I’ve always liked Taylor Swift in her deficits. Swift is often best at her most unexpected, at her most doubted. From the shitstorm-causing reputation, to the complete shock of folklore, she seems to thrive when writing in secret.
Last year, Swift released her 11th original studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, to a culture completely overexposed to her presence. In the middle of the highest grossing tour in music history and in the process of (re-)releasing an insane amount of music, she has had more eyes on her than are comprehensible for a human being.
Statistically, The Tortured Poets Department thrived. It was the fastest album to reach 1 billion streams on Spotify, and “Fortnight” stands as the song with the most streams ever in one day.
Socially, however, it failed. It would be redundant to summarize the album’s failures, as it seems everybody has already done it. In short, it’s stylistically boring and lyrically corny. Not only was the album dull, but it was also shrouded in controversy. Many of the songs are seemingly about Swift’s public appearances with The 1975’s Matty Healy, a man who has a difficult and confusing reputation. It’s bloated with an overreliance on sloppy, overdone, immature lyrics, seen in titles like “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” and “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” These elements bred a culture of hatred for this album, one that I at the time played into.
But a year later, I cannot stop thinking about this album. There is something frightening about it — something I can’t peel myself away from. The album is like watching someone you know drown underneath something they refuse to talk about. It’s me, as a 12-year-old girl, miserable for no specific reason, posting slightly concerning Snapchat stories in the hopes that somebody would recognize my nonsensical growing pains.
There is so much I still don’t like about this album, so much that leaves me both bewildered and bored. It is The Tortured Poet Department’s argument, however, that’s starting to pull me in.
In an explanation regarding the opening track, “Fortnight,” Swift summarized the spirit of her songwriting.
“Inherently, this album is wildly dramatic. ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life.’ These are very hyperbolic, dramatic things to say. It’s that kind of album.”
The album oozes with this hyperbole, presenting love as something genuinely ruining her life, a wildly theatrical and melodramatic take.
When this album came out, this dramatic position on love held no weight for me. It was too pretentious to pretend that love was more than just something to secretly attempt and publicly scoff at. It was too writerly in my eyes to devote shitty poems to somebody, to brim with an obsession so consuming that it has to end in ink-stained fingers. To say that loving someone could ruin a life was, to me, a wild misstep — an incredibly naive admission.
The Tortured Poets Department refuses to back down from admitting the weight of love. It refuses to cower, like me. I’m reminded of Salma Deera’s poem “salt” which begins, “In front of my mother and my sisters, I pretend love is cheap and vulgar. I act like it’s a sin — I pretend that love is for women on a dark path. But at night I dream of a love so heavy it makes my spine throb.” The Tortured Poets Department, unlike Deera, unlike me, does not pretend that love is nothing — it argues that love is everything. And as everything, it holds the power to rot you from the inside.
A thick insanity coats this album. She’s crushed by the weight of her entanglements, with lyrics like “You told Lucy you’d kill yourself if I ever leave / And I had said that to Jack about you, so I felt seen” and “No, I’m not coming to my senses / I know he’s crazy but he’s the one I want” and “I’m so depressed, I act like it’s my birthday every day / I’m so obsessed with him but he avoids me like the plague.”
Within the context of Swift’s life, this is fascinating. She’s more successful than she’s ever been, wealthy beyond most people’s understanding, more critically acclaimed than ever. Yet, she’s completely undone by a man. If failed romance shattered someone with Swift’s power, money and respect, what’s to say this insanity can’t shatter any of us?
Over an hour into The Tortured Poets Department, we reach “So High School,” the most egregious track in terms of sickeningly deluded love. Swift is well into her 30s, donning a metaphorical school uniform to sing, “Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto.” It’s beyond ridiculous. But for some reason, I’m starting to understand it.
This album leans into love as something that drives you crazy, something that strips you of your judgment and forever turns you into the desperation of your 16-year-old self. She’s finalizing the “Don’t blame me, love made me crazy” sentiment she first dropped in reputation, but showing her insanity this time, rather than dancing around it. She’s losing her mind like a teenager after their first kiss, which she even admits with “Everything comes out teenage petulance.” She’s not hiding the fact that love did actually derange her, embracing a lovesickness that genuinely ailed her.
Do I think that love should always result in lyrics like “I know he’s crazy but he’s the one I want?” Absolutely not. Do I believe that moments like “You smokеd, then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist” are secretly a masterclass in irony and brimming with genius? Not even close. But the encroaching realizations of love as more than a girlish, silly venture, as something of life-ruining, obsessive caliber give The Tortured Poets Department more merit than I might want to admit.
Summer Managing Arts Editor Campbell Johns can be reached at caajohns@umich.edu.
Ah yes, more words about Swift. Aren’t we all excited?
As someone who steadfastly defended this album when it came out a year ago, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to escape the grip of Swift’s earnestness. There’s something about her conviction — especially in the deranged ramblings of Tortured Poets — that keeps me wanting to exonerate her lengthy, wayward catalog and confessional, diaristic lyrics. While my co-author has grown to admire Swift’s reading of love as something that scrapes and spills you out, what has grown with me — on or against, I’m not too sure — is something less poetic. It’s not the relationships and emotions Swift details throughout the album, but the dialogue she extends toward her listeners. It’s not her love stories that have literally driven her insane, but performing them for an audience that has. The album is about a tragedy for sure, but I’m not so sure that I buy it’s about love anymore.
What makes Tortured Poets such a brash listen is its aggressive turn to camera. Swift points to the invisible audience in “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”: “They shake their heads saying, ‘God help her’ / When I tell ’em that he’s my man.” The audience exists as early as the opening verse of “Fortnight” — “I was a functioning alcoholic / ‘Till nobody noticed my new aesthetic.” In the scathing break-up anthem of the album, “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived,” Swift accuses her lover of espionage, asking “In 50 years, will all this be declassified?” The talk of others even appears in tracks unrelated to romance, like “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” where Swift sings, “I’m always drunk on my own tears, isn’t that what they all said?” At every turn, Swift is confronted with her own inability to escape perception. This is what sends her to the album’s aesthetic, metaphorical and sometimes explicitly lyrical asylum. What escapes a lot of these lyrics, however, is any attempt of universalization.
Swift is at her best when her songwriting fades into folklore. When her settings are vague, her characters are canonized, her emotions extrapolated for a greater cause, Swift succeeds. The album folklore constructs fictional characters and worlds as vehicles for her hallmark emotional ballads, an influence of alienation from herself that extends to even the less explicit “character” songs. It’s a gambit that works to emphasize the separation between Swift the performer and Swift the author. We are less aware that it is Swift herself writing in the year 2020, and the music is better for it. In folklore, she doesn’t rely on referencing the wider culture to write compelling narratives.
But folklore isn’t the only example of this. Swift has been folklore-izing her songs since her first album. “Mary’s Song (Oh My, My, My)” follows a couple from their first meeting to their old age. The most famous song from her early career, generically titled “Love Story,” is about a love interest she calls Romeo. Her ability to create a sense of place without having to rely on the modern cultural signposts and emphasize the universality of the topics she tackles — while still crafting touching and unique songs — is a strength of hers, not a weakness. A 2014 review of 1989 from The New York Times praises this very quality of Swift’s writing — the ability to craft pop with almost no contemporary references. But, even The Times acknowledges that this spell of hers can falter, and it does on the very same album in “Shake It Off.” When Swift sings “‘Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play / And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate,” the suggestion that these songs are a kind of universal folklore falls apart.
What has changed since then is that Swift, herself, has become such a pervasive cultural machine. In writing the explicitly personal experiences of Tortured Poets, she ends up playing into the aggressive, all-encompassing meta of lore that her fans have built around her music, and her relationships and album rollouts. As a result, Swift loses some of the timeless magic she has previously managed to capture.
This is why it’s so frustrating that Swift makes no attempt to folklore-ize the themes of maddening, never-ending performance in Tortured Poets. The turns to camera, screaming to look at Swift herself as the speaker, shatter any ability to generalize and relate to the themes of perception and scrutiny and the resulting insanity of trying to keep up with these expecting eyes — something that she has successfully accomplished with the song “mirrorball” on folklore. The song’s premise is that the speaker is a mirrorball, constantly performing and reflecting back at the viewer what they want to see. It’s a simple metaphor, but one that is infinitely more convincing than any of the more egregious and self-referential tracks on Tortured Poets.
With the constant, Fleabag-like callouts to the fact that there exists a wider audience judging, criticizing and examining her, the return to folkloric songs is not something that most of Tortured Poets achieves. The central dilemma of Tortured Poets, the insanity that comes with living Swift’s incredibly scrutinized life, just cannot gel with what has made her music so great.
Daily Arts Writer Cora Rolfes can be reached at corolfes@umich.edu.
