OPINION:
The arrival of a new Taylor Swift album is always an event that the Swifty faithful mark on their calendars like Christmas. And this time around, Swift surprised everyone with the release of her 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department. The original 17 songs showed up on streaming at midnight (Eastern time) April 19. But a couple of hours after that — wait, what’s this? Fourteen more songs?
Indeed.
Swift, ever the marketing genius, called it The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. A double album, she said. More like a triple album, really. And one can’t help but ponder the question: When on Earth did this 33-year-old singer have time to pen and record 31 more songs about heartbreak, love, heartbreak, tragedy, heartbreak and still more — well, you get the point. After all, she’s been jetting around the world for her Eras Tour for the last 18 months and spending most other waking moments with her NFL beau, Travis Kelce.
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By all accounts, they seem deliriously happy together. This album, though? More like deliriously tortured. It feels like reading Romeo and Juliet 31 times in a row.
Taylor Swift would probably number me among those hateful, religious, pearl-clutchers in church for what I’m about to say. But I think it bears saying because Swift practically says it herself: Romance for Swift is a religion. In fact, she says what she experiences in moments of intimacy represents something akin to worship for her: “What if the way you hold me is actually what’s holy?”
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I’m honestly grateful that Swift herself has identified that core longing here. She yearns for those fleeting experiences of intimacy to transcend time and space. Indeed, on “Down Bad,” she describes a moment of soul-to-soul connection in ecstatic, cosmically transcendent terms: “Tell me I was the chosen one/Show me that this world is bigger than us/Then sent me back where I came from/For a moment, I knew cosmic love/ … For a moment, I was heaven struck.”
What she’s longing for is salvation, being unconditionally known and embraced. And she works so very, very hard to earn that salvation. Still, Swift savagely spurns those who would suggest such a thing, even though she’s so obviously seeking salvation in relationships that inevitably leave her broken and gutted.
Elsewhere, she sings, “So how much sad did you think I had/Did you think I had in me/How much tragedy?” Honestly, Swift’s appetite for tragedy seems nearly infinite, listening to song after song after song that “poetically” chronicle her black holes collapsing in on themselves. It’s a void no man can fill, no matter how passionately she longs for it. Only God will fill that space, for her, for any of us.
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Now all of that said, everything I’ve written above takes Swift’s tortured personal confessions earnestly, at face value. But I think it’s also worth asking this question about her stories of tragedy and heartbreak: How much is personal, and how much is a performance? A very calculated performance, perhaps? After all, she has a reputation to uphold: No one does a breakup song — or a breakup album — like Taylor Swift.
And Swift has tapped into a seemingly infinite adolescent appetite for such romantically tragic angst. It’s the kind of affection that prompts tween and teen girls to buy four different versions of the same album, just to make sure that they’re not missing out on the complete Taylor Swift experience.
Too cynical? Maybe. Then again, no one else has ever generated a billion streams of her songs on one outlet alone.
And that should give us pause when it comes to our kids and the messages they’re ingesting.
At the surface level, I really don’t like all harsh profanity here (more pearl-clutching — sorry, Taylor), or the glorification of reckless intimacy. But I think I’m even more discomfited by the underlying worldview that millions upon millions of impressionable girls are ingesting: that romantic love is the capstone human experience.
That’s a worldview that Taylor Swift continues to lean into with all her might. And it’s one that deserves our parental attention and critique, lest it leave our daughters (and probably some sons, too) vulnerable to the kind of emotional devastation that Taylor herself plods through over and over again here.
Read the rest of the review here.
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Plugged In is a Focus on the Family publication designed to shine a light on the world of popular entertainment while giving families the essential tools they need to understand, navigate, and impact the culture in which they live. Through our reviews, articles and discussions, we hope to spark intellectual thought, spiritual growth and a desire to follow the command of Colossians 2:8: “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.”
Review written by Adam R. Holz.