On her new album, Taylor Swift goes full-throttle pop
“Took our broken hearts and put them in a drawer,” Taylor Swift sings on “Welcome to New York,” the opening track on her fifth and sharpest album, 1989. Coming from Swift, a superstar who built a global empire penning hits about matters of the heart, this sounds like a threat–stowing her sorrow away after it brought so much success seems borderline irresponsible.
I'm hoping her lyrics get trashed by critics so that she'll realize she doesn't have to dumb herself down to be pop. I still don't see why she couldn't have had her usual type lyrics (amazing), and had them over a pop beat. It's just so silly. So hopefully she'll learn by these reviews if they all say similar things.
But by making pop with almost no contemporary references, Ms. Swift is aiming somewhere even higher, a mode of timelessness that few true pop stars — aside from, say, Adele, who has a vocal gift that demands such an approach — even bother aspiring to. Everyone else striving to sound like now will have to shift gears once the now sound changes. But not Ms. Swift, who’s waging, and winning, a new war, one she’d never admit to fighting.