taylor swift iridescent smoke bombs thread 2019 - lover

“Me!” is the only dud. 1989 only had one dud, too (“I Know Places”) – but Lover is a better album all around. (And yes, so was Reputation, for that matter.)

(this is all in my humble opinion, of course)

reputation is better than 1989 anyway

― american bradass (BradNelson)

for me this is so strange to think about. like, now i can see that 'reputation' is a little bit better than i thought back then, but i can't see where's even one song on reputation that matches all the highs from '1989'. from style to new romantics, clean, i know places, blank space, wildest dreams, etc.
maybe one day i'll get 'reputation'.

one way to get reputation: listen to the "i get so high - OH!" part of "don't blame me"

i think it's her most consistent album this side of speak now. after three years with it i realized everything kind of works, it's so fun and theatrical, my favorite songs' individual parts feel like they fit together jaggedly like the glass of a smashed mirror (cf. "so it goes" (sorry i lied this is the superior taylor del rey song), "king of my heart," "dancing with our hands tied," "dress" (the best song ever made))

it's weird that 1989 is her shortest record and yet i feel like i skate through way more moods on it than in either of the follow-ups, "I wish you would" -> "bad blood" -> "wildest dreams" causes real bad whiplash. much as i like it on its own, "shake it off" also seems to derail the album. this is very hard to prove but i feel like it's missing the focus and confidence of her best records, like it's trying to distract me with shiny or fast-moving new toys throughout. i still love like 90 percent of the songs don't get me wrong

er i guess it's only been two years

“Call It What You Want” alone beats almost any track on 1989 (and 1989 is a really good album!)

I also luv Swedish trap, so

one way to get reputation: listen to the "i get so high - OH!" part of "don't blame me"

― american bradass (BradNelson), Saturday, December 21, 2019 9:13 AM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this song justifies hozier's entire existence imo

i agree that "dress" is like one of the best songs ever and "shake it off" is probably the worse one that taylor made. still, there's at least 4/5 songs on 'reputation' that i really dislike: ready for it, i did something bad, look what you made me do, this is why we can't have nice things...

"this is why we can't have nice things" really pushes it, but i also love the melody

because you break them
i had to take them
awayayayayay

"i did something bad" is very obviously awesome to me though ("and i'd do it overandoverandoveragain if iiiiiii could") so we may not be able to meet in the middle on this

maybe one day. because i get the theatricality of it. it will be my 2020 goal, to give it one more chance.

I REALLY love « I Did Something Bad »

"shake it off" is probably the worse one that taylor made

o_O

I can’t even with some of these opinions!

my ranking of the last 3 albums is def: reputation > lover > 1989

reputation has some duds but is pretty easily the best listen front to back to me... also i find the perspective she writes from on that album -- conniving, reckless, lonely, conducting all her relationships in secret -- far more believable than the starry eyed lovebird of lover. my one knock on reputation as i've said before is that the production is sort of stuck in the mud.

lover adds some badly needed new textures to this super pop era of hers, but also a fair amount of duds that make it hard to listen to front to back. if she had made the album entirely w/ antonoff i'm confident it would've been the best of the three. someone should delete joel little's number from her phone.

1989 has some of her best songs but is kinda cold and very corny. i'll dance to "shake it off" at a wedding but 1989's singles are mostly dreadful. this album really ends with a whimper for me too... style -> out of the woods -> all you had to do -> [skip] -> i wish you would is a great run tho.

Really? I'll take "Blank Space" and "Style" as singles over, to look at the list, "Lover," "...Ready for It?," and "Me!"

the sequencing on all three albums is pretty bad imo so my preference is more about which ones have the most to work with to turn into a great front-to-back listen, but 1989 has the least duds of the three as well

quickly ranking her 1989 and onwards singles:
style
out of the woods
blank space

delicate
wildest dreams
new romantics
look what you made me do
lover
shake it off

ready for it
you need to calm down
bad blood
end game
me!

Really? I'll take "Blank Space" and "Style" as singles over, to look at the list, "Lover," "...Ready for It?," and "Me!"

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, December 21, 2019 10:45 PM (yesterday)bookmarkflaglink

i do love style... blank space is pretty good too. bad blood and shake it off.... woof. maybe it's not the quality of those singles i resent as much as the ubiquity... look what you made me do etc are about as bad or worse but didn't hit like those others.

Lover > Reputation = 1989 for me at this point

"look what you made me do" isn't by any means good but it's ended up endearing to me as a very confused campy "what the hell was she thinking" single which is how i can now prefer it to "shake it off" which is just mediocre and too ubiquitous for its own good

I love "I wish you Would", I love "Style" but really I'd pick "Cornelia St", "Lover" or "Death by a thousand cuts" before them any day of the week. The peaks in "Lover" are her highest probably since Red.

And while I really like "Soon you'll get better", to me "Ronan" is still her definitive cancer song.

I think "Bad Blood" is probably her worst song really. With "Shake it off", I still skip it, but I understand her shooting for a wedding party song, kinda like Bowie with Let's Dance. And it was quite successful at that, so I've got to give it to her.

Listening to the 2019 Tiny Desk concert linked earlier for the first time and digging this, just the bones of the songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvVnP8G6ITs&list=PL1B627337ED6F55F0&index=24&t=0s

HE LOOKS UP GRINNING LIKE A DEVIL

i! want! you! bless my soul
and i ain't gotta tell him i think he knows

the microhooks on this album make me delirious

Same

https://variety.com/2020/music/news/taylor-swift-exits-planned-unannounced-grammy-performance-1203478940/

good for her. fuck the grammys

“ HE LOOKS UP GRINNING LIKE A DEVIL”

I thought it was “that man’s got a body like the devil”

Anyway I like my TS songs horny is what I’m saying

My gf and I were convinced it was "He looks so pretty like a devil" until we read the lyrics.

Starbucks Lovers 2019

stans of newly woke taylor swift brigading over a critical review of her documentary by calling the author anti-semitic for referring to the guy who calls himself “the fat jew” as “the fat jew,” and exhuming an article by — wait for it — ed ch*mpion; you absolutely hate to see it

The review in question entirely reasonable and not even remotely antagonistic towards Taylor. Her stans are as bad as they come.

all this time "mean" was really a guide to role models

(and it's not like this is some obscure figure only known to those who got a copy of the shitty media men list [which he's on] -- the entire first page of google results has the story, if these kids thought to actually google)

Anyone else watch the documentary yet? I mayyyy have teared up when she launched into “Clean” after her brief spiel about sexual assault

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJU-S1t2r1M

new single from the documentary is better than most of the other joel little productions but nothing special and features ill-fitting children's choir backing vocals

I watched it! That part got me too. I liked it a lot but am having a hard time putting my thoughts about it into a coherent form.

I guess what I found most interesting and moving about it was that it's not really about her career or her album, and it's not even entirely about her political awakening. It's about being in your twenties and taking a long, hard look at yourself and trying to figure out if you're growing up into the kind of person you really want to be. It's just that the person going through all that - doing the normal, everyday work of trying to be a decent, engaged, mature adult human - is having to do it under the pressures of an insane, unending level of fame that's already done its best to warp her. I was struck by that moment at the end when she says that she got stuck at the age she got famous. That's a pretty devastating thing to say about yourself, and yet she doesn't say it in a self-reproachful way, more with just honest sadness about the time she lost.

otm

I thought the documentary was really good. Gained a lot of respect for her, and also felt bad for her (surely by design). Mostly it made me wish she would just totally vanish entirely for 5 years, then come back and kick everyone's ass just for herself, not for sales or fucking Grammys.

It was wild to me that she even felt like she had to sell her team of dudes (one of which was her dad I think) on supporting Bresden. Spelling out the risks to her safety and bank account like she isn’t fully capable of comprehending those things on her own. Not to mention she’s Taylor Motherfucking Swift, i.e. (as is said elsewhere in the doc) “The Music Industry “

really enjoyed the doc, it was sort of like "the archer": the movie. i don't even really consider myself someone invested in taylor swift: the person and i cried... several times throughout, especially at the scene where she talked about her disordered eating

i wish we had gotten to see more than the joel little lover sessions (like please put me in the studio where antonoff and swift are writing "death by a thousand cuts" come onnnnn) but i also realize that that's not really what the movie was about. the reputation-era recording footage was great though

every time joel little appeared on screen i yelled "it's my enemy!!!!" even though i've come around to most of his productions on this record

she's such a clever lyricist so it was especially neat watching her excitedly read/sing them back off her phone.

I imagine this wasn't done purposefully but I thought the progression of her as a "character" in this film was really interesting, just in terms of the things she was dealing with and how they were framed. As much as I love her music I still think the initial Kanye awards-show bumrush stuff has been way overblown and it was hard not to roll my eyes when it was portrayed as something incredibly traumatic (that's setting aside all of the gross shit Kanye's done since). But by the end of the movie, when she's opened up about her eating disorder and gone through a real political awakening, I was 100% in her corner.

I think it was traumatic to her because she sets herself up as so driven by praise that even the brief scare of thinking she was being booed was like getting hit by a truck.

There were I thought a couple of good points (pro and con) made on ... Jezebel? Yeah.

https://themuse.jezebel.com/miss-americana-or-miss-it-altogether-a-swiftie-and-a-n-1841452248

This was from the "pro" side:

The Taylor Swift documentary is actually a miraculous body of work in that Taylor spends the entire time—in a film that is supposedly an attempt to speak to her fans—not speaking to them at all. She keeps up the pristine Taylor Swift image, by not saying anything at all. It’s stagecraft, and it’s performed to perfection; that’s why none of this feels like a believable documentary. She still gets to walk away as Taylor Swift, the unblemished package without ever having to show the audience Taylor Allison, the human being. It’s this ability to hide in plain sight that makes her so fascinating, and it’s the thing that will keep Taylor Swift on top for years to come.

Except I guess I would counter that this documentary is *not* supposed to speak to her fans, it's supposed to do exactly what it does. Serve/rehabilitate "Taylor Swift" by way of selective transparency. Which, as the quote points out, is surprisingly hard to do. Like, there is clearly tons of stuff she does not want us to see - like workouts, or rehearsals, or money stuff, or how she lives - and even the "revealing" stuff she wants us to see is very carefully doled out. She eats a burrito because she is "just like us," but esp. in light of the (unspecified) eating disorder reveal, does she usually have to watch what she eats? We sort of see her without makeup, once, but not really, and we see her putting on makeup, but we don't see the whole team she employs to look like "Taylor Swift." None of this matters, this isn't Frederick Wiseman, it just shows an uncanny instinct for how much can stay hidden without destroying the illusion that this is a revealing documentary.

it's true, as wealthy as I'm sure she is, the film was careful not to present her as living in some kind of outrageous luxury. the settings for most of the "intimate" or "personal" moments scanned to me as either very upper middle-class or maybe borderline rich. it is sad that she only discovered burritos like two years ago though.

wow astonishing how much i hate both sides of that jezebel piece

There are no diva fits; there’s not even shade. She is palpably elusive in an interview regarding her fraught relationship with food—she only uses the phrase “eating disorder” to note that it’s not a phrase she used when she wasn’t eating (“You don’t ever say to yourself, ‘I’ve got an eating disorder,’ but you make a list of everything you’re putting in your mouth that day and you know that’s probably not right...”). There’s no real indication of how her issues with food resolved if, in fact, they had. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that I’m entitled to know anything about Taylor Swift’s relationship with food, and I’m certainly not suggesting she shouldn’t illustrate how life in the spotlight can affect such matters; what I’m saying is that after not having asked the question, I’ve been given a really threadbare answer from someone who prides herself on her ability to tell stories.

.... i guess it's possible to get a lot of different things out of the eating disorder monologue, but my main reaction to this is..... for fuck's sake??????