WE ALL HAVE A FANBASE. Me 20 friends, another 20,000 of a base he built with painstaking effort, and the Taylor Swift 20 million candle-lit swifties waiting with their index finger ready to challenge Spotify streaming records and buy her vinyls. Eighteen months after ‘Midnights’ and still fresh off an incredible fourth Grammy for Best Album, she’s back with an incoherent anthology (the New York Times rightly says her new work urgently needs an ‘editor-in-chief’) with a title that’s making the rounds of lost poets to seem humble.
• The Tormented Poets Section, according to her own notes, is “an anthology of new works that reflect events, views and feelings from a fleeting and fateful moment in time – a moment that was as poignant as it was sad. This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter is closed.
With the country DNA from which she started at age 14 inscribed into her sound, Swift’s pop is a periodic collection of ballads that shift slightly in style and mood, just like herself.
There is no one to avenge, no scores to open, since the wounds have been healed. And after much thought, it turned out that many of them were self-inflicted. This writer firmly believes that our tears are sacred when they become ink and write a page. When we tell our saddest story, we are freed from it. And then all that remains is tortured poetry.”
Taylor Swift – Fortnight (feat. Post Malone) (Official Music Video)
• Yes! If you read the reviews, you won’t easily get a clue: on the one hand there is understanding, respect and admiration for the phenomenon of an artist who is consistent and professional, knows music and writes from her heart, that is, she is not haphazard, irrelevant or musically “illiterate” . On the other hand, there are voices of frustration speaking of stagnation, a repetition of the self-referential pattern, an ease of producing material that could be compared to the observational comedy that overwhelms stand-up and essentially prevents talented people from trying harder because they like me what they do and they don’t have to risk it.
That’s where I’m leaning. Likeable, sensitive, chatty, consumable, period. “Folklore” with a little bit of all the previous ones. As if it came out of her pocket with minimal artistic training. Who reads the reviews or cares what others think when they identify completely, preemptively and perhaps for life with the artist as a sworn follower?
• With the country DNA she started at age 14 inscribed into her sound, Swift’s pop is a periodic collection of ballads that shift slightly in style and mood, just like herself. Contrary to its radical transformations Madonna in the previous century – and unfortunately also in the current one –, Taylor belongs to her people, she does not wish to surpass them, nor to embarrass them with unreal personas and out-of-bounds surprises.
The earthy profile works in her favor, why mess with it? She has been exposed for years, she shares, she hurts in public, she rejoices wholeheartedly, and when she disappears from the spotlight for a while, her audience knows that she is either trying to recover from (another) betrayal, romantic or of the showbiz industry, or she is writing to upright, preparing something new.
• With her all american presentation, popularity and why not her restless character, we would expect her reasonable transition to the cinema. He was unlucky the two times he recently trusted others without personal involvement. The whole planet is still laughing at it Catseven its protagonists understood early on that the best thing to do was to troll themselves, in order to have a clear conscience and their reputation.
She declares herself a storyteller and if she wants to invest her ambition somewhere, beyond the music she owns, it is in the narration of her music, on her terms.
To the many-faced and unfortunate Amsterdam of David O’Russell her appearance was as brief as her character’s meme death, like a gimmick with no solid counterpoint. Her naturalness and the experience she has gained after all these years could have brought her close to roles of all genres, from comedy to horror. But not all balladeers are cut for cinema, that’s why no one remembers him Bob Dylan in his strange experiment Renaldo and Clara since 1978.
• Because in the larger context of her publicized actions, whenever she trusted others, it didn’t work out for her, she probably doesn’t care about that. She declares herself a storyteller and if she wants to invest her ambition somewhere, beyond the music she owns, it is in the narration of her music, on her terms. She has proven it by directing more than ten of her own video clips, the highlight of which was “All too well”, whose ten-minute version was also nominated for an Oscar, but did not make it to the top five.
She makes shorts and paraphrases the girl she never left behind with iconic looks. Madonna, since we mentioned her, slowly discovered that she should have directed it in the first place rather than suffer disasters as the lead. Right now, Swift has a power that no one has had before. Her filmed concert moved mountains, naturally, forcing all the expensive films to adapt to new programming in order not to lose to the competition.
With $260 million in grosses, the “Eras Tour – The Movie” she showed people reentering theaters for her sake in a synchronized singalong that has never been done before in history – even in Greece she sold thousands of tickets to special, targeted, “all-lucky” screenings. The bet is not whether she will direct a feature but which story she will choose to tell and when, all the while maintaining the parallel, astronomically responsive career of the privileged complainer next door.
TAYLOR SWIFT | THE ERAS TOUR Concert Film Official Trailer
The article was published in LiFO print.
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