lively and idyllic “Love story” — the first single from 2008’s sophomore album, Fearless, and one of the mainstream smashes that kicked off her crossover from country to pop — Taylor Swift, then 19, was Shakespeare and imagined a happy ending to one of literature’s most famous songs. Famous destined couple.
“Marry me, Juliet, you’ll never have to be alone,” Swift’s Romeo proposes on the final chorus, an accelerating tempo and sudden key change kicking the song into an ecstatic gear. The answer to the couple’s predicament, “Love Story,” seriously suggests, and the only sacrament that can prevent their story from becoming a tragedy, is the trusted god of Shakespeare’s comedy, Holy Marriage.
Fourteen years later, on her moody tenth studio album, Midnights, Swift sounds unconvinced that Juliette should have accepted the offer. “Midnights” oozes ambivalence not just about the starry, fairytale ending you dreamed of in Swift’s early songs, but also about big-written coming-of-age expectations and traditional timelines.
“The only thing they keep asking me is if I’ll be your bride,” sings Swift “Lavender Haze” An airing of the album’s slick opening discontent adds, “The only kind of girl they see is a one-night stand or a wife.” Then, on the raunchy, pulsating “Midnight Rain,” Swift revisits an old relationship that seemed thwarted by her professional ambitions and her ambivalence about settling down. Her voice is down to a particularly masculine vocal range.
Swift, 32, is still the subject of tabloid scrutiny today as it was when she was a premature baby at 19. and her longtime partner, actor Joe Alwyn, are either ready to get engaged, already engaged, or married in secret at some point. Swift’s relationship with Alwyn was both her most adamantly private and her longest relationship. You’ve reached a potentially inviting period.
In both its self-referential, backward-looking sound and lyrical preconceptions, ‘Midnights’ is a record about stagnation, stalled development, and the critical time between yesterday and tomorrow. “I have this thing that getting older never gets wiser,” Swift sings on the album’s infectious, playfully self-flagellating lead single, “Anti-Hero.” (In a way, it’s a sequel to her song that inspired 2019. “Archer” Playing the pop star as Peter Pan, she admits, “I never grew up and am very old.”
These songs focus on the inside, but they also reflect how Swift is perceived in pop culture.recently episode Vulture podcast “Into It” host Sam Sanders asked his guest, NPR’s music critic Ann Powers, why Swift, like fellow stars Adele and Beyoncé, was in the spotlight at such a young age. Than a kind of eternal “curly-haired” teenager. “Taylor has no children,” Powers replied. “And in our patriarchal society, when does a woman change? When she becomes a mother.”
“I don’t know how to accept a childless woman as an adult,” Powers added. “Taylor, thank you for being childless yet, because a childless woman needs to show her way.”
Although Swift has rarely envisioned motherhood explicitly in her songs (aside from the short, fictional lyrics of the “Folklore” track), “peace”), “Midnights” has some memorable lines in its context. Taking the example of There Is —, she sings: by will. Even in this darkly comical representation, motherhood is presented as a potential dilution of a legacy that Swift has always been meticulous about. left nothing to his heirs.)
Then, of course, there’s the instantly meme-fied, irresistibly quotable bon mot of the song.The lyrics are so enigmatic that they invite a lot of speculation — is it about a distorted body image? See “30 Lock”— but it certainly hints at some kind of anxiety about aging in an industry that worships female youth. So, when Rodrigo’s debut single “Driver’s License” hit, Swift blinked and quoted what her mother once said about her. She’s really proud. “
Swift is one of the most famous people on the planet, so it’s hard to think of much of her life as “relatable.” This poses an artistic challenge for the singer-songwriter who values connecting with her audience. The gulf between Swift and Swiftie was most felt on her 2010s blockbuster albums such as “1989” and “Reputation.” On these albums, Swift delved into the minutiae of her other celebrity feuds and her public persona. “Midnights” is still primarily about being Taylor Swift, but paying attention to her own inertia and discomfort allows her to tap into something bigger than herself.
Like Swift, many in her cohort have postponed or abandoned supposedly life-altering events like marriage and parenthood, or at the very least, how partnerships and adulthood have changed in these strange times. If “Folklore” was characterized as her pandemic album, “Midnights” feels like her “post-pandemic” album, a work of exasperation and mental exhaustion. . Here, Swift sounds more like an ambassador for millennial anxiety than before.
But in all ways it evokes a sense of stagnation, “Midnights” represents the maturity of Swift’s perspective, especially when it comes to portraying other women. Unlike, say, the disappointing “Better Than Revenge” and the ambitious “Bad Blood,” Swift on “Midnights” no longer denounces other women from a lofty position of suspected moral superiority. There is none. She points the finger at a culture that enforces a different set of rules on its female peers, or sometimes into uncomfortably masochistic excesses – she blames herself. You didn’t want to play with me,” she sings in the intricately composed finale. “Mastermind.” “Since then, I’ve been scheming like a criminal.”
Crucially, however, she corrects herself, revisiting the streamlined fairy tale she once circulated, adding all the doubts and complexities she once forgot or was not yet aware of. Most effective is “You’re On Your Own, Kid,” which plays like a letter to a younger self, or an Instagram post pointing out which parts were which in a too-perfect photo. Maybe show one side by side. Photoshop. “I hosted parties and starved my body, as if the perfect kiss would save me,” Swift sings, referring to the supposedly innocent days of her early stardom as global fatigue and pain. presented with a new overlay of
in a warm and satisfying ballad, as she suggests “Sweet Nothing” Swift, who co-wrote with Alwyn under the pseudonym William Bowery, has the love she desperately believed would have a happy ending in her early classics like “Teardrops on My Guitar” and “Love Story.” It seems that. But the brooding “Midnight” is also proof that love didn’t solve all her problems. I realized that chasing is the only solution. However, it’s like a flex. She was rewriting Shakespeare. Now she’s rewriting Taylor Swift.