In Defense of Taylor Swift’s Genius on The Tortured Poets Department
To be a poet means to abide by the rules of poetry: your lines must be short and concise and yet be able to conjure worlds and evoke feelings. Of course, one could always decide that they would rather tell a fuller story with all the juicy details. However, when that happens, that person ceases to be a poet and instead becomes a novelist.
To write a pop song is just as constricting. Just like poetry, your lines must be short and concise and be able to conjure worlds and evoke feelings. Even more stiflingly, you would need to stick to the almost unbendingly rigid format of “verse — pre-chorus — chorus — verse — bridge — chorus — end” of the modern pop song.
Imagine that you have a rich story to tell, an inner life to unfold, people and places you want to explore. Before you even put pen to paper, you have it all thought out. And then you begin to write from the place of deep clarity within your head. However, there is just one problem. The reader approaches your work with a blank slate. They don’t know about the hours of internal wrestling you engaged in. So they judge each word as it comes, filtered through their own experiences.
It is a miracle that even a quarter of your message gets through.
And this is precisely the conundrum that artists like Taylor Swift face. She has to set a scene, tell a story, make you feel invested, conjure wonder. And all this in just a few short lines, confined within the formidable format of the modern pop song. That she achieves any success at all is remarkable. For her work to resonate with millions in the way that her record-breaking Eras tour has done is a miracle.
So before we throw stones and find fault by plucking lines out of context and mocking them with abandon, it is important to understand that Taylor is laboring under a very intense, word-sparse discipline. Every time she opens a song, she has to very quickly and very skillfully bring you in on a feeling, a secret, a fleeting moment in time. All this before the typical 3 ½ minutes is up. And that is no easy feat.
“Corny” Lines
Taylor’s critics have jumped on a number of lines that seem almost absurd when taken out of context. For example, in the song “The Tortured Poets Department”, she writes:
You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate
We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist
I scratched your head, you fall asleep
Like a tattooed golden retriever
This verse is an easy target when taken in at a casual glance, but it takes on a different light in the instant world-building that the modern pop song demands. She is, in essence, creating an atmosphere of haze, laze, and abandon, where the mind wanders freely and sleep comes easy, and in this magical concoction, intimacy comes easy too.
Another oft-maligned line comes from the song “I Hate It Here”:
We would pick a decade
We wished we could live in instead of this
I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists and getting married off for the highest bid
Some immediately interpret this through the American prism, assuming that Taylor is fantasizing about a period before the Civil War. However, a wider look at the shaping of the world during that time would allow us to perhaps inch closer at what she is getting at. In her music video “Fortnight”, Taylor dons a Victorian dress, which was a period that began in the 1830s. The 1830s in Europe was when the music romantic era began to flourish in earnest and the ideas of the Enlightenment were reaching its fruition. For a cultural enthusiast, this would be an eye-opening time to visit political salons, watch the theater, and listen to Beethoven’s 9th symphony, only recently written. Therefore, Swift is likely evoking a moment in world history of wonder, the flourishing of progressive ideas, and the planting of the seeds that will shape our modern world.
Also, it is best to assume that anything “corny” that Taylor writes comes from a place of deep self-awareness. In the sorrow and the chaos that perfumes the world she creates in The Tortured Poets Department, her choice of supposed “corny” language such as the line “My friends all smell like weed or little babies” is likely to be self-effacing humor, just as lines in her previous songs have attested (ie, I’m just gonna shake it to the fella over there with the hella good hair; Guess I’ll just stumble home to my cats . . . alone; Hey kids, spelling is fun!)
A Period of Transition
Over the last few albums, Taylor has experimented with singing about fantasist revenge stories (No body, no crime), imagined love triangles (betty), dabbling in historical characters (the last great american dynasty), and singing brutally honest songs about the limits of her humanity (peace). In The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor is boldly experimenting with the breadth of her songwriting and is showing us all of its varied shades and hues — once again, within the suffocating limits of poetry and the modern pop song.
If she felt the need to use footnotes to explain every possibly offensive lyric, then she wouldn’t be a songwriter, she would be an academician. If she wanted to flesh out characters even more and let her pen just flow, she would be an author. Instead, she chose to be a songwriter, telling stories in less time than it takes for you to drink your morning coffee. That, at the very least, deserves recognition. To pull this off as yet another record-setting commercial success, we may very well conclude it’s genius.
