In preparation for my stream, I have listened to all 31 tracks on
The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. I was curious why people were so pissed so I listened to this for 2 fucking hours. Here's the verdict.
The songs are very well produced and everything is flawlessly mixed and very professional. There's no way to fault her production. It is impossible to say her music is outright bad.
What is torturous about this album is that, at least in the first half, there is almost no variety. Each track is similar to the last. She never really flexes her range or goes out of this comfortably restrained zone. There's also no shifts. The songs don't usually pick up or slow down, and if they do it is not by much. I'm trying not to sound needlessly derisive, but at times it sounds like unnecessarily good slam poetry to a beat. She's mostly just telling a story to music without using the medium to help with her storytelling.
It wasn't until Song #13 (
I Can Do with a Broken Heart) where there's actually a key change and she's singing differently in the second half of the song. Song #14 (
The Smallest Man in the World) also does this, but I swear to god no other song before that does. It's the same beat and pace the entire time. #8 (
Florida!!!) is probably my favorite in the first half because it features Florence + the Machine, and just having her on really breaks up the album because it's another voice aside from Taylor's.
But what inhibits me from actually enjoying this even as background music is that
every single song is about breakups. I know that's a meme with her but without exaggeration every song is about a man.
I didn't know what the difference between
The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology and the version without "The Anthology" was. There's 15 more songs on The Anthology and I was debating if maybe there were two different masters put out. I actually looked this up and apparently they're the exact same fucking thing except Anthology is longer.
What really gets me about this post is that I would absolutely not explain this listening experience as cohesive brilliance. It's actually really jarring to hear a song about a breakup with a man and then hear another song about a breakup with a man. Like I know that Taylor Swift is a real person and she's in a long-term relationship with football man. The album would give me the impression that they have an extremely toxic, abusive relationship and she is psychologically abusive, if I didn't think the songs are just made for money.
While listening I was thinking how they all felt like different pitches at the same kind of single. Like, imagine an order comes down from Hollywood that we need 10 new hit singles. We need a heartbreak song for women. TayTay puts together 15 songs to try and knock this out.
There are some albums which are a listening experience. You sit down and actually play it from song to song and you can feel how they complement each other and set a tone. An album can also inform you about where an artist is when you composed the record. I really don't feel like I know anything more about Taylor Swift now than I did before.
In the second half now, #19 is
The Albatross which now my favorite song from the album. It sounds a lot different from the rest and actually has some meaning and introspection. It actually feels like this is how she actually feels.
I'd also like to point out how many of her track names sound like meme references.
- #1 Fortnight
- #4 Down Bad
- #11 I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)
- #25 I Look In People's Windows
#23 is the song
I Hate it Here where she says, paraphrasing: "When I was a kid my friends would play a game where we pick a time in history to travel back to and I'd pick the 1830s without the racists so I could be sold off to the highest bidder, and then my friends got weirded out". The rest of the song is about escapism. It's kind of hard to care about that lyric because the entire story is way more weird than Taylor just not wanting to be around racists. Like, if she could go back to 1830s and be sold off to an exotic lord from the Far East and not just white guys that'd be fine.
"
I Look in People's Windows" is lyrically about as creepy as the Adelle song about showing up at an ex's doorstep to remark about how he's happy and has a wife and children. It's literally just about looking through windows to make sure he's not moving on. Though it's probably her best singing? Like she actually sings in this instead of just sing-speaking. It reminds me somewhat of Imogen Heap without the reverb.
Taylor writes her own lyrics and sometimes she can be an awkward writer. The "Everybody is a sexy baby" from
Antihero is popular and my mom always hated
Love Story because in the story both Romeo and Juliet fucking die. That's just a quirk of her music and is one of the most humanizing things about the album.
Though now at the end I feel like I get what her appeal is: It's a catharsis. A teenage girl processing her first heartbreak, something no one has the right equipment to handle until they experience it firsthand, will listen to this song sprawled out on her bed, iPhone with TayTay in one hand and tissuebox at the ready by the left.
They're not
literally all about breakup, it's this sort of: "There's issues, I wish things would change, I'm unhappy, but I'm not always unhappy, and also if we break up then I'd be proving haters right, and I'd be pissed if we broke up and then you upgraded". Each of these waffling emotions is a different song, which just sounds like a breakup to men. These are not really thoughts men have, and teenage boys processes breakups like "
Grug hate you but Grug peepee get hard", and "
maybe Grug kill self?".
TL;DR: This is an album for teenage girls. If you're a man you are not the target audience of this album and you will not enjoy it. The production quality is high but the songs are very samey. I liked
Albatross and
Florida!!!. There's nothing in this album to be upset about.
