It took Taylor Swift a long time to find her voice without tiptoeing around a need to be politically correct or maintain an air of daintiness for the sake of certain sects of her white supremacist fanbase. Even in 2013, in an interview with Vanity Fair, Swift was largely glib in the statement, “For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that’s taking something that potentially should be celebrated—a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way—that’s taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.” A rare moment of understatement for a woman who usually paints a very detailed portrait with her songwriting. And though this was after the 2009 incident between her and Kanye West that would set off a Montague versus Capulet-level feud that has now spanned almost a full decade (the VMAs of ’09 took place on September 13), Swift took slightly longer than most with little patience to suffer fools to finally stand her ground. For even more than Katy Perry giving her cannon fodder to release “Bad Blood” in 2015, Kanye (and Kim, thanks to her publicly shaming Swift with the “receipt” of her granting Ye permission to use her name in “Famous”–though he never quite said how he would be using it) would end up giving her angered inspiration for an entire album: 2017’s Reputation.
Placed next to that album’s moody, faux goth girl cover, the one for her seventh record, Lover, is in stark contrast. Awash in the pastel tones of the sky behind her and a glitter heart around her eye, Swift is, for seemingly the first time, happy in love. The object of her affection, in case you didn’t know, is Joe Alwyn, best known for supporting roles in decidedly royal movies like The Favourite and Mary, Queen of Scots. Yet this time around, Swift doesn’t appear as keen to parade her love in the public eye (minus the part where a large bulk of songs on this record are still in reference to her current significant other, just not from a jilted perspective). She’s learned her lesson the hard way after Instagramming herself on an inflatable swan with Calvin Harris in the summer of ’15 as way of “official announcement” of the long speculated relationship. After Harris came yet another British amuse bouche (apart from Harry Styles) for Alwyn, Tom Hiddleston. That, too, lasted about a year.
With this new sense of calm and self-assurance about her present relationship, it’s only fitting that Swift should commence the record with a song called “I Forgot That You Existed.” A two-in-one cathartic purge of deux male names that have plagued her–Kanye West and Calvin Harris–it initially peppers in plenty of allusions to her beef with West in lyrics like, “How many days did I spend thinking ’bout how you did me wrong, wrong, wrong?/Lived in the shade you were throwing/’Til all of my sunshine was gone, gone, gone,” “In my feelings more than Drake, so yeah” (oh how one wishes Lana Del Rey had gotten more credit for a song called “In My Feelings”) and “Got out some popcorn as soon as my rep started going down, down, down/Laughed on the school yard as soon as I tripped up and hit the ground, ground, ground.”
Yet, at the same time, its duality in shading that notorious Petty Betty named Calvin can’t be ignored in the chorus itself: “I forgot that you existed/And I thought that it would kill me, but it didn’t and it was so nice/So peaceful and quiet I forgot that you existed/It isn’t love, it isn’t hate, it’s just indifference.” Of course, if she was truly indifferent, she might not write a song about that indifference, but any who…we all know Calvin was a huge twat about giving Swift her songwriting credit for 2016’s “This Is What You Came For” after she seemed to decide she no longer wanted it to be listed under her (fittingly Swedish) pseudonym, Nils Sjöberg. Cue Calvin’s now infamous bitch boy Twitter tirade (the classic mark of a man with an oversized pituitary gland if Trump is any indication).
With that, we segue into “Cruel Summer,” not, as you might expect, a cover of the classic Bananrama hit (for Ace of Base already has the brilliance of such a cover on lock), but her own take on that summer she first met Alwyn. Once again, Swift seems to be mixing vengeance with pleasure as she intimates both Kanye and Alwyn in naming a song after the former’s music festival (as well as the summer of 2016 when her reputation first got tarnished and she pointendly decided not to release an album despite her usual “every two years” pattern) and making mention of her secret encounters with the latter. Encounters that found her in a very strung out emotional state that also served as the basis for her noting of Alwyn in “Delicate,” “This ain’t for the best/My reputation’s never been worse, so you must like me for me.” At the very least, she came out of 2016 with a new Englishman that wasn’t Hiddleston. And oh how quickly domestic it all becomes as evidenced by the fourth single to be released from the record, “Lover.” Almost unbearably uncomfortable in its nostalgic bent that makes it feel like it could exist in the 1950s as opposed now, Swift croons without abashement, “Can I go where you go?/Can we always be this close forever and ever?/And ah, take me out, and take me home (forever and ever)/You’re my, my, my, my lover.” So much for keeping a low profile on things.
Mercifully, Swift breaks up the schmaltz with one of the most standout (and political) tracks on the album, “The Man.” Hypothesizing about all the ways in which her life would be different if she were a man (in general and in the entertainment industry), Swift eviscerates the double standard with, “I would be complex, I would be cool/They’d say I played the field before I found someone to commit to/And that would be okay for me to do/Every conquest I had made would make me more of a boss to you.” Best of all, she tears down Leonardo DiCaprio much more smoothly than the non sequitur ways of Lindsay Lohan with the lyric, “And they would toast to me, oh, let the players play/I’d be just like Leo in Saint-Tropez.” Probably so. Unfortunately, she was born to be a roundabout pop star after serving time in the country genre. The most sexually objectified type of woman. So is it any wonder that Swift hit another wall of impatience with her simultaneous objectification and double standard as she laments, “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can/Wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man And I’m so sick of them coming at me again ‘Cause if I was a man, then I’d be the man.”
Intermingling the “bops” with the wistful ballads, “The Archer” follows. And certainly plays into that accusation she repurposed for use in the video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” “likes to play the victim.” Admitting at least that she might have a bit of fetish for “combat,” it is within this track most of all that Swift builds upon the thesis of the record, which is that one cannot be a lover without also being a fighter.
As we soon hear with “I Think He Knows” (which finds Swift, like all pop stars leaving their twenties, again slightly schizophrenic with regard to her age, i.e. “It’s like I’m seventeen, nobody understands”), we are harkened back to her more germinal years. When so much of her early discography relied on a pattern that incorporated overt hits with more throwaway tracks that only a die-hard fan could love. Very much in the tradition of fellow Sagittarian and emotionally charged pop powerhouse, Britney Spears. Lover seems a return to this unlike the more consistently listenable 1989 and Reputation. At times almost especially cringeworthy because of the listener remembering that this is an almost thirty-year-old woman spouting lines like, “Hey, kids! Spelling is fun!” (an atrocious non sequitur in “ME!” that Taylor felt so personally victimized by that she actually removed it for the album’s release–proving once again that she has quite some difficulty with making artistic choices and standing by them if they’re not well-liked).
But things pick up again on “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” even if she still appears to be trapped in high school. The song echoes shades of Lana Del Rey’s early era “This Is What Makes Us Girls” in rhythm, as well as evoking the image of poignantly felt disgrace as only a teen can set against the backdrop of smalltown America. Juxtaposed with Swift’s newfound confidence in getting political, a palpable reference to the fall of the U.S. to the house of Trump is present in the line, “American glory faded before me.” Though it’s also, once again, an allusion to her own loss of a squeaky clean reputation (for Taylor can’t help but be a narcissist in constantly talking about herself). Yet she does tie a political thread throughout the song’s high school allegory, particularly in the image, “American stories burning before me/I’m feeling helpless, the damsels are depressed/Boys will be boys then, where are the wise men?” Evidently not even in London, where her own “boy” resides, if you catch one’s Brexit meaning.
A rhythmic return to that of “The Man,” “Paper Rings” might be scary to a boy who is one year younger than she at twenty-eight as she declares, “I like shiny things, but I’d marry you with paper rings.” Oh Taylor, always taking a gamble on lyrics that might prove humiliating further down the line when it all falls to pieces (despite fans being convinced that the song infers the two have been married “for real”).
The gushing over Alwyn continues on “Cornelia Street,” as she rehashes that first year of their relationship in 2016, “back when we were card sharks, playing games.” The game imagery holding strong, Swift expresses relief when, after pulling a classic femme move and fleeing when things don’t escalate the way she wants them, Alwyn finally “showed [his] hand,” likely all the heart cards for added cheese.
Allegedly not about one of her own relationships, “Death By A Thousand Cuts” was reportedly inspired by a Netflix rom-com (Someone Great) and speaks to the slow, stabbing pain of a long-term relationship coming to its end being tantamount to that ancient (though it was only banned in 1905) Chinese torture method known as lingchi, wherein a prisoner’s limbs are systematically cut off over a period of time, resulting in a death more painful than life itself. Pretty gory for a pop song about love, and maybe the “edgiest” Swift gets on this record.
An edge that tapers off on “London Boy,” another bathetic ode to Alwyn and, now, his birthplace. Showing her continued recent flavor for black men (as shown in the Get Out meets Black Mirror video for “Lover”), a clip of Idris Elba saying, “We can go driving in, on my scooter. Uh, you know, just ’round London. Alright, yeah,” with regard to what he might do with a girl who won a date with him opens the track before Swift segues talking into all the other places she likes (SoCal, Tennessee). Yet home isn’t where the heart is now that she’s fallen under the spell of England (“God I love the English,” she gushes)–a spell she’s been under since a few boyfriends back at this point, leading one to wonder if maybe she only went for Conor Kennedy in an attempt to replicate the whole royalty thing in America (alas, her nemesis, Kim K, has already somehow laid claim to that).
Transitioning to another object of her affection–her mother–on “Soon You’ll Get Better” featuring Dixie Chicks (never forgetting her country roots, after all), Swift keeps it Sag again with the lyrics, “And I hate to make this all about me/But who am I supposed to talk to?/What am I supposed to do If there’s no you?” For there is no shame in her emotionally needy game (even if it’s Ariana Grande who is the one with a song called “needy”). Unwitting elements of her longtime accustomedness to always having her way as a rich person also shine through in the line, “You’ll get better soon ’cause you have to.” But what if money can’t buy the thing she wants for once?
Taking another page from Ariana, “False God” wields the relationship as a metaphor for religion itself (particularly the sex element as was the case in Grande’s “God Is A Woman”) as Swift declares, “Religion’s in your lips/Even if it’s a false god, we’d still worship…/The altar is my hips/Even if it’s a false god/We’d still worship this love.” So yeah, now Swift is getting old enough to infer she gets eaten out.
Contriving more politicism on “You Need To Calm Down,” Taylor’s well-timed for Pride Month second single from the album, she still tends to make it about her both lyrically and in the video. Indeed, there’s something at odds with her moral self-righteousness about being the victim in her fraught exchanges not only with critics in general but with fellow women in the public eye in particular, saying things like, “You know, Katie Couric is one of my favorite people. Because she said to me she had heard a quote that she loved, that said, ‘There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women,'” in the same abovementioned Vanity Fair profile. This in reference to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler poking fun at her love life like everyone else at the 2013 Golden Globes. Yet wouldn’t helping other women involve not telling them they’re going to end up in hell for expressing an opinion about her?
Taking more responsibility than usual for being the one to blame for certain relationship snafus, “Afterglow” is the closest Swift will get to sounding like pre-bad girl era Rihanna (think “Unfaithful”) as she admits she can be self-sabotaging and occasionally batty with, “Hey, it’s all me, in my head/I’m the one who burned us down But it’s not what I meant I’m sorry that I hurt you/I don’t wanna do this to you/I don’t wanna lose this with you/I need to say, hey, it’s all me, just don’t go/Meet me in the afterglow.” Of the fire…sign that is a Sagittarian.
Arguably one of the most annoying pop songs ever made, “ME!” isn’t really worth talking about (especially when everything was already said with the video). Subsequently, the eerie instrumental sparseness of “It’s Nice To Have A Friend” finds Swift at her love storytelling best, painting the picture of two childhood friends becoming lovers as they transition from “school bells” to “church bells,” the small change in one word marking a swift passage of time. It also iterates Swift’s belief that the greatest love begins with the foundation of friendship (just like on Dawson’s Creek).
Perhaps subconsciously forgetting all about her feud with Katy Perry, Swift declares being “wide awake” on the final track, “Daylight.” This after “sleeping so long in a twenty-year dark night.” So yeah, another boy has brought light into Swift’s life. Let’s just hope he brings some darkness later on for the next album. For, while Swift opens up just ever so slightly about who she is behind all the hagiography of her own making, the intended vulnerability of Lover isn’t quite genuine. And will certainly never measure up Britney Spears letting completely loose by going apeshit on a car with an umbrella. That’s when a pop star can honestly say she doesn’t give a fuck anymore about the public opinion. Swift, of course, always will. For it’s ingrained in her to curate her own narrative with the finest toothed of combs. And Lover is no exception, even if, like Lana said, “Kanye West is blonde and gone.”
