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Discussion: Taylor Swift - 'RED' | Metascore: 77/100
Member Since: 11/29/2010
Posts: 19,664
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Member Since: 10/31/2011
Posts: 16,937
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Quote:
Originally posted by muddysquirrel
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Yassssssssssssssssssssssssss. Metacritic and all the absolutely terrible journalists involved with it can SUCK IT.
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Member Since: 4/9/2012
Posts: 1,916
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New one
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Working full-time gigs at record stores for nine years meant hearing a lot of music I wouldn’t have otherwise spent any time with. I’ve kept up with indie music (or college rock, or whatever you want to call it) pretty well since the mid- to late-90s, so I never needed much help there. Typically, it was pop, soul and pop rock music that my always diverse batch of co-workers often exposed me to. Everything from U2′s All That You Can’t Leave Behind, which I heard about fourteen thousand times in late months of 2000, to Avril Lavigne’s Under My Skin, a record I even ended up buying at some point. Nowadays, it’s the lonely late hours of the night that usually prompt me to look into artists I wouldn’t otherwise check out. I screen the new releases on iTunes, listening to as many samples as I can. Most of what I hear, of course, is very much not for me. But, from time to time, I’ll be really surprised by how good a Miley Cyrus or P!nk or Katy Perry song is. My most recent surprise find just happens to be, as I type this sentence, the by-far most popular record on the planet – Taylor Swift’s fourth proper studio album, Red. I’d heard the record’s lead single, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” a number of times, here and there, floating around in popular society’s dying common spaces. A good pop song, I thought, not realizing that it was the work of that goofy, skinny, super young country singer who serial dates celebrities and acts super phony every time a camera is pointed at her. It never occurred to me that it could be Swift – an artist I knew to be a bland product of the modern pop-country machine. This was a pop song. A cheesy one, but a good one, with great production, an incredible hook and brilliant production.
The samples I eventually heard on iTunes were at times interesting, but it took hearing the album’s most recent single, “I Knew You Were Trouble,” to convince me to really look into Swift and her new record. What I found was a pretty solid pop disc that had few traces of any sounds I relate to the country genre (through further investigation I learned that Red is a departure from Swift’s past records, which are full of generic mod-pop-country). So yes, finally, I bought a copy of Red. Of the album’s 16 tracks I genuinely enjoy six – quite a bit, even. The by-far best offering remains, I think, the above mentioned “Trouble,” a synth-heavy production that feels, to me at least, oddly hip. It’s an indie synth pop track that could be played alongside Fun or even Gorillaz, the difference being that Swift songs – I hate to admit – really do have notably stellar vocals. Other great cuts include opener “State of Grace” (which, oddly enough, sounds like Swift singing over an early naughts U2 composition), “Stay Stay Stay” (a cutesy indie pop song that will absolutely be in a television commercial soon enough), the aforementioned “We Are Never” (another big snyth-pop production with a massive hook), “The Last Time” (a singer/songwriter collaboration with Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody that, no jokin’, could’ve easily been on the Once soundtrack) and “The Lucky One,” an epic swell of a production that borders on being too cheesy.
But here’s the thing about this review: I’m unusually picky about pop music. Maybe too picky. Chances are, if you like Taylor Swift – or commercial pop music, or pretty much any of the songs I’ve discussed in this review – there’s a very good chance you’ll like most of Red. I recognize that the title track is a big winner, as are second single “Begin Again,” pop-fest “22″ and Ed Sheeran collaboration “Everything Has Changed.” I just don’t personally happen to like these songs a whole lot … yet. What I’m saying is this: Taylor Swift, against all odds, has made a pretty damn impressive pop record. Working with producers like Butch Walker (Avril Lavigne, Weezer, Katy Perry, Pete Yorn), Dan Wilson (Mike Doughty, Adele), Jackknife Lee (U2, R.E.M., Weezer, Bloc Party), and Kanye West’s secret weapon, Jeff Bhasker (Bruno Mars, Alicia Keys, Fun, Drake, Beyonce, Jay-Z, Lana Del Rey, etc.) doesn’t hurt. Nor does being able to sing as well as Swift surely can. Yeah, the record’s themes – a 20-something girl growing up, trying new things, falling in and out of relationships – isn’t relatable to me, but that’s what all the massive hooks and interesting production is for. I never thought I’d say this but, sure, I like some Taylor Swift songs. Maybe even a whole lot, even. That said, when I listen through the Swift back catalog I dislike just about everything I hear; Red, though … well, for what it is, it’s pretty damn impressive.
87/100
http://www.zecatalist.com/music-2/taylor-swift-red/
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Member Since: 11/29/2010
Posts: 19,664
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Quote:
Originally posted by dragonhunter
New one
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Somebody who appreciates 'TLO' at last. Other than that dude has a flop taste about the best songs on the album.
Still a nice review and grade.
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Member Since: 10/31/2011
Posts: 16,937
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Jesus, what an annoying review. GUYS I DON'T USUALLY LISTEN TO MANUFACTURED BS LIKE TAYLOR SWIFT BUT ERM A FEW OF THESE SONGS ARE REALLY GOOD. I LIKE U2 AND AM OBSESSED WITH INDIE MUSIC SO I'M STILL COOL THO, RIGHT?
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Member Since: 12/13/2011
Posts: 26,638
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Quote:
Originally posted by Great Username
Jesus, what an annoying review. GUYS I DON'T USUALLY LISTEN TO MANUFACTURED BS LIKE TAYLOR SWIFT BUT ERM A FEW OF THESE SONGS ARE REALLY GOOD. I LIKE U2 AND AM OBSESSED WITH INDIE MUSIC SO I'M STILL COOL THO, RIGHT?
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They are perfectly inclined to having ****** taste.
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Member Since: 3/19/2012
Posts: 5,155
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Quote:
Originally posted by Great Username
Jesus, what an annoying review. GUYS I DON'T USUALLY LISTEN TO MANUFACTURED BS LIKE TAYLOR SWIFT BUT ERM A FEW OF THESE SONGS ARE REALLY GOOD. I LIKE U2 AND AM OBSESSED WITH INDIE MUSIC SO I'M STILL COOL THO, RIGHT?
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Those indie music snubs are so annoying
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Member Since: 10/16/2005
Posts: 16,872
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I liked the All Music review by Stephen Erlewine. I have read several of his reviews over the past few years and this seemed very fair. I did crack up when he called "22" a "ludicrous club-filler."
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Member Since: 11/9/2011
Posts: 12,849
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I don't get what are they trying to prove with that kind of snobbery tbh. Can't they just stay talking about the music alone? They are cool or not, no one cares about that. That kind of HS mentality is annoying.
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Member Since: 10/31/2011
Posts: 16,937
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Quote:
Originally posted by Icannot
They are perfectly inclined to having ****** taste.
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What kind of iconic gif.
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Member Since: 4/9/2012
Posts: 1,916
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Quote:
Is Taylor Swift being taken too seriously?
Pop stars tasked to deliver adolescent angst have rarely been so subdued as Taylor Swift. She is 22 and last month sold 1.2 million copies of her new album in its first seven days of release, an occurrence as rare in the faltering music business as a comet in the night sky.
That Swift defies the current economic model of selling music is not a surprise since she is a star made for this post-recession era of staycations, “Downton Abbey” and Prius sports wagons. Like any pop singer, she mirrors her time, and lucky for her, she didn’t emerge during the economic prosperity of the post-9/11 era when McMansions lined Heartland cornfields, weapons of terror were to be found in the desert and Arnold Schwarzenegger stumped for Hummer. As is known to any market research analyst, we aren’t rewinding to those halcyon days and our current “new normal” means downsized sales expectations in almost every market sector, especially cars, real estate, tourism. Which means the raised metric for pop longevity is demure thoughtfulness, not tacky opulence.
The indulgence of last decade produced enough pop trash to fill a trailer park in East Peoria: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Ashley Simpson, Jessica Simpson, Mandy Moore, Kelly Osbourne, Avril Lavigne, Hilary Duff and even back benchers t.A.T.u, M2M, Hoku, Skye Sweetnam, Brooke Allison, Willa Ford and many others. The hubris was so high, record contracts were even slung to professional partygoers Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, who were both paid more for their brand than they were for whatever babble they purred into a microphone.
Today, most of these former lip-syncing product pushers are hovering on either side of age 30 and already long past their expiration date, leaving reality television and game shows the only shelves that will hold the weight of their baggage. Time is always a cruel leveler, but what is more telling from the last decade is the overnight rejection of so many of its key touchstones, from Britney Spears to George W. Bush, the tramp stamp to the luxury SUV, rap-rock to screamo, the Osbournes to the Palins.
“Red” (Big Machine), Swift’s fourth album released three weeks ago, is a beneficiary of our lowered expectations from the Bush years. Swift is certainly a more dedicated songwriter and skilled singer than her counterparts from a few years back, but the emotional twists inside her new songs still feel strategized rather than mined from a deeper place. The critical reverence shown to her since the album’s release has positioned her music within the grand tradition of confessional women songwriters — Lucinda Williams, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — but comparisons like those might be too convenient. The early work of that crew revealed poetic flashes of anger, sadness and deadly wit, and always with the sense these singers carried a worldly weight on their backs and were using their music to lighten their load. Swift is many times removed from that approach — blame it on getting your first record contract when you’re 16, for starters. Despite how well crafted or brightly produced, these songs are brimming with attitude, but it serves to create distance. We never connect to the real person in the song doing the emoting, which is the goal of any music made for adults by adults. Since the ultimate goal of “Red” is to get adults to buy it for themselves, and not their kids, that’s a problem.
Which isn’t to say “Red” is not destined to become her biggest seller. After all, she got this far because she conveys the perfect characteristics for a pop star in an economic downturn: modesty and austerity.
Like shaking off a bad dream, the economic collapse four years ago created a strong public desire to forget much of everything associated from that time, which was not so long ago but today feels like an eternity. The collective craving for cultural amnesia blunted many career trajectories and forced immediate shifts in political and commercial narratives. Sideshow attractions like Honey Boo Boo and Todd Akin will continue to tick across the landscape, but it’s unlikely their brand of bunkum will gain the prominence it might have just a few years ago, due to the increased media proliferation that will usher them to niche corners, and a public tolerance for diversions that appears to be approaching full tilt.
Call it good timing but Swift managed to gracefully lift her porcelain legs over the pop music pile-up of last decade to design a career that appears to have nowhere to go but forward. Her breakthrough second album “Fearless” (Big Machine) made her a household name, filled her shelves with industry awards and generated sales approaching 10 million copies.
That album arrived in late 2008, just months following the stock market collapse, a summer when $4 per gallon gas prices forced the automotive industry to seek federal bailouts and the steady climb of real estate foreclosures that have not yet been abated. What followed became a public preoccupation with the financial services industry, equitable tax rates and codes, trickle-down economics, debt ceilings, unemployment and other Wall Street/Main Street discrepancies that forced a cultural reassessment of who we are and where we are heading.
In the pop world that same year, Swift personified the kind of star who just might jump at the chance of a staycation. Unlike her predecessors who were subsequently falling off the pop radar, she didn’t need to make a requisite virgin promise that would ultimately crumble; her appeal emerged more as a confident big sister than strip mall jailbait. One song off the album, “Fifteen,” targets girls of that age, suggesting, “When you’re fifteen and your first kiss/Makes your head spin ‘round/But in your life you’ll do things greater than/Dating the boy on the football team.”
Restraint is not often a message you hear a pop star pushing on their fans, but it resonated with parents who were trying to show the same self-control with their family budgets. Swift’s real life poise complimented the crossover appeal of her tuneful roots-pop sound. Both inside and outside the music was a star embraced for her reliability, especially at a time the sky was falling.
How deep an impact Swift’s moderate pop sensibilities was making was evident in 2009 when Kanye West stole her trophy moment at the MTV Video Music Awards and subsequently took a public flogging that forced him to later apologize. That image — her mute, him blabbering — illustrated the quiet tidal shift taking place and it’s not inconsequential that West, once one of the most respected figures of conscious hip-hop, is now is relegated to the sidelines as a celebrity windbag.
“Red” arrives serendipitously: timed for release weeks before the presidential election, with enough sweeping drama in it to match the magnitude of the season. The album is a game-changer in moving her beyond the clichés of mainstream country and across darker pop borders. Other singers who earn their spoils mining mallrat lust for years appear lost once their audience walked off the dance floor and onto a stage where life gets complicated. Swift doesn’t have that dilemma, for her, adulthood is starting to suit her.
That “Red” is intended as a transitional album is made clear by the chiming guitars of opener “State of Grace” reminiscent of U2, and later, by songs that cover the gamut, including glam-pop, piano ballads and Americana. There’s a lot to like in this ambitious and very tuneful collection, made certain through writing collaborations with song sprucing by an A-list team: Semisonic’s Dan Wilson, Marvelous 3’s Butch Walker, Max Martin and Shellback (Katy Perry, Maroon 5, Britney Spears) and Jacknife Lee (U2, R.E.M.). Duets with Brits Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol and Ed Sheeran burn with heartache.
Swift earns sole writing credit for nine of the album’s 16 songs and she moves the short distance between lovelorn and defiant. She also possesses the self-awareness that her music may not be taken as seriously as her indie counterparts: “It feels like a perfect night/to dress up like hipsters/and make fun of our exes,” she sings, and elsewhere accuses an ex that he will likely “hide away and find (his) peace of mind/with some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.”
True, it’s difficult to be cool when still having to produce Disney-tailored slams like the hit “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” which crowbars the phrase “like, ever” into the song to parrot teenage authenticity — a “conversational” bridge finds Taylor talking with her BFFs and dropping the L-bomb five times in 10 seconds.
That moment could be the greatest reveal of “Red”: Even when Swift tries to be her most natural, the calculation shows. She may be praised as the apex pop star of her generation, but that reflects how tight our comfort zone has shrunk — just like our wallets — these last few years. Instead of singers who might leave our scars exposed, we cling to the ones who are CoverGirl-ready and know how to touch them up.
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http://www.salon.com/2012/11/11/is_t...too_seriously/
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Member Since: 12/8/2010
Posts: 17,643
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Expert Witness (MSN Music)
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So if Stephin Merritt can make a big deal out of 69 love songs, why can't Taylor Swift make a fairly big deal out of 16? His being formally savvy in his pop-polymath way and hers being formally voracious in her pop-bestseller way? Need either deal be autobiographical? One hopes not in both cases, although verisimilitude has its formal aspects for bestsellers. Swift hits the mark less often than Merritt‑-65 or 70 percent, I'd say. But one could argue that the verisimilitude requirement forces her to aim higher. I like the feisty ones, as I generally do. But "Begin Again" and especially "Stay Stay Stay" stay happy and hit just as hard. That's hard. A MINUS
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Member Since: 11/9/2011
Posts: 12,849
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Heh. That Salon piece caused a twitter-war between music journalists. Here's a new take from Salon:
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In Defense of Taylor Swift
On Sunday, Salon published a piece that asked the question: Is Taylor Swift being taken too seriously? The author, Mark Guarino, argued that while Swift is an able songwriter and an obvious superstar she’s not a serious artist. I disagree. Taylor Swift is being taken exactly as seriously as she should be and I’ll get into why in a minute. But I want to first say that though Guarino’s opinion is manifestly unpopular (the piece inspired a round of vitriol on Twitter, spearheaded by New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones), I suspect it’s more widely held than the euphoric press on Swift would suggest.
Like many great pop songwriters who break through freakishly young (Swift signed her publishing deal at 14 and released her first album two years later), Swift’s lyrical style is so direct it can be misunderstood as facile. She is an artist who, without irony, titles her songs “Love Story” and “Innocent.” You’ll find wit and sass and even sarcasm in Swift’s lyrics but never cynicism or hopelessness, and for those who’ve actually experienced life after 22, that can be difficult to stomach. Then there’s the fact that a very short list of largely female solo artists (Adele, Lady Gaga, Rihanna) currently prop up what remains of the traditional music industry. It’s bad business to bite one of the few hands that still feeds you.
All that having been said, the reason most critics love Taylor Swift is because she’s everything we wait for in an artist. The best pop songs feel instantly familiar, like they’re already downloaded into your psyche, part of the software the human brain comes with at birth. When I first heard Taylor Swift’s “Our Song,” a twangy hit off her self-titled debut, I thought it was a cover, that’s how primary and obvious it felt. When you blend that kind of lyrical easefulness with relatable good looks (boys want to kiss her, girls want to have her over for slumber parties) and a genuine warmth and comfort with the press, you have a superstar. That’s the decades-old equation.
There are two ways to go about calling the mathematics of Swift’s awesomeness into question. You can say you just don’t like the sound of her music; it’s too slick or too country or her voice irritates you. That’s a subjective, to-each-his-or-her-own kind of thing and go with God. The other is to dismiss her as insignificant because she writes songs about how it feels to be young. That is a profound misunderstanding of the fundamentals of pop music. At its core — and this distinguishes it from other genres of contemporary art like film and literature — pop music is about the universality of adolescence. It’s about tapping into the version of our selves that is simultaneously most basic and most complete, the version formed in high school, when, as John Hughes once said, “it feels as good to feel bad as it does to feel good.”
There is nothing more emotionally sophisticated in the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” or Dion and the Belmonts’ “Teenager in Love” or the Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me” than in Swift’s best songs. And though I realize this will sound like blasphemy to many, Swift’s “Fifteen” could be the sequel to Big Star’s “Thirteen.” 1.2 million 22-year-old girls didn’t buy Swift’s new album, “Red,” when it came out last month; 1.2 million moms and older sisters and 16-year-olds and at least a couple of dads and a lot of gay men did because that feeling of being, as Swift puts it, “happy, free, confused and lonely in the best way” never really leaves you. A very brainy male friend of mine in his late 30s who sometimes quotes from medieval religious texts recently got his hands on a copy of “Red” and started inserting lyrics from it into the language of his emails. This girl has serious cross-demographic appeal.
I suspect that when Swift critics accuse her of not being adult enough they don’t mean it. I don’t think anyone who really loves pop music can misunderstand it as a realm for grown-ups. I suspect that what we really disagree about is the packaging. Frere-Jones found an inherent sexism in Guarino’s argument. I’m not going to get into that, but what I will say is I think Swift would be neither as ridiculed nor as successful if she were a dude. More than the token Serious Female Singer Songwriters (Joni Mitchell, Lucinda Williams, Carole King,) Swift reminds me of masters of quirky pop sincerity like Alex Chilton and Jonathan Richman. Mocking an ex for liking a record that’s “much cooler” than hers (as Swift does on “We Are Never Getting Back Together”) is so something Richman might do. If these guys had been 6-foot-tall blonds with cupid’s bow lips, they might have been resented by the rock boy demographic. Instead, they are adored.
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/13/in_d...f_taylor_swift
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That review from MSN, I thought they would skip Red. 91. Wow.
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Member Since: 12/5/2009
Posts: 9,974
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Member Since: 11/29/2010
Posts: 19,664
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Quote:
Originally posted by thediscomonkey
Heh. That Salon piece caused a twitter-war between music journalists. Here's a new take from Salon:
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That review from MSN, I thought they would skip Red. 91. Wow.
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Did you read Ilxor too? That Salon dude really got dragged bad.
77 Metacritic score. Where are the prophets now who predicted it wil drop to 60-ies after the first reviews? l
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Member Since: 3/19/2012
Posts: 5,155
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She's back to 77? Great!
When i think that some haters were saying it would be a critical flop
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