Taylor Swift Finally Lost
After a non-stop onslaught of public praise from fans and critics alike, the pop star finally wears out her welcome on her worst album yet.
My moment has finally come. For many years, ANTIART has been the most prominent and critical media source when it comes to any output from Taylor Swift. We literally might be the only one legitimately.
While everyone from Anthony Fantano to Pitchfork was glazing her for re-recording her old music and selling the vinyls to her fans for $50 each, we were calling her greedy and overly celebratory about mediocre material. I’ve made fun of her fans for dragging her ex-boyfriend Jake Gyllenhaal for dating young women, when Taylor herself dated Harry Styles, Conor Kennedy and Taylor Lautner while they were all under 18. I’ve lost hundreds of followers for pointing stuff like this out, and gained notoriety on other platforms like TikTok’s Keep The Meter Running and Hot and Single for espousing Taylor related slander.
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She’s late to every trend. She was given Time Person of the Year and has harnessed so much power and worldly clout yet never uses it for any social good. She’s a greedy annoying billionaire who is among the biggest destroyers of our o-zone layer with her private jet. Her fans are cult-like weirdos who dox people and do Midsommar-esque rituals in the nosebleeds of her sold-out stadium concerts. Every facet of our culture has to be dominated by her face and mid personality. You can’t watch a football game, go to the movies, engage in celebrity dating gossip, scroll Instagram or go record shopping without her coming up. She is virtually inescapable yet never gives the masses anything to think about, and when you point out how little substance there is, one of her fans will say something stupid like “why are you expecting anything from her she makes pop music”. She’ll evade criticism that way and then still call herself a singer-songwriter, win the award for songwriter of the decade, and all the news sources will act like this is fact. She is encased in a 10-foot titanium set of power armor that protects her and her brand from any form of criticism. Even Pitchfork died before her career did. And even they glazed her for giving us absolutely nothing.
Well, I’m happy to report that the discourse has caught up to what I have been saying publicly for almost four years. Taylor Swift is not a good songwriter and her production is repetitive and boring. It was like this on Red, it was like this on Midnights, and it’s like that on the so-called TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT.
At last year’s Grammy Awards, she won Album of the Year over Lana Del Rey, who I believe actually deserved it for her poetic and boundless Did You That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard. During her acceptance speech, she forced Lana to come up on stage with her and stand in the background. It was awkward, and close sources to this tell me that Lana was actually really mad at her for this. This was a nice visual example of how awards ceremonies like The Grammys reward mediocrity while leaving the real artists in the background, out of sight. During the acceptance speech, she acknowledged the reluctant Lana, before announcing the new album called THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT. It was almost like Lana collaborating with Taylor was making a deal with the devil, giving her a bump in streams and profile while having her style, fan base and aesthetic sucked out of her like a musical life force. Even the long song titles like “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” were eerily similar to Del Rey’s like “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman life me”.
You might be surprised to hear me say this, but I’m actually very happy this record came out. To me, this album perfectly encapsulates the tasteless, anti-appeal that Taylor’s music has. It isolates it like a bacteria in a lab that we can now all study perfectly with a high-powered microscope. First off, the copying is on full display. Just looking at the regular and deluxe covers, I am reminded of The 1975 as well as Joy Division. The former has copied off the latter before to be fair, but in a more interesting and cheeky way that added to the art. Here, the black and white drabness is more of a preview of how mild and colorless the music is then it is a signifier of dark sound to come. Sonically, she lifts from Ed Sheeran, Phoebe Bridgers, Lorde, Mitski, New Order and Chvrches. It’s all done so shamelessly and without a clever spin either. She even makes references to great songwriters like Patti Smith and The Blue Nile, but seemingly learns nothing from the wonderful music they made.
For the most part, every single song follows the same exact structure literally and thematically. We get a whisper quite, sing-songy verse that repeats a melody three times, before breaking from the melody with a reverbed pre-chorus. Then we get the chorus which is usually sung one octave up in a voice that resembles shouting but is too compressed and neutered to evoke any anger or emotion, with an added drum. The second verse repeats the formula but has more reverbed, shouted interjecting background vocals, and then back to the chorus which takes us out. Sometimes there’s a bridge that sounds like the verses. All the verses are packed with what a fourth grader would consider poetic. Like this: “the goddess of timing once found us beguiling”, “I took a nap / I circled you on a map”.
She seeks to do the same Antonoff produced, novelesque dense writing that Lana did on her last record, but she does the young adult version. This is the difference between reading Sylvia Plath and Stephanie Meyer. The difference between her and Lana is that Lana has never pivoted from her character. Since Born To Die, she has been pushing this toxic female character that overtly sings about using her sexuality to advance herself, while dealing with abusive older men who probably have wives. She’s always on the back of some dirty Harley, going to some business conference to find a suitor, or crying at Coachella while smoking an American Spirit. The songwriting has improved and the character has advanced herself and her sense of self worth, becoming more reflective and descriptive with each passing record. It’s a beautifully woven narrative that simultaneously tells a universal tale of the American Dream while pinpointing just one woman’s experience at a particular point in time. With her last record, her and the character kind of merged into one. It’s almost like it took eight or so records of using this auto-fiction to find the woman she truly is. It’s really special and intimate.
Taylor Swift on the other hand wrote one short story about an ex-lover in a creative writing class in 9th grade and has been re-writing the same tale over and over and over again. She’s kind of like Wonder Woman. An all-powerful, flawless character that has always been right and therefore never has to learn from a single one of her mistakes. It’s like she notices how boring this is, and attempts to pivot on this record by just making shit up. She already did this to wide success on “Anti-Hero”, which sounded more like a pitch for a shitty Netflix crime show than a song. All throughout this record, she is telling these frivolous, meaningless stories about people dying and her dying. Every other song peppers in guns, death, drugs and very forced cursing in an attempt to break from the immaturity of her previous work. It’s like she takes the worst parts of Phoebe Bridger’s morbid poetry, Mitski’s vignette style, and whatever Hulu crime series she watched last and rolls them up into a grey, flavorless ball. I’m sure that her fans will piece together all these sloppy stories together like little kids do with the backstory of Call of Duty: Zombies or Skibidi Toilet, but to me, it just registers as a bunch of bullshit. She has no life experience or real sadness to draw from. So she makes up stories about being raised in the circus or an asylum, and just exclaims lyrics like “‘Cuz I’m miserable and nobody even knows!” When she’s not making stuff up from a first-person POV, she’s like an omniscient narrator dictating nonsense plot points and similes to us like a book report. This album is all telling, no showing.
The OG version of this record is long and makes me want to end it all, but the deluxe is a different beast. THE ANTHOLOGY brings the length to a staggering 2 hours. Each song here is either an acoustic guitar or piano ballad, and these songs sound legitimately AI generated. The structure I detailed before is done here for every single song without fail. Here we also get some of worst lyrics on the album, including the infamous “We would pick a decade / We wished we could live in instead of this / I’d say the 1830s without all the racists”. I want to pin this line forever onto her legacy so I can always point back to it as an example of how she is the worst songwriter in modern music. She operates in the most formulaic and riskless framework for all of her songs, and whenever she decides to take a risk, it results in horrific shit like this line.
THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT: THE ANTHOLOGY: is the most aesthetically empty, fake depressed, material stealing, thoughtlessly rendered, pseudo-edgy, poor written and unimaginative effort that Taylor Swift has ever released. Listen to anything from The Weeknd, Mitski or The 1975 and you’ll see the way they change things up versus how she keeps everything the exact same. The music on display here is offensively non-dynamic. The first song “Fortnight” with Post Malone is kind of catchy and well-produced, every other song is a 0/10. Pound for pound, song for song, this is the worst album of the 2020s without a shred of doubt. Can we stop listening to this garbage, please? There are a million artists who are deprived of a spotlight because this miserable woman feels the need to take up all the space and attention. She is not tortured, she is not a poet, she is a business that pumps out ear-piercing sounds every year and I want my hearing back. Can we please end the cycle and leave her in the past?