Taylor Swift - The Tortured Poets Department: Rated

THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT (2024): 5.1/10

I had to do it because it didn’t sit well with me that one piece of music can be rated so dramatically differently by people.

I don’t love Taylor Swift and I generally ignore her as a public figure but I tried to take an objective look and take it for a piece of music.

I liked the musical arrangement and the production - most of the songs would have been really good especially for a pop album, but what ruined most of this album for me was the lyricism. The whole thing read like a troubled teenager discovering poetry for the first time and trying desperately to apply it to their privileged lives, failing miserably.

The myth that this album is the same song over and over is false. If anything, I have felt that this doesn’t feel like a cohesive project at all. We get multiple types of pop that don’t really lead into or out of each other.

I then read the intention to understand this album and where it comes from better and what struck me was “an attempt to distance herself from being seen as a poet while still saying this is about poetry,. poetry is really a metaphor in this album.I think she’s talking about trying to present some version of what happened to her in this formal, structured, poetic way, and how that’s hard.”

How silly is that?? It’s poetry but not poetry but put poetry in the title? And then not utilise poetry in the entire lyrical structure of any of the songs on the album? Forget the possessive apostrophe on POETS’ on the title? Use Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Dead Poets Society as inspiration for your titles, and twist it to fit your self victimising narrative? 

Tell me I don't get it, but I don't think that is clever at all. I think she merely gets tangled into the strings of her own artistic intent.

Not to mention that musically, nothing revolutionary has gone on. Not for music or pop in general but not even for herself. This work felt like a “best hits” of 1989, Folklore and Midnights mushed together and tied together with duct tape. Would have been a ton better if it had been a compilation album of the three.