Taylor Swift’s newest thing is spelling it all out for us. She’s recently taken to the gratuitous parenthetical: (Taylor’s Version) (Long Pond Version) (No Really I Can) (From the Vault) (The Till Dawn Edition) (Acoustic Version) (Remixes) (3 a.m. Edition) (10 Minute Version) (Old Timey Version) (90’s Trend Remix) (the witch collection) (moonlit witch version) (dancing witch version) (lonely witch version) (cabin in candlelight version) (Pop Mix) (Digital Dog Remix).
Here’s the deal: it’s boring to avenge Taylor Swift, but it’s boring to deride her. It’s boring to talk about her all the time, but it’s boring to assert that you are tired of the discourse. It’s boring to care. It’s boring not to care. It’s boring to be flippant, to treat her work with the levity of “Sylvia Plath didn’t stick her head in an oven for this!”, but it’s boring to engage in earnest, good faith criticism of the work. It’s boring to write about how boring it all is because of course it’s boring. Have you heard the music?
Stereogum critic Tom Breihan almost had it. “A lot of the meta-text stuff around Tortured Poets is interesting,” he writes. “The proper nouns, the concrete allusions, the frustrated longing at its core. Too bad about the songs.”
Perhaps Taylor Swift’s meta-text was once interesting. It was interesting to me once, circa August 2014, when Swift got on a Yahoo-and-ABC-sponsored livestream to announce her fifth studio album 1989. It was interesting when I was 14, and I could invoke my own superiority as a fan and listener by reminding myself that somewhere, there were people in the world who actually thought “I Knew You Were Trouble” was about Harry Styles. How could they be so stupid, Red was recorded from late 2011 to early 2012; she didn’t start dating Harry until late 2012. But then again, there were still people spelling “swiftie” with a y instead of an ie, people who hadn’t even heard of the T-Parties. There were still “Sweeran” shippers in 2014, Calvin Harris defenders in 2015. Not everyone deserved to be held to the same standards of fandom to which I held myself. I wasn’t good at all that much during this time, but I was a damn good fan of Taylor Swift.
In 2024, the meta-text has become tired. I’m glad Taylor realizes that it’s all “So High School,” because I’m finding it increasingly difficult to make myself care about how hard it’s been for America’s cheer-captain to be dating the star quarterback (or tight end, I guess!). In 2014, when Taylor famously sang, “She wears short-skirts / I wear sneakers. / She’s cheer captain / And I’m on the bleachers, ” at the very least, we could suspend our disbelief and watch Taylor Swift With Glasses get excluded by Brunette Taylor Swift Without Glasses, and maybe see ourselves in the happy ending.
But I’m no longer interested in this discourse of relatability. I’m not interested in speculating about a billionaire’s mental health. I am certainly not interested in invoking Sylvia Plath, with or without criticism of the long tradition of confessional poetry to which Taylor Swift may or may not be staking her claim.
The difficult thing here is that I’m honestly not sure what to be interested in. Tom Breihan says that the songs all sound like bonus tracks, as if Swift released two records of nothing but extras, all lacking the substance to constitute an album. He’s probably right, but I’ll say it a different way: The Tortured Poets Department runs entirely within parentheses. It isn’t the body text, but rather the secondary addition, the afterthought that unfocused eyes may gloss right over while skimming the main concentration of words. Whether TTPD’s legacy in Swift’s career will be more than a parenthetical follow up to a bygone main text remains to be seen, but it is curious how plausible it seems.
I think what may be the most difficult thing about The Tortured Poets Department is that it’s quite clearly not her worst project—but it sure as hell is her most irritating. Its mediocrity is offensive. Reputation’s sharpness grew on people. Lover had at least one banger for every flop, and tracks like “ME!” were quickly forgotten in the wake of folklore and evermore, two albums that perhaps weren’t groundbreaking, but were at least damn good. And Midnights, well, it was an ignorable enough blip. TTPD is nearly double the length of Midnights, clocking in at over two hours if you listen to the Anthology version, which you have to.
On the topic of run time, let’s talk numbers for a bit. TTPD is a 16-track album. TTPD: The Anthology takes the count up to 31. Nine songs in total drop the f-bomb, “Down Bad” leading the charge with eighteen total “fucks” given through the track’s course. At least seventeen of them are gratuitous.
“Down Bad” is an interesting case. The instrumentals consist of a few flavors of drum machine and sound very much like they were created to be a backdrop to the vocal performance, which is in turn, so disaffected in its delivery that it feels like it should be second to a more exciting instrumental. Like many of the album’s tracks, nothing rises to the foreground. Swift sings, “Everything comes out of teenage petulance.” Now that’s a self-awareness I haven’t seen from her in a while, albeit a self-awareness that feels as meticulously crafted and contrived as much anything else. I think of album tracks like “imgonnagethimback” where she attempts a Gen-Z vengeance and vindication sensibility, but lacks any of the earnestness to actually pull it off. It does just sound like a boring 34-year-old’s petulance.
But again, I’m not sure it even matters. Here goes another review, 900 words in, where I barely even mentioned what the record sounds like. Don’t bother railing me for it, I already know. There’s no point in separating Taylor Swift the musician from Taylor Swift the music from Taylor Swift the person, persona, or phenomenon—what would she have to write about if no one was making these conflations. In fact, Taylor Swift, however you define her, is practically begging us to elide the difference. An album like The Tortured Poets Department could simply not exist if we kept all the Swifts separate. And if you’re going to take up the most tired, overwrought trope of the tortured artist, with only the empty aesthetics of torture as signifier, you should at least put the music in the main text.
