The Pop Corporation

When you’re fully in the lore of standom, every utterance from your favourite artist is either an in-joke, or breadcrumbs to follow for some deeper meaning.

And that’s where we’re at with the stratospherically successful Taylor Swift who, in terms of ticket sales and hit records, can basically do no wrong.

However, what if you’re not fully versed in the back stories, whispers, vague winks, and all that?  What do you do when you simply judge an album for what is literally in front of you?

It’s a tricky business being critical of an artist which has seemingly trademarked paranoia with previous relationships, other popstars, and backed by partisan fans feeding into it. Such is the narrowing of eyes in The World Of Swifties, that any perceived unfairness toward their favourite songwriter is lambasted as unfair, or worse still, something much more sinister.

Either way, Swift has once again shifted shape with the latest ‘era’, which in part aims to step away from Relatable All-American Girl Next Door, and toward something that recognises that her all conquering image is something to be examined and even sent up. She’s a showgirl and all that glitters isn’t necessarily gold. It’s lamé, right?

Whether she’s crying for help from inside the bubble of performance, or leaning into the fantasy of her own on-stage image, whatever you decide after listening to these songs, she is unequivocally too big to fail in terms of pure numbers.

A refrain in ‘Elizabeth Taylor’, she sings “you’re only as hot as your last hit baby” through a simile of the Hollywood icon’s life, adding “I would trade the Cartier for someone to trust”, which is a well explored trope when our stars tell us it’s tough at the top. Musically, it’s a mildly brooding synthy pop track, and it’s fine and all, but there’s something about the current pop (and hip hop) climate that makes the namedropping of luxury brands so out-of-step, unless you’re buying into the idea of decaying opulence, which of course, many pop culture vultures are.

Where the album feels like it works, is in the softer moments. A track like ‘Eldest Daughter’ sounds already like it will be sung back at Swift from a huge audience, swelling over the deliberately sparse augmentation.

However, when the tempo quickens, it’s where the cracks start to show. Understandably, Swift sounds worn out on this album – she recorded it in the middle of her globe trotting tour – and while die-hard fans may enjoy this as a show of vulnerability, others will wonder if Taylor should have regrouped and waited until she was fully revved up and ready to go.

Backed by pop-titan, Max Martin, you’d hope for some bombast and fireworks – or failing that, some sugary, irresistible pop that you just can’t argue with. However, the mood of the songs is rather lowkey and Martin’s team offer a tight, polished backdrop for Swift, which too often, leaves you feel like you could be getting more.

Regrettably, there’s times of the album where you’re looking at it through your fingers, most notably in ‘Father Figure’ and ‘WOOD’. Maybe Taylor’s just having fun, and we should stop reading into a pop LP so keenly, and that she’s just let the handbrake off and doing whatever the fuck she wants… but the interpolation of the George Michael classic to sign a line off with “my dick is bigger” is going to make any right thinking music aficionado wince (although, you have to concede that George would have probably hooted at the idea and given it his blessing). In ‘WOOD’ – a paean to (presumably) NFL star Travis Kelce’s penis, she sings about a “redwood tree” and a curse being “broken by your magic wand” with “new heights of manhood”, and the whole thing just… well… doesn’t suit her.

Katy Perry in her previous camp greatness and current Sabrina Carpenter, sure. They could pull a sly wink off like that. Pop fans aren’t prudish either, and the whole Nintendo Wii menu version of the Jackson 5’s ‘I Want You Back’ makes the whole thing feel very peculiar indeed. It’s a shame really, because there’s a version of mid 30s sexuality and innuendo that absolutely would have worked through some sequined showgirl lens, but instead, it feels more like Rod Stewart’s cavorting, which has always been a joke.

Also grabbing the pop forums by the collar is an apparent beef with Charli XCX, who gave everyone ‘Sympathy Is A Knife’, which told of feeling inferior in the face of the huge stardom of the like of Taylor Swift.

Swift, it seems, has missed the point and given us ‘Actually Romantic’, delivering an aside about the subject of the song calling her “a boring Barbie when the coke’s got you brave”, leaving us without the fun, sharp intake of breath when someone serves the tea, but rather, a feeling of tedious spite and pettiness. On ‘Brat’, you’ll note, there’s a song called ‘Everything Is Romantic’. It’s not like we’re not normally able to enjoy popstars fighting for no good reason, and it’s not like Charli is squeaky clean herself, but there’s something about this whole thing that feels like an irritant.

Swift adds: “Wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face – some people might be offended, but it’s actually sweet – all the time you’ve spent on me.”

Too often, online criticism is met with the boring “rent free” mantra, which strips all nuance and empathy from any situation, and regrettably, that’s exactly a realisation of the worst fears people may have had about the state Taylor Swift currently finds herself in.

Of course, she’s no ghoulish monster all told – she’s a pop singer singing about pop things. Charli XCX was painting herself in a dim light when she sang about comparison being the thief of her joy – however, it’s not as dimly lit as Taylor Swift’s seemingly intensifying billionaire paranoia.

Pop and rock is littered with terrible people with terrible views, and literal terrible actions. It’s not like, broadly, people can’t look beyond these things in a broader narrative. However, Taylor doesn’t come off as camp and clever, nor even fun and catty when she gives us ‘CANCELLED!’

In it, she sings “did you girlboss too close to the sun? Did they catch you having far too much fun?”, which in itself, is kinda pointed and silly, which is sometimes fun. However, given her proclivity for hanging out with literal fascist sympathisers, it sticks in the craw to hear a chorus that proclaims “good thing I like my friends cancelled – I like ’em cloaked in Gucci and in scandal!”, adding “can’t you see my infamy loves company?” and “now you know exactly who your friends are… we’re the ones with matching scars.”

Yuck.

You worry that Swift suffers from actively needing conflict – manufactured, imagined, or otherwise – to get out of bed at the moment. Over the years, she’s hit out at relationships no matter how fleeting they were, like she was a one-woman Greek tragedy. This has been great for people who like taking arbitrary sides in things – but honestly, now, it all feels kinda boring. She’s apparently met the love of her life, is set to be married and a performer moving in the history books like no-one since Michael Jackson or The Beatles. And yet, instead of getting a satisfying ‘told you so’, we are met with thin drama, damp petty behaviour, and a song about her fella’s shaft.

Being fair, in ‘Wi$h Li$t’, she does think of more pleasant things, but the overriding feeling from this is a tension that just doesn’t click. More than ever, she’s sounding like an unreliable narrator. Dreaming of domestic bliss and a nice house is fine in song, but y’know she is personally worth somewhere in the region of $1.6 billion, so it’s not like it’s not completely achievable, right? And again, while she assures us that material things and success mean little to her, she will underline how she’s wooed by two-grand-a-night Parisian hotels, a life of “Balenci’ shades”, and the aforementioned “Gucci and scandal.”

When the songs sound great and fun, it doesn’t matter what the lyrics are necessarily. However, sonically, it’s a bit lower mid-tempo and doesn’t have any sharp left-turns. Even if that’s what she intended, it’s all a bit unexciting. Given some of the music coming up through the ranks, which is bursting with life, this all feels a little staid. So with that, you examine the lyrics a little more closely because surely, that’s where the meat is. And they just aren’t.

Reviews for this album will no doubt be a mixture of praise and pith, and all told, neither are needed. When someone’s work is poorly received, you always keep one eye on “might this sound great or be a cult favourite in a decade or so?” We’ve seen this with albums by the likes of Paul McCartney which were unfairly judged against his previous work, now being reappraised. An album can still be half decent once you take away the current fatigue of an artist’s popularity. However, we’re not picking that up here, even though pre-sales have already ensured that Swift has a hit on her hands purely in terms of pure stats.

It’s a mildly distracting album and thin on good lines. Maybe it’s one for the fans? It seems unlikely that this will be the gateway album into the rest of her back catalogue if anyone is approaching her music new.

Maybe, given the title of the album, we were expecting more insight and reflections on fame and a look behind the velvet curtain that us plebs just don’t get to see. Maybe we were expecting a bit more showgirl camp and brassiness, all smudged greasepaint and feather headdresses. Sadly, what we got was a couple of genuine clunkers and some other fairly standard songs from someone who has, in the past, showed much higher standards.

There’s no-one on the market right now, that has more eyes on her than Taylor Swift and the expectation around her is impossibly severe both in hope and withering asides. It’s almost pointless trying to be negative about it, because she’s the whole circus. It’s genuinely interesting to see what it’s like, close-up, when a generational megastar releases a new album. We just wish we’d found the material more interesting.

If this ends up being considered a flop – which we’re not sure it will be with ol’ Teflon Taylor – we’re more interested in how she responds to that. When her back is genuinely against the wall and she comes out swinging, maybe that’s the album that’ll turn us around?