Album Review: Taylor Swift's "1989"

 

When Bob Dylan went electric, he didn't stop being Dylan. "Like a Rolling Stone" broke a few barriers in 1965—including the radio-frightening six-minute mark—but the writer behind it remained the same, quick with an elusive metaphor and a sneer.  Still, Dylan was 24 then, the age Taylor Swift is now, and he was anxious to ...
shuck off the expectations that had grown with his legend: the acoustic guitar, the protest songs, the kind of obligations that musicians such as Pete Seeger had readily embraced. "Highway 61 Revisited," Swift's "1989" is not. But her new album marks the same turning point, a star intent on burning off the past's residue for her own headstrong purposes. Dylan went on to embrace country, teaming up with Johnny Cash on "Nashville Skyline," but Swift, once that city's golden child, has cast it aside for the alleged pop sounds of her '80s babyhood.

As Millennials are often accused, Swift is nostalgic for a decade she can't remember: don’t look back for the influences of “1989,” which are better observed through lateral glances. The titular chorus of "Welcome to New York" recalls the monotone delivery of Empire of the Sun's "Walking on a Dream"; "Out of the Woods," a song co-written with fun.'s Jack Antonoff and thunderous with the synth sounds flooding the parched waterways of modern rock radio, lands between Chrvches and Chromatics—artists that perhaps new BFF Lorde’s turned her on to. Pop eternals Max Martin and Shellback, whose credits read like a Now! compilation, are her main collaborators here, and they fake it like pros, but in a year when underground influencers Ariel Pink and Grimes claimed to be submitting songs for pop superstars, it’s curious that Swift didn’t go direct to the sources of the indie records she eye-rolled just an album ago. Maybe it's best to think of "1989" as the big-budget, Michael Bay reboot of such acts: as a Swift record, it often has too many cyborg additions to recognize.

Swift, who's a bit of a shrieky singer (an endearing quality, I think) and a wordsmith who shuns the thesaurus, has always found power in her storytelling. She knows the great alchemy of pop is in transmuting the personal into the universal: skew too detailed, and it's hard to relate; go generic and the song loses substance. But in the center, the middle of the road that even Billy Joel shirks from, that's where perfect pop lies. No modern pop star mastered the art as deeply as Swift did on sophomore album "Fearless," a collection threaded with one girl's vision of small towns, fairy-tale love and the crushingly real heartbreak that follows. The high school Swift pictures in "Fifteen" doesn't have a name, but many have walked its halls.

It connected, and deeply: ”Fearless" won top 40 airplay and an Album of the Year Grammy — making Swift, then 20, the youngest artist ever to win the industry's greatest honor. One could make the case she stopped being a country star then and there. Her next two albums would sell over a million copies each in their first weeks: no other artist of the last decade can claim that. That's alchemy, and maybe magic. Why declare a break?

Post ’65 Dylan remained an unbroken gush of Dylan lyrics, but the Swift speaking now sounds like someone else. Her growing fame hasn't helped: the storytelling that was so clear and vivid on "Fearless" has given way to the anonymous drama of "Back to December" and “I Knew You Were Trouble” on recent albums, songs that rely on the crutch of the soap-opera static of her much-reported dating exploits or that ostensibly unscripted TV run-in with Kanye West. The fewer details she shares, the better the mystery: is this one about Harry Styles? Jake Gyllenhaal? Her "Dear John," a phrase that once famously referenced break-up letters to faceless, forgotten boyfriends, gains most of its meaning from knowing one can pencil "Mayer" in after. We know more about her than ever, but "1989" feels like her least personal release yet.

Sometimes such context grounds pop, giving it greater truth and sincerity — Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” may be the most famous example, all the way through Jay Z’s recent role as subject and sideman for Beyonce's "Drunk in Love" — but too often lately, it excuses the cynical coasting of releases like Justin Bieber's "Journals," a collection of songs less revealing than an Instagram photo. Thanks to a teen audience that plays YouTube videos like their older siblings did CDs, visuals of all kinds have become more inseparable from songs now than ever. But listen to “1989” lead single “Shake It Off” with your eyes closed and Swift’s singularity begins to vanish: the video's awkward dancer, the older version of the dorky, t-shirt-wearing teen of “You Belong With Me,” becomes just another straining studio diva, feigning confidence in the face of players, haters and more clumsy slang.

 

It's odd she opens the album with "Welcome to New York," a declaration of her evolving life, only to offer up More Songs About Turbulent Romance after. Swift has never shied away from sourcing personal experience, but "1989" offers so little of the one she says she's living now: a big city adventure centered around fun, famous friends, not boys. Where are the songs about getting Shake Shack with Lorde or her birthday bash with Lena Dunham? Or one about her beloved cats? I'm not kidding: anything would be more meaningful material than more imaginary tall, handsome, dangerous men who just don't work out, a movie Swift has played us many times. It feels like she's holding back the next reel.

Swift's too talented a writer to leave all the sparkle out of her new songs. Many of the love stories in "1989" scrub away the evidence, but she saves the album's best metaphor for the closing "Clean": "You're still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can't wear any more." Indulgence, loss, mistakes that can't be unmade, all there in one line. But the album too often pictures her life in CW montages: "Welcome to New York" is an anthem for people who've never been—or who can afford to move there in a $20 million apartment, the city’s mythic reputation unblemished by its difficulties. In the twangiest song on “Speak Now,” Swift sang "Someday I'll be living in a big ol' city": one would think she'd throw back to that here, to complete the brag, to tie her pages together. But it seems she'd rather move on.

As the promised pop record—pop in the way Lorde is, with rock edge throbbing beneath its hooks—"1989" has lovable moments, or at least the heat of a one-night-stand. "Shake It Off" is exuberant and funny, even if “hella good hair” is a lesser, less knowing line than “indie records much cooler than mine” was on "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together." "All You Had to Do Was Stay" hits a chorus note that lodged an immediate place in my brain; the "Drive" soundtrack-ready "Style" borrows a trick from frenemy Katy Perry, delivering the chorus in staccato syllables. The second half loses steam: the presumably Perry-targeting "Bad Blood" is dark and militant but the sloppy lyrics can't match the intensity. "How You Get the Girl" lands below Carly Rae Jepsen on the depth chart, and "This Love" can't decide if it wants to turn ghostly or neon. Among the bonus tracks, "You Are in Love" is the rare "1989" song to sound authentically vintage, echoing the synth tones of Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia" (a '93 track, for the record) — and the rare lyrics Swift's explicitly penned from another woman's perspective, a welcome escape from another straining romantic scenario of her own.

Part of the album's appeal is that it arrives, like Beyonce's self-titled did last year, in time to make a clean sweep of its lacking pop competition. Jessie J lacks even a Borg-assimilated Swift's personality; "Wildest Dreams" and "Style" both lean on Lana Del Rey's dreary influence, but Swift does her James Dean imagery better; Sam Smith and Ariana Grande have huge voices but small material. What's left, the "Frozen" soundtrack? In comparison, the beats and hooks of "1989" are sturdy and refreshing. Better, they turn a sound its creators treated as downcast and introverted into something bubbly and bright. The songs are also slimmer than usual: Swift's tracks once often lingered near the five-minute mark, but they rarely hit four here, getting the weaker cuts out the door quickly.

With "Red," an album with Swift's first Martin collaborations, there was a sense the musician wanted to see what she could do—what trouble she could get into. But she has just one solo writing credit on "1989," and what may have been training wheels one album back seem to have fused to the bike. In many ways, “1989” is a success, but that's something to mourn for: the most popular, industry-acclaimed new songwriter of her generation, an artist who could work with anyone and has the clout not to, handing herself over to the industry's well-oiled machinery. But maybe that's the only way to get where she wants to go.

The draw of “Fearless”-era Swift was that she didn’t need to change to be a star, but no one stays forever 20. For better or worse, “1989” is the sound of Swift in 2014, growing up and finding her way forward. But who knows? She may have “Blood on the Tracks” in her yet.

-- David Greenwald
(I read this review and was just in awe! it just represents the way I feel and way more)