While Taylor Swift, in her cloying manner, has seen fit to post all of the glowing reviews she collected about The Tortured Poets Department by retweeting them with responses that quote her own lyrics, not every review was an example of high praise. But before one pivots to that lone wolf who stood apart from the pack of praising reviewers, let us go over the reviews Swift actually did choose to highlight. There was the one from Rolling Stone that gave it “instant classic” status and a review title called, “Come For the Torture, Stay For the Poetry.” Swift’s lyric quote reply? “And that was the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding” (a line taken from the album’s eponymous “The Tortured Poets Department”). To The Times and The Sunday Times’ declaring the songs to be “as rich and concise as a short story collection,” Swift gushed, “These chemicals hit me like white wine” (except she spells it “whiiiiite wiiiiine”), a lyric pertaining to Travis Kelce on “The Alchemy.” Swift also reposted a review from the UK’s i newspaper (though that seems slightly like scraping the bottom of the barrel for her), which offered the vague title, “If you expected a Taylor Swift revenge album, you were wrong.” Although not “laudatory,” per se, Swift still replied, “I feel like laughing in the middle of practice” (a lyric from the only other Kelce-inspired song besides “The Alchemy,” “So High School”).
From another British publication (and yes, it’s pointed that she’s favoring British rags, as though to further laugh in Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy’s face from afar while they’re forced to be subjected to these headlines in their home country), The Independent, Swift reposted the review titled, “Taylor Swift’s country-hued tales of bad boys & good girls are irresistible.” Her reply to that was: “Everyone we know understands why it’s meant to be” (another lyric from “The Tortured Poets Department”). The mutual ass-licking bender continued with Swift reposting Variety’s, review, “Taylor Swift Renews Her Vows With Heartbreak in Audacious, Transfixing Tortured Poets Department,” specifically quoting some rearranged lines from it that praised the record as “a culmination of [Taylor Swift’s] genius for marrying cleverness with catharsis… If she is both our best heartbreak chronicler and most uplifting popular entertainer, no one is coming for either job.” This being a nod to her warning on “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart,” “Try and come for my job.” But rather than quoting that line, Swift goes with one from “Down Bad”: “for a moment I was heaven struck.”
Another Billboard review offered, “Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department is messy, unguarded and undeniably triumphant.” Swift returned, “What a crash, what a rush,” a line from “Florida!!!” From HITS Daily Double, Swift retweeted the article that assured, “She’s A Big Girl Now,” with the publication highlighting in their caption, “On TTPD, @taylorswift13 has grown up, is telling the truth and is letting go of the past.” First of all, was she not telling the truth before? It’s not exactly the most flattering compliment, especially to a pop singer who famously despises not being believed (see also: her sexual harassment lawsuit). Nonetheless, Swift answered, “If you know it in one glimpse, it’s legendary” (from “loml”). She at last concluded her bender of reposting good reviews with one from Uproxx (also not the most sophisticated rag), which touted, “Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department Isn’t The Breakup Album You Were Expecting—It’s Better.” Swift rewarded that sentiment with another lyric from “So High School”: “cheeks pink in the twinkling lights.” It is also worth noting that Swift named each and every one of the reviewers in her retweets. For it is important to her to give credit where ass-licking credit is due (a very deliberate and quintessentially petty choice on her part, as though to emphasize and further ostracize the anonymous reviewer with the gall to not see her work as “masterful”).
Of course, all of this “aw, shucks” posturing is a put-on, with Swift herself happy to admit, “You know you’re good, and I’m good.” Britney would have said it more poetically and without as much faux humbleness: “I wasn’t good. I was great.” And yes, Spears, too, was subjected to her unfair share of scrutiny and condemnation. In truth, more than Swift has ever experienced, for Spears’ height of fame also existed at a height of paparazzi invasiveness and gossip rag power. Even so, Swift has made no bones about her irritation with anything resembling criticism. Granted, she’s never lashed out at critics in a manner as direct and unexpected as her “dark foil,” Lana Del Rey. Instead, Swift lets her dissatisfaction be known in other ways (like writing a song called “Mean” after a critic slammed her performance of “Rhiannon” with Stevie Nicks at the 2010 Grammys). Or, when that fails, she’ll leave it to the Swifties to let their dissatisfaction be known. While the Swifties’ “wrath” could never compare to that of the Barbz’ or the Beyhive’s, it is sufficient enough for a reviewer going against the accepted opinion that TTPD is “genius,” “brilliant,” etc. to decide, “Na, I’m not gonna put my name on this review.”
With critics well-aware of the personal and professional fallout that could result from lambasting the fans’ precious god(dess), it was a review of The Tortured Poets Department from Paste magazine that opted to allow the writer to put their work out into the internet ether with the protection of anonymity. No name was attached to the review (save for “Paste Staff”) and, as such, it is one of the most brutally honest assessments of Swift and the album that has come about during this “era.” While Variety insisted that Swift hasn’t made a right proper breakup album since 2012’s Red, the critic here emphasizes that Swift has been writing the same record from the get-go…with folklore and evermore being “hiccups in the timeline—existing as the most fully-formed renderings of Swift’s own insecurities and concerns” (not to mention her only genuine attempts at writing in the third person). For the reviewer, that’s definitely not what TTPD is, so much as further evidence that Swift is on songwriting autopilot at this juncture (and who knows, maybe AI came up with the lines about “seven chocolate bars” and a “tattooed golden retriever”).
On “The Alchemy,” Swift insists, “This happens once every few lifetimes.” For Swift, “it” (read: love turned to regret and anguish) happens every album cycle. Every relationship and every breakup is her artistic cannon fodder to shoot back into the masses so that they can process her heartache as well. Perhaps help her pinpoint the moment where it all went wrong. It is precisely for this reason that she concludes the album with the line, “The story isn’t mine anymore.” That it certainly isn’t. For once you put anything out into the world, even a review, it is condemned to be interpreted, twisted and analyzed. And yet, Swift is quick to insist that art should be above condemnation or critique: “What do we do to our writers, and our artists, and our creatives? We put them through hell. We watch what they create, then we judge it. We love to watch artists in pain, often to the point where I think sometimes as a society we provoke that pain and we just watch what happens.” Madonna once said something similar in the form of: “What people fail to realize is how much guts it takes to do what we do, what any artist does… How much guts it takes to put yourself on the line and say, here’s my work, here’s my heart and soul.”
Well, first of all, that’s what a critic, a good critic is actually doing as well. And second, Madonna has never been as “fragile” as Swift, nor has the majority of her canon been an “autopsy” of dead relationships (she simply isn’t that heteronormative). A topic that is becoming less and less mineable. Indeed, one can hear Swift struggling to sound profound not only in the lyrics, but in the commentary she offers for each song. For “Fortnight,” she bills not getting to be with the person you thought you would be as the most tragic thing possible. A “perspective” that reeks of being a privilege of the rich (for who else has time for such la-di-da romantic ideals?). As she tells it, she imagined “Fortnight” taking place “in this, like, American town where the American dream you thought would happen to you didn’t, right?” Let us pause here to note that Swift seems to be mutating the definition of the “American dream” into something centered on “winning” in love, not financial security and job satisfaction by way of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.” And maybe she’s transforming the conventional definition to conform to referring to love because she already did achieve the American dream long ago. “Hard-won” by way of being born to a financial adviser (who is a millionaire himself), which certainly helps with having a “pie-in-the-sky” dream supported. Thus, Swift continues to explain why “Fortnight” is “tragic” because, “You ended up not with the person that you loved, and now you have to just live with that every day, wondering what might have been, maybe seeing them out, and…and that’s a pretty tragic concept, really. So I was just writing from that perspective.” In other words, her own very tunnel vision-y one. For Swift’s biggest and only “tragedy” at this juncture is not being able to secure her “true love,” whoever she might actually deem that to be (for now, it seems, grossly enough, like it was supposed to be Matty Healy).
And that’s where, with just one line, the Paste magazine reviewer’s biggest, most damning smackdown comes in: “There is nothing poetic about a billionaire.” And definitely nothing tortured either. So it is that the very notion of Swift painting herself as a “tortured poet” spouting lyrics like, “Don’t want money/Just someone who wants my company” is utterly incongruous. What’s more, apart from the fact that a large percentage of America does want her company (and is willing to pay for it, too), money can buy friends and love anyway. False ideas of “pure intentions” be damned—everyone, at their core, is interested in another person for what they have and what they can give. Especially in the U.S.
With the anonymous reviewer tearing down the facade of Swift’s “tortured” shtick for this album (and others that have come before it), they then go on to pick apart the lyrics and production themselves, throwing Jack Antonoff under the bus for good measure by noting that he “rewrites the same soulless patterns every time,” elsewhere begging to “get that man away from a keyboard.” “All of this to say” (now a “Fortnight” quote) that it is important to have divergent voices among the clamoring accolades not just for Swift herself, but this album in particular. Just as it was when the only critic who lambasted Beyoncé’s surprise drop self-titled album dared to say, “…her version of empowerment, such as it is, is based on a sort of inherent conservatism, rooted not in compassion and generosity, but instead in materialism, braggadocio and inescapable narcissism. Feminism is actually caring about people who are oppressed—women, minorities, the poor. It is not spending 99% of your time talking about how great you are and how much hotter you are than other women and how rich you are, and occasionally inserting some sort of nebulous piffle about ‘girls running the world’ or whatever else.”
The critic who dared to put his white male name on that review ended up needing to write a follow-up apology article about it…due to the backlash, naturally. And this was in 2013, which we can now look back on as a much less “woke,” less easily scandalized time. In the climate of the current culture, it’s only gotten so much worse for critics, who don’t even feel safe to put their name on an honest assessment (or “opinion,” if you prefer). And while someone like Swift wants to paint herself as being a “tortured artist,” there is no art more tortured (and ridiculed/deemed “valueless”) than criticism itself, with critics presently written off as nothing more than “trolls” (as though the work they do is as “effortless” and without measured consideration as firing off a comment in the comments section). “Trolls” that can no longer speak freely due to a mutated form of fanaticism that sees fit to punish any unfavorable review with verbal abuse and/or threats of violence. Hence, the editor’s note that accompanied the TTPD review: “There is no byline on this review due to how, in 2019 when Paste reviewed Lover, the writer was sent threats of violence from readers who disagreed with the work. We care more about the safety of our staff than a name attached to an article.” As though to prove Paste’s point, one writer posted about the harassment she was receiving online due to speculation that she was the “culprit.” (She was not.)
Unfortunately, the fact that this might become more and more the norm in the ever-waning field of criticism is not only a harbinger of the death of free speech in the U.S. (a.k.a. “agree with my views or die”), but also yet another reason for someone ever considering a “career” (read: unpaid side gig, at this point) as a critic to turn quickly toward another path. But for those few still willing to stay the course, it’s evident that the inverse of the Lady Gaga “ism” (itself grafted from Madonna), “There can be 100 people in the room and 99 don’t believe in you, but all it takes is one who does,” holds plenty of weight for the critic brave enough to stand in defiance against the 99 people who really, really believe.
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