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A Farewell to Twang
Taylor Swift's '1989': New Album Review
Taylor Swift has put her days in country behind her with her new album, “1989,” and a move to New York.
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Originally posted by New York Times
For almost a decade, Taylor Swift has been waging, and winning, a war, smiling all the while.
Country music has been — was — a natural enemy for her: hidebound, slow moving, lousy with machismo. She could break the rules and make people nervous simply by showing up. And yet country was also a hospitable host body. She faced almost no direct competition there, and it’s a genre that embraces success, grudgingly if need be.
Most important, country gave Ms. Swift context. It made her a transgressor, which means even her most benign songs could be read with mischievous intent. From the outside, she looked like a conquering titan. But from the inside looking out, even as the genre’s biggest star, she was always something of an underdog, multiplatinum albums and accolades be damned.
That she would one day abandon country has long been clear. It’s a big box, and a porous one, but a box all the same. “1989” (Big Machine), though, her fifth album and the first that doesn’t at all bother with country, manages to find a new foe.
In her new album, “1989,” Taylor Swift takes on the rest of mainstream pop.
But don’t be distracted by for whom the belle trolls; she trolls with glee, and that’s what matters. Take the clever “Blank Space,” a metanarrative about Ms. Swift’s reputation as a dating disaster:
Saw you there and I thought
Oh my God, look at that face
You look like my next mistake
Love’s a game, want to plaaaaaay?
This is Ms. Swift at her peak. It’s funny and knowing, and serves to assert both her power and her primness. By contrast, the songs where she sounds the least jaded — “How You Get the Girl,” “Welcome to New York” — are among the least effective. |
Read entire review here
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