Rating: 0.5/5 Stars
Taylor Swift (“Midnights’’) did not need to do any of this. She has enough industry power and wealth to free herself from the album deals that pressured her before her cultural omnipresence. She has enough of a cultic fan base to defend and pay for anything she releases. She has enough sales records to scare away any competition. She won her wars against Kanye West and Scooter Braun a long time ago. She could go the Fiona Apple route and stagger her music releases every decade or so. But she did not. The fact that Swift can orchestrate a huge album rollout as this can only mean she does this all for the artistic endeavor, for her love of songwriting, for some deep push to let the world know what she is capable of.
If so, gosh: where did it all go wrong?
“The Tortured Poets Department” is Swift’s eleventh studio album, two albums before what could be her biggest cycle yet, given her whole “13” schtick, despite her effort in promoting every new release like her climactic swan song. But while each increases Swift’s army of listeners and reputation among music critics, all “Tortured Poets” offers is a parody of Swift’s music.
The formula is simple: take a soft light acoustic guitar or piano, muddy it with some cloudy synths, add in some out-of-tune element and multiply it all onto a 31-song tracklist. Cynical listeners have blamed pop auteur Jack Antonoff for homogenizing sad girl pop. They are wrong—Lana Del Rey, Lorde, Florence Welch, Clairo et al. sound nothing alike—and even in terms of just Swift’s music Antonoff contributed to Swift’s sonic range. “Tortured Poets” gives those cynics leverage. Antonoff and his co-conspirator Aaron Dessner are effectively the two other band members in the project that is “Taylor Swift.” The trio created a magnum opus with their pandemic project “folklore,” back when Swift’s association with Dessner made headlines.
The songs sound like demos from The 1975, no surprise given the album’s obsession with frontman Matty Healy. Many of the lyrics revolve around Swift’s two-week fling with Healy, as in “Fortnight,” or her six-year commitment with Joe Alwyn, as in “So Long London.” That is, if you care. Setting aside how exhausting it is to analyze Swift’s lyrics for secrets about her love life, the album’s lyrics in general prove that the music industry need not be afraid of AI-generated music, since Swift herself can write her own awkward and generic songs.
She seems to be under the impression that sprinkling some million-dollar words with some four-letter ones equals lyrical depth. On “Down Bad”: “Everything comes out of teenage petulance/F*** it if I can’t have him.” Instead, it sounds like something out of my notebook from high school full of bad poetry about unrequited crushes and parents who “just don’t get it.”
Yet even that sounds more coherent than whatever Swift’s attempts at “tortured poetry” try to be. On the title track: “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate/We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.” On “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”: “You’ll slide into inboxes and slip through the bars/You crashed my party and your rental car.” The awkwardness could survive scrutiny if Antonoff and Dessner did not surround them with sophistication. At times it feels like Swift ad-libbed the lyrics in a test of artistic rawness, a technique her friend Del Rey used on her last album. But Del Rey is not a tortured poet—she is an actual one.
But one disclosure: the part on “But Daddy I Love Him” where she fools the listener into thinking she announced a pregnancy is by far the peak of the album. This should tell you a lot.
Swift admits that she is “not like Patti Smith,” a name drop that Smith apparently appreciated, possibly for the exposure to Swifties, possibly because Swift was contrasting herself with Smith, not comparing. What feels weird is that Swift is in fact capable of infusing pop music with poetry. Whatever was cringey about her previous lyrics—I am still trying to figure out how “I come back stronger than a ‘90s trend” made the green light—still had charm, like it was a small reminder that Swift is capable of artistic failure. But these new lyrics waste your attention in their novelty. It is honestly quite sad—no, really, it is quite misery-inducing how Swift, whose artistry seemed to have justified her cultural expanse, discards effort in favor of “look how random this sounded, now pretend to comprehend it and give me my Grammy.”
Other than melodrama about her love life—wait for all the football metaphors when she eventually dumps Travis Kelce—what is “Tortured Poets” trying to be? In its attempt at being confessional, instead we get humble brags and oblivious embarrassment. “thanK you aIMee” apparently addresses her beef with Kim Kardashian, which I forgot even existed. “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” is yet another Swift song complaining about her self-induced fame. At least on “mirrorball” and “Anti-Hero” she acts sincere enough for you to pity her. Here, Swift blames you of all people for her misery. She sings, “Breakin’ down, I hit the floor/All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘More.’” At the end she giggles in a snarky recapitulation of “Anti-Hero”: “‘Cause I’m miserable/And nobody even knows!”
The lack of apostrophe in the title now makes perfect sense. The department is not run by tortured poets, nor is it dedicated to them. The album is like a department of poets that Swift has invaded and tortured through the most underwhelming album of the year. Never would I have thought the fake AI-vocal “leak” of “Fortnight” that circulated around Twitter would be more interesting than the actual song. The album even divided the Swifties, and the only other things that divide Swifties are album rankings and if it is kosher to still listen to Harry Styles. Whether this album succeeds commercially, she does not need to worry; her fan base will forever cover the down payments on her jet trips, golden toilet paper and whatever poor assistant has to clean up her cats’ floor droppings. But this review has only scratched the surface of what could possibly turn out to be Swift’s first true critical flop.
Image by Paolo Villanueva via YouTube
