Paste Magazine drags The Tortured Poets Department to the pits HELP

[Princess Aurora 31,749]

Here are some highlights:

Sylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this! When Taylor Swift took the Grammy’s stage last month to claim her award for Best Pop Vocal Album for Midnights, she saw that spotlight as an opportunity to announce her 11th studio album: The Tortured Poets Department. The follow-up cut to audience members—Swift’s music industry peers, mind you—told us all that we would ever need to know, and the collective disinterest across the crowd echoed through our TVs. Folks from all walks of life took to social media to express a multitude of reactions. Swifties clamored to their beloved monarch’s forthcoming era, while others lambasted the terminally cringe title and artwork and ridiculed Swift for making a night recognizing musical achievements across an entire industry about herself—knowing perfectly well that it would send her fanbase into a surge that would, no doubt, overpower the excitement around the ceremony itself. Quite a few people questioned whether or not that moment suggested that a critical—definitely not commercial—tide would turn against the world’s most-famous pop star. And, perhaps it has—but, to most, it will look like nothing more than a single ripple in Swift’s ocean of successes. 

 

“I took the miracle move-on drug, the effects were temporary,” Swift muses, and it sounds like satire. This is your songwriter of the century? Open the schools.

Aside from the Puth nod, which I can only discern as a joke, I think Antonoff should stick to guitar-playing. Get that man away from a keyboard, I’m begging you.

and rows of variant LP copies will haunt the record aisles of Target stores just as long as Midnights has—if not longer. 

This album and its hackneyed grasps at relevance exist as “Did I just hear that?” personified, but in the most derogatory sense of the notion.

But, you cannot write about someone being a “tattooed golden retriever” and get away with it and still retain your title as the best songwriter of your generation. You just cannot.

The billionaire is having an identity crisis, but there are no social media apps for her to buy up. So she sings like Lana Del Rey and writes meta-self-referential songs about looking like Stevie Nicks.

she, too, can’t outrun the damning fate of being plum out of ideas by hopping in her jet and skirting off to God knows where. See you at the Grammys.

"Now that Swift is in her 30s, it sounds like she is infantilizing her own audience more than ever before—that singing to them at a level that could force them to reckon with something more akin with adulthood would be some kind of kink in the coil or her consumeristic threshold, that writing lyrics that sound like they were penned by a 30-year-old would, somehow, deter the interests of the billions of people who adore her."

[Princess Aurora 31,749]

I think they went a bit too harsh   . The album is cute though 

[harry 3,415]

Why is so much this review about Taylor Swift the celebrity and not TTPD the album? 

[Princess Aurora 31,749]

38 minutes ago, harry said:

Why is so much this review about Taylor Swift the celebrity and not TTPD the album? 

I have no idea. I heard the reviewers are mad at Taylor since her fans threatened them back when they reviewed Midnights  

[SeekingThrill 10,040]

Thank God, someone pointed it out.  

[Chris 59,253]

ngl they made several points. i went to target yesterday with the goal of getting the standard Manuscript edition (i didn't cos i needed my oatmilk and didnt have enough for both) and there was an entire shelf of 1989 TV still  

[i wish you were gay 4,726]

It is a mediocre album, like all her albums. So it makes sense.