Taylor Swift She can boast of being the most popular artist of the 21st century, and perhaps of all time. Five of the ten most popular albums in the United States in 2023 were his, according to Luminate, an analytics company. Swift’s albums have now accumulated 384 weeks in the top ten of the Billboard chart, surpassing the Beatles’ record. She is halfway through the most lucrative concert tour in history. The film version of it grossed more than $260 million at the box office last year.
On April 19 he released a double album titled «The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology». Across 31 songs, Swift wields her scalpel and dissects every inch of her recent relationships. Few composers have known how to better transmute heartbreak into successes. (“The rush,” as she sang in “Blank Space,” surely she has always been worth it). Unfortunately, on this album she has given up dance pop in favor of something as downcast as her title indicates.
Gone are the irresistibly catchy choruses of “I Knew You Were Trouble” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” replaced by dreamy synths, muted drums, and languid vocals. Swift knows how to do melancholy and sadness well. However, “The Tortured Poets Department” is gloomy but not memorable. For a woman who launched her career as a precocious country-singing teenager, her new lyrics sound surprisingly immature, with unimaginative rhymes. “Like she lost my twin, fuck if I can’t have him,” she sings on “Down Bad.”
It’s a sign of their stardom that many Swifties rushed to buy the album anyway: one day after its release, “The Tortured Poets Department” sold 1.4 million copies in the United States. But some have broken ranks and confess that the songs seem disappointing and same. Is Swift falling into the trap that ensnares those who reach the top in their fields, from authors to CEOs? Maybe no one, not even her composers, wants to tell music’s biggest star that her songs are dull.
In “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart” she boasts of being “so productive it’s an art.” In fact, it is quite common for great artists at the peak of their fame to release long double albums: think of the 30 songs on the «White Album» by the Beatles or the 20 of «The River» by Bruce Springsteen. But both could have benefited from more selective editing and still would have become the cherished classics they are today. For Swift, it is the quality of her output, and not the quantity of it, that distinguishes her from her colleagues.
Swift’s latest work is not up to her usual level. In one of her songs, she claims to be at her “best.” Her fans, both hardcore and sporadic, wonder if her glow is fading.
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