Taylor Swift - RED - October 22

i have a feeling her tour for this album is going to be amazing and full of such moments

taylor swift can't sing live: myth or fact?

in concert she was fine

yeah she did fine when i saw her on the fearless tour, and i'd guess she's probably worked on it since then given the criticism

Obv she's not a vocal powerhouse that doesn't mean she can't sing

In my very humble opinion "The Last Time" would be a great song if a) it was mixed better and b) it appeared on a Snow Patrol record.

Otherwise the record is all over the place, so many stylistic variations, not surprisingly my favourite stuff is the U2-hybrid stuff like "State of Grace" and "All too well". Her band is awesome

"the moment i knew" is killing me

love this album so so so much now, maybe almost as much as fearless??

great article imo

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/164733-taylor-swift-red

It doth protest too much. xhuxk tangled with a few defenders on FB yesterday:

I like a lot of what's in this piece (what I got through, anyway), but I guess I think Nathan's setting up a bit of a straw man. There have always been critics who've taken Taylor Swift seriously, since her first album -- and in fact, given that he thinks she's made some major lyrical advance on her new one (which I definitely don't hear myself), I'm guessing that maybe more than a couple critics took her earlier (and sorry, better) albums more seriously than he did. *Speak Now* finished 26th in Pazz & Jop two years ago (35 voting critics put it on their top 10 lists), and Rob Sheffield gave it a 4-star lead review in Rolling Stone, a magazine he seems to be saying hasn't given her music its due. (On RS's website, *Fearless* gets 4 stars as well.) Took me less than two minutes to verify all that. So I'm stumped. Also, "Gangnam Style" is way more fun than he thinks, and in general it seems like he's coming a couple decades late to the Guess What Guys Pop Music Can Be Good Too revelation. It's still true, of course, but if whoever he's arguing with is too stupid to have figured it out already, I wonder if they might also be too stupid to argue with.

def just filed a piece where i argue that she's made a minor lyrical advance

this guy is definitely trying too hard tho

on pop matters? i'm shocked

it's hilarious that he's overstating the thesis of the name of the publication he's writing for

lol xpost

www.popisokay.com

i wonder if there's a beleaguered Pop Matters editor that quietly deletes things like "That's right, pop does matter" from half the submissions they receive

i wonder if there's a beleaguered Pop Matters editor

no

lol

wonder if there's a beleaguered Pop Matters editor

by taking beleaguered out of the sentence you transferred it to me

don't get beleaguered

so my faves after like two weeks:

all too well
i almost do
stay stay stay (holy shit the isn't-it-funny-we-can-throw-phones-at-each-other-and-not-break-up conceit is so joyous it's infectious)

People are having a hard time dealing with Taylor Swift.

i couldn't get past this. for chrissakes the middle-aged white guys on the local afternoon sports radio show were riding for we are never ever.... when it came out.

yeah i think its "douchey elitist music snobs" who are having a "hard time dealing with taylor" than the nebulous "people," and who cares about that demographic anyways...

more than*

can someone post bad reviews of this record, just so i know they exist?

it's not even the real music snobs. critics love her; speak now in addition to selling whatever ridiculous number it sold got fawning pieces in the voice; this one is the same only more so; it's just college kids whose primary use for music is branding who say nasty things about her at this point. well i mean i still kind of hate this album but that's not the same thing.

i am NOT going to college newspapers for bad reviews of this record

it's not even the real music snobs. critics love her; speak now in addition to selling whatever ridiculous number it sold got fawning pieces in the voice; this one is the same only more so; it's just college kids whose primary use for music is branding who say nasty things about her at this point.

― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, October 31, 2012 4:17 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

don't conflate "music snobs" and "critics" because as much as we might joke about, if you're a good critic, you're not a music snob.

i mean more ANYONE whose "primary use for music is branding" when i say "douchey elitist music snobs"

I've been delaying talking about this album until I can do it properly, but I think a lot of TS crit both pro and con focuses too excessively on the details of her lyrics and not enough on the songcraft. What I find endlessly fascinating is the way that Taylor's means of telling her favourite stories expand with each album (which forms a natural covalency with the sense of her expanding persona). Notwithstanding the more obvious pop / collab-o diversions, much of Red feels like it's bedding down and exploring the expansions in songcraft which she achieved on Speak Now - even if lyrically the shifts aren't as apparent, I think her musical craft feels much more flexible and varied than it did on Fearless (and again I'm not actually talking about e.g. "I Knew You Were Trouble").

As usual many of my favourite moments on this album are the musical easter eggs she hides in her songs like the "so you were never a saint..." bridge in "State of Grace" and the "get you a - get you alone" bridge in "Treacherous". Hard to think of another pop artist who can achieve lift-off in their songs so effortlessly and so regularly.

I suppose an obvious corollary for a lot of the tensions and dynamics at work is Nicks' work in Fleetwood Mac.

fair. but yeah, as you say, nobody anyone really needs to write a piece in correction of. xp

don't conflate "music snobs" and "critics" because as much as we might joke about, if you're a good critic, you're not a music snob.

i mean more ANYONE whose "primary use for music is branding" when i say "douchey elitist music snobs"

― king louie riel (rennavate), Wednesday, 31 October 2012 10:24 PM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, I feel like the idea of pop music as mindless music for little girls is something which 99% of critics now have abandoned (if they ever held onto it) but which still circulates among the general public like some kind of pseudo-science superstition.

I'd say country-pop more than pop per se is an area which remains a blind spot for many critics (even if only to the extent that it is passed over in silence), which more than other reason maybe is why people writing popist defences of Red feels a bit tardy.

need markers 2 come back & post abt this album

The narratives, meanwhile, are sharply observed and often heartbreaking, as the phenomenal “All Too Well” exemplifies: “Here we are again on that little town street / You almost ran the red ‘cause you were looking over at me / Wind in my hair, I was there, I remember it all too well” leads to a truly wonderful image of dancing in a refrigerator light. This is heartfelt stuff, goddammit! Do you know how hard it is to find pop songs these days that are sung as if the singer has had actual life experience with the sentiment? Well, trust me, it’s pretty hard.

this is seriously written in the voice of an onion columnist

lol

so many reviews of this nature read like the writer is growing a brain in public

hah that's a great way of explaining *that* style of writing

What I find endlessly fascinating is the way that Taylor's means of telling her favourite stories expand with each album (which forms a natural covalency with the sense of her expanding persona)

otm, me too

It doth protest too much.

oh you're better than this, alfred

but it totally doth

tothtally

"Treacherous" really is so amazing.

""I can't decide if it's a choice / Getting swept away / I hear the sound of my own voice / Asking you to stay."

This is a really thoughtful observation, that weird sense of doubling you get when you do something reckless and ill-advised where it's like you're watching yourself take the bad (but seductive) option and you're powerless to stop yourself.

that popmatters review is like something i'd have written when i was 19 or something, lol. idk i think it's fighting the good fight, kneejerk anti-pop idiocy continues to be hugely rife.

As usual many of my favourite moments on this album are the musical easter eggs she hides in her songs like the "so you were never a saint..." bridge in "State of Grace" and the "get you a - get you alone" bridge in "Treacherous". Hard to think of another pop artist who can achieve lift-off in their songs so effortlessly and so regularly.

both of these are among my favourite moments on the album but i'm not sure they're hidden, they're kind of the moments that taylor TURNS ON THE LIGHTS in the songs

the key thing about red for me is how BIG it sounds, which abby noted upthread - it really is taylor as soldier of love, and by necessity she's drawing in broader brushstrokes than before because ultimately the album argues that it doesn't matter whether the love turns out to be happy or sad or heartbreaking or w/v

Yeah not so much hidden but more how they arrive as a gift late in songs that would have been great even without them.

"wominimizing"

http://its-her-factory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/taylor-swift-wominimizing-and-opposite.html

Holy fuck, before I even clicked that link, I was all like "great, from the people who brought you 'mansplaining'..."

that was a good link!

rings v true

isn't it great!! ('femmequivocating' sounds better but i don't feel like the concept 'femme' is equivalent to the concept 'man'? so.)

it is all kind of circling back to the idea that Swift is so powerful because she is best at performing white femme femininity.

Since I was the main one "tangling" with Xhuxk about that Popmatters article, I'll defend it. (Also I copyedited it; we're discouraged from cutting content, probably bc nobody's getting paid, but Popmatters editing procedures are a different story, they are treating me well here, etc.) I loved its enthusiasm and the sense that Nathan was discovering his love for the album as he sifted through all its details. He made it feel like something was at stake. As I was pointing out to X, I've always admired Swift but rarely loved her songs and never her albums, so I woudn't have bought the album if not for Nathan's manifesto, even having read Lex's and Caramanica's excellent pieces. (I would've just waited for it at the library.) By now I figure Swift fans just love her for reasons I never will -- BUT I love this album. Esp the Max Martins and "Lucky One". Her albums have always felt like a relentless march of verse-chorus-verse to me, but here she's shaking that up using different techniques -- like using two chords over and over in "State of Grace", or emphasizing the structural differences to a ridiculous extent in "Trouble", or just inserting hooks that totally bypass the language that everyone acknowledges is one of her gifts ("Weee-EEEE!"). (Which I love, but I'm a patriarch.) Tim's points about her expanding songcraft are right on. So yeah, to me it's her least consistent but her best.

Also agree with Lex about kneejerk anti-pop idiocy concerning Taylor. Granted, that's based mainly on certain daily critics and the sociological cauldron of FB, but not everyone's come around to her, for reasons both good and bad. And anyway, I like strawmen, they're entertaining.

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcsh060Fwv1rxl3mn.gif