Taylor Swift wrote this: ‘In my mind I see fairy lights piercing through the fog, but I still have the spirit to bear the weight of that crack.’
Taylor Swift is making people bored…? – Photo: Billboard
That is the opening line of a song on the album Tortured Poets Department , the song So Long, London.
The song seems to be inspired by the classic quatrain in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby , when Gatsby shows Nick the blue light on the other side of the bay, symbolizing an eternal, unreachable desire. by Gatsby.
Is there any desire that Taylor Swift hasn’t achieved?
When Tortured Poets Department released, Taylor Swift was on top of the world. She appeared everywhere in popular culture : the Eras tour was the most popular in history, she won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for the fourth time (something no one had ever done), while still growing. He re-recorded his old albums with additional unreleased songs.
And then she released an album with 31 songs, 2 hours long – equal to a movie!
Is the “blue light” that Taylor Swift is reaching for not just greatness, because she has already achieved that, but absolute, lasting, unchanging greatness?
Reaching the peak is not enough, she wants that peak to be maintained endlessly and expand infinitely.
People often talk about Swift as a poet in music and her ambition to become a true poet is evident in The Tortured Poets Department , the album whose title roughly translates as “department of fallen poets”.
But as always, ambition, once too expansive, can backfire. The Tortured Poets Department is still an album with compositions that reach the level many people desire, but this is Taylor Swift and we cannot avoid becoming “double standards” when expecting more.
Taylor Swift releases 31 songs for new album – Photo: Getty
Granted, Taylor Swift has truly excelled in playing the role of an ideal literature teacher for her young fans, incorporating dense references to academic art books into her love confessions. It’s the poetry of Dylan Thomas, it’s William Shakespeare, it’s The Secret Garden, it’s Peter Pan, it’s A Wrinkle in Time, it’s Greek mythology, even the ancient philosopher Aristotle has a role. cameo in her “lecture”.
It’s true that Taylor Swift still, as naturally as breathing, writes songs that take the shape of a short story, like The Black Dog about a couple sharing their location with each other and then she sees him walking in. a bar, or I Look in People’s Window with a girl walking on the street, looking into the windows next door looking for a familiar face.
Even if you drink light wine, you get drunk
That is, Swift’s poetry is still good, still full of vocabulary that makes us cry, and the minimalist indie, guitar- and piano-centered compositions of Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff still expand and develop from the Folklore period. , the “drama” with the ex-lover is still hot, but the lack of truly outstanding songs that are capable of sticking in the listener’s mind and supporting the album makes 2 hours of listening to music inevitably contain some passages. lengthy part.
“If you drink too much light wine, you will get drunk. A wise person will say too much, even if it’s good, it will be boring”, or as the English idiom “too much of a good thing can be bad” (too much of a good thing can be bad).
Is Taylor Swift making the world miserable?
Taylor Swift’s frequent appearances have caused people to coin the phrase “Taylor Swift fatigue”, the feeling of being tired of seeing her everywhere, seeing her all the time, hearing her music everywhere. Every corner of social networks is filled with stories about her.
Taylor’s hard work (fans jokingly call her “American buffalo”) has only recently helped her reach one peak after another, but in return, it has taken away her sense of magic. The secret that is needed in an artist – the feeling that she is not always here to sing for us and display her life in songs like an exhibition.
After all, with art, sometimes disappearance is as important as presence.
