The Ringer - Everything Noteworthy About the New Taylor Swift Album, ‘Lover’2019-08-26T10:25:11-04:00http://www.theringer.com/rss/stream/205942082019-08-26T10:25:11-04:002019-08-26T10:25:11-04:00The Taylor Swift ‘Lover’ Exit Survey
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<p>Riding the roller coaster of emotions on the pop star’s triumphant return to form on her seventh studio album</p> <p id="w7Klve"><em>Just a few days after its release, </em>Lover<em> is already </em><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2019/08/26/taylor-swifts-lover-is-already-the-bestselling-album-of-2019/#37a76f826a7d"><em>the best-selling album of 2019</em></a><em>—so is Taylor Swift good again? </em>Ringer<em> staffers chime in on their favorite songs, the insipidity of “ME!,” ordinary Joe, and feminism that you can dance to. </em></p>
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<h4 id="xrvrNJ">1. What is your tweet-length review of <em>Lover</em>?</h4>
<p id="ofMwyV"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/alyssa-bereznak"><strong>Alyssa Bereznak</strong></a><strong>:</strong> A refreshingly mature album with occasional dashes of Swift’s characteristic bitterness (good) and pandering bubblegum pop (bad).</p>
<p id="ewli8X"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/kate-knibbs"><strong>Kate Knibbs</strong></a><strong>:</strong> <em>Lover</em> is lovable. </p>
<p id="3kCTgU"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/andrew-gruttadaro"><strong>Andrew Gruttadaro</strong></a><strong>: </strong>I still maintain that <em>Reputation </em>was a long con by Taylor Swift to lower absurdly high expectations—and look! It worked!</p>
<p id="ae2d4w"><a href="https://www.theringer.com/authors/kate-halliwell"><strong>Kate Halliwell</strong></a><strong>:</strong> Thank God Taylor Swift is so bad at picking lead singles, so that our low expectations could be blown out of the water!</p>
<aside id="FziOKB"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Taylor Swift’s ‘Lover’ Is a Perfect Snapshot of Her Life—and Possibly Her Best Pop Album","url":"https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/23/20830106/taylor-swift-lover-review"},{"title":"Taylor Swift Is a ‘Lover’ and a Fighter","url":"https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/26/20833037/taylor-swift-lover-album-review"}]}'></div></aside><h4 id="GFFF5t">2. What is your favorite song on the album?</h4>
<p id="3hwzyF"><strong>Knibbs:</strong> Right now it’s a toss-up between<em> </em>“Cruel Summer” and “The Man,” but it changes hourly. </p>
<p id="Y3Pbjg"><strong>Bereznak:</strong> “The Archer.” I love a song that builds, and Swift always shines when she strips away the fancy production and lets her emotions get raw.</p>
<p id="nXDUZl"><strong>Gruttadaro: </strong>“False God” may be a blatant rip-off of Carly Rae Jepsen’s work with Blood Orange, but man, that vibe is surprisingly right in <a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D74-dg0XUAAOdIN.jpg">Taylor’s Q-zone</a>. </p>
<p id="MTq8DQ"><strong>Halliwell: </strong>“Cornelia Street”<em> </em>has been stuck in my head for 72 hours straight and I have no regrets. </p>
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<h4 id="sgsvmb">3. What is your least favorite song?</h4>
<p id="WMo5cy"><strong>Knibbs: </strong>“ME!,” which should truly not be on this album, or even released into the world to befoul the airwaves with its insipid melody.</p>
<p id="mM0x7k"><strong>Bereznak: </strong>“ME!” For the past two albums, Swift has been bad at predicting the hits on her albums. “Look What You Made Me Do” and “...Ready for It?” signaled that <em>Reputation</em> would be a disaster. In retrospect, and after<a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/11/8/16621926/hearing-both-sides-of-taylor-swift"> processing my feelings</a> about her silence during the election, I will now defend a whole seven tracks from that release. (“Delicate” fans, hello.) She repeated the exercise with <em>Lover</em> when she released that cloying Brendon Urie collab and the misguided “You Need To Calm Down.” But I get it, she wants to make money.</p>
<p id="45vMbQ"><strong>Halliwell: </strong>“ME!” Somehow the lead single is the worst song on the album, and it’s not even close. </p>
<p id="uiUM7l"><strong>Gruttadaro: </strong>“London Boy” gives me secondhand embarrassment.</p>
<h4 id="YMkIJN">4. What are your thoughts on Joe Alwyn, the apparent inspiration for a majority of this album?</h4>
<p id="OcALCt"><strong>Gruttadaro: </strong>Ever since <em>The Favourite </em>I’ve been unable to picture Joe Alwyn as anyone but <a href="https://78.media.tumblr.com/57d02cc852f69a2e925f28ae0f467db1/tumblr_pblnhvCzbQ1wexhbmo1_540.gif">the guy who gets emotionally dominated by Emma Stone</a> and, y’know, <em>Lover </em>hasn’t really changed that.</p>
<p id="0aEExx"><strong>Knibbs: </strong>Great gowns, beautiful gowns. </p>
<p id="9Nz22k"><strong>Bereznak: </strong>Look, it’s a testament to Taylor Swift’s artistry that she could write such a solid album about a celebrity as underwhelming as Joe Alwyn. He may very well be a supportive, kind partner who will loyally board a private jet whenever she beckons. But unlike her past flames, he has very few compelling, well-known characteristics to reference in lyrics. He’s not listening to indie records much cooler than Taylor’s (Jake Gyllenhaal). He doesn’t have a “James Dean daydream look” in his eye (Harry Styles). And, as far as we know, he is not “an expert at sorry and keeping lines blurry” (John Mayer). Without those kind of recognizable, vivid details, the songs sometimes feel generic. “London Boy” is a bop, sure, but it also seems like she’s using the one thing we know about Joe Alwyn—that he is from a cool European metropolitan city—as a stand-in for a personality. Similarly, “Paper Rings” might seem like a love song, but in the context of their lopsided success, the subtext is that maybe she fell for someone who is only a moderately successful actor. (“I like shiny things, but I’d marry you with paper rings.”)</p>
<h4 id="Nsqi7z"><strong>Halliwell: </strong></h4>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Taylor Swift to Joe Alwyn every time they fight <a href="https://t.co/eZfC1tnbtm">pic.twitter.com/eZfC1tnbtm</a></p>— Kate Halliwell (@katehalliwell) <a href="https://twitter.com/katehalliwell/status/1165737743516745728?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 25, 2019</a>
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<h4 id="y9mbd1">5. Pick your favorite analogy on the album.</h4>
<p id="sRaGRF"><strong>Bereznak: </strong>I almost spat out my morning smoothie when I heard the lyric “And they would toast to me, oh, let the players play / I’d be just like Leo in Saint-Tropez.” Every pop song needs more Leo imagery, and I’d like to personally thank Swift for reminding me<a href="https://twitter.com/alyssabereznak/status/1164927007399931904"> this photo</a> existed. </p>
<p id="79w4cm"><strong>Gruttadaro: </strong>“You’re the West Village / You still do it for me, babe.” As an NYU graduate I find this offensive and also offensively on-point. </p>
<p id="Lr6oAv"><strong>Halliwell: </strong>“In my feelings more than Drake, so yeah.” I’m just happy those <a href="https://ew.com/music/2019/05/09/taylor-swift-cover-story/">Drake hints</a> didn’t lead to a collab. </p>
<h4 id="CWMvzH">6. Finish the sentence: “Taylor Swift’s collaboration with the Dixie Chicks is …”</h4>
<p id="SWgKOe"><strong>Knibbs: </strong>… something that should have happened sooner. </p>
<p id="z3xU7I"><strong>Bereznak: </strong>… a tender song about her mom’s struggle with cancer, and a nice, brief return to Old Taylor. </p>
<p id="tf3Fh2"><strong>Halliwell: </strong>…<strong> </strong>devastating! Call your mothers!</p>
<p id="8xkpgV"><strong>Gruttadaro: </strong>… simultaneously great and not prominent enough. Natalie Maines couldn’t get a verse?! </p>
<h4 id="kFgxNC">7. Let’s talk about “The Man.” </h4>
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<p id="oUTLon"><strong>Knibbs: </strong>I thought a Taylor Swift feminism song might be cloying, but in fact it rules. </p>
<p id="BuxbuP"><strong>Gruttadaro: </strong>Damn, even Taylor’s first-grade-level assessment of misogyny is a jam.</p>
<p id="FWFDnD"><strong>Halliwell: </strong>I already know how sexism works and didn’t really need this reminder, but also ... it’s a bop!</p>
<p id="TE6NqS"><strong>Bereznak: </strong>Legendary Leo lyric aside, my feelings about the song are complicated. Its sentiment—that women are often shamed for their sexual exploits, and held down while their male counterparts thrive—is absolutely valid. But Swift’s history with this “narrative” is fraught. During the 2016 election, she sometimes conflated valid media critique with sexism. Yet, despite her apparent feminism, she never publicly endorsed a presidential candidate. Her decision to stay out of politics altogether highlighted the utter privilege she has as a rich, white pop star. (Many women do not have the option to stay silent about, say, their increasingly limited access to health care.) My point is, she has used the sexism card when it’s convenient to her, so I’m hesitant to deem this some kind of feminist ballad. Nonetheless, it is very catchy.</p>
<h4 id="p3RJTq">8. What’s your favorite shady reference or Swiftian Easter egg on <em>Lover</em>? </h4>
<p id="m5boiA"><strong>Bereznak: </strong>“I Forgot That You Existed,” which is presumably about her ex-boyfriend Calvin Harris, appears to reference a tweetstorm he wrote after her camp revealed she had a hand in his hit song “This Is What You Came For”: “I figure if you’re happy in your new relationship you should focus on that instead of trying to tear your ex bf down for something to do,” he wrote in a now-deleted tweet. In the song she writes, “Sent me a clear message / Taught me some hard lessons.” The irony of the song is that its very existence disproves its thesis. You don’t write songs about people you’re indifferent about. </p>
<p id="Pqvp2D"><strong>Halliwell: </strong>It’s the <em>Carol</em> reference. Obviously. </p>
<aside id="g56QpL"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"From Cornelia Street to London: All the Shade and Easter Eggs on Taylor Swift’s ‘Lover’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/24/20830545/easter-eggs-taylor-swift-lover-karlie-kloss-joe-alwyn-calvin-harris"}]}'></div></aside><h4 id="gbdr8E">9. Is Taylor Swift good again?</h4>
<p id="spdQp0"><strong>Halliwell: </strong>So good!!</p>
<p id="hVocfk"><strong>Knibbs: </strong>She was never bad—but this new album is a showcase for her staying power. </p>
<p id="94Ivk3"><strong>Bereznak: </strong>Ugh, you’re really going to make me say it? Yes, she’s good! Are you happy now?</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="vEaEvo"><strong>Gruttadaro: </strong>I think we still need to be conscientious about separating Taylor Swift the Celebrity from Taylor Swift the Musician. She’s still the narrative-shaping megastar she was five days ago, even as she requests to be removed from narratives and claims that she’s forgotten certain people existed. Taylor Swift the Celebrity is still not in a great place. But Taylor Swift the Musician is definitely back, and that’s actually the first step of rehabilitation for Taylor Swift the Celebrity.</p>
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https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/26/20833162/taylor-swift-lover-exit-surveyThe Ringer Staff2019-08-26T09:29:49-04:002019-08-26T09:29:49-04:00Taylor Swift Is a ‘Lover’ and a Fighter
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<p>On her new album, the singer says she wants to be defined by the things she loves, not the things she hates—but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t learned how to direct her combative energy toward worthier adversaries</p> <p id="tPZtD5">“I’m ready for combat,” Taylor Swift sings on her seventh album, <em>Lover</em>. “I say I don’t want that—but what if I do?” That unanswered question hangs like mist over the sunset-hued synths of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KpKc3C9V3w">“The Archer,”</a> the album’s third single and one of the most convincingly candid songs Swift has released in some time. The title is a subtle nod to her astrological sign (Swift will turn 30 a few months from now, during the next Sagittarius season) but the chorus finds her as divided as a Gemini. “I’ve been the archer, I’ve been the prey,” she sings, her delivery emotive but refreshingly understated. “Who could ever leave me, darling / But who could stay?”</p>
<p id="rEGT7k">Combat has had a way of finding Taylor Swift throughout the past decade of her fame, though she’s usually taken pains to convince the world that she was the one on the receiving end of the arrow. Her most infamous feud, with Kanye West, has now been raging for a decade—it was recently the 10-year anniversary of West’s interrupting Swift at the 2009 VMAs, if that’s the sort of holiday you observe—while she recently announced the end of her years-long spat with Katy Perry, with great public fanfare, <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/watch-taylor-swift-katy-perry-you-need-to-calm-down-video-848857/">at the end of a music video</a>. Wounded, Swift has fired back at such archers as <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/tina-fey-amy-poehler-respond-taylor-swifts-special/story?id=18667853">Amy Poehler and Tina Fey</a> for making award-show jokes about her love life, a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYa1eI1hpDE">music critic</a> for failing to properly appreciate her artistry, and Kim Kardashian West for leaking the audio of a private phone call between Swift and West. As time went on and her fame grew, Swift came to seem less like a plucky David and more like a Goliath picking epic fights with other people her size, celebrities whose concerns seemed petty and prohibitively distant from the mere mortals listening to her music.</p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="uFpye0"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Taylor Swift’s ‘Lover’ Is a Perfect Snapshot of Her Life—and Possibly Her Best Pop Album","url":"https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/23/20830106/taylor-swift-lover-review"},{"title":"How Taylor Swift Went From Sweetheart to Snake (and Back Again?)","url":"https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/21/20826837/ten-years-of-taylor-swift"},{"title":"From Cornelia Street to London: All the Shade and Easter Eggs on Taylor Swift’s ‘Lover’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/24/20830545/easter-eggs-taylor-swift-lover-karlie-kloss-joe-alwyn-calvin-harris"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="RnVunb">Part of what has made Swift a more interesting and tolerable celebrity in the lead-up to <em>Lover</em> is that she seems to have both accepted her innate love of combat and learned how to direct her energy toward worthier adversaries. In August 2017, she took the stand to testify against former radio DJ David Mueller, whom she was suing for groping her under her skirt at a meet-and-greet event four years prior. Swift recently <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/aug/24/taylor-swift-pop-music-hunger-games-gladiators">told</a> journalist Laura Snapes that when she was in the courtroom “something snapped, I think,” and the quotes that emerged from Swift’s testimony were full of a righteous kind of anger we’d never quite heard from her before. When Swift was asked by Mueller’s lawyers why his hand wasn’t visible in a photograph of the incident, Swift replied, it was because “my ass is in the back of my body.” </p>
<p id="7eGcDl">In the time since her tabloid-pop-opera <em>Reputation</em>, Swift has also aimed her arrows at Republican politicians in her adopted home state of Tennessee (specifically senators Lamar Alexander and Marsha Blackburn), the head of her former record label Scott Borchetta, and, <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/11/8/16621926/hearing-both-sides-of-taylor-swift">however belatedly</a>, President Donald Trump. The person she’s currently cast as her supervillain, though, is famed pop manager Scooter Braun, who recently paid $300 million to purchase Borchetta’s former label Big Machine and, with it, the master recordings of Swift’s first six albums. Days before <em>Lover</em> came out, Swift revealed her sly strategy to combat this perceived injustice: She plans to rerecord all six of her original albums, so she can once again own copies of her songs. “I’m glad that this has shone light on it because it’s sort of an insidious part of our business,” she told radio host Elvis Duran on Friday morning. “I’m happy to take full ownership of this album. … The person who bought my art, he’s never made any art in his life ... so he could never understand that personal connection.” </p>
<p id="9ZKnGZ">Maturity is often the simple realization that two seemingly opposing facts can both be true. Taylor Swift has been the archer. She’s been the prey. </p>
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<p id="bTqKni">In April 2016, Swift filmed an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnbCSboujF4">installment</a> of <em>Vogue</em>’s video interview series “73 Questions.” While guiding a cameraperson through her idyllic Los Angeles home, Swift fielded a string of rapid-fire queries about her favorite cocktail (“vodka Diet Coke”), the first song she learned to play on the guitar (“Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer) and the last movie that made her cry (“<em>The Martian</em>!”). Midway through the interview, she was asked what career she would have pursued if she had not become a musician. “I might be in advertising,” she replied. “Maybe coming up with slogans and concepts is the same as hooks and songs.” </p>
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<p id="FB1Xrf">It was a revealing glimpse into Swift’s mind, and the way that her mysterious gifts as a songwriter have always been tied to an inherently pragmatic business savvy. She is uncommonly good at expressing, within the structured confines of a song lyric, the internal rush of an intense feeling—a skill she perfected on her great 2012 album, <em>Red</em>. But some of the less compelling songs on her previous two albums, <em>1989</em> and <em>Reputation</em>, veered too far from the nuance of lived experience into that realm of empty sloganeering. <em>Reputation</em> misfires like “I Did Something Bad,” “Look What You Made Me Do,” and “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” felt less like lived-in experiences and more like the studied creation of an inauthentic persona, Taylor Swift’s Chris Gaines.</p>
<p id="mks7y4">She’s ready to put all that unpleasantness behind her, though. In a spoken-word snippet in the final minute of <em>Lover</em>, Swift can be overheard telling someone, “I want to be defined by the things that I love, not the things I hate, not the things I’m afraid of, or the things that haunt me in the middle of the night.” It’s a worthy thesis statement for this uneven but occasionally dazzling return-to-form record, and it’s also something of a risk, because many of the things that Taylor Swift loves are not exactly cool. </p>
<p id="Wcp4Kb">They include: <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/taylor-swift-removes-me-lyric-874631/">spelling</a>, musical theater, melodrama, cats (the animal and the musical), ’70s singer-songwriters, ’80s synth-pop, the Dixie Chicks, extended metaphors, London, fantasizing about marriage, rainbows, butterflies, and, you know, <em>love</em>. While there are some flashes of anger and antagonism here and there, the songs that best define <em>Lover</em> are the ones on which Swift allows herself to sound giddily, unfashionably ecstatic. “Paper Rings” is “Miss Mary Mack” refashioned as a rockabilly tune; the chiming, <em>Pitch Perfect</em>–core “Death by a Thousand Cuts” is sure to be an a cappella group staple for many years to come. “London Boy,” Swift’s most obvious ode to her beau, Joe Alwyn, is relatively embarrassing (“Darling, I fancy you!”), but it’s also one of those highly personal lapses in judgment often suffered by the deeply smitten, so it makes perfect sense on an album earnest enough to call itself <em>Lover</em>.</p>
<p id="y37raX">Some of the album’s most revealing admissions, though, are subtler. Back when she was playing by the rules of the country establishment, Swift’s music featured the requisite nods to the sanctity of religion (from her early hit “Our Song”: “And when I got home, before I said amen / Asking God if He could play it again.”) <em>Lover</em>, though, has a few references to spiritual crises and questioned faith: “Holy orange bottles, each night, I pray to you,” she sings on “Soon You’ll Get Better,” a moving ballad about her mother’s cancer. “Desperate people find faith, so now I pray to Jesus too.” It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that the next song is the sultry “False God,” which finds salvation in more earthly places: “I know heaven’s a thing, I go there when you touch me, honey.”</p>
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<p id="H1xdUT">Though they accompany her on <em>Lover</em>’s quietest song, the presence of the Dixie Chicks is both a Swiftian power move and a subliminal fuck-you. “I come from <em>country music</em>,” Swift <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/aug/24/taylor-swift-pop-music-hunger-games-gladiators">explained</a> in her interview with Snapes. “The number one thing they absolutely drill into you as a country artist, and you can ask any other country artist this, is ‘Don’t be like the Dixie Chicks!’ … I watched country music snuff that candle out. The most amazing group we had, just because they talked about politics.” The times have certainly changed since the Dixie Chicks criticized George W. Bush and the Iraq War (the <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/kacey-musgraves-gun-violence-lollapalooza-867369/">gleefully outspoken cowgirl</a> Kacey Musgraves took home the most recent Album of the Year Grammy), but Swift seems to have had an old, formative score to settle with the country music establishment and is just now feeling confident enough to reach back into her quiver.</p>
<p id="E7M6vP"><em>Lover</em>’s most surefire conversation starter is “The Man,” a provocative, percussive reverie in which Swift imagines how her career would be discussed if she were a man. Not every lyric sticks the landing, but it’s refreshing to hear a Taylor Swift song about something other than romance, and one that creates a villain more formidable and systemic than just another celebrity. “They wouldn’t shake their heads and question how much of this I deserve,” she sings. <em>This</em> is the Swift who said “ass” in a court of law. May we hear more from her on future records.</p>
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<p id="fVIkXU">An unfortunate trait that <em>Lover</em> shares with <em>Reputation</em>: terrible choice in lead singles. 2017’s “Look What You Made Me Do” was a head-scratcher of a comeback hit, and even on the album it’s the most cartoonish rendering of Taylor’s inner Wario. “ME!,” Swift’s anodyne 2019 duet with Brendon Urie, was a dizzying overcorrection, pushing her sound so far into the light that it makes you see sunspots. “Me!” makes slightly more sense in the context of <em>Lover</em>, coming as a kind of comedically excessive bouquet of I’m-sorry flowers after the searching torch song “Afterglow,” and also as a reminder that Swift is this era’s most inevitable subject of a Broadway jukebox musical. <em>Lover</em>’s second offering, “You Need to Calm Down,” was another casualty of Swift’s overzealous songwriting-as-advertising-slogan tendency. Its on-the-nose attempts to commodify #Pride have come under reasonable scrutiny. It’s a shame, though: From a melodic and production standpoint, it’s one of Swift’s strongest singles in years.</p>
<p id="7gvqMs">Much was made of the fact that “Old Town Road” “blocked” <em>Lover</em>’s first two singles from hitting the top of the Billboard Hot 100, and neither lingered very long in the top 10. But much of <em>Lover</em> suggests that Swift might be slowly, gradually plotting a sustainable future beyond the dogged pursuit of The Big Hit Single. Though it features names like Lorde collaborator Joe Little and St. Vincent’s Annie Clark (a cowriter on “Cruel Summer”), the most surprising aspect of<em> Lover</em>’s credits is the absence of Max Martin, the cowriter of some of Swift’s most colossal hits. Add another one to that list of Swift’s somewhat idiosyncratic loves: the old-fashioned album format. (It’s perhaps her smartest commercial strategy, too: <em>Lover</em>, like <em>Reputation</em> before it, is already on track to be the year’s biggest-selling album.)</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="r6TYa2">The best single from <em>Lover</em>, its title track, did not get the corporate tie-in, NFL-draft-night roll-out that “Me!” did, and that’s a good thing: It would have been crushed under all that weight. It’s destined for more sacred spaces, like headphones, lonely car rides home after dropping someone off at an airport, and first dances at weddings. “Lover” is unlikely to be a smash hit on pop or country radio, because it doesn’t sound like anything else currently popular on either of those formats so much as it does a deep cut off Sheryl Crow’s <em>Tuesday Night Music Club</em>. All the better. “We can leave the Christmas lights up till January,” Swift sings, her voice rich and resonant, as if it’s testing the echo capacity of a brand-new apartment. “This is our place, we make the rules.” In that line you can hear excitement and the faintest hint of fear, as she realizes she has come to that place, in life and in love, where she can finally do whatever she wants. Can a lifelong archer trade combat for contentment? She will start with the length of one slow dance and see.</p>
<p id="2n9bnB"><em>An earlier version of this piece misstated when Swift recorded her “73 Questions” interview with</em> Vogue.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/26/20833037/taylor-swift-lover-album-reviewLindsay Zoladz2019-08-24T06:30:00-04:002019-08-24T06:30:00-04:00From Cornelia Street to London: All the Shade and Easter Eggs on Taylor Swift’s ‘Lover’
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<p>The odes to Joe Alwyn are pretty apparent, but there’s enough fruit on the vine here for Kaylor shippers too</p> <p id="jBE50J">Taylor Swift’s much-anticipated album <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/23/20830106/taylor-swift-lover-review"><em>Lover</em> dropped Friday</a>, ushering in a new era full of the catchy bops and country ballads we all missed so much. But just because Taylor’s new vibe is all pastels and soft sunshine doesn’t mean she can’t still bring the shade—from calling out everyone she’s ever dated to more political and social commentary, there are plenty of deep cuts and Easter eggs to parse in the lengthy—<em>18-song!</em>— album. </p>
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<p id="PLmVpv">First of all, I hope Joe Alwyn, Taylor’s boyfriend of three years, is just as committed to this relationship as his megastar girlfriend, because judging by the lyrics on the album, she is ready for wedding bells<em> tomorrow</em>. Several songs on the album include shout-outs to their forever love, including “Lover,” “Paper Rings,” “I Think He Knows,” and “London Boy.” Listen, I’m glad she’s happy! Joe Alwyn might be the most boring person in the world, but whatever floats your boat, girl.</p>
<p id="88HGoN">Luckily, for those of us less enamored of Mr. Blue-Eyed Billy Lynn, Taylor shouts out plenty of past relationships on <em>Lover</em>, too. Apologies to “Thank U, Next,” but “I Forgot That You Existed” has taken the crown for Most Savage Break-up Song of 2019: “It isn’t love, it isn’t hate; it’s just indifference.” Whew! Jill Gutowitz <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2019/08/taylor-swifts-lover-album-meaning-and-analysis.html">theorized for<em> Vulture</em></a> that this deeply petty song is about Calvin Harris, and considering I also forgot he existed, that checks out. It could also be a dig at Taylor’s ongoing feud with Kanye and Kim Kardashian West, but it seems like there’s a new conflict between them every other day, so as hard as we try, it’s impossible to forget about all of that. </p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="luC0f0"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Everything Noteworthy About the New Taylor Swift Album, ‘Lover’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/23/20830167/taylor-swift-album-lover-ringer-coverage"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="R3j5W8">And please think of the <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/11/9/16625462/taylor-swift-karlie-kloss-kaylor-tumblr-shipping">Kaylor shippers</a> in your life today—between “Cornelia Street,” “False God,” and “It’s Nice to Have a Friend,” the <a href="https://nylon.com/taylor-swift-karlie-kloss-news">internet conspiracy theory</a> that Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss are star-crossed lovers has never been stronger. (Which is not to say that it’s particularly strong, still, but LET US HAVE THIS.) There’s an entire <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=679wr31SXWk"><em>Carol</em></a> reference in “It’s Nice To Have a Friend”—“Lost my gloves / You give me one / Wanna hang out? / Yes, sounds like fun.” No one has ever referenced a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QljnNIBtaI">clandestine glove lunch</a> in a totally straight way, I said what I said. <a href="https://memedocumentation.tumblr.com/post/136322720365/explained-harold-theyre-lesbians-meme">Harold</a>, they’re—probably not, but seriously, live a little—lesbians.</p>
<p id="ZOGBeR">Even if she’s not secretly in love with Karlie, Taylor is an ally now. She’s political! OK, she may still have work to do, as evidenced by people <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2019/06/21/how-taylor-swift-angered-everyone-you-need-calm-down/1512715001/">lashing out</a> at her overblown attempt at advocating for LGBTQ rights in her video for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkk9gvTmCXY">“You Need to Calm Down.”</a> But progress is progess, and from lyrics supporting the gay community to teaching Fighting Sexism 101 in “The Man,” Taylor proves that she can mix Important Messages with delicious shade, like when she sings, “They would toast to me, oh, let the players play / I’d be just like Leo in Saint-Tropez.” I assume she’s referring to Leo’s dating history and not his <a href="https://www.theringer.com/pop-culture/2018/7/25/17610558/leonardo-dicaprio-beach-volleyball-faq">beach volleyball skills</a>, but who can say?</p>
<p id="shuQI1">And finally, in “Daylight,” the lyrics “You ran with the wolves and refused to settle down,” could point to Harry Styles. One Direction released a song called “Wolves” in 2015, and various <a href="https://twitter.com/94HESLegendx94/status/1164846626281680896?s=20">online sleuths</a> have connected the song to Taylor’s “Out of the Woods” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLf9q36UsBk">music video</a>, which was supposedly also written about Harry. But hello, are we all forgetting that Taylor dated someone who <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOnWEmbW3OQ"><em>actually ran with the wolves</em></a> in the 2009 cinematic classic <em>Twilight: New Moon</em>? This song is obviously about Taylor Lautner, and you can take that to the bank.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="feXy4S">Even if the album boils down to 70 percent Joe Alwyn, 20 percent Kaylor, and 10 percent everyone else, it doesn’t really matter who Taylor is pining for, or dragging in the dirt—pretty much every song on <em>Lover</em> is just as good as we hoped. Now excuse me, I’m off to watch <em>Carol</em> on repeat and scour the internet for every photo of Karlie and Taylor ever taken on <a href="https://twitter.com/klossbow/status/1162470317908025350?s=20">Cornelia Street</a>.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/24/20830545/easter-eggs-taylor-swift-lover-karlie-kloss-joe-alwyn-calvin-harrisKate Halliwell2019-08-23T17:34:11-04:002019-08-23T17:34:11-04:00‘Lover’ Instant Reactions, Celebrity Photoshop Fails, and a Too-Close Read of the VMA’s Seating Chart
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<p>Plus, ‘The Bachelor’ vs. ‘90 Day Fiancé’ and a celebrity Instagram hoax</p> <div id="2TTVCk"><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/5usnvOaQjniA7yuc936DBg" style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 232px;" allowfullscreen="" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></div>
<p id="4RvQVL"><a href="https://art19.com/shows/ringer-dish/episodes/b3045a71-35d9-4cfb-926c-26b38f89533b">Taylor Swift’s newest album</a>, <em>Lover</em>, was released on Friday and spoiler alert: It’s good (0:30). Julia Roberts, Rob Lowe, and Tom Holland were among the celebrities who got duped by an Instagram hoax (14:24). Why are so many celebrities so bad a Photoshopping their Instagram photos (20:50)? Plus: <em>The Bachelor</em> vs. <em>90 Day Fiancé</em> (30:41).</p>
<p id="kqImwA"><strong>Subscribe: </strong><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ringer-dish/id1465286477">Apple Podcasts</a> / <a href="https://art19.com/shows/ringer-dish">Art19</a></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/2019/8/23/20830361/lover-instant-reactions-celebrity-photoshop-fails-and-a-too-close-read-of-the-vmas-seating-chartKate HalliwellAmelia WedemeyerJordan Ligons2019-08-23T14:34:37-04:002019-08-23T14:34:37-04:00Taylor Swift’s ‘Lover’ Is a Perfect Snapshot of Her Life—and Possibly Her Best Pop Album
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<p>The pop queen’s seventh studio album finds her balancing private bliss with public unease and making some of her strongest songs along the way</p> <p id="LgCNgu">It is time to take seriously, and literally, Taylor Swift’s threat to rerecord her back catalog, now that it appears to be a promise. In the interest of full disclosure (and receipts), here is her exchange with <em>CBS Sunday Morning</em>’s Tracy Smith on the matter, as transcribed from <a href="https://www.cbspressexpress.com/cbs-news/releases/view?id=53324">an interview airing Sunday</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p id="L2gzEa">“Might you do that?” Smith asks.</p>
<p id="4xGv62">“Oh yeah,” Swift says.</p>
<p id="Ap7Fmj">“That’s a plan?” Smith asks.</p>
<p id="irxPj3">“Yeah, absolutely,” Swift says.</p>
</blockquote>
<p id="LeUhqE">So: That’s a promise. Oh yeah. Absolutely. The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/arts/music/taylor-swift-master-recordings.html">sordid backstory</a> here—in late June, Swift’s first record label, Big Machine, was sold to a company owned principally by Scooter Braun, superstar manager and professional guy named Scooter, over her vehement objections, in that the master recordings to her first six blockbuster records are now controlled by a cohort of Kanye West—is both <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/7/1/20677580/taylor-swift-scooter-braun-feud-masters-justin-bieber-tumblr-post">a fascinating music-biz conundrum</a> and the 100,000th installment in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/entertainment/taylor-swift-kanye-west-vmas-10-years/">the 21st century’s defining celebrity feud</a>. The implications of the world’s biggest pop star redoing and rereleasing all her old albums <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/arts/music/taylor-swift-rerecord-albums.html">are staggering</a>, legally and logistically, but set aside the industry intrigue for a second and just think about <em>how bizarre that’s going to sound</em>. </p>
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<p id="4Ewx5n">What we’re talking about here, specifically, is Taylor Swift, who turns 30 in December, rerecording <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb-K2tXWK4w">“Fifteen.”</a> Rerecording <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgFeZr5ptV8">“22.”</a> Rerecording <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb2stN7kH28">“Our Song,”</a> from her self-titled 2006 debut, famously released when she was 16, a Pennsylvania native with a pronounced Nashville twang and an even more pronounced teenage exuberance as she delivered the lines, “When we’re on the phone and you talk <em>real slow</em> / ’Cause it’s late and your mama don’t know.” Picture her even singing the words <em>your mama</em> now. She’ll be relitigating eight to 12 highest-possible-profile relationships, from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUwxKWT6m7U">that guy</a> to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA4iX5D9Z64">that guy</a> to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-YI_EXTi-w">that fuckin’ guy</a>. Goodness gracious, she’ll be rerecording <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYa1eI1hpDE">“Mean,”</a> from 2010’s <em>Speak Now</em>, with added motivation from the 6 billion additional people who’ve been mean to her in the decade since. </p>
<p id="N37ViW">Today, we welcome Swift’s seventh blockbuster album, <em>Lover</em>, out on her new label, Republic, and yes, she owns the masters, and yes, it is light-years better than 2017’s stormy <em>Reputation</em> and very arguably her best pop album to date, and yes, that’s (arguably) counting 2012’s <em>Red </em>as a pop album. <em>Lover </em>is alternately lovey-dovey in the extreme (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsKoOH6DVys">“London Boy,”</a> from the “Darling I fancy you” refrain on down, is the dorkiest song she’s ever written amid <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mBGUWf4rg">fearsome competition</a>) and something far moodier and deeper and weirder and more startling. (“London Boy” is immediately followed in the tracklist by the single saddest song she’s ever released, and also her best song since <em>Red</em>’s “All Too Well,” at least.) </p>
<p id="bEbWoY">What makes Swift’s back catalog valuable is, of course, the gazillion dollars it stands to generate; what makes it invaluable, to her especially of course, is that every record is a very specific snapshot of a very specific person at a very specific moment in her life. They are time capsules she buries in each and every one of our heads. More than any other pop star of her time or perhaps anybody else’s, she puts out albums that function as vivid eras unto themselves, as self-contained and almost painfully distinct as seasons of a prestige anthology TV series nearly everyone on earth is more or less forced to watch. <em>American Taylor Story</em>. As we contemplate the baffling notion of 2020 Taylor Swift taking another crack at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWSt64gNr30">the power ballad</a> 2010 Taylor Swift sang <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/ariellecalderon/enchanted-owl-city">about the Owl City guy</a>, we are perhaps better equipped to appreciate the relentless <em>nowness</em> of <em>Lover</em>, a sprawling behemoth of clumsy lust and wounded grace, imperfect by necessity but enthralling by design. Messiness once again suits her, just as her ferocious devotion to the present tense always has. </p>
<p id="r7nRld">What I’m saying is that for, incredibly, the <a href="https://twitter.com/mehpatrol/status/1164674622647914496">second straight</a> Taylor Swift album, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuXNumBwDOM">the first single</a> also turned out to be <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/4/26/18517778/taylor-swift-me-music-video-ts7">the worst song</a>.</p>
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<p id="HlDBeG"><em>Lover</em>, at first blush, will be viewed primarily (and charitibly) through the prism of <em>Reputation</em>, a 200-ton Goth Phase excursion that was not, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tmd-ClpJxA">lousy first single</a> aside, as lousy as it first appeared. “Actually, <em>Reputation </em>was good” is 2019’s foremost hot take, and sure, we can agree that “You should take it as a compliment that I got drunk and made fun of the way that you talk” is actually <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUoe7cf0HYw">a pretty great opening line</a> for a song. We can marvel, furthermore, that the record did well enough that she toured stadiums to support it, even if <a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/81026251">the Netflix documentary of that tour</a> peaks with, uh, <em>Red</em>’s “All Too Well.” </p>
<p id="8zBsTs">But the first thing that makes <em>Lover </em>superior is that it dispenses, immediately, with the celebrity-feud angst that weighed down even <em>Reputation</em>’s lovey-doviest moments. Which is to say Track 1 is called “I Forgot That You Existed,” and is either about Kanye or <a href="https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/a28794817/taylor-swift-i-forgot-that-you-existed-calvin-harris-lyrics/">that other fuckin’ guy</a>, and includes the line “And I couldn’t get away from ya / In my feelings more than Drake, so yeah,” and has a winsome, giggling, finger-snapping buoyancy that lousy first single “ME!” tried and failed to manufacture. The concept, in a word, is <em>whew</em>. Her relief is also yours.</p>
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<p id="EJmG73">Swift <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/taylor-swift-cover-september-2019">described <em>Lover </em>to <em>Vogue</em></a><em> </em>as “a love letter to love,” and a smitten dorkiness does indeed animate the likes of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d1wKn-oJnA">“I Think He Knows”</a> (in which she repeatedly sing-raps the line “He got that boyish look that I like in a man”) and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zdg-pDF10g">“Paper Rings”</a> (which kicks off with her sing-rapping the lines “The moon is high like your friends were the night that we first met / Went home and tried to stalk you on the internet / Now I’ve read all of the books beside your bed”). Shout-out to Joe Alwyn, Swift’s boyfriend of three years or so, a handsome actor and agreeably empty vessel (you likely remember Emma Stone saying <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_IHjskGvSM">“What an outfit!”</a> to him in <em>The Favourite</em>, but don’t remember the outfit) such that their love can be reduced in song to <em>we day-drink and watch rugby together </em>and other such agreeable I’m Smitten; He’s English celebrity-relationship vagueries. <em>Lover</em>’s title track, a dusty and flagrantly country-ish shuffle, was the best-received of the record’s pre-release singles, very sweet and, as always, very specific: “And I’m highly suspicious that everyone who sees you want you,” she purrs. (Not really.) “I’ve loved you three summers now, honey, but I want ’em all.” (Absolutely.)</p>
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<p id="hIvdzE">For those who comb every new Taylor Swift pop album for clues that she might one day make an old-guard Taylor Swift country album, “Lover” is nearly this album’s peak. Nearly. I am here to tell you that “Soon You’ll Get Better”—costarring, as long threatened, the Dixie Chicks—immediately enters her top five songs of all time, and not at no. 5. It <a href="https://ew.com/music/2019/08/23/taylor-swift-dixie-chicks-soon-youll-get-better/">concerns Swift’s mother’s ongoing experience</a> with cancer and constitutes a throwback in terms of both instrumentation (acoustic guitar, Dixie Chick Martie Maguire’s aching fiddle) and unbearable intimacy, especially the catch in Swift’s voice as she sings, “You’ll get better soon / ’Cause you <em>have</em> to.” It made me cry on first listen while I watched a bunch of 8-year-olds bumble through soccer practice; it is a devastating reminder, if you needed one, of why it is worth enduring all the tabloid drama Swift creates, and why she’s at her best when she manages to fully set it aside.</p>
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<p id="jayIxS"><em>Lover</em>’s<em> </em>18 tracks are<em> </em>produced mainly by Joel Little (best known for his work on Lorde’s first album, <em>Pure Heroine</em>) and <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2017/6/2/16044056/jack-antonoff-bleachers-taylor-swift-top-40-f4c57e4fbd08">your old pal Jack Antonoff</a>, best known for Swift’s formal 2014 pop debut <em>1989</em>, not to mention Lorde’s second album, <em>Melodrama</em>. (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic8j13piAhQ">“Cruel Summer,”</a> the song reportedly <a href="https://pitchfork.com/news/taylor-swift-and-st-vincent-collaborate-on-new-song-cruel-summer/">cowritten by St. Vincent</a>, has by far <em>Lover</em>’s biggest chorus, for whatever that’s worth.) There is a smeary, narcotized, digital-bubblebath haze to much of this record, an au courant Spotify-core subset of electro-pop that will never be Swift’s specialty, but can still suit her quite well. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kwf7P2GNAVw">“Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince”</a> (coproduced by Little) is a moody and mesmerizing little faux-chillwave mash note, a very forward-looking approach to high school regression, from its vivid homeroom angst (“The whole school is rolling fake dice / You play stupid games, you win stupid prizes”) to the cheerleading squad backing Swift up amid all the decaying beauty: “And I don’t want you to (Go!) / I don’t really wanna (Fight!) / ’Cause nobody’s gonna (Win!).” </p>
<p id="i0crdc">Moodier still is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acQXa5ArHIk">“False God,”</a> which with its eerie sax moans and breathy, downbeat dream pop sounds more like Carly Rae Jepsen singing a Blood Orange song than Blood Orange’s Devonté Hynes cowriting a Carly Rae Jepsen song. That’s an Antonoff joint, as is “The Archer,” another well-received early single that dropped Swift into a blaring synthesizer reverie but presented her at her most direct, and most wounded: “They see right through / Can you see right through me? / They see right through / They see right through me / I see right through me / I see right through me.” The panic in her rising voice by the time she gets to “I see right through me” is another reminder of the nearly unparalleled craft at work here, fueled as always by the boldface noise constantly threatening to drown it out, but still plenty capable, at times, of cutting through it. </p>
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<p id="bNVyTi">In terms of generating headlines and think pieces and exhortations to calm down, <em>Lover</em>’s flashiest moment is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHoHDNxay3A">“The Man,”</a> a lush and pointed and distinctly Haim-like 2010s-does-1980s-pop jam with a chorus that begins, “I’m so sick of running fast as I can / Wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man.” It is, indeed, Swift’s gender-flipping lament in the vein of Beyoncé’s “If I Were a Boy,” but with Swift’s very distinct sense of playfulness and content generation: “And they would toast to me / Oh let the players play / I’d be just like Leo / In Saint-Tropez.” </p>
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<p id="SU6JnE">The song, much like the final verse of the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/arts/music/taylor-swift-you-need-to-calm-down-video.html">somewhat opportunistic</a> gay-pride jam <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkk9gvTmCXY">“You Need to Calm Down,”</a> is in part a denunciation of society’s insistence on comparing female pop stars to one another, so sorry about the Haim and Beyoncé stuff. But Swift is at her best when she’s angry about something (or better yet, <em>someone</em>) very specific, but still light-footed and lighthearted enough to sharpen that anger to a lethal point. <em>Lover </em>is a jumble of private bliss and perpetual public unease; contrary to its opening track, she has not forgotten that her various enemies exist, and neither, at any point, will you. But it’s got some of her best songs, from her official pop era or otherwise, and even as it swings from the painfully intimate to the awkwardly universal, it strikes her most effective balance yet between the flawed human and the even more flawed megacelebrity. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="d0OxJa">And so, just as it’s absurd to imagine 2020 Taylor Swift fully reinhabiting, say, the Taylor Swift who conjured up 2008’s teen-queen triumph <em>Fearless</em>, this album, too, will feel tremendously antiquated to even her biggest fans a decade from now, and likely feel tremendously antiquated to her too. It is, by design, a perfect snapshot of a flagrantly imperfect moment; that’s what makes <em>Lover</em>, in its greatest moments, so great.</p>
<aside id="JOlvwu"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"ringer_newsletter"}'></div></aside>
https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/23/20830106/taylor-swift-lover-reviewRob Harvilla2019-08-23T13:25:21-04:002019-08-23T13:25:21-04:00Taylor Swift Shakes Off the Bad Vibes With “Cruel Summer”
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<figcaption>Getty Images/Ringer illustration</figcaption>
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<p>The second track on ‘Lover’ is a better rebuke of her personal drama than anything on her last album. Plus: Lana Del Rey is set up for the album of her career, Young Thug and Gunna go to the beach, and Little Brother is back.</p> <p id="7rFbmu"><em>Because he has nothing better to do with his time, each week, Micah Peters riffs on the most awe-inspiring, confounding, addictive, or otherwise hilarious moments from the week in music. This week, he’s on vacation, so colleague Justin Sayles is handling duties and kicking things off with new stuff from the yin and yang of ’10s pop music:</em></p>
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<h4 id="bIashw">Taylor Swift’s finally ending her “Cruel Summer” </h4>
<p id="3CaivN">The summer of 2016 was the lowest for Taylor’s career: We were just one year removed from her biggest as a pop star, when she placed five singles in the year-end Billboard Hot 100, but a feud with <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2016/7/18/16047030/kanye-west-taylor-swift-kim-kardashian-snapchat-e4c3339d9d73">Kanye West and Kim Kardashian</a> had diminished her star and <a href="https://pagesix.com/2019/08/08/taylor-swift-felt-isolated-during-her-2016-feud-with-kim-and-kanye/">affected her mental health</a>. (In her journals, she called it her <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/aug/23/taylor-swift-lover-review">“apocalypse.”</a>) Her musical response the next year, the <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/11/10/16633196/taylor-swift-reputation-review">poorly received <em>Reputation</em></a>, did nothing to move the narrative back in her direction. By the time she began to roll out singles for her new album (<em>Lover</em>, out Friday) the question wasn’t whether she would reclaim her throne but <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/6/4/18651415/katy-perry-taylor-swift-miley-cyrus-pop-new-music-billboard-charts">whether she was still made for these times</a>. Well, about that …</p>
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<p id="wkJEh6">“Cruel Summer,” Swift’s most infectious song since that run of singles from <em>1989</em> and the second track on <em>Lover</em>, sets the tone for the new album’s warmer, more inviting vibes. And most crucially for Taylor, it tells a more humanizing version of that ill-fated period three years ago. Over a burbling Jack Antonoff production, Taylor sings of falling in love with current boyfriend Joe Alwyn while her public life was in shambles: “Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes / What doesn’t kill me makes me want you more.” Cowritten by St. Vincent, “Cruel Summer” is a more effective rebuke of Taylor’s personal drama than any <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/7934297/taylor-swift-the-snake-history-kim-kanye-instagram">snake emoji</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tmd-ClpJxA">“edgy” turn</a> she’s tried in the recent past. (It also doesn’t hurt that it shares a title with Kanye’s 2012 GOOD Music compilation.) She’s back, and those dark days appear to be over.</p>
<aside id="wJmUUT"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Taylor Swift’s ‘Lover’ Is a Perfect Snapshot of Her Life—and Possibly Her Best Pop Album","url":"https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/23/20830106/taylor-swift-lover-review"}]}'></div></aside><h4 id="siIrhn">Lana Del Rey’s saying “Fuck It” to great results</h4>
<p id="AT1Peu">Speaking of Jack Antonoff productions … </p>
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<p id="4JpZLL">On Monday, LDR <a href="https://twitter.com/LanaDelRey/status/1163608549026459648">tweeted</a>, “I miss doin nothin the most of all,” leading some of her more paranoid fans to wonder whether she may be <a href="https://twitter.com/yayoandweeds/status/1163609348347760640">plotting</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/sIutdelrey/status/1163608757378662401">her</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/cinnamonkilos/status/1163608712709382145">retirement</a>. Turns out she was just referencing one of her two excellent new singles out Friday. The song the line was pulled from, “The Greatest,” is possibly her best song in years, and an instant Lana classic: She sings of California dreaming, pining for the past, generational dread, and Kanye and Bowie over an AOR instrumental. It’s perfect. The other song released Friday is called “Fuck It I Love You,” which … I’m shocked she doesn’t already have song called that. We’re one week out from <em>Norman Fucking Rockwell</em>, her new album, and if these songs and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uFv9Ts7Sdw">the</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg3DxELVPj4">previous</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY2LUmLw_DQ">singles</a> are any indication, we may be getting her magnum opus.</p>
<h4 id="HiFMDx">Young Thug and Gunna having so much fun in the “Surf” video</h4>
<p id="p8pfrO">In which a father and son have a nice time at the beach. </p>
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<p id="BFIfWs">Thugger blessed us last week with his first official album, <em>So Much Fun</em>, a project that more than lived up to its name (surprise <a href="https://www.stereogum.com/2055659/young-thug-tainted-a-perfectly-good-so-much-fun-song-with-a-new-machine-gun-kelly-verse/news/">postrelease addition of Machine Gun Kelly</a> to highlight “Ecstasy” notwithstanding). Even amid Young Thug’s unbridled enthusiasm, the Pi’erre Bourne–produced “Surf” stands out as one of <em>SMF</em>’s purest joys. The low-budget video for the song, which dropped on Wednesday and was directed by Be El Be, doubles down on those vibes: Thugger and protégé Gunna take to the beach with ATVs, a cadre of bikini-clad women, and Super Soakers. It’s the perfect encapsulation of a man who just made the most serious project of his career by showing he’s at his best when he’s not being serious at all.</p>
<h4 id="4b8rNK">Little Brother’s reunion is “Everything”</h4>
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<p id="kp41Iq">Nearly a decade had passed since Phonte and Rapper Big Pooh linked up for a full-length project. The Durham, North Carolina, emcees rose to indie prominence in the early 2000s alongside producer 9th Wonder on the strength of their first two albums, <em>The Listening</em> and <em>The Minstrel Show</em>. But along the way, 9th left and Phonte and Pooh began focusing on solo work, and, after 2010’s <em>Leftback</em>, it seemed we’d possibly seen the last of LB. That changed Tuesday with the surprise drop of <em>May the Lord Watch</em>, which <a href="https://www.vibe.com/2019/08/little-brother-may-the-lord-watch">Big Pooh called the</a> “album of [their] careers.” The famed producer (and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9th_Wonder#Hip_hop_professor_and_academia">hip-hop professor</a>) is still gone, but beatsmiths like Nottz and Khrysis have given the rappers a backdrop as rich as anything they’ve worked in the past. Nowhere is that more apparent than “Everything,” a masterful piano-chop job by Khrysis that finds Phonte and Pooh in classic Little Brother form: discussing the trials of life in a conversational manner and ultimately finding some inner peace.</p>
<h4 id="kQqDig">Jay Som’s channeling “Semi-Charmed Life” on “Superbike”</h4>
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<p id="FfmNCJ">This entry is mainly here to highlight my colleague Lindsay Zoladz’s <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/20/20813318/jay-som-anak-ko-melina-duterte-filipino-mitski-turn-into-everybody-works">excellent profile on 25-year-old Jay Som</a>, one of the more exciting indie rock voices to emerge in the past few years. In their conversation, the musician says that the intro of “Superbike” is a nod to Third Eye Blind’s 1997 hit “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beINamVRGy4">Semi-Charmed Life</a>.” I really like “Superbike,” but now I can’t listen to it without hearing those <em>doo-doo-doo</em>s.</p>
<h4 id="88qqKb">Bonus: ScHoolboy Q tells Danny Brown about that country club life</h4>
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<p id="SQTUy5">Q is every bit surprised as you are that he’s a golf-playing dad. “I used to look at that shit like some white boy weirdo shit,” he tells an overjoyous Danny Brown on the set of Brown’s overjoyous new Viceland show, <em>Danny’s House.</em> If you have even a passing interest in ScHoolboy’s music, you know that his old feelings about the sport are <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/schoolboy-q-crash-talk-golf">not the case anymore</a>. In fact, he’s now got a membership at three country clubs. That’s great for his game, but less so for his code: “There’ll be some corny shit. Motherfuckers really be snitching,” he says. “I got a bad habit of hitting the ball out of the sandbunker and not raking. There’ll be a motherfucker that ride right by you—you see him look at you funny.” Q then wraps up the segment by teaching a “young” Nikki Glaser about which strands of weed will make her more popular at school. ScHoolboy may never be fully at home at the country club, but he is when he’s in <em>Danny’s House</em>.</p>
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https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/23/20829997/taylor-swift-cruel-summer-lana-del-rey-the-greatestJustin Sayles2019-08-21T13:36:22-04:002019-08-21T13:36:22-04:00How Taylor Swift Went From Sweetheart to Snake (and Back Again?)
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<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="https://www.zalkus.com" target="_blank">Daniel Zalkus Illustration</a></figcaption>
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<p>In 2009, Taylor Swift was a country music princess on the verge of superstardom. In 2019, she’s a full-blown music juggernaut, and a case study for the ups and downs of modern pop stardom.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="7XFUNT">In the same way that a meteorologist might struggle to predict a whole year’s weather rather than the next week’s rain, it is exceedingly difficult to distill an accurate assessment of Taylor Swift as though she’s an ordinary pop act; she is a musical biosphere unto herself. Swift’s music isn’t released as much as it is unleashed, the melodies saturating deep into the tissue of contemporary public life whether we like it or not. I turn on the television to watch sports and Taylor Swift is there; I go to pick up an Amazon package and her blond, feline face is smiling at me and reminding me I’m absolutely going to listen to her new album, <em>Lover</em>, of course I am, how could I not? Swift has achieved the kind of success that turns a person into an institution, into an inevitability. </p>
<p id="sJ9D8N">But before she felt as inescapable as the weather, she was simply a star in waiting. Ten years ago, Taylor Swift was a 19-year-old Nashville singer-songwriter with a steadily growing fan base, a pair of twangy tween-dream albums and a string of <em>Billboard</em> hits. But 2009 was the year her perky, countrified celebrity solidified into industrial-grade American fame. </p>
<p id="bq9wkp">It was the year “You Belong With Me,” an earworm about an underdog-in-love that helped turn its girl-next-door singer into the closest thing music had to a Disney princess, blasted from car radios no matter which station they were turned to. Swift’s second album, <em>Fearless</em>, had made her the best-selling musical act in the United States. Critics loved that she wrote her own songs, parents loved that none of them had cusses, and everyone loved that they were catchy as shit. Swift was also a publicity prodigy, connecting with fans on MySpace and with tabloid-reading, album-buying moms through her <em>Us Weekly–</em>core romance with Disney star Joe Jonas. She hosted <em>Saturday Night Live</em> for the first time. And at the MTV Video Music Awards that year, Kanye West jumped onstage to interrupt Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video, kicking off an exhausting entanglement that would alternately muddle and enhance each artist’s reputation. (What else fuels fame like a feud between celebrities?) </p>
<p id="ehdZUn">In the ensuing decade, Swift has risen into a rarefied echelon of true pop superstars, though her sweetheart persona has been complicated to the point that her formerly shiny-smooth image now features snakeskin embellishments. She doesn’t cry about her haters anymore, she uses them as fodder for hit-single cheek—“Shake It Off,” “Look What You Made Me Do,” “You Need to Calm Down.” Her <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/8519784/taylor-swift-career-sales-streaming-totals-2019-ask-billboard">best-selling record</a> is still 2008’s <em>Fearless</em>, released just one month after Spotify showed up in the United States and nuked album sales indefinitely, but Swift has dealt with that decline by making sure her tours are treated as unmissable spectacles by fans. Her <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/8487606/taylor-swift-reputation-stadium-tour-breaks-record-highest-grossing-us-tour">hefty album sales</a> for the Reputation tour in 2018 led <em>Forbes </em>to<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/monicamercuri/2019/07/10/taylor-swift-is-the-worlds-highest-paid-celebrity-with-185-million-in-2019/#6bca38b46c9d"> crown her</a> the highest-paid celebrity in America. As touring profit becomes a more reliable indicator of appeal, Swift is still on top even if she never bests her teenage self’s album numbers. “Her core fan base is still huge,” David Turner, a music critic who runs the streaming music newsletter <a href="https://www.getrevue.co/profile/pennyfractions">Penny Fractions</a>, told <em>The Ringer</em>. “But she doesn’t seem just fine with having a core fan base. She might just want too much out of what is a very fleeting and hard-to-maintain existence.” </p>
<p id="oSBMnM">This week, Taylor Swift is releasing her seventh studio album, <em>Lover</em>, after an old-fashioned Big Album Rollout that feels a little stuffy and out of step in an era when Ariana Grande can release <em>Thank U, Next </em>on an inspired whim and Beyoncé’s strategy for domination involves blitzing fans with new music. <em>Lover</em> is on track to sell well, with “approaching” <a href="https://variety.com/2019/music/news/taylor-swift-lover-million-copies-before-release-1203307292/">1 million copies sold</a> prior to release, according to a <em>Variety</em> report, although the mixed critical reaction to her first singles suggest that the days of Swift as an unmitigated darling are officially over. (And the <em>Variety</em> report is based on a fuzzy international prerelease tally.) Swift hasn’t been a genuine ingenue for a long time—but it’s not entirely clear what she is now, or whether her position in pop is sustainable.</p>
<aside id="Px0k9q"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Very Pink, Very Perfect Life of Taylor Swift","url":"https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/the-very-pink-very-perfect-life-of-taylor-swift-107451/"}]}'></div></aside><p class="p--has-dropcap" id="aScN7h">The fact that Swift was a real-life precocious teen <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2016/10/24/16040870/taylor-swift-10-years-later-99e4729b8c19">when she came onto the scene</a> is important to understanding her early public image. Swift had started playing guitar and writing music as a child, gaining attention by singing the national anthem at local sporting events in the early aughts. Raised in Pennsylvania, Swift’s parents moved her to Nashville to further her career; her Southern twang reflected her ambition more than her upbringing. She signed her first record deal at 14, negotiating with former Universal executive Scott Borchetta at Big Machine Records. “Taylor and I made an aggressive deal on the back end,” Borchetta <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/the-very-pink-very-perfect-life-of-taylor-swift-107451/">told</a><em> Rolling Stone</em> in 2009. “I’ve written her some very big checks.” The wunderkind with finance-whiz parents was shrewd from the start, and not just on the business side: Piggybacking off Tim McGraw’s celebrity to drum up interest in “Tim McGraw” gave country fans an easy way to remember Swift as the girl who sang about their icon. In a glowing early profile, <em>The New Yorker </em><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/10/prodigy-pop-music-sasha-frere-jones">called</a> her a “preternaturally skilled student of established values.” She hewed closely to the tried-and-true girlie-girl Nashville aesthetic for female talent while quietly exerting an unusual amount of creative control; unlike other young stars, she wrote or cowrote almost all of her music. She was perfect at being conventional—so perfect that nobody felt threatened by the deftness of her songwriting. </p>
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<cite>Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Swift at the Country Music Awards in 2008</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="RIYNyO">Swift’s age and background meant that she could cultivate the image of a bubblegum-country cherub fairly easily. Just by existing, she checked so many boxes: in addition to being extremely young, she was blond, white, wealthy, and thin. On top of that, she liked to strum her guitar in poufy outfits, to sing her own longing lyrics about backyard romance, and to giggle and go along with whatever her interviewers wanted, crafting her goody-two-cowboy-boots image like a pro. “The young country super-starlet is a flat-out fantastic interview subject. So open and honest and funny and interesting; so willing to play along—to go here, there or anywhere during the course of an interview,” J. Freedom du Lac <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postrock/2008/02/her_song_talking_taylor_swift_1.html">wrote</a> in a <em>Washington Post</em> profile from 2008. “She’s a reporter’s dream—and, no doubt, a publicist’s, too. A media darling, indeed.”</p>
<p id="BauCX0">Swift was also a digital native who knew how to use social media in a way that Nashville hadn’t seen yet, still quite novel for pop acts. “She has aggressively used online social networks to stay connected with her young audience in a way that, while typical for rock and hip-hop artists, is proving to be revolutionary in country music,” <em>The New York Times</em>’ Jon Caramanica <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/arts/music/09cara.html">noted</a> in 2008—the same year 13-year-old Justin Bieber signed with Scooter Braun after uploading a video of himself singing to YouTube. </p>
<p id="xgAvkV">Swift worked in a confessional mode, and part of her widespread appeal was how flung-open her emotions appeared; if you hurt her, she wrote about <em>the ways</em> you hurt her, and then sprinkled her liner notes with hints as if to whisper: <em>Yes, I was referring to you</em>. This intimate approach built a legion of devoted, empathetic fans, but also shoehorned Swift into the limiting role of the easily bruised naif. And despite her excellent reception, she often grabbed headlines for being a whiz kid; her breezy, deft confessional narratives were sometimes categorized as teenybopper alchemy, which was something Swift pushed back on from the beginning. “I didn’t want to just be another girl singer. I wanted there to be something that set me apart,” Swift <a href="https://ew.com/article/2007/07/25/getting-know-taylor-swift/">told</a> <em>Entertainment Weekly </em>in 2007. “And I knew that had to be my writing.”</p>
<aside id="FbiP13"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Kanye vs. Taylor: Who Won at the VMAs? | TIME.com","url":"http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/09/13/kanye-vs-taylor-who-won-at-the-vmas/"}]}'></div></aside><p class="p--has-dropcap" id="YZwboU">And then it happened. At the MTV Video Music Awards in September 2009, Swift won the Best Female Video award for “You Belong With Me,” beating Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” video. As Swift spoke, a Hennessy-soaked Kanye West catapulted himself to the stage and grabbed the microphone from her hand. “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’mma let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time,” West said. “One of the best videos of all time!”</p>
<p id="ebKu71">West was escorted out of the building as Beyoncé grimaced in the crowd and Swift <a href="https://www.marieclaire.com/celebrity/news/a27609/taylor-swift-beyonce-cried-2009-vma/">fled offstage</a> to sob. It was actual chaos in a show meant to simulate shock, a grab-your-fucking-popcorn moment MTV couldn’t have manufactured if it tried. It didn’t matter that Kanye was trying to prove a valid point about race and awards shows—that he had gone about trying to make his point in such an abrasive fashion, and hurt the feelings of a pretty, white teen star who had done nothing wrong overshadowed everything else. Swift was despondent. Kanye’s clearly dashed-off <a href="https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2009/09/kanye-west-apologizes-to-taylor-swift-.html">blog post apology</a> didn’t improve matters. (“I’M SOOOOO SORRY TO TAYLOR SWIFT AND HER FANS AND HER MOM,” it begins, before reaffirming that the Beyoncé video was, indeed, superior.) </p>
<p id="EusZEa">The incident initially provided Swift with a major swell of positive PR. The media took her side; President Obama called West a “jackass” shortly thereafter. “In the arc of her career, it will be seen as, ironically, one of the reasons why she became what she became,” Elaine Lui, the founder of celebrity and pop culture analysis website <a href="https://www.laineygossip.com/"><em>Lainey Gossip</em></a>, told <em>The Ringer</em>. </p>
<p id="ZnIi8B">Even more important than goodwill, the moment moved records, something her camp openly admitted. “The Kanye incident brought attention to Taylor, to an audience that did not really know her or her music,” Borchetta <a href="https://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/10/23/did-the-kanye-west-incident-help-taylor-swifts-career/">told</a> <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> in 2010. “And when they did check it out, they discovered that they really liked it.” Ever canny, Swift released “Innocent” in 2010, an impressively patronizing song about the experience that suggests Kanye is too simple to actually be a bad person, taking full advantage of her positioning as a wronged party. (“Thirty-two and still growin’ up now / Who you are is not what you did.”) She performed it at the next VMAs. During the same show, Kanye performed “Runaway” and had his own moment of redemption, giving a “toast for the assholes” to a rapturous crowd. The intertwined artists had each found a way to turn the incident into music. Swift had officially been introduced to most of America. Her next move was domination. </p>
<aside id="6LbO3b"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Taylor Swift and the Growing of a Superstar: Her Men, Her Moods, Her Music","url":"https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/04/taylor-swift-cover-story"}]}'></div></aside><p class="p--has-dropcap" id="bDMJWm">Swift got a true fairy-tale awards show moment the next year, in 2010, when she became the first solo female country act to win the Grammy for Album of the Year for <em>Fearless</em>. She kept a regimented schedule, releasing an album every two years—<em>Speak Now</em> in 2010, and her fourth album, <em>Red</em>, in 2012. Both debuted at no. 1, solidifying Swift’s position as a music-industry force, gobbling up Grammys and <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/474400/taylor-swifts-red-sells-121-million-biggest-sales-week-for-an-album-since-2002">breaking sales</a> records. A country star who, to that point, had shed every marker of the distinction aside from her sound, she began openly flirting with pop, working with producers like Max Martin and Shellback (“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “22”), and collaborating with Ed Sheeran and Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody.</p>
<p id="kgDTBV">Since her Joe Jonas days, Swift had gravitated toward famous romantic partners, a habit she kept as the years went on, her increasing fame—and the increasing fame of her boyfriends—making her a constant presence in tabloids. Starting with Taylor Lautner in 2009, Swift’s publicly documented relationships over the next few years included John Mayer, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Harry Styles. In addition to keeping her on the front page of supermarket rags, these relationships often resulted in hit singles, like “Dear John” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” reportedly about Mayer and Gyllenhaal respectively. (The Easter eggs she left in her liner notes, like capitalized letters spelling out words or acronyms hinting at who each song was about, played into the curiosity around her delectably passive-aggressive lyricism.) Even people who didn’t listen to her music, then, were made aware of her status as a queen bee in the A-list dating pool. And though present in the tabloids for her romantic life, Swift managed to keep her image squeaky clean; while slightly older peers like Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears were publicly struggling through substance use issues and photographed in embarrassing and dangerous situations, the closest Swift got to a scandal was dating an 18-year-old Kennedy scion and making her neighbors angry for … <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/12/taylor-swift-s-neighbors-are-mad-at-her">digging up rocks</a>. In 2012, Michelle Obama presented her Nickelodeon’s Big Help Award. “This is amazing!” Swift <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2012/04/michelle-obama-honors-taylor-swift.html">gushed</a>, shaking the first lady’s hand. </p>
<p id="Lm0v9J">Swift’s appearances in the public eye continued to frequently involve a moment when she looked awestruck, surprised, and generally in need of a hug. She was “<a href="http://www.mtv.com/news/1682780/taylor-swift-justin-bieber-punkd/">absolutely traumatized</a>” by Justin Bieber’s <em>Punk’d</em> punk. Her awards-show face <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/aj8/44-photos-of-taylor-swifts-surprised-face-cfe3">became</a> a meme. She fell so easily into her groove as America’s flabbergasted sweetheart that it started to irritate people, but the music was good enough and the public goodwill strong enough that nobody cared that much. Or, <em>almost</em> nobody. <em>Deadspin</em> published something literally called “<a href="https://deadspin.com/the-hater-s-guide-to-taylor-swift-5701312">The Hater’s Guide to Taylor Swift</a>” in 2010, with the words “This Woman Must Be STOPPED” superimposed over photos of Swift as accompanying art. And in 2012, <em>Salon</em>, in perhaps its most <em>Salon</em> moment to date,<em> </em><a href="https://www.salon.com/2012/11/11/is_taylor_swift_being_taken_too_seriously/">argued</a> that Swift was overrated because people had lowered their expectations for life after the recession. But these were contrarian provocations, and in general, Swift had reached an ascendant point in her career and public image. </p>
<aside id="tsTN5L"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Taylor Swift and Big Machine Are the Music Industry","url":"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-12/taylor-swift-and-big-machine-are-the-music-industry"}]}'></div></aside><p class="p--has-dropcap" id="M6NlQc">By 2014, Swift was the most popular country-music act in the world, but not yet the most popular music act in the world. And so she released <em>1989</em>, her first true front-to-back pop album, with synthesizers and programmed percussion supplanting her acoustic guitar, largely produced by Max Martin as well as Lena Dunham’s ex-boyfriend Jack Antonoff. It was a pop blockbuster, with songs so polished and precision-engineered for Top 40 it seemed like Swift had consulted some demonic algorithm developed to lodge a song in the brain forever, to get it played at football games, bat mitzvahs, and weddings as well as rodeos. “A lot of people who couldn’t get over the country part of her were finally listening to her,” <em>Rolling Stone </em>critic Brittany Spanos said. While the country music market still had a robust album-buying culture and had its own touring circuits and Nashville darlings, working within a genre pigeonholed Swift, even if she was clearly producing music that felt as much pop as country on <em>Red</em>. Although some country fans felt betrayed, the positioning of<em> 1989</em> as Swift’s big transition allowed her access to a new market and announced that she <em>wanted </em>the whole market. Despite a sharp industrywide decrease in record sales, <em>1989 </em>was a massive success, exceeding commercial expectations by hitting 5 million U.S. sales in its 36th week of release, making it the <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/6620398/taylor-swifts-1989-5-million-fastest-selling-album-decade">fastest-selling album in a decade</a> and ginning up the <a href="https://music.avclub.com/with-1989-taylor-swift-finally-grows-up-1798181732">best </a><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/oct/24/taylor-swift-1989-review">reviews</a> of Swift’s life. “It remains her masterpiece, her strongest piece of work,” Lui said. “It was a firm demarcation between Taylor the country music star and Taylor the global pop star and cultural phenomenon.”</p>
<p id="B6xRF0">“Welcome to New York,” the album’s first song, signaled a shift in Swift’s personal life, as she had left Nashville and moved into a <a href="https://streeteasy.com/blog/taylor-swift-tribeca-apartment/">vast penthouse</a> in Tribeca. She began gathering famous female pals with gusto, embarking on high-profile friendships with Lena Dunham, Lorde, and a wide range of narrow models, most notably Karlie Kloss. (Swift’s devotion to Kloss inspired <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/11/9/16625462/taylor-swift-karlie-kloss-kaylor-tumblr-shipping">a very robust online community</a> of “Kaylor” fans to theorize and fantasize about the possibility of a romantic relationship between the two.) While her romantic life had served as Swift’s path into the tabloids, now her roster of preposterously hot friends, known as her “squad,” <a href="https://www.teenvogue.com/gallery/taylor-swift-best-friends-guide">served</a> <a href="https://www.self.com/story/taylor-swift-squad">that </a><a href="https://nypost.com/2015/09/01/taylor-swifts-squad-has-become-a-cult/">function</a>. “I think that I just decided if [the media] was going to say that about me, that I was boy-crazy and so dependent on men and all that, I wasn’t going to give them a reason to say that anymore, and I wasn’t going to be seen around any men for years—so that’s what I did,” Swift <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2015/08/taylor-swift-cover-mario-testino-apple-music">told </a><em>Vanity Fair</em>, in an interview where she raved about texting her “20-25” closest friends every day. </p>
<p id="XwoeEs">Also in 2014, Swift <a href="https://nypost.com/2014/04/20/taylor-swift-hires-new-publicist-amid-fresh-start/">severed ties</a> with her longtime PR team and hired a publicist named Tree Paine, a former Warner Music Nashville PR executive who started her own firm when she signed Swift. Paine’s entrance into Swift’s life marked a turning point in her availability to the press. After Paine’s hiring, Swift’s tendency to gab about her personal life with reporters petered out. (Paine did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="MtyAUE"><q> “Her core fan base is still huge. But she doesn’t seem just fine with having a core fan base. She might just want too much out of what is a very fleeting and hard-to-maintain existence.” —David Turner</q></aside></div>
<p id="P9fSig">Instead, as her star power continued to grow, Swift occasionally used both the media and social media to advocate for the payment of artists. In 2014, she <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/for-taylor-swift-the-future-of-music-is-a-love-story-1404763219">explained</a> her decision to pull her music from Spotify in a <em>Wall Street Journal </em>op-ed, saying she did not believe the platform fairly compensated artists. In the summer of 2015, she used Tumblr to lambast Apple for not paying artists for the streams of their work that customers played during their free trials, which then caused Apple to <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6605568/apple-changes-course-after-taylor-swift-open-letter-will-pay-labels-during">nearly immediately capitulate</a>. (So immediately, in fact, that it stirred up <a href="https://gizmodo.com/meet-the-truthers-who-think-taylor-swift-plotted-with-a-1713491244">theories</a> of a secret arrangement between Swift and Apple.) While she remained <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/11/8/16621926/hearing-both-sides-of-taylor-swift">conspicuously unwilling</a> to discuss politics, her eagerness to shape the conversation about artists’ rights underlined that when she wanted to, Swift had enough star wattage to alter the contours of the entire industry. </p>
<p id="riBR8A">Swift had always enjoyed largely critical reception as well as commercial success—<em>The New York Times</em>, for instance, had <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/11/arts/taylor-swifts-first-mention-in-the-times-humbly-hinted-at-what-was-to-come.html">always</a> been in her corner—but during the<em> 1989</em> album she created her first major controversy with the “Shake It Off” video, which features a number of different dance styles, including black dancers twerking. Although white dancers were also twerking, the close-up shots of black bodies coupled with the fact that all of the ballerinas dancing were white led to headlines like “<a href="https://consequenceofsound.net/2014/08/is-taylor-swifts-shake-it-off-video-racist/">Is Taylor Swift’s <em>Shake It Off </em>Video Racist</a>?” and a Twitter <a href="https://pitchfork.com/news/56374-earl-sweatshirt-taylor-swift-is-perpetuating-black-stereotypes-with-her-new-video/">dress-down</a> from rapper Earl Sweatshirt. </p>
<p id="SI0qyI">During the same album cycle, Swift pointedly highlighted herself as someone who had been on the receiving end of gendered criticism. “For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend … that’s turning it into something that is, frankly, a little sexist,” she <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/04/taylor-swift-cover-story">told</a> <em>Vanity Fair</em>. She shared a quote from Madeleine Albright—“there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women”—to comment on a quip Tina Fey and Amy Poehler had made about her dating life at the 2013 Golden Globes. Invoking feminism was, like most Swift moves, a prudent shield. However, more cracks in Swift’s meticulously constructed persona were about to appear. </p>
<aside id="VZkg8E"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Is Taylor Swift a snake? | The Tylt","url":"https://thetylt.com/entertainment/is-taylor-swift-a-snake"}]}'></div></aside><p class="p--has-dropcap" id="ulF7K1">2016 was a bad year for America, and a notably not-so-good year for Swift; declaring oneself a feminist was no longer a bold action for a pop star. She was between albums, yet her purposefully high-profile life kept her in the public eye. She had received a constant stream of attention for the A-list guest stars she brought out during her 1989 tour, like Ellen DeGeneres, Lorde, and Mick Jagger, and coupled with the heavy media coverage of her famous friendships, Swift’s inescapable daily presence in the news cycle began to grate. “The squad stuff had taken over. Everything she did was a story,” Spanos said. “Which also leads to overexposure.” This was something Swift, ever self-aware, was proactively trying to prevent. “I think people might need a break from me,” she <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop-shop/6722682/taylor-swift-time-off-1989-tour-people-need-break">told</a> <em>NME</em> the previous year. Perhaps she could sense what was coming. </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ej6sTU1CdGQFn7Ow1vMS7GnuryI=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19084005/GettyImages_480320412.jpg">
<figcaption>Swift with Hailee Steinfeld, Lily Aldridge, Gigi Hadid, and Lena Dunham during the 1989 Tour in 2015</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="GBJdPc">Swift hadn’t previously been immune to criticism, exactly—in addition to the critiques of her “Shake It Off” video imagery, her video for “Wildest Dreams,” set in colonized Africa, had received blowback for its creepy daydream of colonialism. In 2015, writer Dayna Evans <a href="https://gawker.com/taylor-swift-is-not-your-friend-1717745581">argued</a> that Swift’s brand of feminism was performative and ultimately hollow. “Swift has to be the person with the prettiest friends, the biggest records, the most popular and successful and groanworthily obvious boyfriend,” Evans wrote in a piece titled “Taylor Swift Is Not Your Friend.” “The underdog narrative that the Swift machine has built is one of forced falsehoods; Swift is not coming from behind. She’s been ahead since she started.” And when Swift <a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/7/21/9012179/taylor-swift-nicki-minaj-twitter">inserted herself</a> into a conversation Nicki Minaj was having on Twitter about racism at awards shows, she appeared both self-centered and blithely unaware of the larger issue of racism in the industry at play. (The two stars quickly made up.) </p>
<p id="yO5Ylt">That was all a prelude to the real backlash, which began when Kanye West reentered the picture. The two had publicly made nice the previous year at the Grammys as well as the VMAs, when Swift presented West an award, and West told Ryan Seacrest that they had even considered collaboration. West also sent Swift a <a href="https://www.eonline.com/fr/news/693218/kanye-west-sends-new-bff-taylor-swift-the-coolest-flowers-but-were-they-taken-from-kim-s-rose-wall">square made of flowers</a>, which she Instagrammed. But the détente fell apart in 2016. That February, West released the song “Famous,” which includes the following lyrics: “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous.” Swift was, famously, not happy. </p>
<p id="fLVt4r">“Taylor was never made aware of the actual lyric, ‘I made that bitch famous,’” her representation <a href="https://ew.com/article/2016/02/12/taylor-swift-kanye-west-famous/">told</a> <em>Entertainment Weekly</em>. And when Swift won Album of the Year in 2016 later that month, she appeared to upbraid West during her speech. “There are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame,” she said. Kanye insisted that she had approved the lyrics. “She had two seconds to be cool and she fucked up,” West <a href="https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a37995/taylor-swift-anti-squad-members/">said</a> during a club appearance. That June, Kim Kardashian West <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/kim-kardashian-west-gq-cover-story">insisted</a> to <em>GQ</em> that Kanye had received permission—and subsequently <a href="https://www.thefader.com/2016/07/17/kim-kardashian-famous-kanye-taylor-swift-footage">released</a> on Snapchat a recording of Swift verbally approving the song and thanking West for calling her. “Relationships are more important than punch lines,” West said on the call, emphasizing that he wanted to make sure Swift felt comfortable with being name-dropped. “Right after the song comes out I’m gonna be on a Grammy red carpet and they’re gonna ask me about it and I’m gonna be like, he called me,” Swift assured him.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="9J8jRN"><q>“<em>1989</em> was a firm demarcation between Taylor the country music star and Taylor the global pop star and cultural phenomenon.” —Elaine Lui</q></aside></div>
<p id="sZthly">Reputational hell broke loose for Swift; #KimExposedTaylorSwift rapidly began trending on social media; a proliferation of the snake emoji, meant to symbolize Swift’s untrustworthy and low nature, checked the comments of her Instagram page and the mentions of her Twitter. “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative,” Swift <a href="https://www.thefader.com/2016/07/18/taylor-swift-responds-kim-kardashian-kanye-video">wrote</a> in a now-deleted Instagram post. </p>
<p id="DWGqmt">Victimhood at the hands of West was a narrative Swift had often stoked and benefited from. Now, though, she was in too deep—her alleged machinations had been exposed. “The Kimye thing was probably the most general public disdain for her,” Spanos said. “She wanted to play the victim,” Kim said during the episode of <em>Keeping Up With the Kardashians </em>that preceded the leak of the recording on Snapchat. “It worked so well for her first time.”</p>
<p id="F1Z00n">It was Swift’s worst PR moment, undermining the persona Swift used to connect with fans, a persona founded on a sense of struggle against bullies. “This really subverted that narrative and showed that she was just as calculating as some of these people that she had been accusing of being calculating and manipulative,” writer Allie Jones, who covers <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/topic/rag-time">celebrity culture</a>, told <em>The Ringer</em>. Jones noted that Swift’s impulse to amp up her public displays of affection with then-boyfriend Tom Hiddleston didn’t help the situation. “People pretty quickly figured out that that was also calculated because paparazzi don’t just hang out near her private home in Rhode Island, hoping to catch her with a random British actor.”</p>
<p id="Y7IECq">In addition to her renewed feud with Kanye and much-paparazzi’d relationship making her appear manipulative, Swift also faced blowback for her silence on the presidential election. Katy Perry—another supposed bully Swift rallied against in the 2014 song “Bad Blood”—was touring the country as part of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and nearly every other major pop star had explicitly come out in support of Clinton, from Beyoncé to Demi Lovato. Swift, however, <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/11/8/16621926/hearing-both-sides-of-taylor-swift">did not</a>. Her silence was taken as a political statement, and some fans horrified by the candidacy and election of Donald Trump fumed about Swift’s silence. “Taylor Swift, much like Chance the Rapper and Katy Perry and a number of other artists of that era, existed in a wave of post-Bush, Obama-era positivity,” Turner said. “I don’t know how you make that pivot.” </p>
<p id="43fQDp">Swift had always, of course, been a rich white girl “from Nashville,” but she’d mostly been able to position herself as a politically neutral figure during the Obama era. But in an election as contentious as 2016, silence was its own statement, an announcement of privilege too loud to ignore. “She is maybe our whitest pop star,” Spanos said. “She’s kind of existed in her own bubble.” Swift had been able to use this whiteness to her advantage on many occasions; most notably, the optics of the angry black man attacking the shaken blond girl had played in her favor during the 2009 VMAs incident. And although Swift would eventually come out in support of Democrats, her often-noted silence during the 2016 presidential campaign made her into an unwilling symbol of complacency and right-wing sympathy. White supremacists <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ae5x8a/cant-shake-it-off-how-taylor-swift-became-a-nazi-idol">praised</a> her online as an “Aryan goddess.” Her studiously anodyne persona had been turned on its head. </p>
<aside id="saGBzr"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data="{"stories":[{"title":"Taylor Swift Can't Be The Victim And The Villain","url":"https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2017/08/25/546035401/taylor-swift-can-t-be-the-victim-and-the-villain"}]}"></div></aside><p class="p--has-dropcap" id="w12hL0">In the fall of 2017, Swift teased the release of <em>Reputation </em>with images of snakes, signaling that she intended to address the Kimye debacle and her tarnished image. Swift had mined hits from her intrapersonal conflicts in the past, so continuing the tradition made sense. However, the album’s lead single, the surly electro-pop kiss-off “Look What You Made Me Do,” fell flat with some critics. <em>Vulture </em><a href="https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/review-taylor-swifts-new-song-look-what-you-made-me-do.html">called</a> it “the worst music of her career.” <em>The Ringer</em>’s Lindsey Zoladz referred to it as “<a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/8/25/16202748/taylor-swift-look-what-you-made-me-do-single-review">boring, unrelatable, and insular</a>,” and our own Justin Charity called it “<a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/11/9/16625006/taylor-swift-reputation-chart-singles">a failure</a>.” (Personally, I think it’s a great workout track for daydreaming about emotionally destroying your enemies by obtaining glorious abs.)</p>
<p id="svKbZc">Media ill will remained so pitched that Swift’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/6/16742166/taylor-swift-time-magazine-person-year-2017-silence-breaker-me-too">inclusion</a> in a <em>Time </em>magazine feature on women in the #MeToo movement prompted a debate over her worthiness, even though she had filed and won a lawsuit against a DJ who had groped her as a young woman, speaking out in unflinching terms about the issue. The cold feelings went both ways; instead of sitting for traditional interviews, Swift published <a href="https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/taylor-swift-poem-vogue">a poem</a> in <em>UK Vogue</em> and a list of things she “<a href="https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a26628467/taylor-swift-30th-birthday-lessons/">learned before turning 30</a>” for <em>Elle</em>. </p>
<p id="vRkHKZ">However, the lackluster critical response to<em> </em>“Look What You Made Me Do” didn’t lead to a drubbing when the album came out; as an album, <em>Reputation</em> still received largely positive reviews praising many of its other songs. “End Game,” a collaboration with Ed Sheeran and Future, sounded like an impressively bad idea in theory but turned out surprisingly fun, and the sixth single, “Delicate,” is one of Swift’s finest songs. While the lead singles spent less time on the charts than her one-two <em>1989</em> punch of “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space,” “Delicate” ended up as a sleeper hit. It is actually <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/8464159/taylor-swift-delicate-reputation-biggest-radio-hit">the longest-charting song</a> Swift has ever had, courtesy of the adult contemporary chart.</p>
<p id="XQR9f2">After all that, the waves of backlash Swift had received in 2016 and 2017 didn’t actually translate to career disarray. Instead, Swift doubled down on maximum commercialization; she partnered with ESPN to <a href="https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2017/09/170717/taylor-swift-ready-for-it">preview a single</a> during a college football game, and partnered with UPS to <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-are-ups-trucks-so-fervently-promoting-taylor-swift-2017-11-09">plaster promotional posters</a> on its brown trucks. If she was going to be a snake, she was going to be an ultracapitalist snake. Though her period of media silence took her out of the spotlight, <em>Reputation</em> sold over a million copies in its first week. And while the <em>New York Post </em>had initially <a href="https://nypost.com/2018/01/01/taylor-swifts-reputation-tour-shaping-up-to-be-a-disaster/">reported</a> that the Reputation tour was “shaping up to be a disaster” in 2018, it ended up as the <a href="https://www.radio.com/blogs/tiana-timmerberg/taylor-swift-s-reputation-tour-crushes-record-highest-grossing-us-tour">highest-grossing U.S. tour ever</a>, beating the Rolling Stones’ 70-date tour from 2005 to 2007 with only 38 dates. </p>
<p id="BsIByh">Although<em> Reputation</em> was all about spurning haters, Swift did appear to take some of the criticism she received in 2016 to heart. During the 2018 midterm elections, she explicitly endorsed two Democratic candidates in Tennessee. “In the past I’ve been reluctant to publicly voice my political opinions, but due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now,” she wrote in an Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BopoXpYnCes/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link">post</a>. “I always have and always will cast my vote based on which candidate will protect and fight for the human rights I believe we all deserve in this country.” She asked fans to vote; voter registration <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/12/taylor-swift-democrats-midterm-election-celebrity-political-endorsements">spiked</a>. (The Republican incumbent senator who Swift spoke out against, Marsha Blackburn, won anyway.) After all the tumult, Swift’s belated decision to get political showed that she was ready to change up certain aspects of her celebrity when necessary—but her next era was, in many ways, a reaffirmation of who she already was: an industrialist steamroller. </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="eRMUuV">In April 2019,<strong> </strong>the same week a mural of multicolored butterfly wings popped up in the Gulch, a trendy neighborhood in Nashville, Swift released a new single, the first track off her seventh studio album, <em>Lover</em>.<em> </em>“Me!” featuring Brendon Urie of Panic! at the Disco,<em> </em>served as a statement on many things: her steadfast devotion to bubblegum pop, her spelling skills, her approach to brand tie-ins, and even, perhaps, her slightly fading power as a pop star. The media blitz for the song was a slick big-business spectacle; Swift announced it during an appearance at the 2019 NFL draft, then performed it at the Billboard Music Awards. But the song hit no. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100—an accomplishment for most artists, but an outright flop for Swift. “Me!” was her first lead single to fail to hit no. 1 in nearly a decade, since 2010’s “Mine.” Ironically, the song Swift couldn’t dislodge from the top spot was a country tune: “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X. </p>
<p id="ud160J">Her next crack at a top track came this summer, when she released the candyland-colored video for “You Need to Calm Down” in June, which is also Pride month. It features a parade of LGBTQ stars sipping tea and frolicking, including RuPaul, Ellen DeGeneres, and the lyric “shade never made anyone less gay.” “The lyrics seemed to be comparing homophobia to people being mean online,” Jones said. </p>
<p id="kYiet8">“Its a breathtaking argument: that famous people are persecuted in a way meaningfully comparable to queer people,” Spencer Kornhaber wrote at <em>The Atlantic</em>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/06/taylor-swift-you-need-calm-down-hijacks-queerness/591829/">noting</a> that the denoument of the song’s music video, in which Swift and Katy Perry appear to make amends, further confuses the message. “Thought this video was about gay rights? Nope, it’s primarily narrative management for superstars.” Then again, plenty of young gay fans adored the video, and it angered right-wing commentators—the clumsiness of her messaging aside, at least it was a choice to voice her beliefs. “Taylor, in this case, is in a position of <em>she’s fucked if she does and she’s fucked if she doesn’t</em>,” Elaine Lui said. “She is making a political statement. I believe it comes from a place of good. Was it executed perfectly? Probably not. However, the intention is there, and hopefully the execution can get better.” </p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Q1TwhDx6Ye-zULuMH51gtzwnORM=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19084006/GettyImages_1153173078.jpg">
<cite>FilmMagic for iHeartMedia</cite>
<figcaption>Taylor Swift performs at this year’s iHeartRadio Wango Tango</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="3gFujg">Pop predecessors like Madonna and contemporaries like Lady Gaga had explicitly aligned themselves with the gay community decades and years ahead of Swift, and had paid special attention to their LGBTQ audiences in a way that made their allyship seem more than just performative. Releasing “You Need to Calm Down” in 2019 marks Swift as behind. “It’s kind of something she should have done in 2014 or 2015,” Turner said. While Swift has identified her friendship with singer and dancer Todrick Hall as the impetus for this more overt move toward allyship, her tardiness makes it harder to enjoy the rainbow confection without parsing exactly how manufactured it was.</p>
<p id="Xtkgd0">“I don’t think she fully grasped what people wanted from her,” Spanos said. “It’s not exactly what everyone was begging for.”</p>
<aside id="b5jpk7"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data="{"stories":[{"title":"Taylor Swift Gets Real About Katy Perry, Kimye and More in 'Vogue'","url":"https://www.etonline.com/taylor-swift-says-its-a-great-thing-that-shes-no-longer-considered-americas-sweetheart-in-vogue"}]}"></div></aside><p class="p--has-dropcap" id="Qoqn3W">“A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” Swift <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/taylor-swift-cover-september-2019?verso=true">told</a><em> Vogue </em>this summer, referring to her feud with the Kardashian-Wests and the public fallout from it. In the interview, Swift frames <em>Lover</em> as a return to positivity, a “love letter to love.” In the “Me!” video, a snake turns into butterflies; Swift is signaling a return to happiness, a move away from her spiky side. For all the hand-wringing, it’s not clear when, exactly, Swift was ever really canceled; she’s everywhere in the run-up to her album release, even on <em>Pitchfork</em>, which reviewed five of the singer’s previous albums in anticipation of <em>Lover</em>. (<em>Red</em> <a href="https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-swift-red/">has</a> a 9.0!)</p>
<p id="MzqFow">While<em> Lover </em>is a step back into the sunshine after Swift’s shift into more confrontational music, she is still willing to publicly slug it out. This summer, Swift wrote an impassioned Tumblr <a href="https://taylorswift.tumblr.com/post/185958366550/for-years-i-asked-pleaded-for-a-chance-to-own-my">post</a> about facing her “worst-case scenario” after celebrity manager Scooter Braun bought the Big Machine Label Group, which controls her back catalog masters. She brought up her conflict with Kim and Kanye and accused Braun of being a bully, and Big Machine’s Scott Borchetta of betrayal. Things escalated from there: Bieber <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BzWYdS9Hj5R/">jumped</a> on Instagram to defend Braun, other celebrities took sides, and Borchetta insisted Swift was lying—that she had not been blindsided by the sale, and had been given an opportunity to purchase her catalog. Although Swift’s narrative of the artist vs. the industry was a sympathetic one, the skeptical coverage of the brouhaha underlined how Swift’s swings at bigwigs don’t necessarily pack the same punch. In past years, people may have been more willing to see her as an unaware, innocent victim; in 2019, everyone is too familiar with the playbook. Instead, some of Swift’s best organic publicity this album cycle stemmed from Kid Rock aggro-tweeting about how she had succumbed to Hollywood liberalism, accidentally proving that her late-blooming political stance would help keep her in the news, after all. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="q8H3wL"><q> “Taylor, in this case, is in a position of <em>she’s fucked if she does and she’s fucked if she doesn’t</em>.” —Elaine Lui</q></aside></div>
<p id="SL49B4">Swift has come far from her Nashville roots by many metrics, but her fidelity to the concept of the traditional album rollout is putting her at odds with the newer generation of artists. Ariana Grande, for example, rejoiced when she abandoned the standard pop timeline and released <em>Thank U, Next </em>shortly after <em>Sweetener</em> just because she felt like it. Other rising stars, like Lil Nas X, never had access to this machinery; instead, he <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tech/2019/6/27/18760004/tiktok-old-town-road-memes-music-industry">harnessed TikTok </a>and meme culture to make “Old Town Road” <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/4/8/18299972/old-town-road-lil-nas-x-billy-ray-cyrus-remix-number-one-charts-country-rap">this year’s summer anthem</a>, and history’s longest-lasting no. 1 hit. Hip-hop is ascendant, Max Martin–era big industry pop is on a sharp decline, and adhering to a corporate machinery that appears increasingly unnecessary may hinder Swift in time. “Pop as a genre just doesn’t exist in the same way it did 10 years ago,” said critic David Turner. “The kids love Billie Eilish. I don’t really know what Taylor Swift does in a world where kids love Billie Eilish.” </p>
<p id="QIk2at">“Taylor is also far too young to go the Pink or Kelly Clarkson route and age gracefully into brassy empowerment anthems that all sound like pleasant <em>Ellen</em> episodes unto themselves,” my coworker Rob Harvilla <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/6/4/18651415/katy-perry-taylor-swift-miley-cyrus-pop-new-music-billboard-charts">wrote</a> earlier this summer, musing over how she could retain her former relevance. Taking the mom pop route—a perfectly fulfilling and well-compensated path, it must be said!—would be a premature change of course for Swift at this point, but it’s not a bad worst-case scenario. (And taking a role in the upcoming and spectacularly weird <em>Cats</em> movie, as Swift did, could be a good jump start down that road.) A better course change might be one that brings her full circle. “She could always just go back to country, and her career would be set,” Turner said. </p>
<p id="5HXK92">One thing Taylor Swift does in a world where kids love Billie Eilish is that she <a href="https://uproxx.com/pop/taylor-swift-lover-amazon-boxes/">partners</a> with business behemoth Amazon to shellac<em> Lover</em> images on the company’s packages. Eilish might have the cool factor, but Swift is fiendishly corporate. One of her shrewdest strategies for juicing album sales figures is to “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/billboard-charts-bundles.html">bundle</a>,” which means offering the album as part of a deal selling merchandise like T-shirts and hoodies to fans. This isn’t a Swift-specific tactic; rapper Travis Scott recently used bundling and paired his concert tickets with his album in order to climb the charts. But it is yet another example of how much strategy goes into maintaining this level of success. </p>
<p id="TY6tYf">“I think that Taylor Swift is pretty indestructible,” Lui said. She’s right: Even if <em>Lover</em> underperforms, Swift is so ensconced in the industry that it’d take far more than one whiff to bring her down. “It’s her, Drake, and Beyoncé,” Spanos said. “If they released an album that critics totally hated it would not change anything for them.”</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="FOItTE">Swift is a long way from the up-and-coming country colt most famous for looking aghast at an awards show; she has built herself into an institution, which is why so many of her biggest stumbles have come when she has presented herself as the little guy in conflicts—the top dog can’t be the underdog, too. Taylor Swift may never eclipse the critical and commercial success of <em>1989</em>, any future attempts to take political stands may be as ego-tripping as “You Need to Calm Down,” and I somehow doubt we’ve heard the last of her and Kanye’s feud, but if the past 10 years have taught us anything, it’s that her foibles don’t detract from her persona as much as they <em>enhance</em> its fascination. (Also, the single “Lover” is a return to form.) When the seams show as Swift tries to control the narrative, it is a reminder that her story and celebrity are now too large for any one person, no matter how shrewd, to steer. She’s not America’s sweetheart, but Swift has achieved an American Dream—she’s too big to fail. </p>
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https://www.theringer.com/music/2019/8/21/20826837/ten-years-of-taylor-swiftKate Knibbs