My TTPD Review

For everyone asking my thoughts on Taylor Swift's The Tortured Poets Department

Everyone knows that I love Taylor Swift. My fun fact? I have a burnt orange T-SWIFTY license plate. Another fun fact? In high school, I made a 73-slide PowerPoint about Taylor Swift to prove a teacher wrong. (I should probably update it.)

Every time Taylor releases an album is a moment, a moment marking time, an event making history - at least in the lives of Swifties.

I have experienced three Taylor Swift album releases throughout my college experience. These album releases have been the fan memories I waited for when I was a little kid stalking older Taylor Swift fans; I wanted to have album release parties and sing along with my friends and freak out over new social media posts. I wanted to have Taylor Swift be the backdrop of these coming-of-age moments, to add meaning to my story.

Quite frankly, that’s probably why so many people love Taylor Swift. We grew up with her, and we continue to grow up with her. She told stories about being on the outside or falling in love or breaking up with boys in a way that resonated with our past memories or future hopes. She was young enough that we could project whatever we wanted onto her. She was close enough to us to where we could feel connected to someone, yet far enough away from us to where we could blur away her imperfections.

The Tortured Poets Department is not her best work, at least in my opinion.

It’s not the same embodiment of girlhood that Fearless was when she revolutionized country music. It’s not the same groundbreaking, contemporary pop that 1989 was when she transitioned out of country music. It’s not the same heartbreaking, raw folk that folklore or evermore when she surprised us during the pandemic.

But that’s just it. It’s not the same.

It wasn’t ever supposed to be a repeat of her previous albums, and if it were, we would’ve complained that it was the same-old, same-old. There are only so many new barriers that you can break as an artist until you settle into your sound and skillset as a singular artist. We can’t compare the breakthroughs she made in the past to the breakthroughs she is making now.

Admittedly, Taylor Swift garnered herself the repertoire and reputation (pun intended) to where everything we are expecting from her is her next best. The way that she has navigated through the music industry (whether one believes it to be manipulative, overly capitalistic, annoying, etc.) has given us this expectation.

Every era is different. Every tour is bigger. Every album release is more well-known.

And that’s amazing, but we’ve set an unrealistic expectation on her to continuously “get better”. Yes, to a certain extent, she has maintained that expectation, but that’s a pretty high pedastal to put someone on without one day expecting them to fall off. And I don’t mean “fall off” as in she becomes irrelevant. I mean “fall off” as in everyone gets upset and mad at the product she gives us - in this case, The Tortured Poets Department.

To me, I actually think TTPD serves as her slap-in-the-face album. It’s the album that teeters on the edge of being just good enough for some to believe it is her best work, just new-sounding enough for some to believe that she has more on the horizon, and just disturbing enough for some to believe that she has lost her repertoire. And that was her exact purpose.

You see, I don’t think this is her best album. I skip a lot of the songs. A lot of them on the dual album sound like evermore (Thanks, Aaron), and I’m not personally in an evermore mood. But that doesn’t make it a bad album; it just makes it an album I don’t want to put on repeat.

Similarly, Jack Antonoff is back on the album. That much was expected, and that also means that some of the songs are going to sound like the other music she has produced with Jack Antonoff. I mean, it is the same two people on another project again. I love the mellow, synthpop that Jack produced with “Fortnight”, “The Tortured Poets Department”, and “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toy”. But again, I love Jack Antonoff. I could convince myself into this.

I think that her lyricism is beautiful, but she’s honestly crossed into the territory of pedantic unreachability, piling on vocabulary word after vocabulary word in a way that makes the message unreachable. Some people will say that means the album is more lyrically mature while people like me will say that makes the album a bit out of touch.

Then, there’s some lyrics that are, dare I say, stupid:

(“But Daddy I Love Him”) I'm having his baby / No, I'm not, but you should see your faces

(“I Hate It Here”) We wished we could live in instead of this / I'd say the 1830s but without all the racists and getting married off for the highest bid

(“So High School”) You know how to ball, I know Aristotle

But I’m not exactly sure what you were expecting. Not every word out of your mouth is a Shakespearian hit, and if you don’t like her poor word choice here and there, you don’t have to listen to the song.

What is the point of me saying all of this? The point is that the debate and controversy around this album is THE EXACT POINT OF THE ALBUM.

Taylor has reached the point in her career where she is wrestling with the expectation vs. reality of being Taylor Swift. The name ‘Taylor Swift’ has become unreachable, larger-than-life, and out of her control. She is a character in our game, and we have taken her stories and contorted them to our own. (I can prove all these points with lyrics, interviews, changes that she has made in the public eye, etc.)

Thus, we get TTPD. She gives us a sound that is a little bit different but not enough to be completely out of our comfort zone. It pulls us into what she is saying and gets us streaming her music because it’s catchy.

While we’re pulled in with the sound, we are tuned into what new details we’re going to hear about Taylor Swift’s life, what new things we can pick apart. And then, we are hit with lyrics such as Putting narcotics into all of my songs / And that's why you're still singing along (“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”) or 'Cause I'm a real tough kid / I can handle my shit / They said, "Babe, you gotta fake it 'til you make it" and I did / Lights, camera, bitch, smile (“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”).

She’s calling the music industry out (but more specifically, her fandom) for putting her on a pedestal. We’ve all idolized her for too long, made her our symbol of heartbreak, Americana, and healing. Her music did these things, but it also put her in a position of impossibility where every next thing has to be her best. She can’t just release music. She can’t just make an album that is meant to be more songs for your discography.

We need her album to fit into our expectations of what is coming next in her career according to what we know about her, but this album (albeit not her best) is perfect in these ways:

• She talks about Matty Healy for essentially the entire album. Nobody expected that. Nobody wants to hear about how the perfect Miss Americana fell in love with the controversial Matty Healy.

• She admits pretty disturbing things about her mental health. Nobody wants to hear about how Taylor Swift, the billionaire, is not immune to immaturity or depression. She should have grown up from who she was ten years ago because we grew up using her music. We can’t conceptualize that successful people carry trauma with them.

• She is still talking about Kim. Nobody wants to hear about how Taylor Swift isn’t the all-forgiving, all-American girl who just forgives and forgets.

• She shares details and insights into her relational immaturity and lack of emotional boundaries. Nobody wants to know that the person they grieved their relationships with has not yet figured out the relationship thing.

In my opinion (and possibly completely different than what Taylor intended), this album was supposed to make people really uncomfortable because it didn’t teeter toward an extreme. It wasn’t the f-you that reputation was, and it wasn’t the i-love-love that Lover was.

It leaned into topics and things that, as her fandom, we believe are over but, in her life, are not. It’s art that fleshes out the discomfort, disassociation, and imperfection in her life. It’s art which is meant to de-idolize the symbol and person we have made ‘Taylor Swift’ to be. It’s art that challenges who we believe successful (especially female) artists are and how they’re supposed to act.

Taylor is not supposed to still be talking about things that happened ten years ago. Taylor is not supposed to share so many details about her life even though that is her job and that is how we fell in love with her. Taylor is not supposed to talk about past relationships and love because she’s in a happy relationship now.

It’s objectively an average album. (For me, no Taylor Swift album is going to be just average to me. I can persuade myself to love anything she produces.) But that was the purpose! To see if we could wrestle with Taylor Swift as an imperfect, flawed human being and artist who may not appease your every expectation of her art and life. Maybe her art is her art for specific times in her life, and once she produces it, it becomes art for the audience that wants to receive it. We don’t put this same expectation and pressure on other artists; when their albums don’t hit the deepest wells of our heart, we move on.

Her art has to be new. It has to be everything for everyone. It has to fit into who we have made her out to be. If not, then she’s a fading artist. She’s becoming irrelevant.

Her life has to be perfect. It has to be smooth-sailing and without a mistake. It has to move on quickly from her past trauma and mistakes. If not, then she’s an unreliable person to love. She’s not our Taylor anymore.

But maybe she’s not supposed to be.