you took my sadness out of context at the tortured poets department complex
Please be patient with me as I try to explain vibes because I don’t understand music theory. And as I go off-track.
The Tortured Poets Department is Taylor Swift's most bitter, cynical, snarky album. It's sonically consistent and self-indulgent. As much as I love that for her, I'm awaiting her musical ambitions to catch up to my imagination. She still has several more career-bests under her belt, but artistic development takes time and experimentation. But I am a patient woman, and I knew in my heart in 2012 that she had sown the seeds for Folklore. The thing about a "real fan" like me is that I'm not going to eat any old slop she serves. It's my understanding of her oeuvre that allows me to be critical and appreciative of her skills.
I’m not going to review these songs track by track because quite frankly most of them didn’t retain my attention. The ones that follow is commentary on the stickier songs.
My official stance regarding the real-life stories that may have inspired these songs …
The stories in the tortured poets department are a composite, like New York magazine does.
"so high school" could have been really good--with that early 2000s haziness and its rom-com atmosphere. Unfortunately, it is a love song with no stakes or tension, maintaining an even emotional tone. Without the undercurrent or acknowledgement of anxiety in songs like “Begin Again” and “Invisible String,” the song lacks a certain bite. One of love’s great powers is its ability to neutralize anxieties and quell grudges. But I get it. The song isn’t supposed to be that deep, so it’s just a shimmering haze. People dunk on “He knows how to ball/I know Aristotle,” but that line IS so high school. It’s a dark academia The Secret History stan fetishizing her student athlete bf who’s apparently doing a lot of semi-private hand stuff.
“But Daddy I Love Him” is the album standout. Breathless and exhilarating, she serves up both a spiteful criticism of her fans’ culture and rich fanservice. She pays homage to herself in this petulant reworking of “Love Story,” which is driven not by a conviction in true love, but a cathartic rant. The crux of the song is “I’d rather burn my whole life down than listen to one more second of all this bitching and moaning. I’ll tell you something ‘bout my good name; it’s mine alone to disgrace. I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empaths’ clothing.”
Even though the expansive emotional production and the narrative structure follows that of “Love Story,” the result is not a love song. “Love Story” directly addresses our narrator’s Romeo, who manages to put all the pieces together and legitimize the relationship in the eyes of her family and the law. She puts all of her trust in him, and he does not fail her. There are no heroes in “But Daddy I Love Him,” only the entitlement to make terrible delusional decisions and to throw away your goodwill. She’s Don Draper and he’s not as smart as Rachel Menken and able to realize “You don't want to run away with me. You just want to run away.” Her “true love” is only an accessory to what she really wants, which is self-determination. He is the getaway car, just going along with her when she commands him to “floor it through the fences.”
“The Black Dog” is immensely satisfying and one of my new favorite songs. It’s Taylor doing Phoebe Bridgers in boygenius. The dog motif must be a nod not only to “Me and My Dog” and “Letter to an Old Poet,” but also “The Moon Song,” which is about the desperate need to love someone at the expense of your own dignity and how you will always return even if they push you away. I ache during that turn from “so I will wait for the next time you want me like a dog with a bird at your door” to “when you saw the dead little bird you started crying.” That effect is somewhat echoed with the repeated reference to the “black dog” and bookended with “tail between your legs you’re leaving.”
Still, the song maintains Taylor Swift’s plainspoken vulnerable lyrics and narrative structure. Slow, sad premise-establishing start, energetic chorus, more context in the next verse, chorus melody with different lyrics, emotional bridge that references the chorus, original chorus with strategic lines changed so the meaning is a little different. It’s not just a good song, but a rewarding story because it’s metatextual without being overly repetitive. Even the sound continually builds upon itself to progress the story with increasingly stacked vocals and harmonies and robust instrumentals. The one thing it’s missing is a four-part harmony with backing vocals by boygenius.
“loml” is such a pure Taylor Swift song. The Tortured Poets Department’s self indulgence often comes in its verbosity, feeling like she’s chewing through a chockful of metaphors meant for pull quotes.
“loml” avoids this trap by being so deeply felt. She wasn’t asking to be a princess in a fairytale. She was asking for someone to love her, and they couldn’t stay. Commitment wasn’t just a dream. It was a broken promise. The tapestry of innocence depicted in Fearless and “White Horse” has been torn, and “loml” paints a world-weary loss that can’t be outrun.
“The Prophecy” is Taylor doing Sufjan Stevens, which is a cool experiment. She needs the real thing, though. To that end, she needs to read The Four Loves by CS Lewis and listen to the Tim Keller sermons about Leah and Sarah and Hagar. Even though “I got cursed like Eve got bitten” is a clever and self-aware line, I’d like for her to refresh her religious imagery. References to altar, hips, sacrifice, holy ghost--these feel muddled sometimes. She’s gotta wrangle the Dessners to help her produce a track about Bathsheba, including lyrics akin to “my little lamb” or “You loved him more than your womb could sustain in its widow’s ramshackle embrace.” She better stand outside the Illinoise stagedoor with a boombox playing it in hopes that Sufjan Stevens shows up.
Speaking of biblical references, maybe it’s a bit children’s CCM (don’t remind me of the song because it’s been stuck in my head for years), but if she wanted to throw a biblical reference into “But Daddy I Love Him,” 2 Samuel 6: 22 might have been a good one. “I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes.” David is half-naked dancing and celebrating because the Ark of the Covenant has been brought into his city. His wife Michal tells him he was acting foolishly, and instead of feeling embarrassed, he doubles down on his stance of worship. The Bible says that “Michal daughter of Saul had no children to the day of her death.” I’m sorry to the commentators, but the Lord did not close this woman’s womb because she saw her husband act crazy and she got the ick! It’s not because God hates her, either. Michal not having kids was a casualty of the actions of her father Saul and likely a conscious choice by David so as not to create an even messier line of succession. Yet another example of polygamy’s failure! Anyway…here Taylor Swift is David and the Ark of the Covenant is the guy in the song.
If you listen to “thanK you aIMee,” you’ll find that it shares some melodies with “Marjorie,” which is a song that honors her late maternal grandmother, opera singer Marjorie Finlay. What’s really funny is that it’s not enough that Taylor sings that her saintly mother wishes this woman dead, but the song is also saying MY GRANDMA HATES YOU TOO, KIM! Feels like overkill.
As calculating and devious Taylor Swift inevitably is, the only thing she did during the Kanye/Kim feud was be a white woman in the wrong place at the wrong time. All she really ever asked for was respect. “Innocent,” the song ostensibly “forgiving” Kanye West for hijacking her VMA award acceptance when she was 20. The event was traumatizing to her because when people booed Kanye’s rudeness, she assumed that they were booing because they agreed with him that she didn’t deserve the award. She didn’t really get over it, especially since he didn’t seem sufficiently penitent, so the resulting song “Innocent” is condescending. It’s clear that she wanted to be seen as the “bigger person,” and a lot of people fell for it. That was her schtick then, being a graceful princess wise beyond her years. The song is more effective as one of gentle self-compassion from someone who’s been through it, which is why Taylor’s Version feels richer. “32 and still growing up now” means more coming from the woman in her 30s who wrote “Growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all."
The feud subsided for a while until Kanye and Kim double-crossed her when asking permission to use her name in his song “Famous.” Yes, she said the “I think me and Taylor might still have sex” line was tongue in cheek, and she didn’t dispute the idea that the song can have a line like “I made her famous.” What she didn’t consent to was the line “I made that bitch famous,” which was disrespectful and made her the butt of the joke, and they didn’t seem to ask her permission to make a nude wax figure in her likeness for the music video. The latter is violating, and newly relevant considering the amount of AI-generated explicit content that was made in her image. I’m sure her team is considering suing over the images, especially since she’s equipped with a killer legal team and it would be a genuine act of feminist solidarity. If she won, the case could be used as legal precedent to help other victims. The problem is, if she loses, that’s a massive L for all women.
FWIW, I always rooted for Kim and Kanye because it added complexity to Kim’s outward character to be Kanye’s advocate and protector in his struggle with mental illness. She was on his side for as long as she could bear it. They have a beautiful family together and I think they were the love of each other’s lives. The tragedy is that love wasn’t enough and she couldn’t save him from himself.
ADDENDUM
“Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me” is another rehash of Reputation’s “in my villain era” concept, which she’s revisited from time to time. “Anti-Hero” was another, which was dated on arrival but people still ate it up. (That’s because I was “the mortifying ordeal”-posting in 2018.) Still, WAOLOM is good! It’s enjoyable (because the the narcotics she put in them, duh!), and again, I lament that “Look What You Made Me Do” is the song that people will remember over this one or even “I Did Something Bad,” which would have been the superior lead single. WAOLOM uses similar tricks as “The Black Dog,” with emotive vocals, dynamic production, and repetition with variation.