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, received Album of the 12 months on the Grammys, making Swift the solo artist with probably the most wins of all time in that class. Her high-profile romance with soccer star Travis Kelce has delighted her followers whereas conserving her within the highlight. She’s defeated all her haters; her followers are legion; virtually everybody admits, now, that she’s superb 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 is just not totally content material together with her present excessive standing. The album suggests nothing a lot as Swift chafing furiously in opposition to the bounds of the picture that’s taken her thus far — 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 melancholy has begun to tug 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 together with her new dangerous boy (“Down Unhealthy”), resentment with everybody who tells her they shouldn’t be collectively (“However Daddy I Love Him”), the sluggish, grudging realization that maybe there are some issues with the connection (“I Can Repair Him (No Actually I Can)”), and fury when he finally leaves her (“The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”).
The narrator’s despair over her love for the misplaced depressed boyfriend threads its means via the entire album (“loml,” “The Black Canine”). Generally, imagery related to him results in a music in regards to the dangerous boy (“Contemporary out the Slammer,” which ends on an ambivalent line about “imaginary rings”), like an intrusive thought. At occasions, her heartbreak over each breakups is so intertwined it turns into not possible 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 music 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 explicit 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 all the time an odd match for good lady 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 group 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 via a sequence of racist jokes from the host and cracked one among his personal about watching violent, racist, and misogynistic porn.
Swift’s followers have been outraged. They launched a hashtag, #SpeakUpNow, beneath 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 achieved such hurtful issues? Was she merely lashing out after her breakup with Alwyn? What was she considering?
In The Tortured Poets Division, Swift means that she didn’t notably take care of the outrage or the priority about her courting decisions. “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 probably the most judgmental creeps who say they need what’s greatest for me
Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll by no means see
Pondering 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 during which the narrator is feeling notably defensive about her relationship together with her tortured poet, and the tongue-in-cheek music title and over-the-top hysterics of the refrain counsel that she shouldn’t be taken totally critically. In later songs, the narrator will conclude that her tortured poet was dangerous information in any case — 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 have 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 aggravated with the individuals who thought they obtained 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 uninterested in being her followers’ greatest buddy?
Swift constructed a not-insignificant quantity of her fame on bringing her followers into the story of her romantic decisions. Her most potent creative weapon is her capacity to jot down lyrics about her personal life that learn as completely susceptible and completely trustworthy. Then she seeds Easter eggs into the liner notes, inviting her followers to match the heartbreak of every music with a real-life ex. She invitations her followers over to her home for home made cookies and secret album-listening periods. She sends them Christmas packages. Swift’s star picture is constructed across the trope of the perfect buddy, the lady who lives subsequent door to you and tells you the whole lot about her life.
In The Tortured Poets Division, it’s beginning to sound as if Swift is just not utterly glad with dwelling 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 lady 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 music the place she brags about with the ability to smile her means efficiently via the Eras tour whereas coping with her breakups. Because the music 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 outdated Kim and Kanye feud (“Cassandra”) and even Swift’s center college bully (“thanK you aIMee”) (until 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 surprise, that turning the story into artwork can redeem it. “Trying backwards is likely to be the one option to transfer ahead,” she sings. Positive, but when Swift retains wanting backward at her outdated betrayals, when does the shifting ahead half begin?
There are different indicators that Swift may 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 creating 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 currently, though she used to modify up her appears dramatically as she moved between album eras. The Reduce’s vogue critic Cathy Horyn just lately described Swift’s model as “self-conscious” and advised that the various vocal critics of Swift’s vogue decisions are “in all probability bored” together with her college-girl-next-door outfits, that are starting to come back off as somewhat disingenuous on 34-year-old Swift. “It’s value remembering that Taylor Swift has all the time been older and wiser than her years,” Horyn famous. “The lady can’t be discovering herself eternally.”
Swift has found herself and rediscovered herself in tones of girlish surprise in albums for over 20 years now. She’s taken that girl-next-door picture so far as she will 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 in quest of one thing new.
When Swift received 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, nonetheless, she advised she was prepared to maneuver previous that want.
“I might like to let you know that that is the perfect second of my life,” Swift stated, “however I really feel this blissful once I end a music 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 technique 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?
