Taylor Swift, the review of The Tortured Poets Department

It is a line that will be quoted and analyzed and whose meaning will perhaps be declassified in 50 years, as Taylor Swift sings in another beautiful and very wicked song. This is called The Tortured Poets Departmentt, gives the title to the most anticipated album ever in the streaming era (this is not hyperbole, there have never been so many pre-saves) and talks about a tormented love story (but is it okay?) with a man who loves to self-sabotage and still uses a typewriter. At one point, before reminding him that “no-fucking-body” can love him as much as she does, Swift laughs in his face and tells him that “you’re not Dylan Thomas and I’m not Patti Smith, this isn’t the Chelsea Hotel and we are two modern idiots.”

It’s a fragment of romantic dialogue and should be taken for what it is, but it contains a truth: Taylor Swift is not Patti Smith. It’s obvious, but perhaps it should be written to tell the story The Tortured Poets Department who speaks the direct, broad, popular and therefore simplified language of contemporaneity. Swift is not Smith because he does not have his poetic impulses, the ability to transfigure reality, the pathos. She is a daughter of another time and that’s fine with her. We are all modern idiots, not just those two. However, Swift has a different talent on which this album is based perhaps more than any other: she is the queen of self-narration, she knows how to create worlds around her love stories. She and she is a real author, the album is full of intelligent, tasty, interesting passages. Swift sometimes describes herself as an anti-heroine, but she always comes out on top: The Tortured Poets Department it’s the album of a good girl who deals with some bad boys and has the presumption to set them straight with her love. Obviously it ends badly. She writes that her best songs come when she hangs out with the worst men, those who think that “normal girls are boring” and have cut out the next morning. She is always the adult in the couple.

From bad boys there is plenty of it in the 16 pieces of this album which surprisingly this morning, two hours after publication, became 31 to make up a double title The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. It doesn’t matter trying to figure out if So Long, London is dedicated to Joe Alwyn and if the tattooed golden retriever of the title track is Matty Healy and if the singer of 1975 is also the protagonist of Guilty as Sin?, where one of his favorite bands, Blue Nile, is actually mentioned. She counts the talent that Swift has in staging desperate attempts to straighten out stories destined to end badly and to tell it by mixing truth, fiction and, if necessary, a little irony that saves her. Like when in But Daddy I Love Him (cit. The little Mermaid?) screams like crazy “but dad, I love him, I’ll have a child with him”, and then adds that “it’s not true, but you should see your faces”.

In the same song, there is a lunge at the “wine moms” and ultimately at all those who question his love choices and therefore also certain fans who criticized the relationship with Healy: “I’ll tell you one thing right away, I’d rather burn for the rest of my life rather than listen to another second of this whining and moaning.” Only she, she sings, can disgrace her good name. It’s not just drama, there’s also a happy ending. In The Alchemy we seem to glimpse Travis Kelce, the good boy who arrives after a series of bad boys and takes home the Super Bowl and the girl, like in the finale of a beautiful Rete 4 show.

Men don’t change and neither does Taylor, after all she sings that growing up prematurely sometimes means not growing up at all. The limit of The Tortured Poets Department it’s that you feel like you’ve already heard at least half of these songs, and it’s a good thing because they create a feeling of familiarity in those who love this way of writing and it’s a bad thing because we would like more moments like the drum hits that move Florida!!!, sung as a duet with Florence Welch. But the themes, musical and otherwise, are more or less the same. Nick Cave once said something like: when I write, I draw more or less from the same puddle of vomit. When he writes, Taylor Swift draws more or less from the same pool of tears. And she gets drunk as she sings in Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?.

I remember the shock when Bruce Springsteen released Tunnel of Lovethe first album after the boom of Born in the USA. The production was tepid, the synthesized sounds out of his world, the songs unusually soft. And yet it all came back if you listened carefully to the lyrics and immersed yourself in that world of broken hearts and broken promises. It’s a similar feeling to what you get while listening The Tortured Poets Department. Musically it’s a slightly beefier, less nocturnal and livelier version of Midnights, with a few acoustic touches here and there. One admires a bit the ability to be pop without using the musical clichés of this time, without leveraging the excitement for the banger (sorry) or for the bopponi (sorry). One wonders how it is possible that one of the two greatest living pop stars can make a record in which there is not a single authentically daring passage, in which the ability of pop to invent things is renounced. Frankly, the lyrics are more interesting than this synth pop which now seems to be Swift’s chosen sound for her semi-diary confessions.

Behind them are Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner of the National, it’s not a lack of talent, it’s a precise choice, almost a language if we also think about Midnights, and it has to do with the strength that details have in such a context. Listening to it on headphones and turning up the volume allows you to grasp subtleties that ultimately have substance. Like when in the wild The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived Swift’s voice becomes slightly distorted as she begins to spit out a series of questions to her ex: “Did someone send you who wanted me dead? Did you sleep with a gun under your bed? Were you writing a book? Were you a sleeper agent? In fifty years will all this be declassified?”.

The album ends – so to speak, given that after the sixteenth song there are another 15 to listen to – with Clara Bow, silent film diva, sexy actress by 1920s standards, original it-girl. She serves Swift to tell of her rise, from a girl who no one thought would ever see the lights of Manhattan to a global pop star, and the fate of all the it-girls, and even the hit girls. Yes, because this collection of short poems summarized on love has another side, namely the reflection on the fame on which Stevie Nicks extends his blessing hand, which is not only mentioned in Clara Bow, but opens the album (in the physical version) with a spoken prologue in which he says things like “he looked back from the future and shed a few tears, he looked back at the past and he felt fear”. In this sense, the moment more Reputation of the album is I Can Do It With a Broken Heart where it seems like we see Swift on the stage of the Eras Tour while the audience acclaims her and she feels depressed: “I cry a lot, but I’m productive: it’s an art.” People will go crazy for it.

Whether you like it or not, The Tortured Poets Department it is the (temporary) peak of the monocultural phenomenon that is Taylor Swift, also born from the infinite production (only 31 songs today), from the omnipresence in the pop debate, from the ability to make millions of people passionate about her personal soap. She has the charm of the event to stay away from due to boredom, saturation or disesteem or to participate in in an era in which it was thought that pop culture was so fragmented that it could no longer produce a star disputed even by the rulers. This too will pass, she too will pass, everything will pass. After the “you look like Clara Bow” and the “you look like Stevie Nicks in 1975”, the album ends with “you look like Taylor Swift”. It’s another time Reputation, a leap forward decades, certainly a bittersweet ending: beauty fades, on to the next one. “In this light you look like Taylor Swift, we like her a lot, you have something more than her, the future is bright, dazzling”.