It’s funny: people say a lot online that what you’re allowed to like and dislike in music is bounded by age, gender and so forth. “It’s not FOR you,” they say. And in many ways, when it comes to Taylor Swift, that’s fair enough.
There are certainly quite a lot too many heterosexual men in their 50s opining on her in ways that are a bit off: angry that she’s not Joni Mitchell, or that she’s a bit full of herself, or that her melodies are simple… Angry with a passion they can’t find for any other pop music. And no, sir, this music IS not for you. However, for those of us that do care about pop music we shouldn’t let those weirdos, nor the reactions against them, letting us have an opinion. This is still mass culture, it still impacts us all, and it’s still interesting!
All that said, I struggle to have an opinion on Taylor Swift records, in a similar way to how I don’t really have many opinions about cars. Just like with cars, there’s a few I think are stunning like “False God” or “Anti Hero” or “hoax,” for example, some like “Lover” which I just think are ugly and over-designed, and an awful lot that are just… there. I absolutely understand why people are “petrolheads”, I completely respect the craft and history of automotive engineering, but much as I try with a few exceptions even the most expensive and imposing of cars is not going to move or inspire me. Likewise, I completely respect the way Swift has made celebrity and life in the media into her medium, the grand performance of it all, the raising of bitter and biting cynicism with just a tiny sweetening drop of romanticism to vast popularity, the production values of it all – but still…
This album is impressive too. There’s lots of the lush 80s disco pop that – as a friend pointed out recently of “Style” from1989 – if you take the instrumentals alone could be long-lost Balearic DJ classics. There’s flagrant referencing galore, of George Michael (credited) on “Father Figure”, of Pixies and The Jacksons (uncredited) on “Actually Romantic” and “Wood” respectively. There are a lot of uncharacteristically laboured rhymes, of the sub-Sondheim musical theatre variety, which rather denature the bleakness of her usual writing.
There are some wildly clunky lyrics too. “Actually Romantic,” allegedly a diss track against Charli XCX is clearly calculatedly in the voice of an exasperatedly sarcastic perpetually online 12-year-old, but… why? And “Wood” is supposed to be the sexy times song about her fiancé, but just seems like a bunch of really honking knob jokes. It’s actually a really weird album, but somehow less fun than that makes it sound. Like it’s good, I guess, that a billionaire is being this petty and preposterous and silly in public, but I dunno. I dunno, man. I mean, I tried, I really did – but maybe it really IS just not for me, either.
