Within the days after the April 19 liberate of The Tortured Poets Department, the latest album from Taylor Swift, I found a presentation explaining the artist’s relationship with 1975 frontman Matty Healy. It’s miles over a hundred pages prolonged, and it’s no longer the valid presentation, video, or article of its kind. Fans are clamoring for some clarification as to what’s going down in TTPD, an album that is extra abrasive to Swift’s fanbase than one thing else she’s ever launched. For quite a bit of it’s a confusing, off-hanging abilities, one which requires a deep dive to know. Delight in Dark Souls, it’s about the lore.
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For longtime fans of Swift, that can also no longer sound love one thing else recent. She’s prolonged had a aptitude for the dramatic. Since 2008’s Fearless, Swift has pulled methods love hiding messages in her CD lyric books. As her profession has skyrocketed, now at its perfect level ever, Swift has evolved her esteem of deception and mystery. Hidden tracks, hints at recent albums, and further are all par for the course for Swift. It’s one thing that her fanbase, Swifties, esteem. It turns song fandom into a sport that keeps you involving no longer exact when recent albums and singles tumble but on every occasion Swift does one thing else, because whenever you happen to aren’t paying attention it is doubtless you’ll presumably omit the next big clue. “I’ve skilled them to be that scheme,” Swift said of her fans in a 2019 interview with Leisure Weekly.
It’s quite a bit love how Dark Souls, and other video games by developer FromSoftware, come their storytelling. Dark Souls has a yarn, fans will enthusiastically mumble, you exact have to know the attach to imagine. Most steadily, that scheme merchandise descriptions. There are entire worlds corpulent of tales and characters in FromSoftware’s titles, but most of it is by no scheme straight away told to you. You would possibly want to hunt it down. The floor stage of the sport is in most cases essentially based on vibes by myself. That is a simplification to verify, however it’s an effective solution to summarize how Dark Souls approaches its storytelling. But when Swift has been doing this for over a decade, what’s so particular about The Tortured Poets Department?
One of Swift’s greatest strengths as an artist has continually been her capability to dispute a yarn thru song. Be it in early albums or across the genres she’s dabbled in, from pop to country and the entirety in between, Swift is a storyteller. It’s fragment of what made tracks love “Like Legend” (from Fearless) so well-liked, and subsequently helped her upward push to status. This capability is most evident in the 2020 sister albums Folklore and Evermore. Whereas the albums tranquil preserve a pair of of her extra autobiographical songwriting, they extra steadily than no longer present Swift breaking out of her have level of view. Folklore in particular is far extra of a conceptual album, with a throughline in a pair of songs about a esteem triangle at various stages. This lets her penchant for emotional tracks going thru falling inner and exterior of esteem, as properly as heartbreak, rob on a recent lifestyles. It’s Swift crafting a world and a tale. In internet page of attach her feelings straight away into tune, she will be able to be able to funnel them thru a recent lens to lend a hand a yarn.
The Tortured Poets Department, however, lacks that authorial intent. That isn’t to claim there isn’t a display the album, it’s exact extra musically and narratively messy. In internet page of the tour-de-drive breakup album about longtime boyfriend Joe Alwyn that fans expected TTPD to be, the album is far extra about her infatuation with 1975 frontman Matty Healy and her fans’ response to it. For of us that don’t know, Healy and Swift began dating in May perchance additionally of 2023. When the couple first emerged together, Swifties disapproved. Healy had gotten in grief for a series of controversies spherical perceived racist habits. By June of 2023, the couple had broken up. TTPD is largely a story of Swift’s sturdy feelings for Healy, for better and worse. The notice “But Daddy I Like Him” is about Swift’s nettle at fans for ridiculing her likelihood of accomplice as no longer being ethical, no subject her esteem for him.
Swift is on the total reductively considered as a musician who exact makes song about her relationships, and a vast selection of her most efficient songs clearly have mine her experiences with previous lovers. But when it’s exact that TTPD is one other relationship-centered document from Swift, the connection she’s processing here is the one she has alongside with her fanbase. This battle between Swift and her fans is central to TTPD. It’s an album about what it solution to “make it” thanks to your fanbase, exact for that fanbase to develop into the mediate, jury, and executioner of your esteem, lifestyles, and song profession. It’s comprehensible why fans who have invested so grand in the fandom are attach off by it.
To come aid to the Souls metaphor, audiences steadily don’t know the valid solution to house art work that demands to be met by itself phrases when these phrases imply being abrasive to the target audience itself. Whereas the Souls video games have flourished since Demon Souls was first launched in 2009, they’ve a recognition for chewing up gamers who aren’t prepared to “git gud.” For of us that’ve most nice looking played video games which would be about good participant gratification and assembly your every need, Dark Souls will lay your ass out. It’s a lesson in being humble. So is The Tortured Poets Department. It’s an album that asks fans to preserve in tips that their parasocial relationship with Swift is no longer going to be for her again. The final notice on the album, “Clara Bow,” reckons with this devil’s bargain Swift has made alongside with her fans for stardom.
This battle also has Swift turning TTPD into a musically inconsistent album that (in its anthology form) contains 31 tracks, with few songs that feel love legend ballads or radio-ready hits. “Maybe this sucks, presumably it’s no longer what you judge I can also tranquil have, what are you going to have about it?” Swift appears to question. In particular grating tracks love “Florida!!!” are a lot like the notorious poison swamps of many FromSoftware video games. It’s an incredibly hazardous but assured assertion from Swift that makes me explore TTPD in a extra clear gentle. As Giovanni Colantonio writes on Medium, “It will also completely be essentially the most adverse mainstream pop document we’ll ever explore from an artist at this stage of public attention.” But this boldness also lacks musical concord, and the album falls flat to the ears—leaving every Swift and her fans to fall aid on lore as a crutch.
The Tortured Poets Department leaves fans craving extra, and after so many years of hidden messages, the manner to fulfill that depart is to dive into the lore. It has grew to develop into TTPD into the head of the fandom tradition of Swifties. An equal, if no longer elevated, interval of time can also very properly be spent studying and watching explainers about the album than for certain listening to it in hopes of uncovering extra secrets, exact as many FromSoft fans will exhaust time watching VaatiVidya explainers about the latest Souls sport or studying the 107-page fan-made lore bible for Bloodborne.
However the attach Souls fans seek to unearth and pickle which scheme, Swifties apparently are seeking to imagine for one thing beyond the glaring floor which scheme of The Tortured Poets Department. Its prickly grief to fans makes it a laborious pill to swallow. So, as a replacement, lore gets the level of curiosity. Because lore goes down smoother.
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