The latest album by the most famous and active pop star on the planet is having the usual enormous success, but it still seems that something has gone wrong
The Tortured Poets DepartmentTaylor Swift’s eleventh studio album, has broken the single-day streaming record on https://twitter.com/spotify/status/1781444540999831575 And https://twitter.com/AppleMusic/status/1781474840110915892?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1781474840110915892%7Ctwgr%5E35332bf5f90ed6dcc09ce59b913dd9ec97e4482a%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.billboard.com%2Flists%2Ftaylor-swift-tortured-poets-department-records-broken%2F and that of the highest number of vinyl records sold in a week. These were predictable results, because Swift’s album release is probably the biggest thing that can happen in the recording industry right now: she is by far the most famous pop star in the world and has a very large and loyal community of fans ( the so-called swifties), willing to spend considerable sums to follow her in all her concerts and to dedicate a lot of time to following her private life.
However, if a large part of Swift’s fans welcomed the album with the usual great enthusiasm, contrary to what had happened recently, a significant amount of doubts and perplexities also circulated regarding The Tortured Poets Department. Not only from critics, who gave the album quite severe reviews, but also apparently from among https://twitter.com/nicholasrhutch/status/1781382910756491404?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1781382910756491404%7Ctwgr%5Ec5c98dbef57ab1eb9aafe02325ec9be8607378fd%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F04%2F22%2Farts%2Fmusic%2Ftaylor-swift-album-fatigue.htmlwho seems to have been a bit disappointed by the album and for reasons in some ways similar to those that motivated the criticism in the press.
In fact, most of the negative reviews described the album as made too quickly and focused on the usual clichés of Swift’s songs, above all a rather ostentatious self-referentiality. It’s nothing new. The predilection for autobiography has always characterized Swift’s records: in almost all cases her songs are conceived as short personal stories, full of very specific metaphors and references on which fans love to build theories, which are usually attempts to answer the question “who are you talking about?”. According to many insiders, however, in The Tortured Poets Department Swift would have re-proposed this formula in a more ostentatious and repetitive manner than usual.
Some reviews have pointed out that, in a certain sense, The Tortured Poets Department it could only be a flat and predictable album in many respects, given that it was made in a very busy period for Swift, who has been working at a very fast pace for at least five years. The New York Times has also coined a specific expression to try to describe on the one hand how much Swift has been absorbed by her commitments in recent years, and on the other how much the enormous amount of the offer she has made available to fans between concerts, special editions , films and gadgets of all kinds risk becoming cloying: «Taylor Swift fatigue».
From 2019 to today Swift has released five unreleased albums (Evermore, Folklore, Lover, Midnightsand precisely The Tortured Poets Department), recorded four of his first six albums from scratch (the rights to which had been purchased five years ago by the controversial music manager Scooter Braun) and organized the Eras Tour, a series of 151 concerts around the world, shows lasting at least three hours.
All these commitments make it more difficult not only to make a good record, but also to take the time necessary to develop ideas that are different from the usual and find something meaningful to tell. For example, music journalists Matt Stevens and Shivani Gonzalez wrote that, probably, The Tortured Poets Department It’s a record that suffered from Swift’s “fatigue” and her continued efforts to dominate the music market through close releases of new albums (Midnights was released only 18 months ago), tours and collateral activities (such as the Eras Tour film and the dozens of music videos he has directed in recent years) have ended up impacting the quality of his music.
The journalist from Vanity Fair Chris Murphy: “It’s almost as if too much is being produced, too quickly, in a brazen attempt to completely saturate and dominate a market instead of having anything important or even partially interesting to say,” he wrote in a https://twitter.com/christress/status/1781178574466142608 on Twitter (X) giving his impressions of the album.
– Read also: How did Taylor Swift get to have all this success?
Another line of criticism, also coming from some fans, concerned the great attention that Swift dedicated to the promotion of The Tortured Poets Departmentsuch as the choice to publish it in different editions, such as CD, vinyl and “Phantom Clear Vinyl” (a special hardback edition like a book, and with a bonus track, “The Manuscript”) just to maximize profits and break new sales records.
The other objection reported by many experts is Swift’s tendency to write songs that obsessively talk about her private life: her relationship with success, her childhood, her fans’ expectations and, above all, her stories love “ended badly”, such as those with Matty Healy, frontman of the British rock group 1975, and with the British actor Joe Alwyn. A trend which, however, according to several critics, in The Tortured Poets Department it is emphasized to the extreme.
Mark Richardson wrote about the Wall Street Journal that the album is a “talkative account” of his personal dramas, and that musically it represents a step backwards compared to previous albums. In fact, even if Swift has «built her brand on self-referentiality, since the beginning of her career», in the past her works had been distinguished by a great attention to melodies and catchy choruses, elements that according to Richardson in The Tortured Poets Department they are in short supply.
Anthony Fantano, a very famous American YouTuber who reviews new pop, rock and hip hop releases in a hilarious and sometimes provocative way, also panned the album. “It’s hardly Swift’s first time playing the rejected, heartbroken, broken woman, but here we are again: She’s drinking from that well more hungrily than ever, like a dehydrated camel,” she said in her video review. Fantano also noticed a certain laziness on the part of the two producers, Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, who in his opinion would have made a less compact and flattened album on an outdated and artificial synth pop.
According to the music critics of New York Times Lindsay Zoladz, The Tortured Poets Department it doesn’t work because of the boring and verbose way it is written. The two parts that make up the edition Anthology of the album (the complete one, in short) contain a total of 31 songs and last more than two hours: an eternity, also considering the current attention span of listeners. The lyrics often return to the same themes, and “as the album progresses, Swift’s writing begins to seem unrestrained, imprecise and needlessly long-winded,” wrote Zoladz, who said the album could use an editor ( and therefore of a person hired to significantly shorten the texts).
– Read also: Is the title of Taylor Swift’s new album missing an apostrophe?
All this criticism in some of the major American media is quite significant, given that the criticism mainstream in the United States they often tend to overlook the new things that come from pop, especially when they are created by pop stars with a huge following like Swift. One of the most severe reviews, which has been taken up by several newspapers in recent days, was that of Paste Magazine, who decided to sign it on behalf of the entire editorial staff so as not to expose the critic who wrote it to the reaction of Swift’s most radical fans.
In summary, second Paste Magazine the album would be characterized by banal and not very credible writing, especially because Swift, a billionaire with a very exclusive lifestyle inaccessible to most people, tries to take on the point of view of a common fan, inevitably resulting artificial.
On the Atlantic Spencer Kornhaber wrote that the album is not perfect, that it suffers from the great speed with which it was made and that it undoubtedly has “quality control” problems, in the sense that it alternates long moments of “boring confusion” with “flashes of magic ». However, according to Kornhaber, Swift, Antonoff and Dessner may have structured the album in this way consciously, to “convey the boredom she apparently felt in her previous relationship, with a man who never gave her all the affection that he needed” (Healy or Alwyn, precisely).
There are also those who defended Swift’s work, underlining how the most critical reviews were published a few hours after the album’s release, without listening to it several times and taking the right time to analyze it properly. This is, for example, the opinion of the journalist from Bloomberg Jessica Karl, according to whom a record containing 31 songs cannot be “digested and understood” so quickly, and many negative reviews are tainted by preconceptions or previous antipathies.
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