If you asked me a year ago, I’d tell you Taylor Swift has been my favorite artist for the longest time. When my older sister showed me the music video of “Love Story,” I fell in love with the blonde girl with curls and a sweet country voice.
Flash forward to over ten years later and now Taylor Swift has become a cultural phenomenon. Her influence and power as a musician has skyrocketed, especially in the past few years with the start of the Eras tour, rerecorded albums, and the release of Midnights. It’s almost insane to think about her journey as an artist as someone who lived through it all with her — the rise, the fall, to the household name she is now.
Her most recent album, THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT, is the newest addition to her seemingly endless discography.
If I’m being honest, I was worried if I would like this album based on the aesthetic and tracklist alone. The song names are questionable, namely But Daddy I Love Him and I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can). It set the tone of what was to come and to me, I interpreted it as much more childish and immature than her previous album concepts.
Of course, I had no idea what it actually sounded like but it’s a Taylor Swift album and therefore I would be tuning in no matter what. Imagine my surprise when this album turned out to be a secret double album with 31 songs. As I listened to each, I was ready to fall in love with at least one of them as I always do. Unfortunately, although I liked a few songs, I was highly disappointed with the quality of this album.
Sometimes when you’re very invested in one particular artist or person, it feels like people are attacking you when they criticize them. I get it, I’ve been there, I know how it feels. I’ve seen a lot of Swifties defend this album with their life, saying that everyone just loves to hate Taylor Swift for the sake of it, or that it’s made for fans so other people won’t get it — which is frankly the stupidest argument I have ever heard.
Taylor has been cranking out albums nonstop since Folklore released in 2020. With her rerecordings, vault tracks, and two new full-length albums, fans have been enjoying the influx of new content without much thought. As someone who has and will always hold a special place in my heart for Taylor, I have also stepped away from the fandom and online discourse about her so that I am able to look at each album objectively.
With the release of so much music in a short period of time, it’s no wonder that each album/song seems less thoroughly vetted and looked at for mistakes or just insensitive remarks. I believe that the quality of her music has gone down with THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT, which isn’t surprising for an album of 31 songs. I wish that I resonated with the lyrics and stories she’s telling on this album, but unfortunately with the lines “We wished we could live in instead of this I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists” and “You wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me” — it feels so tone deaf to people of color and people who deal with severe mental health issues.
I hope that Taylor goes back to releasing albums every year or two, as I think that will help with the quality of her newer music going forward. I hope she takes this criticism gracefully and doesn’t dismiss it for the fact that it’s “just the haters” talking, because it’s not.