CRITIC-AT-LARGE: Taylor Swift: The Encore
The Taste of Me is Acquired, But It’s His Favourite Dish
Taylor Swift: The Encore
Well, well, well... just when you thought the year would escape Taylor Swift, she’s back. This time it’s with four new tracks, The Encore, to round out last year’s The Life of a Showgirl. By all accounts her worst album, I, too, disliked it—for its schmaltz, its derivative musical aspects, its unnecessary Charli xcx diss, and for its straightforwardly triumphal tone about newfound love: “You dug me out of my grave and / Saved my heart from the fate of / Ophelia” runs one chorus (“The Fate of Ophelia”); “Sleepless in the onyx night / But now the sky is opalite” runs another (“Opalite”). Say what you will about Swift’s love songs, but they’d never sounded so... loveless. Just where exactly was the artist who wrote songs like “Cornelia Street,” which sees its singer both “mystified” and “terrified” by love, all in a taut, internal couplet rhyme? But mainly I disliked The Life of a Showgirl for how it recast Swift, an impressive songwriter now in her maturity, as on-the-nose, shallow, and kitsch; “adult contemporary” gone on a Disney cruise.
Social media is flooded with the recommendation (from Swifties and haters alike) to take a damn break. So why is she back? I suppose Swift’s always been the girl who can’t let anything go, who insists upon herself, who beats the dead horse, or rather—and why search for an idiom when she’s already put it best?—never could “[leave] well enough alone.” That line comes from “the 1,” an earlier song that displays in miniature much of what I adore about her. “In my defense, I have none,” she sings, in six words fronting up a posture and then showing her vulnerability. I love that flicker, by candlelight, between the showy poser and the brokenhearted, a doubleness that’s manifested across her career (see: reputation) as much as within individual songs. Haven’t we all tried to be someone else in public? Or pretended like everything’s okay when we’re wounded? Or just felt misunderstood by others? The narrator of “the 1” would like to play it cool—she even tries out a swear word!—but it’s exactly that sense of self-restraint, the qualifiers and corrections, that breaks my heart. This is a song full of “I didn’t, though”s, and “If my wishes came true”s, and “I guess you never know”s—and in making these excuses and adjustments, it also manifests a brilliant musical pun. “It would’ve been fun / If you would’ve been the one,” our narrator sings to a favourite ex, the melody arriving on the first beat of the bar—also known as the one—exactly zero times. This formal aspect—the way Swift weds music and text, sound and meaning—is deeply understated in criticism about her work, and whenever people ask me about her million-dollar wedding, I’m usually thinking about her work in much smaller terms.
Alright, The Encore: “Cleveland!” (exclamation point included!) is the low-hanging fruit (see: Instagram Reels), and is probably one of the worst things Swift has done, like, ever. It’s a love song addressed not to her husband—the song’s subject—but her haters, and it weirdly centres public opinion about their relationship rather than, you know, their actual relationship. Swift’s mediation is set against the genre of... cheer music. And it includes what I can only describe as an accident in the line “The taste of me is acquired / But it’s his favourite dish” which is unintentionally suggestive of cunnilingus. The climax, if you will, is in the spoken-word declaration, “You only need to find one person in this entire world / Who doesn’t find you completely insufferable,” which I’m sure Swift means sarcastically, but in a song like this, you get the sense that perhaps she really did just settle for less.
“Patient Zero” shows Swift in a Tortured Poets Department kind of mood, with its odd fiddle sample and illness-as-metaphor schtick. Apart from its clunky bridge, however—”Let’s get into it”, Swift announces, then proceeds to disclose absolutely nothing—I’m glad to report that it does hold together. If you’re gonna full send this kind of thing, you gotta full send it, and like Robyn’s amazing “Call Your Girlfriend,” the song’s relentless belief in its own perspective is what actually undermines it and gives it its hint of tragedy. “Patient Zero” is an exercise in imagination, as Swift addresses her ex’s new girl—“If you wanna party with somebody who might know / About the devil on his shoulder... / I got you; I was patient zero”—but of course it excludes the more likely possibility that, um, everybody’s moved on. She’s cleverly set the first line of the chorus, though, as a mimic of her real-life ex Matty Healy’s song “Somebody Else,” because Swift never moves on from anything, and because (to paraphrase Rob Sheffield) the person most sick of Taylor Swift is of course Taylor Swift herself. “Pink Clouding” and “Babylon” sound like offcuts from 1989 and evermore, respectively, and in that sense display a kind of aesthetic exhaustion all Swift’s posing and cheerleading can’t quite cover up. Thus, The Encore.
Still, this is the woman who taught me everything I know about songcraft, and I guess I’m a little sad for her and afraid too for her wellbeing. When I listen to the best of Swift, I’m often taken by the feeling I get when I read the great poets, which is a sometimes-overwhelming sensation of an extraordinary intelligence at work, an intelligence which organises and arrays and in that way is quite like life—though I must know somewhere that what I’m encountering is art and art’s stillness, life’s opposite. What strikes me about The Encore is a total lack of self-awareness—in other words, a lack of intelligence. Despite what some lit-crit types may have you think, an artwork is not an example of society—it does not merely demonstrate social or historical trends; nor is it a symptom of a larger pathology—but rather is society in itself. When we read a great novel, listen to a great song, or watch a great film, we know what it means to be in good company. Auden reckons that one of the questions we ask ourselves when we read a poem (and I think this goes for songs, too), is a moral one: “What kind of a guy inhabits this poem? What is his notion of the good life or the good place? His notion of the Evil One? What does he conceal from the reader? What does he conceal even from himself?” And the Swift of The Life of a Showgirl and now its four Encore tracks is often just bad company. In my defense, I have none.
