Her music is like fingernails across a chalkboard to me, but she seems like a decent person and I think it's great that girls have some like that to look up to.
Taylor Swift - Tortured Poets Department
- Thread starter ISUCyclones2015
- Start date
Listening to a Swiftie album and tortured do go together.
Make music that I’d actually listen to?
Four old men and one old woman (old being my age or older) all complained to me she’s after Kelce for his money.
The last two, I just said Google is your friend. People just can’t grasp the concept of rich successful women, including at least one woman.
That's really hilarious....like she's probably exponentially wealthier
There is no requirement to listen except as issued by family members. No one in my family is a fan.
Based on your post, I sampled a little of The Melvins album ... promising, but heavy for early-afternoon listening (plus, I was at work
). I will return to it.Quick search reveals it's the band's 27th studio album. Wow!
Also, this intersects loosely with:
Nostalgia for the 90's and 00's
It's offseason, it's Friday, we need another hot topic. What are you most nostalgic for from the 90's and 00's? I was born in '82 so those were my formative years. I remember wearing Adidas track/windbreaker jackets and pants nearly every day in middle school. At least I think that's what...
cyclonefanatic.com
She has some absolute bangers, not going to lie, but I’m pretty sure she could release an album where all she does is burp the alphabet over and over, and a bunch of 20-something year old girls who call themselves “plant moms” would cry over it and say how perfect it is.
Imo (from the overall bery little rhat I've listened) she has some pretty good stuff in a catchy bubble gum type but at times also has surprisingly in depth lyrics.
I've watched a few live performances though on YT and found her pretty boring whether paired back or full blown big stage stuff.
My wife listens to country, since TS left, wife doesn’t listen to her. Which is great in my book.
I even have an 18 YO daughter and I can imagine how 2 TS songs go off the top of my head, and those are Shake it Off and that terrible song with the chorus says “…You’re being too loud.”
I’m sure I’ve heard dozens more but can’t think of them. When I hear clips on these news reports on the new album it seems fine, but I just have no interest.
My daughter is into Tyler Childers, Jason Isbel, Zach Bryan and Mt Joy. I think she knows and doesn’t mind T Swift but it’s not her thing.
And my wife thinks T Swift songs mostly just sound the same and is more into the new folk sort of music.
Middle-aged men shocked that music of young(ish) woman detailing her perspective on relationships and life doesn't resonate with them. More at 10!
Well there was clue this would happen.....
www.newsweek.com
Song lyrics are now more repetitive and simple, study confirms
Since 1980, the lyrics in songs in English have become less complex and more angry, researchers have concluded.
www.newsweek.com
People throw rocks at things that shine
I consider myself a (male) Swifty. I'm increasingly slouching into middle age (37 later this year).
I'm in it less for her music than her personality, though. She seems like a genuinely nice, good, and generous person, which is hard to be with her level of fame and wealth. In terms of having a celebrity role model that girls and young women can look up to, I don't know if you can do better than Taylor Swift.
Her cats are adorable, too. Definitely in it for the world's most famous cat lady.
Her music is... okay. High floor, low ceiling. It's product, not art. A lot of the problems with Taylor Swift's music are just problems with modern pop music in general. She has an ear for pop catchiness. The production and backing musicians are always top notch. She works with some of the most talented songwriters in the music business (usually men, but increasingly women like Phoebe Bridgers and Florence Welch).
Taylor doesn't seem to have an ego about her that her music is anything more than "good" if meaningful for her fans. She certainly honors what comes before her. She reveres Stevie Nicks, for instance.
The complaints her songs/albums all sound the same has some merit, though. Something like 95% of her songs use the same two chord sequences (like most pop songs nowadays). She works with a very limited harmonic palette and doesn't play in very many keys. Her production is slick and professional but ultimately embody whatever is the "standard" for pop songs at the time. Nearly all of her songs are structured in standard verse/chorus/verse/chorus format with the occasional bridge thrown in there. She isn't in a band with multiple lead singers and her songs don't really have much for instrumental features, and thus they end up sounding repetitive.
Switching vocalists between songs and dropping in a guitar solo one song and a Hammond organ solo the next one helps break things up and keep it fresh. She doesn't have that advantage.
She also deals with a relatively limited scope of topics in her lyrics. They're almost all boy/girl love songs of some nature: either love going well ("London Boy") or going terrible (most of her songs really). I can see why that resonates with a large audience of young women cursed with the terrible fate of trying to date and form meaningful relationships with knucklehead boys/immature men in their teens and 20s.
It just gets old after a while when that is all you do. She's 34. She's ~20 years into her recording career and has released 11 studio albums. I give her a lot of credit for Folklore and Evermore where she tried to mix in more metaphor and storytelling in her lyrics, but most of that catalog is just her talking as herself in simple terms about what she feels about her latest relationship... for almost two decades now.
I'm not asking her to be like one of the weirder songwriters of yore (e.g., Bowie, Björk, Zappa, or to put together some weird prog song with yodeling in its hook, etc.). Just get a little weird for us.
But all this is okay. I'll still listen to her when I want to bop along.
I can't read 10 paragraphs about Taylor Swift, and I like Taylor Swift.
