression that Swift isn’t fully content material along with her present excessive standing. The album suggests nothing a lot as Swift chafing furiously towards the bounds of the picture that’s taken her to this point — and even, maybe, her beloved fanbase.
Decoding the storyline of The Tortured Poets Division
The Tortured Poets Division sees its central character reeling from two breakups: one with a long-term lover whose despair has begun to pull the narrator down (“So Lengthy, London”), and one a quick fling with a tortured dangerous boy who nobody appears to approve of (“Fortnight”). Because the album goes on, the narrator veers between teenage infatuation along with her new dangerous boy (“Down Unhealthy”), resentment with everybody who tells her they shouldn’t be collectively (“However Daddy I Love Him”), the gradual, grudging realization that maybe there are some issues with the connection (“I Can Repair Him (No Actually I Can)”), and fury when he ultimately leaves her (“The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”).
The narrator’s despair over her love for the misplaced depressed boyfriend threads its method by the entire album (“loml,” “The Black Canine”). Generally, imagery related to him results in a tune concerning the dangerous boy (“Contemporary out the Slammer,” which ends on an ambivalent line about “imaginary rings”), like an intrusive thought. At instances, her heartbreak over each breakups is so intertwined it turns into unattainable to inform who, precisely, she’s singing about (“I Can Do It With a Damaged Coronary heart”).
Albums aren’t autobiographies, however Swift tends to play with the blurry line between tune and truth, and that tendency is on full show right here. Famously, she writes songs about her actual life and encourages her followers to make connections between her lyrics and her biography. Right here, the depressed ex-boyfriend traces up with actor Joe Alwyn, who Swift dated for six years, and the tortured dangerous boy appears to reflect 1975 frontman Matt Healy, who Swift dated for a controversial few weeks shortly after her breakup with Alwyn.
It’s the controversy that will get specific airtime in The Tortured Poets Division.
The very temporary however very controversial story of Taylor Swift and Matt Healy
When it comes to public picture, edgelord Healy was at all times an odd match for good woman Swift. He’s the sort of provocateur who feedback on the far proper by doing ironic Nazi salutes onstage, whereas Swift apparently has to combat her crew to make any political assertion in any respect, provocative or in any other case. In February 2023, earlier than information of their relationship broke, Healy appeared on a podcast the place he laughed by a collection of racist jokes from the host and cracked considered one of his personal about watching violent, racist, and misogynistic porn.
Swift’s followers had been outraged. They launched a hashtag, #SpeakUpNow, below which they begged her to interrupt up with Healy and to not tarnish her title and her model by associating with somebody who would make such racist jokes. How, they demanded, may she present such poor judgment? How may she use her platform to raise somebody who has stated and completed such hurtful issues? Was she merely lashing out after her breakup with Alwyn? What was she pondering?
In The Tortured Poets Division, Swift means that she didn’t significantly take care of the outrage or the priority about her courting selections. “I’ll let you know one thing about my good title,” she sings in “However Daddy I Love Him:”
It’s mine alone to shame
I don’t cater to all these vipers wearing empath’s clothes
God save essentially the most judgmental creeps who say they need what’s greatest for me
Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll by no means see
Considering it could actually change the beat of my coronary heart when he touches me
And counteract the chemistry and undo the future
There’s a sure layer of irony to the lyrics right here. That is the part of the album through which the narrator is feeling significantly defensive about her relationship along with her tortured poet, and the tongue-in-cheek tune title and over-the-top hysterics of the refrain counsel that she shouldn’t be taken fully significantly. In later songs, the narrator will conclude that her tortured poet was dangerous information in spite of everything — that he’s “the smallest man who ever lived” and that her want for him stemmed from self-destructive urges.
Nonetheless, at no level does the narrator counsel that every one the individuals who warned her about her boyfriend had been right, or that she’s glad they spoke up, or that she feels she ought to have listened to them, or that she shouldn’t have taken the model hit for courting him. By the tip of the album, she nonetheless appears pretty irritated with the individuals who thought they received a say in her love life, even when they suppose they need what’s greatest for her.
What occurs if Taylor Swift decides she’s bored with being her followers’ greatest pal?
Swift constructed a not-insignificant quantity of her fame on bringing her followers into the story of her romantic selections. Her most potent creative weapon is her potential to write down lyrics about her personal life that learn as completely weak and completely sincere. Then she seeds Easter eggs into the liner notes, inviting her followers to match the heartbreak of every tune with a real-life ex. She invitations her followers over to her home for home made cookies and secret album-listening classes. She sends them Christmas packages. Swift’s star picture is constructed across the trope of the very best pal, the woman who lives subsequent door to you and tells you every thing about her life.
In The Tortured Poets Division, it’s beginning to sound as if Swift isn’t fully glad with residing out that picture anymore. She resents that her followers begged her to dump her boyfriend. She resents that courting a nasty boy put unsustainable stress on her good woman picture. She appears to resent, to a sure diploma, that she feels compelled to maintain current on the pinnacle of pop perfection she has lastly achieved.
“I’m depressing, and nobody even is aware of!” she crows in a spoken interlude on the finish of “I Can Do It With a Damaged Coronary heart,” the tune the place she brags about with the ability to smile her method efficiently by the Eras tour whereas coping with her breakups. Because the tune fades out, she provides, “Try to come for my job,” with an exhausted sigh. Swift appears pleased with reaching the highest of the world, however all the identical, she doesn’t precisely appear to be having fun with her time there.
All through Poets, she ruminates obsessively on the previous. The shock second half of the album options songs about that previous Kim and Kanye feud (“Cassandra”) and even Swift’s center faculty bully (“thanK you aIMee”) (except that’s simply Kim Kardashian once more — see these capital letters?). In “The Manuscript,” she goes again over a tortured affair she had in her 20s with an older man (referring plausibly to both Jake Gyllenhaal or John Mayer or each) and realizes, with a candy marvel, that turning the story into artwork can redeem it. “Trying backwards is likely to be the one strategy to transfer ahead,” she sings. Certain, but when Swift retains trying backward at her previous betrayals, when does the transferring ahead half begin?
There are different indicators that Swift would possibly really feel caught. Sonically, Poets doesn’t transfer considerably ahead from the dreamy synth pop of Lover and Midnights, with Swift’s main collaborator Jack Antonoff going again as soon as once more to the sound he developed for Lana Del Ray’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! in 2019. Swift used to make a degree of growing a brand new sound with totally different albums, however Poets is treading the identical musical floor she’s been exploring for some time.
Swift’s garments, too, have been static recently, though she used to modify up her seems to be dramatically as she moved between album eras. The Minimize’s vogue critic Cathy Horyn just lately described Swift’s fashion as “self-conscious” and instructed that the various vocal critics of Swift’s vogue selections are “most likely bored” along with her college-girl-next-door outfits, that are starting to return off as somewhat disingenuous on 34-year-old Swift. “It’s value remembering that Taylor Swift has at all times been older and wiser than her years,” Horyn famous. “The woman can’t be discovering herself eternally.”
Swift has found herself and rediscovered herself in tones of girlish marvel in albums for over 20 years now. She’s taken that girl-next-door picture so far as she will be able to take it, farther than virtually anybody ever has earlier than, to the very tip prime of the place mainstream pop can carry her. She capped that portion of her profession off with the Eras tour, and now, it appears as if she’s seeking one thing new.
When Swift gained that record-setting Grammy for Album of the 12 months in February, she stated one thing uncommon in her speech. Traditionally, Swift has made no secret of how a lot award recognition means to her and the way a lot she craves it. This time, nevertheless, she instructed she was prepared to maneuver previous that want.
“I might like to let you know that that is the very best second of my life,” Swift stated, “however I really feel this glad once I end a tune or once I crack the code to a bridge that I like or once I’m shotlisting a music video or once I’m rehearsing with my dancers or my band or on the brink of go to Tokyo to play a present. For me, the award is the work.”
A method to consider The Tortured Poets Division is as an announcement that Swift is now not so within the people-pleasing, high-achieving, best-friend picture she has spent her complete profession to date perfecting. Wherein case, the massive query turns into: What subsequent?
