Taylor Swift - RED - October 22

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

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/11/if-you-listen-closely-taylor-swift-is-kind-of-like-leonard-cohen/264275/

Great work BradNelson; the connection between Swift and Serious Boy Music seems like a necessary evil but I think it works to illuminate just why some are so taken by her, that specific ~writerliness~ that she has in common with the musicians mentioned, a writerliness that has no boundary of gender or age or subject matter. But mainly I am most taken by the descriptions of her craft here, specifically what you write about "Holy Ground."

"I forgot about you long enough to forget why I needed to" has been haunting me lately too.

thanks billy! i pitched several pieces about the record and that was the one i least wanted to write; still fun to do though

Great article Brad.

I think the focus on increasing emotional ambiguity in her work was spot on.

Some people act like Taylor's been devolving away from ambiguity based solely on "Tim McGraw", which ignores the fact that while she hit out the park there it's not like there's anything else on the first two albums that's comparable (even "Fifteen" is nuanced but not ambiguous).

Like, even "Cold As You", which is often held up as an early example of her craft (and does include the great line, "So I start a fight, 'cuz I need to feel something") is really very blunt and judgmental ("Now that I'm sitting here thinking it through / I've never been anywhere cold as you...").

Whereas practically every relationship song on Red spends at least some time flagging the warning signs in the optimistic songs (see "State of Grace", "Treacherous") or remembering the glimmers of hope in the sad songs ("All Too Well", "Sad Beautiful Tragic") or existing somewhere between the two ("Red", "Holy Ground").

And the other quality which runs through some of those songs (esp. "Treacherous") but is also clear in "I Almost Do" and "Begin Again" is Taylor's sense of agency - i.e. increasingly she writes less about what "you" did and more about her own role in relationships.

More than Joni, the songwriter that she increasingly reminds me of is Ani DiFranco (assuming you just focus on the latter's love songs). Like, DiFranco's lyrics for "Independence Day" could totally be current Taylor - there's a trick there where the chorus shifts from the initial line "you can't leave me here / I got your back, now you better have mine" to the final version of "you can't leave me here / now that you're back you better stay this time". The use of slight shifts in the accumulative logic of classic songcraft (here, the double meaning of "back") is something Taylor seems increasingly confident in wielding.

<i>the songwriter that she increasingly reminds me of is Ani DiFranco (assuming you just focus on the latter's love songs)</i>

one of the purposes of the piece was to shift the conversation away from joni mitchell comparisons as much as possible and i was like "i am totally forgetting someone else who is in this mold" and oh of course it's ani difranco

Kinda ironic that there'd be many many many fans of each who would go out of their way to avoid the other.

sweet post timf

http://www.spin.com/articles/taylor-swift-stealing-lyrics-all-too-well-matt-nathanson

Taylor Dylan

I dunno, I could be missing something but that "wominimizing" link doesn't ring true to me. I don't see how including those vocal hooks undercuts the authority of the message of the song. I think I actually hear it more as exulting in the finality of her decision. In fact, Swift's delivery of the lines that the author cites as showing more sarcasm, self-awareness, and resolve strikes me as just as, probably more, feminine/feminized. Also, the first two anecdotal examples she provides of students 'wominimizing' in her class just seem like a mix of basic etiquette and cautiousness. They don't sound especially feminine to me. (I do that all the time. Right at the beginning of this post, actually.)

maybe she just thought it sounded cool? that wominimizing link is awful.

her songs hugely surpass her gifs

maybe she just thought it sounded cool?

Ha, that was my first thought tbh.

it's well-known to the point of cliché that women hedge and couch their language significantly more than men do.

i actually think the "we-heee" leap sounds more mocking than light? but I am pretty much always a fan of the project of analysis of pop music and what it reveals about us, so.

it's well-known to the point of cliché that women hedge and couch their language significantly more than men do.

ikr, the the point where this resentment at it being pointed out feels v weird

though it does also make it weird that Robin James would write about it as if it's something she's ~discovered~ as she's been teaching (but i think that's something to do w. the rhetorical primacy of 'lived experience' over 'knowledge from a book').

The general point feels correct but grafted onto a song that doesn't serve it. The lightness of the chorus is as much a sense of cathartic relief - like, great, now that's clear I can go back to dancing like I'm 22 - as anything else. I'm not convinced that the singer of "picture to burn" or "dear John" is a good example of a woman who feels the need to disguise her anger.

Also I think taylor's own explanation of the song's deliberate lightness contradicts this theory - womaximising maybe?

The blogger didn't really comment much about her assertion that black women's music is more angry and bitter than white women's music. I'll be honest, I don't really listen to a shit-ton of music by black women, and maybe that's something that I should change, but I have faith that ilm could provide some great examples and counter-examples.

Swift’s song is a perfect example of wominimizing. As strong as the verbal content of her lyrics are, the musical performance of them undermines their authoritativeness. Or, perhaps rather: Swift intentionally performs wominimizing rhetoric so that she won’t be dismissed as bitchy, irrational, angry, etc. Strong sarcasm isn’t something we often hear in vocals by white female pop stars, though, as Angela Davis has noted, it’s a longstanding convention in black women’s blues-based vocal performance traditions. So, there might also be some need to racially qualify the sarcasm (which could be coded black) with appropriate forms of white femininity in the chorus’s vocal delivery.

Does anyone have any compelling reasons to wait for the vinyl

http://www.amazon.com/Red-Taylor-Swift/dp/B009NT0I06/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1352033961&sr=1-1&keywords=TAYLOR+SWIFT+Red

that's a nice price for one, but i pre-ordered on account of the fact that my turntable is placed so i have to get on my knees to put something on and i'll gladly pray to the Goddess of Tay

I finally broke down and paid the full itunes freight on this -- congratulations, Taylor, that's the most money I've spent on an album all year. I like it plenty, but I do think it's patchier than Speak Now and too long by about four songs. The stylistic range is nice, and the best stuff is straight-A work. Without belaboring what everybody else has said, the thing that jumps out at me over and over is the drum production, which I love. Not something I expect to love about a Taylor Swift record, but the consistent tom-tom thumping is the thing that ties the whole record together for me. Unusual for a 2012 pop album, and it kicks several of the songs up a notch.

Also, the first two anecdotal examples she provides of students 'wominimizing' in her class just seem like a mix of basic etiquette and cautiousness.

they sound like, i don't know, a student talking to a college professor in front of a class. definitely no other power discrepancies at play there...the link is pretty dumb

back half of this album is kinda meh? i mean, i could be wrong, and i'm sure it's been discussed before, but that's how it seems to me

Well, I really like half the back half -- "Stay Stay Stay," "Holy Ground," "The Lucky One" and "Begin Again." But could take or leave most of the others.