Album Review: Taylor Swift- 1989
This all sounds
exactly the same…
So maybe subjecting my wife to the new Taylor Swift album, 1989, in the car, as we sped down the
highway was a horrible idea.
It’s really tough to hear the music in our car, you see,
unless you have it cranked up incredibly loud. Our car is older, and when
you’re doing 70+ MPH, just she sheer noise of world rushing by outside the
closed windows still leaks in. So at a low level, we listened to 1989.
And it was around the time the single, “Shake it Off” came
on, that I realized two things: a) 1989
is the “big dumb pop record” of the year, stealing the spotlight (and
rightfully so) from upstart Arianna Grande; and b) 1989, and hell, maybe Taylor Swift, are both like Batman—this
record is not the pop record we need in 2014, but it’s the pop record we
deserve.
It’s difficult to imagine that just eight years ago, Taylor
Swift was a somewhat derpy looking teenager who took the world of pop-country
music by storm with her self-titled debut. She has come along way—a far cry
from the frizzy haired, awkward looking girl featured on the cover who cried
teardrops on her guitar. Now, if anything, it’s teardrops on a wall of
synthesizers and drum machines.
I don’t even know where to start with 1989. I stop short of saying it’s unlistenable because it can’t be
unlistenable—it’s pop music. Pop music that has been labored over by hit-maker
Max Martin. But there, in lies, the rub: it’s so labored over to be catchy and
affable, that any kind of lyrical depth doesn’t so much take a back seat to
hooks and big sounding moments—it’s just stuffed in the trunk, almost forgotten
about completely.
1989 gets off to
kind of a rough start—the opening track, the maligned “Welcome to New York,”
and its immediate follow, “Blank Space,” are in a sense, both awful. As is the
third track, “Style,” which is only saved its preposterously catchy
refrain—despite being musically derivative of early 80s pop and lyrically
insipid.
It’s actually the track that my wife balked at the most,
which in turn made me shut off the album and turn the radio on for the rest of
our car ride, that I really like the most out all 13 tracks on 1989. “Wildest Dreams” arrives late in
the game—within the last third of the record, but there’s something incredibly
admirable about how evocative the lyrics are (yes, even though they are still
so fucking vapid) and how minimal the production is. Coming after so many
countless “big pop moments” it’s refreshing and grabbing to hear a powerful
synth driven ballad like this.
But yeah, “Say you’ll
remember me, standing in a nice dress, staring at the sunset,” is horrible.
Like that’s what my wife got mad about the most, was that lyric right there.
Because Swift herself is credited as a writer on all 13
tracks, this album is inherently about her—more specifically, her headline
getting love life with other famous boys, making for short-term relationships,
then eventually making lyrical content. “I
go on too many dates, but I can’t make them stay—that’s what people say,”
Swift boasts in front of the big beat production of “Shake it Off”—a song where
she eventually raps, kind of, in a bridge section.
And yeah that’s about as cringe worthy as you’d imagine it
being.
Swift’s self-awareness, to an extent, comes off as being
very aloof—like she’s giving one big “Kanye shrug” to the notion of her
personal life becoming the fodder of both tabloids and the songs she sings. “Saw you there and I thought ‘Oh my God, look
at that face, you look like my next mistake…And I know you heard about me, so
hey, let’s be friends—I’m dying to see how this one ends. Grab your passport
and my hand. I can make the bad guys good for a weekend,” she confesses
within the first verse of “Blank Space.”
“Bag guys” are an image that she continues to come back to,
as well as the fact that even though she is a “good girl,” well heck, she has
feelings too—“Got that good girl faith
and a tight little skirt,” she coos on “Style.” Swift, despite being an
adult pop star, is still maintaining some kind of gold-flaked paint façade
within her lyrics. She doesn’t drip sexuality the way contemporaries like Katy
Perry or Miley Cyrus does, but it’s there, buried in the context, dressed up in
PG-13 imagery.
Musically, even when the record isn’t dripping in
saccharine, sounding exactly the same, every song comes off sounding like it
was written to eventually be used as bumper music on a talk radio station. And
what I mean by that is this: I used to listen to this talk/gossip station based
out of the Twin Cities (My Talk 107.1.) When they came back from commercial
breaks, they’d play the refrain of a pop song, and bring the show back in after
the refrain was over, before the next verse started—with the on air talent
saying “Welcome back,” in the space created by a musical pause, if you will.
During my initial listen of this record, there were
countless moments where the refrain finished up, and before the second verse
starts, there’s that pause, and I could almost here someone saying “And we’re
back!” as the beat keeps going underneath them.
1989 is a big,
colorful album that attempts and at times succeeds in distracting the listener
with slick production and Swift’s flat and compressed vocals. The heart of the
record is that there really is no heart—Swift, herself, is a character, or a
caricature: she’s the girl who grew up in the industry, dated famous men, broke
up with famous men, wrote songs about those famous men, then went on to say
“Shucks you guys, isn’t my love life HILARIOUS?” It barely makes for a
compelling listen, let alone an idea to be stretched out over 13 songs. Swift
is often commended for the fact that she writes her own material, and that’s
all well and good, but what does that say about her as a songwriter when she’s
turning out the equivalent of a toothpaste commercial? I can usually find
SOMETHING to like on a pop record, but in this case, it’s a difficult task.
Swift is not an artist; she’s a singer, or a performer. This is more or less a well-designed
product as opposed to an album.
I feel like I’m doing this wrong, however. I feel like in
Swift’s attempt to be affable with an album made to feature “something for
everyone” (80s synth pop, songs that sound like Haim should have written them,
and a Katy Perry dis track that sounds like a Katy Perry song) and in
hipster/indie culture’s continued appropriation and gentrification of Top 40
Pop—well shit, I feel like I am supposed to love this album. But I don’t.
There are certainly things I can appreciate about it. And
despite the flack that “Wildest Dreams” is getting from the fanboys on the
internet (writing it off as a Lana Del Ray b-side) it’s still the only moment
out of nearly an hour’s worth of music that stands out for me as something
remotely memorable. The rest is just today’s catchy hook that will undoubtedly
not stand the test of time, only to be replaced within weeks by that day’s
catchy hook. It takes work to actually make “pop” music that is meaningful and
not just a stick of Fruit Stripe gum. Swift’s ascent to a marquee name and a
straight up pop darling is certainly admirable—she certainly worked hard to get
where she is today, but what, exactly, did she produce in the wake of all that
hard work?
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe all she wants is to be
remembered, standing in a nice dress while staring at the sunset.
Maybe that’s
what we all want deep down.
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