 |
Big Machine | genius.com
|
· · ·
Taylor Swift already told you everything you need to know.
At the age of seventeen, she adapted the bard’s most famous tragedy for her sophomore album, Fearless, refracting it, as one does, through the prism of her own musical mannerisms.
She pivots easily between diaristic confessions and sweeping declarations, she niftily arranges chiming guitars alongside plucking banjos — oh, and that glum ending could do with a bit of redrafting.
“It’s a love story, baby,” she insists, “just say yes.”
And through sheer willpower, it becomes true. In Swift’s version the poison is swapped for a proposal, and Romeo and Juliet live happily ever after.
Taylor Swift is a singularity in crimson lipstick, a force of nature capable of bending narratives to her will as easily as a sun spins its planets. And her gravity well extends far beyond storytelling: in love and war, for better and for worse, through truth and lies and everything in between, she always wins.
It’s this that lit the fuse of her meteoric rise. Swift was a mop of blonde ringlets in cowboy boots demanding to be taken seriously in a world that crushes young women for the slightest transgression, confident in the knowledge that her experience of love and loss deserved to be shared. She took all the tears and screams and teenage ugliness and turned them into the greatest gift of all — validation.
Your fantasies aren’t ridiculous.
Your feelings are valid.
Your pain is real.
And it’s also this that has led to a recent cooling of her public perception. Somewhere along the line, a deep narcissistic streak slithered its roots into Swift’s heart. She maintained centrist silence in the face of political upheaval, her petty feuds and schisms dragged on and on, her quality control slipped lower as her self-obsession boiled higher and higher. Certainly, nobody could begruge an inflated ego to a woman who came of age already beloved by millions, already having released a generous string of albums to unanimous critical acclaim, and was rewarded time and again with sold-out stadium tours, literal armloads of awards and unswerving adoration. It turns out that validation cuts both ways.
The hero of one story is the villain of another, after all. If someone else wins, that means Taylor Swift has to lose.
But on 1989 that particular tide had yet to turn, waters still unmuddied by the drama to come. Swift’s previous album, the scorching-hot Red stood on the precipice of probability, shifting her public image from precocious prodigy to rising star.
Red took the plunge, and 1989 made the splash.
On Red, she burns brighter than ever with joy and pain, with rage and sorrow.
On 1989, she makes history.
The sweet country girl who held your hand at your first day of school and dried your tears through your first teenage heartbreak has finally gone supernova, embracing her full, glamorous potential as a pop superstar.
1989 traces a single shining arc, a smooth, hermetically sealed convexity. But step closer and run your fingers along its glowing edge. You can feel whirring and humming just below the surface — elegant networks of fractally interlocked cogs and wheels pump hot golden ichor through its labyrinthine circuitry, designed as deliberately and as expertly as a modern clockwork.
There is a limit to what can be expressed with analogue instruments, a limit Swift edged closer to with every record. She augmented her emotions with grander ornamentation, texturing songs with booming drums and sweeping strings, and in one memorable instance a particularly wicked dubstep drop.
Out with the cedar and catgut, then, and in with a meticulous splice of radiant synths and pounding drums arranged in hypnotic arrays of repeated cells, sprawling across new horizons.
‘Out of the Woods’ ricochets around on breathless loops of techno percussion, layering deeper desperation with every repetition. ‘I Wish You Would’ propels itself sky-high on kaleidoscopic arpeggios, stretching into the heavens like a pixilated rainbow of could-haves and never-weres. ‘New Romantics’ zips by with electrifying glee, sparks of confetti and cheer threatening to overvolt at any moment.
And it’s not just the upbeat tracks that find favour. Swift and her synths swoon and sigh like the autumn breeze on ‘Wildest Dreams,’ and the healing ballad ‘Clean’ twinkles with charm like a dusty, cracked music box.
It’s a thrill to watch Taylor Swift finally seize the day, finally indulge in a little selfishness and create the glittering pop record she always wanted to make. 1989 is a snapshot of a star at the peak of her popularity, a classic American songwriter in her prime, a woman who for the last time in her life has nothing to prove.
And as always, her best work is found on the mellower tracks. ‘Style’ tells the simmering story of a love doomed to repeat itself, of headlights shining through the dark, of nights of hatred and passion. The details are hazy, but they are entirely beside the point, for the emotions are crystal clear. And the production is pristine: a dozen synthetic pulses blending into a single complex heartbeat.
It is here and only here that Swift cooly refuses agency.
Their attraction is magnetic. Neither has a choice. Their Sisyphean ordeal is as inevitable as the rain falling, as the sun rising, as a Swift album obliterating all-time sales records.
“You’ve got that James Dean daydream look in your eye /
And I’ve got that red lip classic thing that you like”
This song is 1989 in miniature, striking the perfect balance between vintage and modern, between casual and hopelessly romantic. Taylor Swift can never lose. This love will never die, because she refuses to let it. And isn’t that ironclad confidence just a little marvellous?
“And when we go crashing down /
We come back every time /
‘Cause we never go out of style”
It is here and only here that Swift cooly refuses agency.
Their attraction is magnetic. Neither has a choice. Their Sisyphean ordeal is as inevitable as the rain falling, as the sun rising, as a Swift album obliterating all-time sales records.
“You’ve got that James Dean daydream look in your eye /
And I’ve got that red lip classic thing that you like”
This song is 1989 in miniature, striking the perfect balance between vintage and modern, between casual and hopelessly romantic. Taylor Swift can never lose. This love will never die, because she refuses to let it. And isn’t that ironclad confidence just a little marvellous?
“And when we go crashing down /
We come back every time /
‘Cause we never go out of style”