Republic
Pop, 2020
Is it just me or is every new Taylor Swift album heralded these days as some kind of more credible departure from her old music, a sign of growth, blah blah blah? Sure, she abruptly dropped folklore – the new Taylor Swift doesn’t recognize capital letters anymore, maybe because she views them as a tool of patriarchy suppressing her and forcing her to make only fifty million dollars instead of eleven billion a year – because she had nothing else to do, aside from posing for pictures on her Instagram, during the COVID-19 lockdown, but come on, it’s not like we all didn’t try to occupy our time at home during that period. At least she has a recording studio to play in, sheesh.
If this were supposed to be another calculated step in Ms Swift’s growth, then it appears to be that her final form is a mix of Lana Del Rey, musically, and Tori Amos with a touch of Kate Bush thrown in, lyrically. It’s like she had created a single melody and then set a dozen variations of it to some dreamy background track to create some old school Hollywood vibe. That’s not to say that all of it is terrible. seven, for example, is a haunting ballad telling a poignant story of an abused young girl through the point of view of this girl’s friend.
The lyrics are deliberately peppered with occasional whimsical and dramatic turn of phrases, in order to sound deep and complex, but at the end of the day, the whole thing is… pretty moving, actually. There are times when I would look outside the window, imagine myself as a skinny white chick on Twitter ferociously using words from the songs in this album in my daily effort to virtue signal the hell out of my mediocre white ass, only to go, “Wait, maybe they have canceled her already this month for some reason or the other… am I still allowed to say I like her on social media?”
Aside from seven, most of the songs here tend to blend together to become lovely background noise for skinny white teens to get high for the first time. mad woman is the rare track that dials things up higher than “halfway comatose”, and of course it’s about Ms Swift scolding people for calling her mad and thinking that it will affect her in any way. She is, after all, a progressive woman, stunning and brave, and she has stated enough times that she is such on social media to make it true. Plus, she starred in Cats – after that, she will surely be able to withstand any indignity thrown her way.
So yes, folklore. It’s exactly something Taylor Swift would come up in when she has nothing better to do, marketed as and hailed to be something deep and profound. In reality, this is half a half-assed version of her previous album and half of an ongoing metamorphosis into Taytay Del Rey that has begun since Wildest Dreams.
