The Simple Pleasures of Taylor Swift's New Album, 1989


In ways good and bad, the think-piece economy rewards complicated things, especially when it comes to music. Think about the women in pop whose albums have been met favorably and feverishly on the web over the past year: Beyoncé all but redesigned the wheel for the spectacular release of her visual album and launched more than a thousand articles about how she's flipped the music industry model on its head; Lana Del Rey, who sang about domestic violence and the specter of death, bewildered feminists and left them debating her merits; FKA twigs has an identity and sound so enigmatic that none of the seemingly endless words spilled about them has yet to truly pierce the allure of her groundbreaking new album. It almost seems that the deluge of think pieces that now greet every musical release is leading some artists to try ever harder to surprise and experiment-you gotta give them something to talk about. But then comes Taylor Swift's new album, , a record so uncomplicated in its pursuit of pure joy that it's left listeners almost as confused by its sheer simplicity. Ease appears to be Taylor's radicalness, and 1989 is knowingly naive, an album that recognizes the age-old pleasures of pop, filled with Mad Libs of recognizable pop metaphors and clean catchy hooks.


Sure, nothing is 100 percent simple, and as one of the most popular artists of the moment, Swift's music is worthy of unpacking whether she's intentionally stoking it or not. The single 'Welcome to New York' has already been called out for its cupcake-y invitation to gentrify, and the video for 'Shake It Off' elicited a healthy amount of criticism for the racial stereotypes it seems to promote. Mostly, though, the thing about 1989 that's inspired the strongest reaction is the total absence of any remnant of her country roots: she's shed the twang, the very thing that once set her apart in a sea of Katys and Gagas, for a more relatable lyricism and choice of song subjects. Almost all of the idiosyncrasies that once made Taylor so different from everyone else, the odd kind of self-effacing writing that characterized clever songs like 'The Story of Us' and 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,' are softened and filtered through a Hipstamatic lens.


What once felt like songs ripped from the messy pages of a young girl's scribbled diary now feel like tracks made with strong senses of pop structure. Her metaphors are more common: water washing away her pain ( Gone was any trace of you / I think I am finally clean); finding herself in the streets of New York ( The lights are so bright / But they never blind me, me), in a pretty direct take on Jay Z and Alicia's smash 'Empire State of Mind'; and an ex-boyfriend, probably Harry Styles, becomes James Dean, complete with long hair and white T-shirt in the song 'Style.' She's working with what she's heard before instead of breaking new ground: she reinterprets s famously infectious ' ella, ella, ay' for a song called 'Wonderland'; her second single 'Out of the Woods' owes a tremendous debt to Haim's well-received album from last fall; and Lindsay Zoladz immediately noticed some striking cribs from Lorde and Lana. The album's title alludes to Swift's birth year, and also a supposed interest in the sounds of the eighties, but it's vague eighties at best-it hardly commits to any palette, only to a kind of general catchiness. If a cliche in music is pop stars saying their new album is their most personal, Swift has gone the other way, reminding that pop isn't just about her: it's universal. Her album cover cuts off her face abruptly, as if to say, put your own visage up there and sing along to every hit. Swift is reaching for the middle of the road and the mundane in really precise ways-you feel like you've heard almost every song on the album before, and 1989 is a happy, easy concession to what people want, never trying so hard that it could intimidate, instead existing as a sweet little collection of things we already know that Americans love to hear. And that makes the record, to my ear, generous: Taylor Swift is no longer the country bumpkin; she's the everywoman, and anyone has a shot at enjoying 1989.


And I did enjoy it: 1989 is a joyful reminder of just how fun it is to love every second on a pop record, no strings attached. Perhaps the critical community has been expecting too much from pop these days. ( Jon Caramanica noted that Taylor's play to the middle is the smartest move he can imagine her making.) Whatever her strategy, it wholly works-her musical inoffensiveness is now officially her greatest asset. Just last week, in a bit of reality so on the nose that it could have been an Onion headline, an accidental uploading of eight seconds of white noise to Taylor's iTunes went to #1 on the charts in Canada in the run-up to the album's release-$1.29 for 8 seconds of nothing. It's almost too easy a joke to say that consumers couldn't tell the difference between Taylor and empty silence. But it's absolutely worth noting that, these days, nothing can easily sell better than something.


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