🎶 Listening to The Tortured Poets Department by Taylor Swift.
As has everyone else, given it has broken a wide arrange of world records, including being the most streamed album in one week ever, the first album to get to 300 million Spotify streams in one day, the first to occupy the top 14 entries of the Billboard Top 100 Hot Songs chart and also sold the largest number of vinyl copies in a single week in modern times - 859,000.
The reviews seemed to me to go through phases of “this is quite good” to “actually it’s too long and repetitive” - not helped per the release of an extended 31 track “anthology” version hours after the original dropped at which point the NYT asked whether we’ve finally had too much Taylor, apparently not - to “actually there are some great moments”. That’s also roughly my trajectory so far.
It is much more in the style of her last album, Midnights, than her earlier work, so if you liked that you’ll probably like this. Very, very occasionally some of the lyrics felt just a bit like they were made by ChatGPT - but mostly I found it pretty cool and clever. And besides, any bits I didn’t understand are probably because I am no true Swiftie; I don’t know the lore.
A New Yorker article provides perhaps the best explanation of what it means to be a Swiftie that I’ve seen. Why in one of the tracks does TS appear to be trying to rhyme “wife” with “bike” when words that actually rhymed would make at least as much sense? Clearly she didn’t make a mistake that no-one noticed. Rather:
Swift obsessives know to connect “imgonnagetyouback” with “Fallingforyou,” a song by the 1975 that was written by Swift’s ex-boyfriend Matty Healy. In it, Healy sings, “I’m so excited for the night / All we need’s my bike and your enormous house.” Swift’s mention of a bike, in “imgonnagetyouback,” is therefore an intentional creative decision, like the lack of spaces in the song’s title.
Some fans have gone even further, claiming that the lack of spaces not only invites a comparison to “Fallingforyou” but to Swift’s own “Blank Space,” a song on her “1989” album. (1975, 1989—there are a lot of years to keep track of here.) “In Blank Space music video, Taylor Swift is smashing things and sings ‘Cause you know I love the players And you love the game,’ ” a YouTube user called Miranda-ry9tf writes in a comment. “In imgonnagetyouback she says ‘We broke all the pieces, but you still wanna play the game.’ ” Perhaps “Blank Space,” released in 2014, was about Healy, too?
And that stuff like this has led to a disconnect between your typical music reviewer and the more intense parts of her fan base.
Kotaku gives another taster of the parallel Taylorverse, linking to a 100 page presentation someone made to explain the timeline of her relationship with Matt Healy, all essential to fully interpret the album - at least for some folk. As the Washington Post wrote some time ago, there’s a whole Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe out there for those with the time and inclination to indulge.