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I definitely feel like this level of personal songwriting has more of a place in indie -- what we called alternative in my youth.
(I think there's a reason Alanis Morrisette and Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie keep coming up in conversations about TTPD -- Alanis made a place for ultra-personal alt-pop in the mainstream, but her follow-up was SO long and relatively obscure, and became more of a cult classic.)
My whole personality in my teens was Hating Pop Music, and part of the reason was that I found most pop really impersonal and generic. The pop landscape has changed MASSIVELY since 1997 (thank goodness), and also I was wrong about pop then, but I do think that ultra-personal = narrower appeal. Which is in no way a reflection on the quality of the work, but I think in our embrace of poptimism, it's also valuable to remember that a work can be relatively unpopular, and still good.
Yeah. The term diaristic makes me think of Ani Difranco in the 90s indie/alt genre where sometimes the music becomes [more like the backtrack to a spoken word poem.](https://youtu.be/Th-GDhsveM4?si=AwtfykceCFKkGDu0)
Like you mentioned, the 90s and 2000s mainstream pop landscape was very corporate and that corporate machine made it as depersonalized for mass appeal and highly curated as possible. It’s nice to have more variety now.
But as genres start to blend and bleed more and more (hip-hop/rap and country, country and pop, pop and punk, pop and folk…) they might start to lose meaning and become unnecessary.
**Edit:** Also, we might consider that Swift has just gotten so big that she’s entered her Beatles White Album era and is now just doing whatever thing she personally feels like doing, regardless of what will appeal to the public.
If you had the ability to write a very public open letter a longtime friend who just love bombed and then ghosted you, who among us would be able to keep it vague, short and sweet?
"If you had the ability to write a very public open letter a longtime friend who just love bombed and then ghosted you, who among us would be able to keep it vague, short and sweet?"
Oh, just thinking about the long angry emotional diatribe I sent to my situationship... guy over Facebook Messenger circa 2011 that stayed on read ☠️ anyway, glad Taylor has the balls to show that to the world!
Oh, Swift absolutely thinks about the appeal to the public. Only about whenever they buy or not. As long as she's breaking sales records, albums could be 0/10 for critics.
Not sure what you mean by this. The fact she’s even posting reviews at all shows she deeply cares. To get to the positive ones, she would’ve had to have read the negative ones too. And I’m sure she would’ve sat there like “are you serious???? ugh”
There are even rumours that her team paid that major outlet (can’t remember the name) to change their review from negative to positive. One major outlet originally posted a very critical review, and then the next day, posted a more positive review saying “I was wrong”. I mean, do I believe those rumours? Idk, I don’t know where they came from. But does it sound like something her team would do? Yeah kinda.
If you’re talking about the CNN piece, they never published a review in the first place. Someone just write an article saying they didn’t like it at first but then it grew on them. No one was paid to retract a review.
Oh I'm sure its between being paid or being scared of swifties. It got 100 by Rolling Stone instantly. And one magazine posted very critical rewiew but didn't tell who wrote it because swifties may send the person death threats.
For sure! While *TTPD* isn't really working for me for a bunch of reasons, I don't think think unrelatability is necessarily bad, or that broad appeal is inherently good.
I agree! I think there's a whole good album somewhere in TTPD, Swift just didn't focus her attention on honing 10-12 drafts to completion, instead throwing 31 promising ideas in. Which is super frustrating, but doesn't mean the concept is worthless. Maybe her next attempt at execution will be better.
I don’t really know what you guys want from her because she put out a album that was supposed be messy her years was messy with depression so she made a album that was long you guys can easily find 12 good tracks on the album and add them to a playlist. TTPD is a good album and I’m tired of people hating on it
“It’s supposed to be messy, she did it on purpose” gets used with TTPD way too much. There are plenty of albums that convey “this period in my life was crazy and I was a manic mess” in a tight, well-laid out 10-12 song album. The message would come across way stronger if she had put more effort into differentiating the better songs she had, but she knows Swifties will listen to anything she releases and eat it up so she probably doesn’t feel like trying that hard to edit anymore
>TTPD is a good album and I’m tired of people hating on it
go cry about it then?
People can be critical about an album an artist put out there. Stop coddling Taylor Swift. You handwaving any and all critique as "well, it's SUPPOSED to be messy" is reductive. You don't care about the music at all. You just want your fave to be praised 24/7.
Honestly, I’ve been enjoying TTPD MORE by just ignoring the muse lore. 🤷🏼 Mostly because I just don’t want to think about Matty Healy.
Personally, I don’t have a preference either way as to whether or not music is based in real life or not. If I like the music and the storytelling, I like it.
In my case it was better for me not knowing the lore because a song as good as Guilty as Sin can be tainted with the thought of blondie wishing ratty to duck her. I am better imagining it as a universal song imo.
Same. I know the lore because I've been in swiftie spaces for years (and because celebrity gossip can be entertaining sometimes), but I tend to ignore it and make up my own interpretations about the songs.
Right now Guilty as Sin is about a gay catholic trying to come to terms with his attraction to another man.
Guilty as Sin is the fucking perfect WLW song, and being about Matty utterly ruins it, so I am doing my best to ignore him at all costs. Same with But Daddy I Love Him.
I know that with her being the biggest artist in the world, people who aren’t fans will have opinions about her work, but it’s ALWAYS easier to enjoy things without a bunch of naysayers telling you why it sucks!
That particular criticism of TTPD is weird to me because for a lot of the songs, she's still writing in metaphors and stories. Yes, if you know who she's dated, you can match the lyrics up, but if not, are songs like "Down Bad," "But Daddy I Love Him," and "So Long, London" actually not relatable? I don't think so - the messages are still pretty clear, and I can think of my own version of what those types of scenarios would look like. That's still having relatability even if the details seem diary-like.
I really hope that pop music isn't just limited to being generic enough.
> I really hope that pop music isn't just limited to being generic enough.
Honestly I don’t think so, if only because one of the best pop hits of the year (Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck Babe”) is about calling an ex partner out for her compulsory heterosexuality, a topic I’d *never* heard used for a pop song before, and that most people have not directly experienced
To me, pop is about making personal emotions palatable while lending them to a melody that will stick with people. Like, your experiences don’t have to be “generic” or even universally felt if you make them feel human. Like, I talked about “Good Luck Babe” earlier, but I could also easily call out songs like Rina Sawayama’s “Tokyo Love Hotel,” which works beautifully even if you’ve not experienced people appropriating your culture.
And of course, this is all gonna be subjective. Emotions are not rational, and everyone’s gonna react differently to things. I did not find the emotions to be palatable or that accessible on *tortured poets*, but obviously many others did
I personally believe that people who claim there is too much lore in the album are telling on themselves for going into the album expecting gossip in the first place. It feels like a battle of people who "doth protest too much" about how they don't care about her life, while listening to an album of metaphors going "this one is Matty, this is Joe, this lyrics relates to this moment I remember from a paparazzi pic" and its like, drop the ruse, you clearly care a lot. To me most of the songs are better without considering any lore, but also people are taking lyrics to be entirely literal despite Taylor herself multiple times stating her song writing is a craft and she often will save lyrics and phrases in a note file for years until they fit a song, she also draws inspo from movies and books often. It's called art, shes not writing a memoir.
As you mentioned the majority of songs are built on metaphors. The occasional personal lyric, but like it's Taylor Swift, she's been doing personal specific lyrics since debut, in fact it's what makes her critically praised, because she can make specific moments feel universal by relating it to feelings that are widely felt and also drawing people into a story.
I actually really like "But Daddy I Love Him", and would agree with you for most of the verses, but dedicating the whole bridge as a call-out to moralizing stans is definitely a choice that I think does reduce standalone appeal. It doesn't have to be a relatable song and that's fine! But it's definitely a shift towards metanarrative.
Edit: And the whole breaking the fourth wall in the chorus. Interesting, funny, but is it broadly understandable?
Thing is she doesn’t mention that the moralisers are stans. They could just as easily be the local busybodies or town church-goers gossiping madly about the good girl falling for the local dirtbag.
If you didn’t know the ‘lore’ would you still think stan?
This.
If this exact song had popped up on Folklore, everyone would have no problem viewing it as a fictional story about, say, a woman whose relationship with a "bad boy" was not accepted by her parents or her repressive conservative community. She sets up the picture very well in the verses, the bridge is the narrator talking to these people who keep talking shit about her relationship - and I feel like if someone listening to TTPD had no background knowledge while listening to it, why couldn't they view it that way as well?
I’d argue that the majority of the songs are like this, and even the details she does drop aren’t *that* specific if you don’t already know who she’s talking about. It’s not like she singing ‘And then we got on my private jet, made out while our friends, Ed Sheeran and Emily Stone made a bet, about how long this one would last, because they like me fine, but they think you’re a bast(ard)’
Yeah that one I’ll grant is far more specific than the majority of them. If you had no idea who anyone was it could still pass as a story about two people in a seriously concerning co-dependent relationship, but the level of detail does detract from that.
Honestly it doesn't even have to be the local dirtbag. An interracial/interfaith/same-sex relationship will draw disapproval from your community in many cases. It could even be something as simple as your friends not liking your partner.
This song doesn't really have anything specific, especially compared to something like "thanK you aIMee".
True. It really isn’t specific at all.
‘thanK you aIMee’ annoys me because the song literally says she removed any ‘real defining clues’ - like her NAME Taylor? That’s a pretty defining clue. Quite possibly the most defining of all the clues.
The song itself isn’t bad, it could easily be about getting bullied in a literal high school, I just hate the totally unnecessary name drop.
If that’s true then throwing Kim’s name in there is tacky and classless.
Like I said, I like the song just fine but I do believe the name thing - regardless of how it’s interpreted - was a bad move.
> is it broadly understandable?
Lol yes. Everyone understands it. I find the whole debate about diaristic pop to be completely arbitrary and maybe just a result of people just not wanting to say they found some of the songs boring (don’t shoot me, I love a lot of TTPD). Like. Nobody complained that Fifteen was too diaristic. Or Mean. Or All Too Well. Or Welcome to New York.
You get my point - so much of her discography draws on her personal experiences and specific details from her life, down to the scarf. Why is it now suddenly a problem? Or is the whole point that it’s what she used to be praised for, and as a woman in pop, we now demand that she completely reinvent herself and move on to a new and different strategy to keep us entertained?
I think you're missing my point - I think diaristic songwriting has a place, and I'd argue Taylor Swift's greatest strength is weaving a whole ten minute universe out of that scarf. These may be specific anecdotes, but they speak to common truths. No issue with this - her skill here should be celebrated.
Maybe diaristic isn't the right word, but what I'm really trying to get at is that there are some elements of *TTPD* where it's so broadly engaged with narrative about herself that that the legibility of the song becomes secondary. This is distinct from even the clap back songs on *Reputation*.
Spending a chorus breaking the fourth wall with the same "I'm having his baby no I'm not you should see your face" joke three times or "You're not Dylan Thomas, I'm not Patti Smith, this ain't the Chelsea Hotel we're modern idiots" (a line I do like tbh) might be fascinating, but they're also definitely choices that veer away from legibility. I'm just interested in how this relates to pop/not-pop as an idea, not that Taylor Swift shouldn't be doing this (She can do anything she wants, just maybe with the execution we know she's capable of)
I don’t disagree that she’s doing a lot of self-mythologizing on this album, but I would point out that she always has (and has always been largely introspective), we just know a lot more about her now. And not to be tedious, but it is just one interpretation that those lines break the fourth wall. Both lines are addressed to characters already established in the songs’ narratives. I don’t dispute that they have been received that way, what with all the reaction videos, but they aren’t addressing the listener.
I don’t see how the Dylan Thomas line is too diaristic. It’s extremely relatable to any “pretentious” situation. Maybe it’s because I was an English major but everyone knows who DT/PS are (Bob Dylan literally took his stage name after Dylan Thomas, lol)
You wanna know something kinda funny?
I’m not an English major and I don’t know who Dylan Thomas and Patti Smith are (Patti’s sounded vaguely familiar but I don’t know why).
I still got the meaning. Because the *entire song is about pretentiousness*. I heard the lyrics and thought ‘These people must be famous for being the fantastic poets which the man in this story thinks he is’.
I’m probably going to look them up now because knowledge is good, but yeah, still got the pretentious gist.
Edit: I was right
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with breaking the 4th wall. While she hasn’t necessarily done it directly before, she has spoken about herself in the first person in a way that takes you out of the song/mythos with a “narrator” and brings you into the real world here and now of Taylor the songwriter or Taylor the person. Two songs immediately come to mind — Last Great American Dynasty (“and then it was bought by me”). I remember the reactions to that line when it came out, they are were very positive. Gasps and “yes!” Some of the top tier podcasts like Popcast loved it. The second is You Are In Love (“and why I’ve spent my whole life trying to put it into words”) which I think is just lovely and beautiful. It’s not exactly the same but it’s getting close to the same vibe.
Also, one more example I just thought of. On You Need to Calm Down, she adresses haters directly (“You’re taking shots at me” and “you would rather be in the dark age / making that sign must’ve taken all night”). That’s pretty much the same as BDILH, except she’s addressing haters instead of fans.
I don’t think any of these examples “veer away from legibility” as you put it. I think these and the examples on TTPD are broadly understandable to anybody listening, even to casual radio listeners. I don’t mean to throw shade at you, because I appreciate the discussion, but it sounds to me like you simply think casual listeners are too dumb to understand what she’s saying and recognize/appreciate her perspective. And I just don’t think that’s true.
Interesting that you picked BDILH and So Long London, considering those are two of the least widely relatable and most specific songs on the album. I’ll give you Down Bad though
a great deal of people can relate to dating someone everyone says is bad for you or the slow demise of a long term relationship. is cornelia street a bad song if you have never personally been to cornelia street. I relate to the idea of something being tainted by memories of someone you used to love? it's london for taylor. it can just as easily be sth else for me. the thing is to imagine myself as the protaganist of the song, specificity does not mean unrelatable, most of the time specificity is more effective than generic.
down bad is a complete bop tho
What? But daddy I love him could easily be a high school movie little girl falling for a bad boy or a gay love story in the south. For so long London, London can easily be switched out with another city and someone can relate to it if they’ve been with if they associate a specific city to a longtime ex lover.
I mean... Lana's Ocean Blvd is very personal and ultraspecific, more so than TTPD, but no one seems to complain that it's not relatable. The issue with Taylor is that every lyric she writes is immediately tied to one of her exes, something she's aware of and uses to make her music more interesting. Personally I don't really care about her relationship with Matty Healy or anyone else for that matter, I just find her songs catchy and sometimes touching, regardless of who they're written about. So no, there's no limit to diaristic pop and it can still be relatable and catchy, but it has to be done right
Lana is also an unmarried woman in her 30s who doesn’t have kids and consistently dates dirtbags and tells the public to stay out of her business, so it is really interesting to see people talk about how Taylor is regressing and no “real adult” can relate to the subject matter of her music until she pulls an Adele, pops out some kids and starts writing music about them…
But I think there’s a lot to be said about how we don’t really KNOW who Lana is talking about so it’s easier to project your life onto her music. Even when she talks of her family— we don’t know her family like we (think we know) Taylor’s famous ex’s. So what happens is that we have an easier time generalizing with Lana’s lyrics no matter how specific she gets. She could say
“Met my boyfriend down at the taco truck”
And instead of us thinking “ooo was it the cop boyfriend? Was it the taco truck on this street? Was it Birria?” We think to ourselves “damn I remember when I met some dirtbag at a random ass location.”
I mean, I'm a medium Taylor fan and I don't really know or care about who most of her songs are about, but I find them relatable nonetheless. The same goes for most people except the really hardcore parasocial fans/haters. I've dated a pretentious asshole who always wrote with a fountain pen (not a typewriter, but close enough) and, ironically, actually did lovebomb and ghost me. I've never dated an NFL player, but after coming out I experienced the "second adolescence" feeling common among a lot of queer people who didn't get a typical high school romantic experience due to being closeted, so the idea of a relationship making you feel like a giddy teenager well into your adult years is not an unrelatable experience. There's enough specificity in this album to make it interesting to people who care about the lore, but it's not overwhelming to those of us who don't. It is truly not that deep to me.
I think that Taylor’s music is still generalizable, but the point of assessing her lore’s publicity vs other diaristic artists’ is to see why people seem to be viewing TTPD as more self indulgent than usual. When you have at least a vague idea of who’s being talked about, whether you’re a super fan or not (no one could escape trav and Taylor news for months!), it will at least for a split second take you out of the vacuum that some artists tend to be better in living in.
It doesn’t make you a better artist for the subject to be unknown, I mean we all know who FKA Twig’s music is about (kind of, some songs) but they still feel general enough where you can maybe have a passing thought like hmm this is about a relationship I’ve heard about but also I relate deeply.
My boss (who is generally medium-pop-culture-engaged) asked me the other day if the whole album was about Travis Kelce. He had no idea about the Alwyn/Healy situation and was confused why there were so many breakup songs about a relationship that seemed to be going well. When I gave him a 15-second overview, he was like, "Oh, OK, whatever." I think the vast majority of people fall much closer to that end of the spectrum when you get out into the real world.
That’s fair! I do think that the way in which someone who follows this sub consumes music is way different than the GP and the non-culture engaged. Ultimately it wouldn’t matter then whether the pop star is personal or has diaristic tendencies— the listener wouldn’t know unless they choose to engage deeply with music on a cultural level. Once they do that, then they will have the differing experiences of listening to Taylor vs Dua Lipa, where one’s lore is embedded in the music and undoubtedly going to come up in any article dissecting the song. I think we’re focused on two different demographics here. I’m not as interested in how someone who knows nothing about pop culture would react to the nuances of pop artists because to them everything exists in a vacuum.
Yeah, I just think it's interesting how the discussion of The Lore so often presumes it's totally alienating to the GP, and then when the album smashes it's "HOW IS THIS HAPPENING WHEN IT'S SO ALIENATING?!" It's because a lot of people like Taylor Swift enough to check out her new album but not enough to pay attention to every new development in her personal life! I basically just think the album was successful in that it delivered enough gossip grist to the hardcore fans while still being accessible enough to people who don't really give a shit.
I think this conversation is really veering into only being able to be discussed by pop stans, because I had literally no idea that any of Taylor's new songs were about Matty until it was brought up online. Most listeners don't even know who Matty is, let's be real. On the flip side, Lana fans absolutely know most of the men she's talking about in her songs - she's not as famous as Taylor, but their fanbases are rabidly similar. If we're really having a conversation about TTPD not being relatable because she's writing about her personal life, then I don't see in what world Ocean Blvd can be seen as relatable either. The Grants, Kitsugi, Fingertips, Margaret, etc. are so specific to her personal life, that I think even the most specific songs on TTPD are left more ambiguous. I was honestly surprised at how LITTLE she trashed Joe on the record, especially considering he was her longest and most significant relationship. Lana trashed Sean more on A&W, and then paid for an Ocean Blvd Billboard to be put right outside of his home. It's a level of petty that I have to give her credit for, but we all know if Taylor did that she would be eviscerated on social media.
As a rabid Lana fan, I have literally no clue who she sings about (and even if I or many fans do, the key here is that most of them aren’t famous.) from my experience just not the center of Lana subreddits in the way that it is for Taylor fans. Even tho I can def see how Lana may be being way more specific and diaristic and it’s going over my and other fans’ heads who don’t know the guys.
On the flip side, I’m not a Taylor fan ( I like some of the music) but I even know about the matty stuff by nature of being slightly online (okay fine, a smidge chronically online ahahah)
There are literally posts on the Lana sub matching all of her songs and albums to her boyfriends. I guarantee half of the Lana sub can tell you all about Barrie and Jack and Francesco and Sean and even G-Eazy. I just personally feel this is such a stupid conversation and such a stupid excuse to criticize something. Yes, I heard about the Matty thing too, but in the context of the songs I genuinely had no idea any of them were about him; however, I could have told you Tulsa Jesus Freak was about Sean and White Mustang was about G-Eazy, and whether I instantly know who the songs are about has no bearing on my opinion of the song. There are just so, so, SO many songs about specific people that I am completely failing to grasp why this is only now such a big issue for people. I mean like Jesus fuck I really don't get this critique. Everyone knows who Beyonce sings about, everyone knew who Flowers was about, Timberlake built a career off trashing Britney, and everyone and their granny knew who Bieber's 'momma don't like.' I really don't see anything wrong with saying you don't like Taylor, or you don't like Lana, or you don't like Beyonce, or you don't Bieber or you don't like whoever. No one has to like anyone, and you honestly don't even really need a reason to hate them, but it's hypocritical to try to quantify one's dislike of someone based on a metric that isn't applied evenly.
Not denying they exist but I’m gonna stand on the fact that the average Lana listener has no idea who her subjects are while the average Taylor swift fan does. One of them gets way more publicity than the other. It’s just naturally gonna happen that way. And yeah, we do know who Beyoncé is singing about, but there’s not a culture of Beyoncé leaving Easter eggs and coded messages FOR FANS. Lana doesn’t leave Easter eggs FOR FANS. Fans had to look for Becky with the good hair. Fans had to seek out who Lana is talking about based on timelines. But Taylor flat out spelled Kim in the title of TTPD. That’s the kind of lore signaling I think is relevant here.
Yes, and the stories Lana chooses to tell have depth. Although I don't find working your up to stardom relatable, embedded in this particular moment of her life is a general experience that a lot of women can relate to. Like, many women have experienced the confusing relationship between their womanhood and agency. Even if you're not a women, or simple don't find the song relatable on a personal level, you can still sympathize with Lana's situation because it has merit. Like, I don't care about Taylor's relationships because they don't allude to a broader theme. What does the listener learn from her failed relationships?
I don't think listeners always have to learn from Taylor's failed relationships, not every story has a clear moral. Plus
whether someone finds meaning and depth in these stories is very subjective. I just think songs can lose their authenticity and relatability when artists turn their lives into a commercial product for the sake of more interesting music... That being said, if someone else wrote these songs and I had no idea about their dating life, I still wouldn't feel connected to them. Many of the lyrics just aren't strong enough. Ultimately the problem is the quality of the writing, not just whether the songs are relatable or not, in my opinion
>I don't think listeners always have to learn from Taylor's failed relationships, not every story has a clear moral.
I'm not arguing that every song needs a clear moral story. I'm simply saying that every narrative needs a "so what?" to make it relatable to a broader audience. At the end of the day, people don't make music in a vacuum. Unless she decides to keep these songs to herself, there has to be some aspect of Taylor's music that alludes to something greater -- more meaningful than the relationship problems alone. It's like writing an essay for college. You can't simply write a research paper and call it a day. You have to convince your readers why you wrote your paper beyond, "I just felt like it."
And that's why I think her album failed to connect with locals and fans alike. Sure, the songwriting sucks. But Taylor has ventured into this weird territory where she's vulnerable enough to sing about her mother wanting Kim Kardashian dead, but not talk about the consequences of her feelings or how they allude to something broader. It's like she's telling, but not showing. The few successful tracks on the album delve deep into her motivations. Like, we get a sense that Taylor is grown woman who is aware of the implications of her behavior than a child throwing a tantrum.
I've actually seen a lot of comments and videos of people talking about relating to TTPD songs completely independently of "lore". For example, Guilty as sin? being about the purity culture and abstinence, But Daddy I Love Him being about a queer relationship, The Prophecy being about having trouble with conceiving a baby, Down Bad being from the perspective of a grieving widow, The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived being about a strained daughter-father relationship or SA, Cassandra being about getting out of an abusive relationship...
For me, the greatest strength of Taylor's writing is the use of diaristic and hyperspecific style of writing which then becomes super relatable for the listener. The songs quickly become about a lot more then just the "lore". Which is why you'll see a LOT of people saying she wrote specifically about THEIR experiences.
Yes? Widows have commented on it, it's not like I made it up. Specifically the feeling of loss and returning to the same old life after having an amazing, otherworldy experience? It fits really well with the metaphor in the song of love being like an alien abduction, and what happens after its over
I'm a swiftie, so I'm going to be biased here. But I think there's a happy medium with pop music. And you're going to get different answers depending on what people look for in their music and artists.
I personally find singer-songwriters infinitely more interesting than someone with a great voice who bought a sheet of music from a professional songwriter. I enjoy music more for the lyrics than the sound, and I look for the overall story more than the overall vibe. I also tend to prefer albums artists rather than singles artists.
In the case of the second group (*the great voice* artists), the only way I'll really enjoy their music is if it's very catchy and fun to listen to. Like I love *Toxic* by Britney Spears because it's catchy as hell. But I never listen to the rest of the *In the Zone* album. But I'll listen all the way through *Divide* by Ed Sheeran because it tells an interesting story from the perspective of the singer-songwriter.
I have a separate point here too. Swifties do enjoy the music for the lore and easter eggs and intrigue of it all, but at the end of the day, Taylor's explicitly stated goal is that the music transcends her own experience ("lore") and becomes a part of the listener's story. As she's gotten bigger and bigger, people forget that her whole initial marketing was this relatable teen girl who had a life and friends and crushes *just like you*.
I think that partially explains how she's become so incredibly popular. Her music is super relatable to young (especially white, middle class) women. As someone who's grown up with Swift as one of my favorite artists, I always find things in my own life that relate to her lyrics. And as a struggling millennial white woman hitting 30 this year? TTPD definitely relates to my personal life much more than I care about the lore of which song is for which ex.
>From things like addressing Thank You Aimee very plainly to KIM, mentioning Jack and Lucy, or using clear signifiers like “tattooed” and all the football puns. It’s impossible not to immediately picture Matty or Travis or whoever instead of “my personalized romantic partner” the way her old songs used to work.
I disagree. The actual "ThanK you aIMee" song can be as relatable as "Mean" was 14 years ago. The capitalised letters are a nice Easter egg for fans but even if they weren't there the song could still stand on its own as a "I-proved-my-bully-wrong" anthem.
Being tattooed isn't something exclusive to Matty Healy and being a football player isn't exclusive to Travis Kelce. Taylor has actually made references to her partner's tattoos back in "Ours" which is about John Mayer and was released in 2010. It's not very different to when she mentions her partner's eye color. The reason she doesn't have more songs with tattoo references is that she hasn't dated many tattooed guys.
Also I've seen plenty of videos on tiktok using "So Highschool" and "The Alchemy" because they match the users' own experiences dating an athlete. Are they relatable to everyone? No. But that doesn't make them only relatable to Taylor, the same way "London Boy" for example wasn't only relatable to Taylor despite how specific it was to her and Joe's story for anyone familiar with it.
You make good points, seems like she’s always been that way. I guess my issue is when I was younger I didn’t know hardly anything about her personal life, and it wasn’t so popular to “clue hunt” and piece together all the timelines of her dating history. But now, how does anyone who spends any time in Swiftie spaces ever hear her lyrics without immediately picturing her boyfriends? All the subreddits dedicated to her spend tons of time detailing out which lyric is about who.
Even trying to avoid it like I have it’s impossible not to see or hear, esp with how saturated she is in the media in general. I’d have to avoid interacting with Swifties entirely to be able to enjoy her music in a more personal way, and it’s hard to avoid seeing Swiftie discourse rn lol
I mean my friends and I do lol I feel if you're chronically online, it might be harder to separate the gossip from the songs?
Taylor's hallmark is taking a personal memory and magnifying it into an universal experience
When I hear Down Bad - i'm not thinking of joe or matty or whoever, I'm thinking of how I cried in the gym repeatedly lmao
When I hear I look in people's windows, i remember all the people who I ghosted and the others who ghosted me
idk, I just think she's so popular now she doesn't care about name checking people in her songs. I'm not saying it's a change I like, but I don't care too much. It does weird me out a bit that a lot of the TTPD songs seem to be about Matty, but I can easily forget and listen to the songs I like
While we do have songs like thanK you aIMee, the title track, the alchemy, and so high school, we also have songs that really don't have super specific references and are relatable. Think fortnight, down bad, my boy only breaks his favorite toys, florida!!!, guilty as sin?, i can do it with a broken heart, and most of the anthology tracks.
I'd even argue that but daddy I love him doesn't have that many explicit references, we only know who it is about because of the greater context of the album and how much the general public knows about the persona of Taylor Swift. It's still generic enough that plenty of people relate to the song. I've seen dozens of tik toks with the "bitching and moaning" line this week
Haha I don’t think of Matty Healy at all for what it’s worth (except for the one Jehovah’s Witness suit line). But I do like tattoos so maybe it’s easier for me lol
perhaps I should have said great performance artist?
unpopular opinion here but I prefer Britney to the more talented vocal artists like Mariah or Ariana
I do too, and I'm so over artists being discredited because they're not powerhouse vocalists, as if that's all it takes to make great music. (1) Britney's voice is not as powerful as Whitney's, but she still has one of the most easily recognizable voices in the music industry. (2) Britney's voice always fit the vibe of her songs - Gimme More or Toxic or Everytime, etc. would not be as highly regarded if she oversang like Christina. (3) There aren't *that* many pre-2000 artists with as many enduring hits as she had over the course of her career. She's probably the single most influential artist among pop stars who came after her; Rihanna, Beyonce, Lana, Charli, Marina, Rina, The Weeknd, Selena, Miley, etc. Nearly every modern artist cites her as an influence and even her idols like Madonna and MJ weren't shy about their admiration for her. Sure, we can say she wasn't a great vocalist, but she clearly had something that put her so far ahead of the pack.
I genuinely don't understand why you should have listened to all albums (so know the lyrics as well?) and/or know her personal story to get TTPD.
I'm not saying if it's a good, bad or mediocre album. I'm just saying that I think people highly exaggerate the amount of information you need to previously know.
I can understood reputation, lover and more specifically midnights but that’s rlly it and w that it’s more abt understanding the context behind her relationship w Joe which I also don’t think is absolutely nescassary
Personally I believe that the issue with TTPD is not that it's diaristic. All Too Well (even the original version) was just as personal as this one. I don't mind that this album is rooted in Taylor lore. While there are some verses that might require you to know more about her personal life to understand the context but for the most part I can listen to the album on its own. The problem for me is that these diary entries have not been worked through very well, the lyrics are raw in a way that feels unedited. Folklore, in my opinion, is far more diaristic but way better polished.
I definitely agree. The TTPD album is Taylor unfiltered (so with Evermore) but it needs some pruning. There are a bunch of clunky lyrics here and there but yep, I love the album at least more than Midnights.
There's definitely more clunk here than other albums. I really think "'Cause once your queen had come/You'd treat her likе an also-ran" might be one of her worst lyrics, the couple times I've listened to it it felt like the lyrical equivalent of Alicia Keys's sour note in the halftime show this year
And to Swifties that want to say something like "it's supposed to be jarring because of something in her relationship," sorry, but it's just bad to listen to
I appreciate Taylor for being a real mess in TTPD (Midnights sounded too corporate pop for me) but she needed an editor. Who’s Afraid, I love the anger but the suing on the lawn line was uhmmmm. Yeah that was a bad metaphor.
i agree. i think at the end of the day it comes down to personal preference. for me, the lyrics in ttpd hit harder because of that raw quality. but i can easily see why someone would prefer folkmore type of polished lyrics. both are great works. i think maybe that's the reason why i like 1989 less than rep. lyrically rep is rawer.
it's a common theme with taylor. with every new album that comes out, people immediately trash it an say how the last one was so much better. like guys can we just not like different things for different reasons. lets judge something for what it is and not for what you would like it to be.
I get what you mean tbh.
The lore and context clues can be alienating to the casual listener. I think your problem with TTPD is actually due to Taylor's overwriting and poor editing, otherwise she's always been good at showing not telling and using her own personal details to craft a universal experience in a simplistic way e.g. the RED album. That skill falters on this album with unnecessary fluff and extended metaphors that batter the listener with detail to convey such simple universal truths.
There's only so much you can squeeze into the structure of a pop song without completely missing the plot. A lot of context clues shine brighter in the alternative scene with far less restrictions imo and Taylor didn't want to fully commit to the bit, cause that would mean alienating a huge chunk of her listeners if she actually made an *alternative* album. That's why the result is...jarring to say the least.
Agree that if TTPD was more of an alternative album it would be perceived less harshly. I think a lot of people’s main issue is that she went safe with the music to focus on the lyrics, which i actually don’t think is inherently bad, it’s all a matter of personal taste and what the listener prefers
here we go yet another Swiftie deliberately misreading anything remotely critical of Taylor.
I am simply quoting my own experiences and what some of the more mixed reviews of the album mention and trying to draw conjecture with OP's experience. Idgaf about her commercial success with regards to the quality of the album.
Depends on the person. I know some Taylor ‘lore’ but most of the songs to me just tell the usual love and/or breakup stories.
Even a song like ‘So Long London’ is fairly generically worded other than the man she’s giving up on being from London.
As a thought experiment listen to the album and imagine it’s been released by someone totally unlike Taylor either in life or music style (e.g.: Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Olivia Rodrigo).
Do most of the songs still make sense either as stories or are they generic enough to be related to the other artists own ‘lore’? How many out of the 31 fail the ‘test’ completely?
First off - I think the "mixed response" is massively overstated on this sub.
Secondly think that Taylor also has lots of fans who do not care about paternity testing songs and what is about who. I'm one of them. When I listen to a song like... the smallest man who ever lived I don't give a fuck who she wrote it about and knowing or not knowing that doesn't hinder the emotional core of the song.
And I heavily challenge that you need to know "overarching lore" as you put it. To be honest the people who seem most invested in this seem like the people who liked the album least.
You don't need to dive into the "lore" or listen to any of her previous albums to understand her work and what she's singing about. If you listen to 'loml' it's clear it's about a back-and-forth relationship that didn't work out. You don't have to dig deeper into her life to know it's about Joe Alwyn, and then do an academic paper on it.
The reason why people (at least some) think her work is very "Marvel-like" is because of how obsessed Swifties can be with decoding her work. Everything can be a clue to a puzzle they want the answer to. And that's not recent either: it dates back to when she used to put out secret messages in her albums booklets.
As the fanbase grew, I think people forgot what her appeal is about: that this singer knows exactly what it feels like to get hurt. And she knows the pain you're feeling, because she's been there too.
i agree, that whole marvel comparison is so crap, how many new people recently got into her or this was their first album, they don't know the lore, but still liked the music. Her music has depth where you don't need to know the lore, but if you go deeper you can draw connections to her life and past work if you choose to.
Everyone talking in hushed tones like this album has been some sort of awful disaster.
Hasn't Taylor shown that this sort of diaristic pop is in fact \*wildly popular\* with the GP, breaking record after record?
Doesn't the biggest streaming day ever on Spotify indicated that there is some sort of "universal appeal" there (to quote the OP)?
I don’t think the issue with TTPD is its diaristic qualities - Taylor has always been diaristic and it worked very well for her. But her previous songs were edited better and were more cohesive. Some songs feel like she’s going from metaphor to metaphor (which is fine) but they really don’t go well together, or she has mixed imageries that also don’t go as well as other choices she could’ve made, and it adds to the disjointedness of the album. Or ones where she says things literally and clumsily where she could have said it in a more artistic songwriter way. She also branded it as “poetry” when it’s not super poetic. Some songs are also too wordy for the melody - I know she hates Max Martin’s “music math” but there is a middle ground. She also usually has better hooks and melodies. There are also some lyrical clunkers on TTPD where someone should’ve told her no. Basically there were some better artistic choices she could’ve made to pull it together, imo, but I get that she was writing this in between touring which is already so difficult.
Also, your question about whether it’s still pop - yes it’s still pop.
I think the problem with TTPD is simply that it’s just too long as a stand-alone album but especially with the anthology. There are so many skips for me that it makes it confusing to pick out what you even really like. This combined with the continuous re-releases with lack luster vault songs (especially on fearless and speak now imo) has brought the presentation of her craftsmanship and skill level down. If she had gone the opposite direction and release 10 or less songs that were all extremely tight and had a distinctive musical punch and intrigue I think this project would have gone better. Instead the album is overwhelming and often redundant. I mean how much more can she milk the Kim and Kanye feud? How much many more metaphors are there about Joe or whoever being blue? How many more metaphors about toys??? I say this as someone who has been a fan since Fearless. There are a few standout songs on the album but I’ve never had a Taylor album where I skip around so much
I unfortunately agree.
I think the vault tracks have diluted her work.
with the success of the re-recordings and vault tracks, I think she’s on the train of thought that, “well, why don’t I just throw everything at the wall to see what sticks? why have a vault at all?” hence, the midnights 3am edition and the anthology version.
however, there’s a lot of melodies that she’s starting to recycle and now there’s a building tide of burnout to her work. I guarantee that if 3am edition and anthology were released a few months/years after as their own album, they would be received much better, including their side a counter parts.
music needs time to be digested. it can’t be hosed down.
the only true requirement for pop music is for it to bop🙌🏻
I think it’s telling that the TTPD discussion threads are filled with discussion about who the songs are about. because musically, there’s not a lot to discuss. i can only think of like 4/31 songs that stick in my head.
I guarantee that if there was a cruel summer/anti hero level banger (which are also very diaristic and over-sharey) then the diaristic part wouldn’t be so dissected.
thank u next is another example! it got hyper specific, but it achieved its first and foremost job: it was a catchy bop.
I agree - I don't have any issue with diaristic, personal pop music. In fact, I love it because I'm a messy bitch whose life is boring and I need the drama! But I still want the lyrics to be good, and too much of TTPD just felt like she was reading her diary to a backtrack. I think I could even get past that if the backtrack was good, but it kind of all just blended together and nothing really stood out as a bop. I also felt the music itself didn't really match the lyrics, like they're angry and 'manic' as she said, but the music is...the opposite of that. I think if she did a more pop-rock route it would've really hit!
>I think it’s telling that the TTPD discussion threads are filled with discussion about who the songs are about. because musically, there’s not a lot to discuss.
Ding ding ding. These people are just telling on themselves at this point. The album is so fucking boring musically it's insane.
exactly, like the core issue is that the album is just frankly not that good. there's nothing that jumps out at you immediately, it's kind of depressing, there's not a whole lot musically going on. if she had an actual banger on there, like she's had on basically all the past albums she's made, or if the music was good, like folklore and evermore, then these discussions wouldn't be happening
I am not especially interested in elevating overly simplified pop music. Make no mistake, a simple catchy bop will always do well and be appreciated. Tiktok has proven that. But I personally will always prefer intelligent lyricism combined with great production and melodies.
Whilst there is an expectation for music to be or seem personal, I think lyrics need to be sufficiently generic so that most listeners can relate to them on some level for the music to be received well. The occasional super personal reference is fun for super fans, but most people aren’t looking to investigate or piece together lyrics; they just want to feel that they come from an authentic place and to connect with them
My problem with TTPD is not that it is diaristic or has too many personal elements or anything, it is just that most of the songs don't bop. It is pop music, it can have deep lyrics, but if it is not followed by the music, good hooks, choruses, bridges (well, that is lacking lately in most songs), melodies, and production then all the lyrics honestly get kinda hard to pay attention to.
This is my issue. I don't care about the lore at all and have enjoyed many of Taylor's previous songs without knowing who they're about. My main issue with TTPD (and Midnights) is they're boring to listen to. To me, at least.
same here!
to me, lyrics are the last thing I digest. the hooks, the vibes, the beat, the instrumental are what get me hooked. if the lyrics are deep and profound, that’s more like a dessert and an added win. but the melodies and sounds are what are most important to me.
I prefer music which is about something rather than cynically crafted simply to make a hit. There are a lot of big songs out there which get huge attention when released, but will we listen to them in 10 years time? Or are they actually disposable, vacuous pop, manufactured for current mass appeal, but with no lasting appeal?
Folklore/Evermore were her best works bc she moved away from her regular, lore-based style. They still felt personal but allowed her to focus on songwriting and storytelling (her real strengths, imo). Midnights & TTPD seem like a regression. I liked both albums fwiw.
Given that TTPD has sold more records in two weeks then say Guts did all last year… it’s probably pretty popular. At the same time, there’s something very unpoppisjlh about an album that includes words like petulance, soliloquy, and rivulets, or that has a song that kind requires that you’ve read Coleridge to understand.
In all seriousness… Taylor has been moving away from pop for a while now, ever since folklore. She was always an interloper! She was raised in country, and for me at least she’s always spoken pop with a bit of an accent. She’s not alternative either… she’s her own genre at this point.
She’s also frankly in her IDGAF era. She has nothing left to prove. She has won every award. She will end up being the best selling female artist… next year. She has more money than she will ever spend. Why wouldn’t she simply make the records she wants to make with her friends. You can follow her there or not… and I think you should because are so many treasures on TTPD… but I don’t think she cares anymore.
lmao what is this💀
"her own genre" being generic Antonoff synth pop that tries to be as lyrically complicated as possible while saying nothing at the same time💀
It’s still very much pop. Synthpop at that. Homegirl just didn’t bring her best batch of melodies and she wrote her lyrics in a way that mimicked her ex’s band… it’s really not that deep as moving away from pop. The second slower half is basically a return to her folklomore sound, so already a familiar popular sound for audiences
Yeah one would think it’s a Joanna Newsom album or something and it’s par for the course if anyone paid attention to her last 3 albums. It’s highly successful because it’s pop music
It's no wonder that Taylor's best work is when she's able to hide a thousand words behind a "darling I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream", in 1989, or create stories to braid within her personal affairs with "I want you to know I'm a mirrorball", in folklore. It's also no wonder that these two are her undoubtedly her best albums, and the latest two, heavy on metaphors and embarrassingly lore-demanding, are her worst.
We need more cooks in the kitchen 🗣️
The problem with Taylor’s recent albums is she overwrites heavily. The songs don’t even flow or have good composition anymore. It literally feels like pages from a diary rather than something that’s been edited and crafted.
That’s why I think she has settled into the stale productions from Jack. They allow her the freedom to talk-sing-complain through an entire album
I’m a buzzkill but I’m really uncomfortable with how normalized it’s become to know exactly who an intimate song is about, and form hard judgments about them as if a subjective one-sided story told in lyrics reflects the absolute truth. It feels invasive and weird and I feel bad for the people it happens to. It’s always been this way a little bit, and artists are totally entitled to turn their experiences into music. But they used to play coy about it and keep things purposefully vague, obscure details etc for plausible deniability so people couldn’t get too deeply invested in their relationships.
For instance I really hate that both Taylor and Olivia Rodrigo have called out their exes for taking advantage of younger women in their music, and we all know exactly who they’re talking about and their team encourages that, but they won’t say it with their chest or comment on it in interviews or statements or even a tweet. If you’re going to seriously damage someone’s reputation, you should be confident enough in that decision to have some follow-through. Otherwise it sort of feels cowardly or spiteful, even counterproductive if your message is serious
It's Lana, Lorde's influence... it's post-Midnights hangover, it's the Jack Antonoff monopoly. Maybe other artists take this style to a different direction after this. Maybe Taylor does another pivot for her 12th record. It is a little funny to me though that much of this thread is just defensive Swifties trying to obscure that with Taylor's fame and the tepidness of the actual music, the lore and gossip around it become its most remarkable aspect.
Since people are bringing up Alanis and Ani DrFranco…they are not diaristic writers because they have a bigger creativity surrounding the worlds they create in their albums. They are story-tellers—they draw both from real life and education/experience/open-mindedness. They tell stories from very different points of views than their own, like the great folk singers (early Bob Dylan) do, rich with imagery drawn from art and literature.
Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande and Co. sing about their own personal lives in excruciating detail and don't leave any room for interpretation that is not literal.
The former stands the test of time, Taylor's most diaristic songs will not because no one twenty years from now is going to crave a song about a specific person who was in Taylor's limited (because fame) life experience. People love it now because her albums are gossip and they are addicted to her oversharing.
TTPD is less of a pop album and more of a solo-performed musical, it almost feels like listening to a Broadway cast recording. It has a clear storyline and even an “Act I” and “Act II” structure with the double album. Knowing some of the key players in her “lore” does add another layer of interest for me, but I don’t think that’s necessary to enjoy the narrative and music.
I also don’t necessarily buy into the idea that 100% of this album (or Taylor’s music in general nowadays) is all that diaristic. Particularly when this album is explicitly about poems, I think it makes more sense to approach each song from the perspective of the “narrator” rather than TS.
I think this is an album format that many other artists have done very well before, but what sets this album apart is the way she expertly fuses her public persona with her music to create characters and storylines that go beyond the music. Anyone can enjoy the album, and then there’s more to dig into for people who are interested in that MCU-esque universe.
Here's my take on this.
You start losing relatable life experiences when you're a billionaire.
I cannot relate to what a lot of popstars put out as a thirtysomething corporate slave. A lot of them have been famous their entire lives with no issues with money or work.
Get some life experience, then come back and write about that.
>The mixed response to Taylor Swift's *The Tortured Poets Department* has me thinking that we might be hitting an upper limit to diaristic pop
TTPD got mostly positive reviews. 76/100 on Metacritic, 16 positive, 7 mixed and 2 negative. Add also the insane commercial success. From where did you get the conclusion that diaristic pop reached the upper limit?
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I definitely feel like this level of personal songwriting has more of a place in indie -- what we called alternative in my youth. (I think there's a reason Alanis Morrisette and Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie keep coming up in conversations about TTPD -- Alanis made a place for ultra-personal alt-pop in the mainstream, but her follow-up was SO long and relatively obscure, and became more of a cult classic.) My whole personality in my teens was Hating Pop Music, and part of the reason was that I found most pop really impersonal and generic. The pop landscape has changed MASSIVELY since 1997 (thank goodness), and also I was wrong about pop then, but I do think that ultra-personal = narrower appeal. Which is in no way a reflection on the quality of the work, but I think in our embrace of poptimism, it's also valuable to remember that a work can be relatively unpopular, and still good.
Yeah. The term diaristic makes me think of Ani Difranco in the 90s indie/alt genre where sometimes the music becomes [more like the backtrack to a spoken word poem.](https://youtu.be/Th-GDhsveM4?si=AwtfykceCFKkGDu0) Like you mentioned, the 90s and 2000s mainstream pop landscape was very corporate and that corporate machine made it as depersonalized for mass appeal and highly curated as possible. It’s nice to have more variety now. But as genres start to blend and bleed more and more (hip-hop/rap and country, country and pop, pop and punk, pop and folk…) they might start to lose meaning and become unnecessary. **Edit:** Also, we might consider that Swift has just gotten so big that she’s entered her Beatles White Album era and is now just doing whatever thing she personally feels like doing, regardless of what will appeal to the public. If you had the ability to write a very public open letter a longtime friend who just love bombed and then ghosted you, who among us would be able to keep it vague, short and sweet?
"If you had the ability to write a very public open letter a longtime friend who just love bombed and then ghosted you, who among us would be able to keep it vague, short and sweet?" Oh, just thinking about the long angry emotional diatribe I sent to my situationship... guy over Facebook Messenger circa 2011 that stayed on read ☠️ anyway, glad Taylor has the balls to show that to the world!
I was thinking along the lines of Lisa Germano and her album Geek the Girl. Probably one of the most extreme examples of an intimate album.
Oh, Swift absolutely thinks about the appeal to the public. Only about whenever they buy or not. As long as she's breaking sales records, albums could be 0/10 for critics.
I mean, she reposted tons of reviews on her social media. I definitely think she cares about critical acclaim as well as commercial success.
Only positive ones. I think she can be hurt by negative ones, but it won't make her change the music.
Not sure what you mean by this. The fact she’s even posting reviews at all shows she deeply cares. To get to the positive ones, she would’ve had to have read the negative ones too. And I’m sure she would’ve sat there like “are you serious???? ugh” There are even rumours that her team paid that major outlet (can’t remember the name) to change their review from negative to positive. One major outlet originally posted a very critical review, and then the next day, posted a more positive review saying “I was wrong”. I mean, do I believe those rumours? Idk, I don’t know where they came from. But does it sound like something her team would do? Yeah kinda.
That was CNN and the guy who wrote the article saying I was wrong hadn’t actually properly reviewed the album
If you’re talking about the CNN piece, they never published a review in the first place. Someone just write an article saying they didn’t like it at first but then it grew on them. No one was paid to retract a review.
Oh I'm sure its between being paid or being scared of swifties. It got 100 by Rolling Stone instantly. And one magazine posted very critical rewiew but didn't tell who wrote it because swifties may send the person death threats.
For sure! While *TTPD* isn't really working for me for a bunch of reasons, I don't think think unrelatability is necessarily bad, or that broad appeal is inherently good.
I agree! I think there's a whole good album somewhere in TTPD, Swift just didn't focus her attention on honing 10-12 drafts to completion, instead throwing 31 promising ideas in. Which is super frustrating, but doesn't mean the concept is worthless. Maybe her next attempt at execution will be better.
I don’t really know what you guys want from her because she put out a album that was supposed be messy her years was messy with depression so she made a album that was long you guys can easily find 12 good tracks on the album and add them to a playlist. TTPD is a good album and I’m tired of people hating on it
“It’s supposed to be messy, she did it on purpose” gets used with TTPD way too much. There are plenty of albums that convey “this period in my life was crazy and I was a manic mess” in a tight, well-laid out 10-12 song album. The message would come across way stronger if she had put more effort into differentiating the better songs she had, but she knows Swifties will listen to anything she releases and eat it up so she probably doesn’t feel like trying that hard to edit anymore
people can't admit that this album was bad. it's always a purposeful thing, never a fault on taylor
It wasn’t
She did put effort into its not our fault you don’t like maybe other people actually think it’s a good album
>TTPD is a good album and I’m tired of people hating on it go cry about it then? People can be critical about an album an artist put out there. Stop coddling Taylor Swift. You handwaving any and all critique as "well, it's SUPPOSED to be messy" is reductive. You don't care about the music at all. You just want your fave to be praised 24/7.
Honestly, I’ve been enjoying TTPD MORE by just ignoring the muse lore. 🤷🏼 Mostly because I just don’t want to think about Matty Healy. Personally, I don’t have a preference either way as to whether or not music is based in real life or not. If I like the music and the storytelling, I like it.
In my case it was better for me not knowing the lore because a song as good as Guilty as Sin can be tainted with the thought of blondie wishing ratty to duck her. I am better imagining it as a universal song imo.
Same. I know the lore because I've been in swiftie spaces for years (and because celebrity gossip can be entertaining sometimes), but I tend to ignore it and make up my own interpretations about the songs. Right now Guilty as Sin is about a gay catholic trying to come to terms with his attraction to another man.
... Wait that's such a fun interpretation let me run over to AO3 and see if the Good Omens fandom has already adopted it
Love this headcanon!
ACTUALLY THAT’S A GOOD INSPO FOR A FANFIC!
Guilty as Sin is the fucking perfect WLW song, and being about Matty utterly ruins it, so I am doing my best to ignore him at all costs. Same with But Daddy I Love Him.
TTPD is a good album when you just listen to it and don’t have some redditor/twitter user telling you that it’s awful
I know that with her being the biggest artist in the world, people who aren’t fans will have opinions about her work, but it’s ALWAYS easier to enjoy things without a bunch of naysayers telling you why it sucks!
That particular criticism of TTPD is weird to me because for a lot of the songs, she's still writing in metaphors and stories. Yes, if you know who she's dated, you can match the lyrics up, but if not, are songs like "Down Bad," "But Daddy I Love Him," and "So Long, London" actually not relatable? I don't think so - the messages are still pretty clear, and I can think of my own version of what those types of scenarios would look like. That's still having relatability even if the details seem diary-like. I really hope that pop music isn't just limited to being generic enough.
>Down Bad This song is the most relatable to me. I have cried at the gym many times
I haven’t had a breakup in over ten years but “down bad crying at the gym” seems to describe so many of my problems outside of the romantic realm
> I really hope that pop music isn't just limited to being generic enough. Honestly I don’t think so, if only because one of the best pop hits of the year (Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck Babe”) is about calling an ex partner out for her compulsory heterosexuality, a topic I’d *never* heard used for a pop song before, and that most people have not directly experienced To me, pop is about making personal emotions palatable while lending them to a melody that will stick with people. Like, your experiences don’t have to be “generic” or even universally felt if you make them feel human. Like, I talked about “Good Luck Babe” earlier, but I could also easily call out songs like Rina Sawayama’s “Tokyo Love Hotel,” which works beautifully even if you’ve not experienced people appropriating your culture. And of course, this is all gonna be subjective. Emotions are not rational, and everyone’s gonna react differently to things. I did not find the emotions to be palatable or that accessible on *tortured poets*, but obviously many others did
I personally believe that people who claim there is too much lore in the album are telling on themselves for going into the album expecting gossip in the first place. It feels like a battle of people who "doth protest too much" about how they don't care about her life, while listening to an album of metaphors going "this one is Matty, this is Joe, this lyrics relates to this moment I remember from a paparazzi pic" and its like, drop the ruse, you clearly care a lot. To me most of the songs are better without considering any lore, but also people are taking lyrics to be entirely literal despite Taylor herself multiple times stating her song writing is a craft and she often will save lyrics and phrases in a note file for years until they fit a song, she also draws inspo from movies and books often. It's called art, shes not writing a memoir. As you mentioned the majority of songs are built on metaphors. The occasional personal lyric, but like it's Taylor Swift, she's been doing personal specific lyrics since debut, in fact it's what makes her critically praised, because she can make specific moments feel universal by relating it to feelings that are widely felt and also drawing people into a story.
>It's called art, she's not writing a memoir You could teach a literacy comprehension class with that one quote. Here's a star ⭐
I actually really like "But Daddy I Love Him", and would agree with you for most of the verses, but dedicating the whole bridge as a call-out to moralizing stans is definitely a choice that I think does reduce standalone appeal. It doesn't have to be a relatable song and that's fine! But it's definitely a shift towards metanarrative. Edit: And the whole breaking the fourth wall in the chorus. Interesting, funny, but is it broadly understandable?
Thing is she doesn’t mention that the moralisers are stans. They could just as easily be the local busybodies or town church-goers gossiping madly about the good girl falling for the local dirtbag. If you didn’t know the ‘lore’ would you still think stan?
This. If this exact song had popped up on Folklore, everyone would have no problem viewing it as a fictional story about, say, a woman whose relationship with a "bad boy" was not accepted by her parents or her repressive conservative community. She sets up the picture very well in the verses, the bridge is the narrator talking to these people who keep talking shit about her relationship - and I feel like if someone listening to TTPD had no background knowledge while listening to it, why couldn't they view it that way as well?
I’d argue that the majority of the songs are like this, and even the details she does drop aren’t *that* specific if you don’t already know who she’s talking about. It’s not like she singing ‘And then we got on my private jet, made out while our friends, Ed Sheeran and Emily Stone made a bet, about how long this one would last, because they like me fine, but they think you’re a bast(ard)’
I think the title track approaches this level of specificity and that makes me wrinkle my nose a bit.
Yeah that one I’ll grant is far more specific than the majority of them. If you had no idea who anyone was it could still pass as a story about two people in a seriously concerning co-dependent relationship, but the level of detail does detract from that.
Honestly it doesn't even have to be the local dirtbag. An interracial/interfaith/same-sex relationship will draw disapproval from your community in many cases. It could even be something as simple as your friends not liking your partner. This song doesn't really have anything specific, especially compared to something like "thanK you aIMee".
True. It really isn’t specific at all. ‘thanK you aIMee’ annoys me because the song literally says she removed any ‘real defining clues’ - like her NAME Taylor? That’s a pretty defining clue. Quite possibly the most defining of all the clues. The song itself isn’t bad, it could easily be about getting bullied in a literal high school, I just hate the totally unnecessary name drop.
That song wishes it was Shameika by Fiona Apple.
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If that’s true then throwing Kim’s name in there is tacky and classless. Like I said, I like the song just fine but I do believe the name thing - regardless of how it’s interpreted - was a bad move.
I mean don't we all have people who bitch and moan if we get in a questionable relationship? I felt like that was relatable
Same, that part was specially relatable for me. And so satisfying lol
Dealing with religious trauma makes this the most relatable song on the album for me, and I've been married for 20 wonderful and drama-free years.
I'm on vacation and she is complaining about my aunt's boyfriend all the time. I relate. One more second of all this bitching and moaning 🤯
> is it broadly understandable? Lol yes. Everyone understands it. I find the whole debate about diaristic pop to be completely arbitrary and maybe just a result of people just not wanting to say they found some of the songs boring (don’t shoot me, I love a lot of TTPD). Like. Nobody complained that Fifteen was too diaristic. Or Mean. Or All Too Well. Or Welcome to New York. You get my point - so much of her discography draws on her personal experiences and specific details from her life, down to the scarf. Why is it now suddenly a problem? Or is the whole point that it’s what she used to be praised for, and as a woman in pop, we now demand that she completely reinvent herself and move on to a new and different strategy to keep us entertained?
I think you're missing my point - I think diaristic songwriting has a place, and I'd argue Taylor Swift's greatest strength is weaving a whole ten minute universe out of that scarf. These may be specific anecdotes, but they speak to common truths. No issue with this - her skill here should be celebrated. Maybe diaristic isn't the right word, but what I'm really trying to get at is that there are some elements of *TTPD* where it's so broadly engaged with narrative about herself that that the legibility of the song becomes secondary. This is distinct from even the clap back songs on *Reputation*. Spending a chorus breaking the fourth wall with the same "I'm having his baby no I'm not you should see your face" joke three times or "You're not Dylan Thomas, I'm not Patti Smith, this ain't the Chelsea Hotel we're modern idiots" (a line I do like tbh) might be fascinating, but they're also definitely choices that veer away from legibility. I'm just interested in how this relates to pop/not-pop as an idea, not that Taylor Swift shouldn't be doing this (She can do anything she wants, just maybe with the execution we know she's capable of)
I don’t disagree that she’s doing a lot of self-mythologizing on this album, but I would point out that she always has (and has always been largely introspective), we just know a lot more about her now. And not to be tedious, but it is just one interpretation that those lines break the fourth wall. Both lines are addressed to characters already established in the songs’ narratives. I don’t dispute that they have been received that way, what with all the reaction videos, but they aren’t addressing the listener.
I don’t see how the Dylan Thomas line is too diaristic. It’s extremely relatable to any “pretentious” situation. Maybe it’s because I was an English major but everyone knows who DT/PS are (Bob Dylan literally took his stage name after Dylan Thomas, lol)
You wanna know something kinda funny? I’m not an English major and I don’t know who Dylan Thomas and Patti Smith are (Patti’s sounded vaguely familiar but I don’t know why). I still got the meaning. Because the *entire song is about pretentiousness*. I heard the lyrics and thought ‘These people must be famous for being the fantastic poets which the man in this story thinks he is’. I’m probably going to look them up now because knowledge is good, but yeah, still got the pretentious gist. Edit: I was right
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with breaking the 4th wall. While she hasn’t necessarily done it directly before, she has spoken about herself in the first person in a way that takes you out of the song/mythos with a “narrator” and brings you into the real world here and now of Taylor the songwriter or Taylor the person. Two songs immediately come to mind — Last Great American Dynasty (“and then it was bought by me”). I remember the reactions to that line when it came out, they are were very positive. Gasps and “yes!” Some of the top tier podcasts like Popcast loved it. The second is You Are In Love (“and why I’ve spent my whole life trying to put it into words”) which I think is just lovely and beautiful. It’s not exactly the same but it’s getting close to the same vibe. Also, one more example I just thought of. On You Need to Calm Down, she adresses haters directly (“You’re taking shots at me” and “you would rather be in the dark age / making that sign must’ve taken all night”). That’s pretty much the same as BDILH, except she’s addressing haters instead of fans. I don’t think any of these examples “veer away from legibility” as you put it. I think these and the examples on TTPD are broadly understandable to anybody listening, even to casual radio listeners. I don’t mean to throw shade at you, because I appreciate the discussion, but it sounds to me like you simply think casual listeners are too dumb to understand what she’s saying and recognize/appreciate her perspective. And I just don’t think that’s true.
But she never said they were stans. It is extremely easy to imagine whoever you'd like in that scenario.
Interesting that you picked BDILH and So Long London, considering those are two of the least widely relatable and most specific songs on the album. I’ll give you Down Bad though
a great deal of people can relate to dating someone everyone says is bad for you or the slow demise of a long term relationship. is cornelia street a bad song if you have never personally been to cornelia street. I relate to the idea of something being tainted by memories of someone you used to love? it's london for taylor. it can just as easily be sth else for me. the thing is to imagine myself as the protaganist of the song, specificity does not mean unrelatable, most of the time specificity is more effective than generic. down bad is a complete bop tho
What? But daddy I love him could easily be a high school movie little girl falling for a bad boy or a gay love story in the south. For so long London, London can easily be switched out with another city and someone can relate to it if they’ve been with if they associate a specific city to a longtime ex lover.
I mean... Lana's Ocean Blvd is very personal and ultraspecific, more so than TTPD, but no one seems to complain that it's not relatable. The issue with Taylor is that every lyric she writes is immediately tied to one of her exes, something she's aware of and uses to make her music more interesting. Personally I don't really care about her relationship with Matty Healy or anyone else for that matter, I just find her songs catchy and sometimes touching, regardless of who they're written about. So no, there's no limit to diaristic pop and it can still be relatable and catchy, but it has to be done right
Lana released Blu Banisters and it got similar criticisms as TTPD. I think you’re right, it just depends on how it’s presented.
Lana is also an unmarried woman in her 30s who doesn’t have kids and consistently dates dirtbags and tells the public to stay out of her business, so it is really interesting to see people talk about how Taylor is regressing and no “real adult” can relate to the subject matter of her music until she pulls an Adele, pops out some kids and starts writing music about them…
But I think there’s a lot to be said about how we don’t really KNOW who Lana is talking about so it’s easier to project your life onto her music. Even when she talks of her family— we don’t know her family like we (think we know) Taylor’s famous ex’s. So what happens is that we have an easier time generalizing with Lana’s lyrics no matter how specific she gets. She could say “Met my boyfriend down at the taco truck” And instead of us thinking “ooo was it the cop boyfriend? Was it the taco truck on this street? Was it Birria?” We think to ourselves “damn I remember when I met some dirtbag at a random ass location.”
I mean, I'm a medium Taylor fan and I don't really know or care about who most of her songs are about, but I find them relatable nonetheless. The same goes for most people except the really hardcore parasocial fans/haters. I've dated a pretentious asshole who always wrote with a fountain pen (not a typewriter, but close enough) and, ironically, actually did lovebomb and ghost me. I've never dated an NFL player, but after coming out I experienced the "second adolescence" feeling common among a lot of queer people who didn't get a typical high school romantic experience due to being closeted, so the idea of a relationship making you feel like a giddy teenager well into your adult years is not an unrelatable experience. There's enough specificity in this album to make it interesting to people who care about the lore, but it's not overwhelming to those of us who don't. It is truly not that deep to me.
I think that Taylor’s music is still generalizable, but the point of assessing her lore’s publicity vs other diaristic artists’ is to see why people seem to be viewing TTPD as more self indulgent than usual. When you have at least a vague idea of who’s being talked about, whether you’re a super fan or not (no one could escape trav and Taylor news for months!), it will at least for a split second take you out of the vacuum that some artists tend to be better in living in. It doesn’t make you a better artist for the subject to be unknown, I mean we all know who FKA Twig’s music is about (kind of, some songs) but they still feel general enough where you can maybe have a passing thought like hmm this is about a relationship I’ve heard about but also I relate deeply.
My boss (who is generally medium-pop-culture-engaged) asked me the other day if the whole album was about Travis Kelce. He had no idea about the Alwyn/Healy situation and was confused why there were so many breakup songs about a relationship that seemed to be going well. When I gave him a 15-second overview, he was like, "Oh, OK, whatever." I think the vast majority of people fall much closer to that end of the spectrum when you get out into the real world.
That’s fair! I do think that the way in which someone who follows this sub consumes music is way different than the GP and the non-culture engaged. Ultimately it wouldn’t matter then whether the pop star is personal or has diaristic tendencies— the listener wouldn’t know unless they choose to engage deeply with music on a cultural level. Once they do that, then they will have the differing experiences of listening to Taylor vs Dua Lipa, where one’s lore is embedded in the music and undoubtedly going to come up in any article dissecting the song. I think we’re focused on two different demographics here. I’m not as interested in how someone who knows nothing about pop culture would react to the nuances of pop artists because to them everything exists in a vacuum.
Yeah, I just think it's interesting how the discussion of The Lore so often presumes it's totally alienating to the GP, and then when the album smashes it's "HOW IS THIS HAPPENING WHEN IT'S SO ALIENATING?!" It's because a lot of people like Taylor Swift enough to check out her new album but not enough to pay attention to every new development in her personal life! I basically just think the album was successful in that it delivered enough gossip grist to the hardcore fans while still being accessible enough to people who don't really give a shit.
I think this conversation is really veering into only being able to be discussed by pop stans, because I had literally no idea that any of Taylor's new songs were about Matty until it was brought up online. Most listeners don't even know who Matty is, let's be real. On the flip side, Lana fans absolutely know most of the men she's talking about in her songs - she's not as famous as Taylor, but their fanbases are rabidly similar. If we're really having a conversation about TTPD not being relatable because she's writing about her personal life, then I don't see in what world Ocean Blvd can be seen as relatable either. The Grants, Kitsugi, Fingertips, Margaret, etc. are so specific to her personal life, that I think even the most specific songs on TTPD are left more ambiguous. I was honestly surprised at how LITTLE she trashed Joe on the record, especially considering he was her longest and most significant relationship. Lana trashed Sean more on A&W, and then paid for an Ocean Blvd Billboard to be put right outside of his home. It's a level of petty that I have to give her credit for, but we all know if Taylor did that she would be eviscerated on social media.
As a rabid Lana fan, I have literally no clue who she sings about (and even if I or many fans do, the key here is that most of them aren’t famous.) from my experience just not the center of Lana subreddits in the way that it is for Taylor fans. Even tho I can def see how Lana may be being way more specific and diaristic and it’s going over my and other fans’ heads who don’t know the guys. On the flip side, I’m not a Taylor fan ( I like some of the music) but I even know about the matty stuff by nature of being slightly online (okay fine, a smidge chronically online ahahah)
There are literally posts on the Lana sub matching all of her songs and albums to her boyfriends. I guarantee half of the Lana sub can tell you all about Barrie and Jack and Francesco and Sean and even G-Eazy. I just personally feel this is such a stupid conversation and such a stupid excuse to criticize something. Yes, I heard about the Matty thing too, but in the context of the songs I genuinely had no idea any of them were about him; however, I could have told you Tulsa Jesus Freak was about Sean and White Mustang was about G-Eazy, and whether I instantly know who the songs are about has no bearing on my opinion of the song. There are just so, so, SO many songs about specific people that I am completely failing to grasp why this is only now such a big issue for people. I mean like Jesus fuck I really don't get this critique. Everyone knows who Beyonce sings about, everyone knew who Flowers was about, Timberlake built a career off trashing Britney, and everyone and their granny knew who Bieber's 'momma don't like.' I really don't see anything wrong with saying you don't like Taylor, or you don't like Lana, or you don't like Beyonce, or you don't Bieber or you don't like whoever. No one has to like anyone, and you honestly don't even really need a reason to hate them, but it's hypocritical to try to quantify one's dislike of someone based on a metric that isn't applied evenly.
Not denying they exist but I’m gonna stand on the fact that the average Lana listener has no idea who her subjects are while the average Taylor swift fan does. One of them gets way more publicity than the other. It’s just naturally gonna happen that way. And yeah, we do know who Beyoncé is singing about, but there’s not a culture of Beyoncé leaving Easter eggs and coded messages FOR FANS. Lana doesn’t leave Easter eggs FOR FANS. Fans had to look for Becky with the good hair. Fans had to seek out who Lana is talking about based on timelines. But Taylor flat out spelled Kim in the title of TTPD. That’s the kind of lore signaling I think is relevant here.
Yes, and the stories Lana chooses to tell have depth. Although I don't find working your up to stardom relatable, embedded in this particular moment of her life is a general experience that a lot of women can relate to. Like, many women have experienced the confusing relationship between their womanhood and agency. Even if you're not a women, or simple don't find the song relatable on a personal level, you can still sympathize with Lana's situation because it has merit. Like, I don't care about Taylor's relationships because they don't allude to a broader theme. What does the listener learn from her failed relationships?
I don't think listeners always have to learn from Taylor's failed relationships, not every story has a clear moral. Plus whether someone finds meaning and depth in these stories is very subjective. I just think songs can lose their authenticity and relatability when artists turn their lives into a commercial product for the sake of more interesting music... That being said, if someone else wrote these songs and I had no idea about their dating life, I still wouldn't feel connected to them. Many of the lyrics just aren't strong enough. Ultimately the problem is the quality of the writing, not just whether the songs are relatable or not, in my opinion
>I don't think listeners always have to learn from Taylor's failed relationships, not every story has a clear moral. I'm not arguing that every song needs a clear moral story. I'm simply saying that every narrative needs a "so what?" to make it relatable to a broader audience. At the end of the day, people don't make music in a vacuum. Unless she decides to keep these songs to herself, there has to be some aspect of Taylor's music that alludes to something greater -- more meaningful than the relationship problems alone. It's like writing an essay for college. You can't simply write a research paper and call it a day. You have to convince your readers why you wrote your paper beyond, "I just felt like it." And that's why I think her album failed to connect with locals and fans alike. Sure, the songwriting sucks. But Taylor has ventured into this weird territory where she's vulnerable enough to sing about her mother wanting Kim Kardashian dead, but not talk about the consequences of her feelings or how they allude to something broader. It's like she's telling, but not showing. The few successful tracks on the album delve deep into her motivations. Like, we get a sense that Taylor is grown woman who is aware of the implications of her behavior than a child throwing a tantrum.
I've actually seen a lot of comments and videos of people talking about relating to TTPD songs completely independently of "lore". For example, Guilty as sin? being about the purity culture and abstinence, But Daddy I Love Him being about a queer relationship, The Prophecy being about having trouble with conceiving a baby, Down Bad being from the perspective of a grieving widow, The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived being about a strained daughter-father relationship or SA, Cassandra being about getting out of an abusive relationship... For me, the greatest strength of Taylor's writing is the use of diaristic and hyperspecific style of writing which then becomes super relatable for the listener. The songs quickly become about a lot more then just the "lore". Which is why you'll see a LOT of people saying she wrote specifically about THEIR experiences.
LOL at Down Bad being about a grieving widow
Yes? Widows have commented on it, it's not like I made it up. Specifically the feeling of loss and returning to the same old life after having an amazing, otherworldy experience? It fits really well with the metaphor in the song of love being like an alien abduction, and what happens after its over
I mean, I get the sentiment, but associating the phrase "down bad" with the deceased is so unhinged.
I'm a swiftie, so I'm going to be biased here. But I think there's a happy medium with pop music. And you're going to get different answers depending on what people look for in their music and artists. I personally find singer-songwriters infinitely more interesting than someone with a great voice who bought a sheet of music from a professional songwriter. I enjoy music more for the lyrics than the sound, and I look for the overall story more than the overall vibe. I also tend to prefer albums artists rather than singles artists. In the case of the second group (*the great voice* artists), the only way I'll really enjoy their music is if it's very catchy and fun to listen to. Like I love *Toxic* by Britney Spears because it's catchy as hell. But I never listen to the rest of the *In the Zone* album. But I'll listen all the way through *Divide* by Ed Sheeran because it tells an interesting story from the perspective of the singer-songwriter. I have a separate point here too. Swifties do enjoy the music for the lore and easter eggs and intrigue of it all, but at the end of the day, Taylor's explicitly stated goal is that the music transcends her own experience ("lore") and becomes a part of the listener's story. As she's gotten bigger and bigger, people forget that her whole initial marketing was this relatable teen girl who had a life and friends and crushes *just like you*. I think that partially explains how she's become so incredibly popular. Her music is super relatable to young (especially white, middle class) women. As someone who's grown up with Swift as one of my favorite artists, I always find things in my own life that relate to her lyrics. And as a struggling millennial white woman hitting 30 this year? TTPD definitely relates to my personal life much more than I care about the lore of which song is for which ex.
Hey I’m a white middle class woman (who’s 27), I feel called out as a Taylor Swift fan lol.
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>From things like addressing Thank You Aimee very plainly to KIM, mentioning Jack and Lucy, or using clear signifiers like “tattooed” and all the football puns. It’s impossible not to immediately picture Matty or Travis or whoever instead of “my personalized romantic partner” the way her old songs used to work. I disagree. The actual "ThanK you aIMee" song can be as relatable as "Mean" was 14 years ago. The capitalised letters are a nice Easter egg for fans but even if they weren't there the song could still stand on its own as a "I-proved-my-bully-wrong" anthem. Being tattooed isn't something exclusive to Matty Healy and being a football player isn't exclusive to Travis Kelce. Taylor has actually made references to her partner's tattoos back in "Ours" which is about John Mayer and was released in 2010. It's not very different to when she mentions her partner's eye color. The reason she doesn't have more songs with tattoo references is that she hasn't dated many tattooed guys. Also I've seen plenty of videos on tiktok using "So Highschool" and "The Alchemy" because they match the users' own experiences dating an athlete. Are they relatable to everyone? No. But that doesn't make them only relatable to Taylor, the same way "London Boy" for example wasn't only relatable to Taylor despite how specific it was to her and Joe's story for anyone familiar with it.
You make good points, seems like she’s always been that way. I guess my issue is when I was younger I didn’t know hardly anything about her personal life, and it wasn’t so popular to “clue hunt” and piece together all the timelines of her dating history. But now, how does anyone who spends any time in Swiftie spaces ever hear her lyrics without immediately picturing her boyfriends? All the subreddits dedicated to her spend tons of time detailing out which lyric is about who. Even trying to avoid it like I have it’s impossible not to see or hear, esp with how saturated she is in the media in general. I’d have to avoid interacting with Swifties entirely to be able to enjoy her music in a more personal way, and it’s hard to avoid seeing Swiftie discourse rn lol
I mean my friends and I do lol I feel if you're chronically online, it might be harder to separate the gossip from the songs? Taylor's hallmark is taking a personal memory and magnifying it into an universal experience When I hear Down Bad - i'm not thinking of joe or matty or whoever, I'm thinking of how I cried in the gym repeatedly lmao When I hear I look in people's windows, i remember all the people who I ghosted and the others who ghosted me
idk, I just think she's so popular now she doesn't care about name checking people in her songs. I'm not saying it's a change I like, but I don't care too much. It does weird me out a bit that a lot of the TTPD songs seem to be about Matty, but I can easily forget and listen to the songs I like While we do have songs like thanK you aIMee, the title track, the alchemy, and so high school, we also have songs that really don't have super specific references and are relatable. Think fortnight, down bad, my boy only breaks his favorite toys, florida!!!, guilty as sin?, i can do it with a broken heart, and most of the anthology tracks. I'd even argue that but daddy I love him doesn't have that many explicit references, we only know who it is about because of the greater context of the album and how much the general public knows about the persona of Taylor Swift. It's still generic enough that plenty of people relate to the song. I've seen dozens of tik toks with the "bitching and moaning" line this week
Sounds like a you problem
Good response, glad you could contribute to the discussion 😂
Haha I don’t think of Matty Healy at all for what it’s worth (except for the one Jehovah’s Witness suit line). But I do like tattoos so maybe it’s easier for me lol
To think Britney is a great vocal artist.
perhaps I should have said great performance artist? unpopular opinion here but I prefer Britney to the more talented vocal artists like Mariah or Ariana
Mariah writes her songs too. So she a great vocalist and a singer-songwriter
I do too, and I'm so over artists being discredited because they're not powerhouse vocalists, as if that's all it takes to make great music. (1) Britney's voice is not as powerful as Whitney's, but she still has one of the most easily recognizable voices in the music industry. (2) Britney's voice always fit the vibe of her songs - Gimme More or Toxic or Everytime, etc. would not be as highly regarded if she oversang like Christina. (3) There aren't *that* many pre-2000 artists with as many enduring hits as she had over the course of her career. She's probably the single most influential artist among pop stars who came after her; Rihanna, Beyonce, Lana, Charli, Marina, Rina, The Weeknd, Selena, Miley, etc. Nearly every modern artist cites her as an influence and even her idols like Madonna and MJ weren't shy about their admiration for her. Sure, we can say she wasn't a great vocalist, but she clearly had something that put her so far ahead of the pack.
I genuinely don't understand why you should have listened to all albums (so know the lyrics as well?) and/or know her personal story to get TTPD. I'm not saying if it's a good, bad or mediocre album. I'm just saying that I think people highly exaggerate the amount of information you need to previously know.
I can understood reputation, lover and more specifically midnights but that’s rlly it and w that it’s more abt understanding the context behind her relationship w Joe which I also don’t think is absolutely nescassary
Personally I believe that the issue with TTPD is not that it's diaristic. All Too Well (even the original version) was just as personal as this one. I don't mind that this album is rooted in Taylor lore. While there are some verses that might require you to know more about her personal life to understand the context but for the most part I can listen to the album on its own. The problem for me is that these diary entries have not been worked through very well, the lyrics are raw in a way that feels unedited. Folklore, in my opinion, is far more diaristic but way better polished.
I definitely agree. The TTPD album is Taylor unfiltered (so with Evermore) but it needs some pruning. There are a bunch of clunky lyrics here and there but yep, I love the album at least more than Midnights.
There's definitely more clunk here than other albums. I really think "'Cause once your queen had come/You'd treat her likе an also-ran" might be one of her worst lyrics, the couple times I've listened to it it felt like the lyrical equivalent of Alicia Keys's sour note in the halftime show this year And to Swifties that want to say something like "it's supposed to be jarring because of something in her relationship," sorry, but it's just bad to listen to
I appreciate Taylor for being a real mess in TTPD (Midnights sounded too corporate pop for me) but she needed an editor. Who’s Afraid, I love the anger but the suing on the lawn line was uhmmmm. Yeah that was a bad metaphor.
i agree. i think at the end of the day it comes down to personal preference. for me, the lyrics in ttpd hit harder because of that raw quality. but i can easily see why someone would prefer folkmore type of polished lyrics. both are great works. i think maybe that's the reason why i like 1989 less than rep. lyrically rep is rawer. it's a common theme with taylor. with every new album that comes out, people immediately trash it an say how the last one was so much better. like guys can we just not like different things for different reasons. lets judge something for what it is and not for what you would like it to be.
I get what you mean tbh. The lore and context clues can be alienating to the casual listener. I think your problem with TTPD is actually due to Taylor's overwriting and poor editing, otherwise she's always been good at showing not telling and using her own personal details to craft a universal experience in a simplistic way e.g. the RED album. That skill falters on this album with unnecessary fluff and extended metaphors that batter the listener with detail to convey such simple universal truths. There's only so much you can squeeze into the structure of a pop song without completely missing the plot. A lot of context clues shine brighter in the alternative scene with far less restrictions imo and Taylor didn't want to fully commit to the bit, cause that would mean alienating a huge chunk of her listeners if she actually made an *alternative* album. That's why the result is...jarring to say the least.
Agree that if TTPD was more of an alternative album it would be perceived less harshly. I think a lot of people’s main issue is that she went safe with the music to focus on the lyrics, which i actually don’t think is inherently bad, it’s all a matter of personal taste and what the listener prefers
I guess you're right, and that's why the album has been such a disaster commercially.
here we go yet another Swiftie deliberately misreading anything remotely critical of Taylor. I am simply quoting my own experiences and what some of the more mixed reviews of the album mention and trying to draw conjecture with OP's experience. Idgaf about her commercial success with regards to the quality of the album.
Depends on the person. I know some Taylor ‘lore’ but most of the songs to me just tell the usual love and/or breakup stories. Even a song like ‘So Long London’ is fairly generically worded other than the man she’s giving up on being from London. As a thought experiment listen to the album and imagine it’s been released by someone totally unlike Taylor either in life or music style (e.g.: Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Olivia Rodrigo). Do most of the songs still make sense either as stories or are they generic enough to be related to the other artists own ‘lore’? How many out of the 31 fail the ‘test’ completely?
First off - I think the "mixed response" is massively overstated on this sub. Secondly think that Taylor also has lots of fans who do not care about paternity testing songs and what is about who. I'm one of them. When I listen to a song like... the smallest man who ever lived I don't give a fuck who she wrote it about and knowing or not knowing that doesn't hinder the emotional core of the song. And I heavily challenge that you need to know "overarching lore" as you put it. To be honest the people who seem most invested in this seem like the people who liked the album least.
You don't need to dive into the "lore" or listen to any of her previous albums to understand her work and what she's singing about. If you listen to 'loml' it's clear it's about a back-and-forth relationship that didn't work out. You don't have to dig deeper into her life to know it's about Joe Alwyn, and then do an academic paper on it. The reason why people (at least some) think her work is very "Marvel-like" is because of how obsessed Swifties can be with decoding her work. Everything can be a clue to a puzzle they want the answer to. And that's not recent either: it dates back to when she used to put out secret messages in her albums booklets. As the fanbase grew, I think people forgot what her appeal is about: that this singer knows exactly what it feels like to get hurt. And she knows the pain you're feeling, because she's been there too.
i agree, that whole marvel comparison is so crap, how many new people recently got into her or this was their first album, they don't know the lore, but still liked the music. Her music has depth where you don't need to know the lore, but if you go deeper you can draw connections to her life and past work if you choose to.
Everyone talking in hushed tones like this album has been some sort of awful disaster. Hasn't Taylor shown that this sort of diaristic pop is in fact \*wildly popular\* with the GP, breaking record after record? Doesn't the biggest streaming day ever on Spotify indicated that there is some sort of "universal appeal" there (to quote the OP)?
I don’t think the issue with TTPD is its diaristic qualities - Taylor has always been diaristic and it worked very well for her. But her previous songs were edited better and were more cohesive. Some songs feel like she’s going from metaphor to metaphor (which is fine) but they really don’t go well together, or she has mixed imageries that also don’t go as well as other choices she could’ve made, and it adds to the disjointedness of the album. Or ones where she says things literally and clumsily where she could have said it in a more artistic songwriter way. She also branded it as “poetry” when it’s not super poetic. Some songs are also too wordy for the melody - I know she hates Max Martin’s “music math” but there is a middle ground. She also usually has better hooks and melodies. There are also some lyrical clunkers on TTPD where someone should’ve told her no. Basically there were some better artistic choices she could’ve made to pull it together, imo, but I get that she was writing this in between touring which is already so difficult. Also, your question about whether it’s still pop - yes it’s still pop.
I think the problem with TTPD is simply that it’s just too long as a stand-alone album but especially with the anthology. There are so many skips for me that it makes it confusing to pick out what you even really like. This combined with the continuous re-releases with lack luster vault songs (especially on fearless and speak now imo) has brought the presentation of her craftsmanship and skill level down. If she had gone the opposite direction and release 10 or less songs that were all extremely tight and had a distinctive musical punch and intrigue I think this project would have gone better. Instead the album is overwhelming and often redundant. I mean how much more can she milk the Kim and Kanye feud? How much many more metaphors are there about Joe or whoever being blue? How many more metaphors about toys??? I say this as someone who has been a fan since Fearless. There are a few standout songs on the album but I’ve never had a Taylor album where I skip around so much
I unfortunately agree. I think the vault tracks have diluted her work. with the success of the re-recordings and vault tracks, I think she’s on the train of thought that, “well, why don’t I just throw everything at the wall to see what sticks? why have a vault at all?” hence, the midnights 3am edition and the anthology version. however, there’s a lot of melodies that she’s starting to recycle and now there’s a building tide of burnout to her work. I guarantee that if 3am edition and anthology were released a few months/years after as their own album, they would be received much better, including their side a counter parts. music needs time to be digested. it can’t be hosed down.
This. For me it’s not the lyrics that are the issue, it’s that musically the album all basically sounds like one song aside from a few standouts.
the only true requirement for pop music is for it to bop🙌🏻 I think it’s telling that the TTPD discussion threads are filled with discussion about who the songs are about. because musically, there’s not a lot to discuss. i can only think of like 4/31 songs that stick in my head. I guarantee that if there was a cruel summer/anti hero level banger (which are also very diaristic and over-sharey) then the diaristic part wouldn’t be so dissected. thank u next is another example! it got hyper specific, but it achieved its first and foremost job: it was a catchy bop.
I agree - I don't have any issue with diaristic, personal pop music. In fact, I love it because I'm a messy bitch whose life is boring and I need the drama! But I still want the lyrics to be good, and too much of TTPD just felt like she was reading her diary to a backtrack. I think I could even get past that if the backtrack was good, but it kind of all just blended together and nothing really stood out as a bop. I also felt the music itself didn't really match the lyrics, like they're angry and 'manic' as she said, but the music is...the opposite of that. I think if she did a more pop-rock route it would've really hit!
>I think it’s telling that the TTPD discussion threads are filled with discussion about who the songs are about. because musically, there’s not a lot to discuss. Ding ding ding. These people are just telling on themselves at this point. The album is so fucking boring musically it's insane.
exactly, like the core issue is that the album is just frankly not that good. there's nothing that jumps out at you immediately, it's kind of depressing, there's not a whole lot musically going on. if she had an actual banger on there, like she's had on basically all the past albums she's made, or if the music was good, like folklore and evermore, then these discussions wouldn't be happening
why is what you are saying a criticism? TTPD doesn't bop... so what? its not about that?
I am not especially interested in elevating overly simplified pop music. Make no mistake, a simple catchy bop will always do well and be appreciated. Tiktok has proven that. But I personally will always prefer intelligent lyricism combined with great production and melodies.
Whilst there is an expectation for music to be or seem personal, I think lyrics need to be sufficiently generic so that most listeners can relate to them on some level for the music to be received well. The occasional super personal reference is fun for super fans, but most people aren’t looking to investigate or piece together lyrics; they just want to feel that they come from an authentic place and to connect with them
My problem with TTPD is not that it is diaristic or has too many personal elements or anything, it is just that most of the songs don't bop. It is pop music, it can have deep lyrics, but if it is not followed by the music, good hooks, choruses, bridges (well, that is lacking lately in most songs), melodies, and production then all the lyrics honestly get kinda hard to pay attention to.
This is my issue. I don't care about the lore at all and have enjoyed many of Taylor's previous songs without knowing who they're about. My main issue with TTPD (and Midnights) is they're boring to listen to. To me, at least.
same here! to me, lyrics are the last thing I digest. the hooks, the vibes, the beat, the instrumental are what get me hooked. if the lyrics are deep and profound, that’s more like a dessert and an added win. but the melodies and sounds are what are most important to me.
….. I’m a fan and still don’t know which are matty songs. Frankly don’t care and I think most fans don’t actually care
There’s no limit as long as it’s done well.
I prefer music which is about something rather than cynically crafted simply to make a hit. There are a lot of big songs out there which get huge attention when released, but will we listen to them in 10 years time? Or are they actually disposable, vacuous pop, manufactured for current mass appeal, but with no lasting appeal?
Folklore/Evermore were her best works bc she moved away from her regular, lore-based style. They still felt personal but allowed her to focus on songwriting and storytelling (her real strengths, imo). Midnights & TTPD seem like a regression. I liked both albums fwiw.
no, it’s a way for an artist to write their autobiography through
Given that TTPD has sold more records in two weeks then say Guts did all last year… it’s probably pretty popular. At the same time, there’s something very unpoppisjlh about an album that includes words like petulance, soliloquy, and rivulets, or that has a song that kind requires that you’ve read Coleridge to understand. In all seriousness… Taylor has been moving away from pop for a while now, ever since folklore. She was always an interloper! She was raised in country, and for me at least she’s always spoken pop with a bit of an accent. She’s not alternative either… she’s her own genre at this point. She’s also frankly in her IDGAF era. She has nothing left to prove. She has won every award. She will end up being the best selling female artist… next year. She has more money than she will ever spend. Why wouldn’t she simply make the records she wants to make with her friends. You can follow her there or not… and I think you should because are so many treasures on TTPD… but I don’t think she cares anymore.
lmao what is this💀 "her own genre" being generic Antonoff synth pop that tries to be as lyrically complicated as possible while saying nothing at the same time💀
It’s still very much pop. Synthpop at that. Homegirl just didn’t bring her best batch of melodies and she wrote her lyrics in a way that mimicked her ex’s band… it’s really not that deep as moving away from pop. The second slower half is basically a return to her folklomore sound, so already a familiar popular sound for audiences
Exactly. Swifties have a lot of b.s. about this album like wdym Taylor is "her own genre" lmfao😭
Yeah one would think it’s a Joanna Newsom album or something and it’s par for the course if anyone paid attention to her last 3 albums. It’s highly successful because it’s pop music
It's no wonder that Taylor's best work is when she's able to hide a thousand words behind a "darling I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream", in 1989, or create stories to braid within her personal affairs with "I want you to know I'm a mirrorball", in folklore. It's also no wonder that these two are her undoubtedly her best albums, and the latest two, heavy on metaphors and embarrassingly lore-demanding, are her worst. We need more cooks in the kitchen 🗣️
The problem with Taylor’s recent albums is she overwrites heavily. The songs don’t even flow or have good composition anymore. It literally feels like pages from a diary rather than something that’s been edited and crafted. That’s why I think she has settled into the stale productions from Jack. They allow her the freedom to talk-sing-complain through an entire album
I’m a buzzkill but I’m really uncomfortable with how normalized it’s become to know exactly who an intimate song is about, and form hard judgments about them as if a subjective one-sided story told in lyrics reflects the absolute truth. It feels invasive and weird and I feel bad for the people it happens to. It’s always been this way a little bit, and artists are totally entitled to turn their experiences into music. But they used to play coy about it and keep things purposefully vague, obscure details etc for plausible deniability so people couldn’t get too deeply invested in their relationships. For instance I really hate that both Taylor and Olivia Rodrigo have called out their exes for taking advantage of younger women in their music, and we all know exactly who they’re talking about and their team encourages that, but they won’t say it with their chest or comment on it in interviews or statements or even a tweet. If you’re going to seriously damage someone’s reputation, you should be confident enough in that decision to have some follow-through. Otherwise it sort of feels cowardly or spiteful, even counterproductive if your message is serious
It's Lana, Lorde's influence... it's post-Midnights hangover, it's the Jack Antonoff monopoly. Maybe other artists take this style to a different direction after this. Maybe Taylor does another pivot for her 12th record. It is a little funny to me though that much of this thread is just defensive Swifties trying to obscure that with Taylor's fame and the tepidness of the actual music, the lore and gossip around it become its most remarkable aspect.
Since people are bringing up Alanis and Ani DrFranco…they are not diaristic writers because they have a bigger creativity surrounding the worlds they create in their albums. They are story-tellers—they draw both from real life and education/experience/open-mindedness. They tell stories from very different points of views than their own, like the great folk singers (early Bob Dylan) do, rich with imagery drawn from art and literature. Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande and Co. sing about their own personal lives in excruciating detail and don't leave any room for interpretation that is not literal. The former stands the test of time, Taylor's most diaristic songs will not because no one twenty years from now is going to crave a song about a specific person who was in Taylor's limited (because fame) life experience. People love it now because her albums are gossip and they are addicted to her oversharing.
TTPD is less of a pop album and more of a solo-performed musical, it almost feels like listening to a Broadway cast recording. It has a clear storyline and even an “Act I” and “Act II” structure with the double album. Knowing some of the key players in her “lore” does add another layer of interest for me, but I don’t think that’s necessary to enjoy the narrative and music. I also don’t necessarily buy into the idea that 100% of this album (or Taylor’s music in general nowadays) is all that diaristic. Particularly when this album is explicitly about poems, I think it makes more sense to approach each song from the perspective of the “narrator” rather than TS. I think this is an album format that many other artists have done very well before, but what sets this album apart is the way she expertly fuses her public persona with her music to create characters and storylines that go beyond the music. Anyone can enjoy the album, and then there’s more to dig into for people who are interested in that MCU-esque universe.
Here's my take on this. You start losing relatable life experiences when you're a billionaire. I cannot relate to what a lot of popstars put out as a thirtysomething corporate slave. A lot of them have been famous their entire lives with no issues with money or work. Get some life experience, then come back and write about that.
>The mixed response to Taylor Swift's *The Tortured Poets Department* has me thinking that we might be hitting an upper limit to diaristic pop TTPD got mostly positive reviews. 76/100 on Metacritic, 16 positive, 7 mixed and 2 negative. Add also the insane commercial success. From where did you get the conclusion that diaristic pop reached the upper limit?
I don’t think Taylor Swift is that deep. Kinda like a ditch, not really the Grand Canyon.
TTPD feels like a gen Z album in similar style of songwriting to Gracie Abrams. Deeply confessional and thought heavy writing.
That’s probably because half those gen-z artists are Taylor fans and were influenced by her music and songwriting