Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a tight end playing in the Super Bowl -- The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift, April 19

I know you concentrated on the last few albums, but I'm not seeing how the In Character songs have any more or less filigrees than the others. I guess what I'm saying is, it becomes a parlor game to guess which songs are In Character, therefore are grander edifices, and which are not. I'm just not hearing the tell-tale signs that distinguish one from the other.

You can’t hear it in the song construction? It’s not about knowing the biographical details of her life.

I dunno it just seems patently obvious that a song like “So Long, London” and a song like “Ivy” are in very different modes.

(Obvious to me, that is)

The most clearly "in-character" Swift song I can think of – "No Body, No Crime" – also has a unique construction (for her)? It's a perfectly contained little story, with a "kicker" at the end...

To be clear, I'm not saying that some songs grander edifices because they're "in character". I'm saying that they tend to feel like grander edifices and they tend to clearly be written from the viewpoint of a narrator who is not "taylor swift": there is a correlation here which I infer derives from differences in the type of story that taylor wants to tell.

Earlier in her career there wasn't as obvious a distinction between these two modes, but it's grown over time as taylor has accumulated songwriting tics that she deploys to let the listener know she is writing as "taylor swift" - one telling example of this is how "All Too Well" is, in its originally released form, a "perfectly contained little story with a kicker at the end", and everything that was added back in for the long version tended to pull the song away from that.

Also "grander edifice" might mislead - obviously a song like "But Daddy I Love Him" feels grand and imposing.

My point is more how the songs feel more deliberated.

a differing opinion from the initial 'instant classic' review:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/taylor-swift-jack-antonoff-partnership-limit-1235007767/

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLmtT49s/

love this dude rapping t swift lyrics like mf doom

Popcast goes in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLK-cfULZ10

i love the way that song deals with projections and reality and where the two meet, layer over each other until you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends. our shared life is a movie projected on a blank wall in brooklyn. no one really got the sound going so it looks like we’re saying important things about art. really we are just talking about how underrated charlie puth is

I keep thinking about that line "But you told Lucy you'd kill yourself if I ever leave/and I had said that to Jack about you so I felt seen," and how clever, and also how very Taylor Swift, it is that she doesn't say "that's how I feel about you." It's not that they feel this way about each other, it's that they both talk the same way about each other, and those are very much not the same thing. And then to end with "so I felt seen," which is essentially a meme: how can people think that isn't a joke with a punchline?

For different reasons, both critics and fans tend to act as though Taylor is always utterly serious.

Beauty is a beast that roars
Down on all fours
Demanding "more"
Only when your girlish glow
Flickers just so
Do they let you know
It's hell on earth to be heavenly
Them's the breaks
They don't come gently

Florida!!! is a sequel to Wrecking Ball

Florida!!! has grown on me more than any song here — I recoiled from it the first time through, but all its hooks and one-liners have sunk in and I more or less love it now.

Though it's pretty funny that she buried Lana on her actual Lana feature on the last album, and now gives Florence a huge role in a Lana pastiche here.

She should do a remix with Luke Campbell.

Neil Tennant weighs in:

‘To have a successful pop career now you have to have a series of relationships which are amazing and then break up tragically.

‘I wonder what the other half of the relationship feels about this.

‘People don’t write songs like Karma Chameleon any more.’

Full interview here (more for a different thread than this one):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um3o8CUgHRc

That's a shame. Tenant usually Gets It.

This allmusic review is like a parody of all the other disappointed reviews so far, especially the out-of-nowhere final line:

https://www.allmusic.com/album/the-tortured-poets-department-mw0004210541

I'm more confused by the penultimate sentence. An album that the critic finds to be a "tedious" "missed opportunity" also contains "much of the best pop music ever made"?

Sorry yeah that is the sentence I meant

It was the best of pop, it was the worst of pop.

she's always been more interested in songwriting than the craft of pop itself, tennant's correct to find her hits underwhelming as hits

Reviewer is demonstrating the "incoherence" that arises from "lack of a solid narrative".

!!!!!

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/taylor-swift-songs-ranked-rob-sheffield-201800/

she's always been more interested in songwriting than the craft of pop itself,

I'm not following you.

I think Tennant's conception of pop and Swift's conception of it come from different places. Him via disco, her via confessional singer-songwriter. It doesn't surprise me that she's not his speed.

But one of his all-time favorite sons is Joni Mitchell's "Coyote." And uh Sting's "Fragile."

*songs

Whenever I read these geezers' criticisms of Swift, it always seems rather clear they've spent little to no time listening to her. Of all the songs you could cite, "Karma Chameleon" has lyrics that look pretty similar to what Taylor was writing in her Fearless/Speak Now era:

Didn't hear your wicked words every day
And you used to be so sweet I heard you say
That my love was an addiction
When we cling our love is strong
When you go you're gone forever
You string along, you string along

(Not to mention she has a huge song called "Karma" and prominently features colors in her lyrics.)

I wouldn't call him a geezer. His comment's more of an observation -- classic PSB, really -- than cattiness.

The problem -- Tennant the former pop critic should know better -- is that American radio isn't what it was in 1983. Songs are streamable units.

Maybe his point was that we don’t know the identity of the Karma Chameleon?

Taylor is - or was - interested in writing capital P pop songs, but only as one chapter in what is very clearly her chief obsession which is to craft a body of work.

(Some of the most telling lyrics on the new album imagine her songs being played in the future; “Whose Afraid of Little Old Me” and “Clara Bow” dwell on the flipside fear of encroaching irrelevance.)

One of the interesting aspects of complaints about her not being enough of a pop star is that I feel like her most explicit attempts to chase that dream (“Me!”, “You Need To Calm Down”) also felt like the point of lowest ebb in her cultural importance. People ironically observing that her biggest radio hit this year is “Cruel Summer” overlook the fact that the conditions that made the song’s success possible were created by Folklore etc.

Also that most people who have an imperial pop phase watch it end with 10 years in the public eye (it’s now 18 for Swift)

xxp he's more than double her age. Obviously the ubiquity of a "Billie Jean" is harder to achieve in a post-radio landscape, and I agree he was making observational statements about the state of popular music, but he also criticized her songwriting: "She's got a great voice by the way, and the production is beautiful...But melodically it's almost restive...It's all sung on one or two notes going up and down...I like the fact that it brings all these people together, even multi-generational, but I think the one disappointing thing is the music, not the lyrics, the music."

It's all sung on one or two notes going up and down

Didn't posters make a similar comment last week?

I think part of the reason Taylor doesn't have a "Billie Jean" is that she was infantilized and looked down on -- by men, especially -- for so long. It wasn't until relatively recently (~Folklore) that my peers began to engage with her music seriously. I still regularly talk to men in their 40s who dismiss her music out of hand as unserious.

Whereas Please and Obviously were real feats of vocal gymnastics

Also that most people who have an imperial pop phase watch it end with 10 years in the public eye (it’s now 18 for Swift)

Wouldn’t you really start counting from 1989 (the album, not the year)? Obv she was very much in the public eye prior to that, but that’s when her pop era really kicked into gear.

Not Red?

"Love Story" was a huge hit domestically and internationally

yeah, really, she's been a top five fixture since 2008

I'm more confused by the penultimate sentence. An album that the critic finds to be a "tedious" "missed opportunity" also contains "much of the best pop music ever made"?

I think they must have edited this. The penultimate sentence currently is:

While the feelings here are melodramatic and overexpressed, sometimes to the point of ridiculousness, so is some of Swift’s best work, but with far more interesting results.

The last phrase still doesn't work ("but with far more interesting results").

lol, when I think of some of the bizarre and incoherent reviews that have been up on allmusic with no amendments for twenty five years

I still remember general talk about her when "Tim McGraw" was a hit. It was like she was always already there soon enough.

Fortunately Metacritic preserved the original:

While the feelings here are melodramatic and overexpressed, sometimes to the point of ridiculousness, this also has some of Swift’s best work, and much of the best pop music ever made.

Also I was being quite deliberate in how I framed the imperial phase point. Not everyone’s imperial phase (assuming they have one) starts immediately but it’s rare for it to continue much beyond a decade into their career regardless of when it started.

I’m looking at the top 25 songs in that Rolling Stone article and realized I only know two songs in there (blank space and cruel summer).

For how ubiquitous she is as a celebrity I think Tennant might have a point. For those of us not actively following her she doesn’t seem to have the sort of huge hits that non-swifties from different generations can id easily. At least outside the US that’s my perception.

So per example, let’s say: Bruno Mars, who began releasing music at pretty much the same time in the mid 00s as Taylor, has almost the same number of #1 chart hits (8 vs 11) and I guess it was my first thought because he got compared to MJ a lot. He has Uptown Funk.
Everybody knows Uptown Funk. That one is surely on the same level of massive popularity that Billie Jean had.

For Taylor it’s less clear to me. She does have many hits that even a non-swiftie like me can recognize: “shake it off”, “i knew you were trouble”, “blank space”, “bad blood”, “style”, “never getting back together”…. So the hits are definitely there… but I don’t think any of those were as globally massive as a “Billie Jean” or “Uptown Funk”.

many xps

Red was positioned as Taylor's First Pop Album, in the sense that it deliberately pivoted away from country by enlisting Max Martin and other pop producers. But yeah, she already had big pop crossover hits before that; I sometimes forget that "You Belong with Me" is as old as it is.