I had decided I was done writing about Taylor for a bit… after all, there’s a lot going on in the world and even if I have nothing to say about it I don’t know that we need more chatter about Taylor… however. Here are a few true and I think essentially neutral things you can say about Taylor Swift:
She tends to favor things like basic pop chord progressions. If you want a certain kind of musical sophistication, you probably are not going to get it from her.1
She seems to be settling into a sound that is no longer the glossy, radio-oriented pop of 1989–Lover. It is slower, wordier, with a lot of synth and sad piano. She might switch this up, she might not.
Her work tends to be small-scale and introspective: it looks at love, loss, and so on. Put more broadly (and a little inaccurately), she tells stories about feelings.2
Starting with Midnights, her lyric writing has gotten less refined, compressed, and polished. Sometimes this is a good thing. Sometimes it’s… not.3
Adding to the above, Taylor Swift, over basically her whole career, has had a pretty loose approach to rhyme. To pick a song at random, I’m pretty sure that in the chorus of “End Game” she is rhyming “end game” with “first string” and also with “A team.”4
I mention the rhyme thing because for some reason, in a piece in the New Yorker arguing for a lore-based approach to Taylor Swift’s music, the author, Sinéad O’Sullivan, argues that you can’t understand an inexact rhyme in one of her songs without getting into the who dated who of it all:
Swift sings that she hasn’t yet decided “whether I’m gonna be your wife or gonna smash up your bike.” Perhaps the lyric is meant to be somewhat infantile, but even the most novice editor should have pushed Swift toward the more obvious rhyme: “whether I’m gonna be your wife or gonna smash up your life”.… But 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.
In short, Taylor should be treated like Marvel.
Now, the lack of spaces in the title is indeed a wink toward “fallingforyou.” I think that’s pretty obvious. (Taylor’s winks are in general obvious.) But the reason to pick “bike” over “life” is not because of Matty Healy. It’s because it’s a better image and the rhyme works well enough.5 It participates in the honorable female tradition of “you hurt my feelings so I’m going to destroy your mode of transportation.”
So it is “an intentional creative decision,” yes. The same way Taylor’s mixed metaphors are intentional creative decisions. But not because of Matty Healy, but because Taylor consistently prioritizes vivid images over other things—rhymes, metaphors, scansion, and so on.6 Really, it’s an intentional creative decision just by virtue of being made by a sentient being, if we’re being blunt here. Recognizing intentional decisions is where criticism ideally starts, not where it ends. There are many problems with lore-based readings of her music, but the biggest, to me, is that the heaped up pile of connections rarely adds anything or does anything. It’s not even a reading really so much as a heap of associations.
Taylor Swift music criticism isn’t “bad” because critics don’t care about the lore. Music critics (speaking generally, not specifically) care way, way too much about the lore.7 Music critics are not failing “to get” The Tortured Poets Department because they don’t care enough about Matty Healy, or praising it because they do.8 It is baffling to me that eleven albums into her career, after repeated statements from Taylor herself to the contrary, people are claiming you can’t appreciate her music without paternity testing the songs and that music criticism should focus more on her personal life.
The day that Taylor starts playing into “the lore” of it all in the music—as opposed to the marketing, where she absolutely does—is the day her music takes a steep nosedive. The variety of fictional settings present in The Tortured Poets Department, says, to me at least, that this album is written to frustrate people who insist on interpreting her music this way. And also, for the record—if Taylor released a thirty-one track album that you could only appreciate by caring a lot about Matty Healy—that would be—a bad album.9
There are no rules of criticism.10 But some rules of mine go:
try to assume that everything is on purpose
pay attention to an artist’s wider body of work, their style, voice, tics, etc
understand what the work is going for
given all that, start passing judgment
It’s absolutely true that lots of negative criticism of Taylor fails bullet point one. The rambling awkward shapelessness of “I Hate It Here” and the cringe-inducing feeling of hearing about wanting to go to the 1830s but “without all the racists” are both intentional. You might very well take in all of that in and say “yes, but the song doesn’t work.”11 That’s (real)12 criticism. If your response is to say well you’d get if you listened to this 1975 demo tape backward you have lost the plot.
More to the point, the kind of lore-based reading advocated for by O’Sullivan seems like a kind of parodic version of what I take to be a good approach to criticism. An interest in the arc of an artist’s career and a real familiarity with their body of work means you’ll notice things other people won’t. Assuming things are done on purpose is a basic courtesy. Approaching art with a decoding ring is like using TV Tropes to build your critical language—it’s close enough that you can see how people got there, but it’s fundamentally mistaken.
O’Sullivan’s probably right that you do need to understand the appeal of the lore to get swifties. But swifties are crazy and right now they’re making five thousand tiktoks speculating that Taylor is pregnant or engaged or married (i.e., other things she’s made clear she hates). They are in a real sense Taylor’s own Frankenstein’s monster except she loves them (and needs them) as much as she wants to kill them.13 As a phenomenon they’re interesting. But I do not think we need to take any reading comprehension cues from them.
For a few hours, a Ted Hughes poem (“Red”) hand-selected by Taylor was featured on the Instagram page for Florence Welch’s book club. The backlash was so severe that it got taken down before the day was over—I don’t think really because of the Ted Hughes of it all (he apparently had been featured on the book club before) but because of the Taylor of it all.14 It’s a poem she’s mentioned liking before but the nature of these things is that nobody really cares until suddenly they care, as it were.15
Anyway… I don’t have that much interest in Ted Hughes, but I thought it was an interesting choice. In the “tortured poet” mythology,16 Ted Hughes is a villain because he silences—he destroys Plath’s diaries, he edits her poems, he makes it impossible to hear her voice except through him, and so on. Taylor choosing to identify herself with him is (maybe) a way of saying that she is not “the silent woman”17 whose art can only be accessed through the filter of another person. She is the one who edits, who cuts out, who narrates. She is the one who speaks. She is not the easily pitied victim of patriarchal control.18 She calls the shots.19
Now of course it’s still fine to dislike her choice of poem—because you hate Ted Hughes or because you hate the poem or both. (I think I’m both.)20 But picking him over Sylvia Plath is not at all accidental. Taylor could have named “Mad Girl’s Love Song” (another poem she’s mentioned liking). She could have completely avoided picking anybody so loaded. She chose Ted Hughes because he not a likeable figure and because he is the bad guy. (I mean, probably. I find it unlikely she didn’t think about the subtext here at all, but it’s entirely possible she just liked the poem.)21
O’Sullivan asks at one point if the main character of Taylor’s music has secretly always been Matty Healy. The answer is “no,” not just because they didn’t meet until after 1989 came out, but because there’s one main character in the over-arching story of Taylor Swift. And that’s Taylor Swift. It’s her emotional world and her storytelling.
This is the main reason comparing her to Joni Mitchell is a mistake.
I dislike this formulation but can’t think of one I like better right now.
I think you could argue this started with folklore, specifically “the lakes,” but I don’t think so.
Also, you can probably smash up somebody’s life more effectively as their wife. But that’s neither here nor there.
You can see what it looks like when Taylor deliberately refuses to rhyme elsewhere on the album. Here’s the bridge of “Down Bad”:
I loved your hostile takeovers
Encounters closer and closer
All your indecent exposures
How dare you say that it’s—
I’ll build you a fort on some planet
Where they can all understand it.…
The word that rhymes with “closer” is “over.” She won’t say that it’s over.
And also because a lot of music critics do not actually care about music, but that’s a different problem in which I myself would be included if I were a music critic (as opposed to a Taylor Swift analyst).
Or whatever it is that Rob Sheffield does. Sometimes when I read his reviews I feel like he’s writing like he has to help Roko’s basilisk be born because he’s figured out that Roko’s basilisk is Taylor Swift. If you do not understand this footnote you’ve lived an upright life.
I bring a certain Emily Dickinson em dash vibe to my posts that “people who care about using punctuation correctly” don’t really like.
You can’t catch me, criticism police.
Unfortunately I have become obsessed with “I Hate It Here” and listened to it on repeat while listening to this. ):
You can’t catch me… because I AM THE CRITICISM POLICE.
Taylor realizing this in real time:
I saved this comment before the post went down but I feel it was representative:
Obviously, there are reasons to dislike him (as a person) outside of his symbolic meaning here (like Plath’s allegations of physical abuse).
Do we think she’s read the Janet Malcolm book…? I bet she has.
Neither is Sylvia Plath really but you know.
In some ways I think TTPD is an interesting companion piece to Florence + The Machine’s last album, Dance Fever, particularly the song “Dream Girl Evil.”
There’s a self help–ism that you run across sometimes about like, accepting your own evil (your shadow self, in bastardized Jung, which is the only Jung I know). I have never really gotten this kind of line but I felt sort of… closer to getting it? in listening to these two albums.
I’m persuadable though.
Taylor’s comment in the album’s liner notes that it’s the “worst men that she writes best” should, I think, be understood to be inclusive of Taylor herself, who has called herself in other songs “a cursed man.” And she calls herself an “outdoorsman” on here though that one’s a little less striking. You can also make the argument that in “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” she’s the heartbreak prince since the lines go “it’s you and me […] Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince” but while I like the idea of her adopting this title I think parallelism is one of many things Taylor is willing to bend for a song.
also taylor plz read evelyn waugh..... if you read brideshead when your ex was cast, the rest isn't really like that.................
incredible twist in footnote 12