Day 6: Trick or Treat!

Happy Halloween! Here's a pumpkin to really get you into that spooky spirit.

Warning: Don't look at the above image unless you like being scared

On holidays like today, this blog works a little differently. Instead of reviewing a song or similar piece of media I will do a short retrospective on the process as a whole. Today is the sixth day of this project. I did some quick calculations in  Microsoft Excel  and my math shows that I am currently 6% of the way through my schedule. Nice! That may not sound like much, but you're not the one who's living through it so what do you even know? Maybe you try listening to only Taylor Swift for just one week and then get back to me.

Yeah, I didn't think so. This is my odyssey to undertake; I suffer so you don't have to. If I'm being completely honest though, I'm really not suffering that much, not yet at least. I'm sure part of it is that my music choice Pre-Swift already didn't have a huge amount of variety in it, so the switch only changed the number of artists I listen to. I never find myself wanting to listen to a different artist unless I'm listening to a song with a featured artist, like Endgame which features both Ed Sheeran and Future. What a dream team.

K-K-K-KAWAII

While I haven't found myself pining for other music, the lack of podcasts has really been eating at me. For some reason I decided to start this project part way into the new season of Serial which was a very poor decision in retrospective. If I wasn't so damn lazy I would figure out how to turn off notifications but for now I see every new episode of Hello Internet and it kills me that I can't listen to it. 

But hey, I don't make the rules. Point is, I've actually been enjoying Taylor's music. I've just been cycling through her albums listening to the songs I feel like and really getting down the lay of the land. I figure I have a couple more weeks before I start to feel claustrophobic, but that is a problem for future me.

An actual picture of future me.

That's all for today, not sure what'll be tomorrow yet but it'll probably just a regular song review. Let me know in the comments which song you want me to talk about.

See you tomorrow,

-C

Day 5: Does Taylor Swift write her own songs?

I think the title of this post speaks for itself. I wasn't planning on addressing this topic so early in the project, but the fact is that it's very difficult to evaluate Taylor Swift's music without knowing where the words coming from her mouth originate.

You might argue that it doesn't matter who writes the music; all the matters is the song as it exists on the album. I would actually be inclined to agree with that line of thought, after all music is a highly collaborative art form. There are two reasons that I'm choosing to address this issue head on with Taylor.

First, she claims to be very involved in the writing process. If a singer never claims to write the songs they preform then it's pretty difficult to claim wrongdoing. Taylor has credited herself as either the sole writer or as a co-writer on every song, so it's worth at least looking into.

Secondly, honesty, mistrust, and reputation have all been recurring themes in Taylor's most recent works. Her newest album is called Reputation after all, and if you need more evidence of how she feels about her public image you don't have to look very hard. Just look at the Reputation track, I Did Something Bad.

"They're burning all the witches, even if you aren't one,
They got their pitchforks and proof
Their receipts and reasons
They're burning all the witches, even if you aren't one."

For someone who claims to write their own music, singing this would be some seriously bad faith. Luckily, it seems like Taylor Swift actually does write her own songs.

My mindset while I looked into this topic was hopeful, yet extremely skeptical. I think that's fair, after all the public perception around mega pop stars is that their whole lives, especially the details surrounding their careers, are highly manufactured. But for all my attempts I couldn't find any allegations that Taylor Swift has ever used a ghost writer, even in the slightest. She has collaborated plenty, but by all accounts she seems to be the overachiever in the group who happily does the whole project three weeks before it's due. What a goddamn nerd.

I kid. This has actually given me a lot more respect for Taylor as an artist as whole. You can imagine that it was somewhat of a letdown when I found out that a song I had previously praised, Clean, was co-written by English singer/songwriter Imogen Heap. You can also imagine how I was even happier do discover a blog post by Imogen where she details the writing experience with Swift, saying how she also assumed she didn't actually write much, and how surprised she was by Taylor's songwriting zeal.

Obviously collaboration doesn't discredit a writer; I just don't want to give undue credit. In the same manner, I think it's only right to give proper recognition where it's due. Is it possible that Taylor has been paying off everyone she has ever worked with so she can maintain a standard that no one really cares about? Or maybe she has an auditory transmitting chip implanted in her skull that allows her to communicate with her literal ghost writers, who she killed and ate just to absorb their songwriting powers.

Or maybe she's genuinely a hardworking and talented songwriter with well over a decade of experience in her belt. I guess we'll never know.

There's not really a good spot in this post for a funny picture so here's one of someone's Halloween costume where they dressed as Edgar Allen Po that I found on reddit.

nice

That's all for today. Thanks for reading.

See you tomorrow,

-C

Day 4: Forever Hold Your Peace

Love songs are like cats. The best ones are fantastic, but usually they're just pretentious, annoying, and bite me even though all I want to do is pet their fuzzy heads. For the most part it seems like Taylor Swift has great taste in both (her cats are fucking adorable), but her taste in love songs is a little more fallible. Today I'm going to talk about a Taylor Swift song that, for me at least, really misses the mark. It fits into the category I'm starting to see that I'll be referring to as "The Hot Mess". Hot Mess songs usually have all the ingredients of a good song , but just don't put it together, which makes listening to them a lot like eating all the ingredients of a cupcake separately.

Look at those little paws

Taylor Swift's 2010 album, Speak Now, has some excellent tracks like Mine and Mean. Most of the other tracks don't measure up to these songs, which is by no means a sin. What irks me is album's namesake, the song Speak Now, today's subject.

Before I tear in, I'm going to say what I like about this song. First is Taylor's voice which, as always, sounds like an angel. No surprise there. It also has an incredibly catchy chorus, something it shares in common with most of the songs on this album. Beautiful singing and catchy hooks are what Taylor's career is built on, especially her earlier works. Despite what the rest of this post is going to say, I listened to this song about ten times in a row without getting bored. The worst crime a song can commit is being boring and unremarkable, and at the very least this song manages to avoid that.

Taylor, let me address you directly for a moment. I know you're a regular reader of the blog, and I want to say right away that all my criticism comes from a place of respect for your work and what you've been able to accomplish. I'm not going to say it again so try to remember it!

COMMENCE THE EVISCERATION

There are so many parts of this song that frustrate me it's hard to know where to start. The first thing that struck me is it's unending wordiness. The wisdom in most media is "Show don't tell" which is admittedly difficult in a completely auditory media, but there are more ways to communicate ideas than the words on the page.

"I sneak in and see your friends

And her snotty little family, all dressed in pastel
And she is yelling at a bridesmaid
Somewhere back inside a room
Wearing a gown shaped like a pastry"


These lines are some of the worst offenders in my opinion. If I didn't know better I would say that these lyrics were written with no music in mind, and they just had to come up with something that kinda fit. Wait a second, I don't know better than that! It would be completely unsurprising to me if the lyrics and the music for this song were synthesized apart from one another. I'm sure that in reality there was consideration between the two, but if this isn't clear to the audience then the intent doesn't really matter. It's more than just the instruments, Taylor's vocal performance certainly leaves something to be desired. I know, I know, I just finished praising her beautiful voice, and I take none of that back! My issue here isn't with the quality, it's with the matching of her voice to the topic at hand. The intonation of her voice lets me know nothing about the tone of the song, which would make it feel very tired if her voice wasn't smoother than butter.

It's easy to make fun of this song for it's cliched premise, but to me the premise of a song is much less important than if all the elements of a song work together in a cohesive way to build something greater than the sum of it's parts. Take another song on this album, Better Than Revenge. This song has an equally overdone premise, but the lyrics, vocals, and the music really work together to give the song a clearly defined tone, and for the life of me I can't stop listening to this damn song. I don't know if I would say it's "good" per se, but it's fast, fun, and I enjoy listening to it so I don't really care.

"She's not a saint and she's not what you think, she's a mattress"

When it comes down to it, I think the best way to summarize these problems is as a lack of direction. I get that Speak Now is just supposed to be a cute love song, but Taylor knows how to write a better love song than this. Both Love Story and You Belong With Me have similar topics but work way better as a whole. The point of Better Than Revenge may be a little contrived, but at least I can see what it's trying to say. Speak Now effectively tells a story, but I have no clue what the real message is and why I should care. It has about as much personality as Qui Gonn Jinn.

Zing

And with that topical reference, I'm going to end this post. Despite how I sounded today, I am really enjoying this so far so I'll try to have something more positive to say tomorrow.

See you then,

-C

Day 3: Clean

I'm gonna be honest. 1989 is, in my opinion, Taylor Swift's best work. Sure, it has the occasional dud, but for the most part I think the songs on this album are more cohesive and impactful than her other works. It also gives a much broader look at Taylor's style, with some songs containing well-trodden Taylor Swift troupes and others hinting at what's still to come.

Stranger Things have happened

So today I'm going to be talking about just one song on 1989 that I genuinely like, Clean. The more I listen to and think about it, the more things about this song I find myself enjoying. The aspect I like most is how this is very clearly a breakup song, but is so different from Taylor's other songs of the same subject. Most of her breakup songs are immediately post break and have a tone that reads distressed, longing, or angry but Clean goes for something totally different: peace. I'm not saying those other songs are bad, just that there's a lot of them and it's nice to have a fresh breath of air.

Or I suppose I should say a fresh lung full of water. If you haven't listened to the song but for some reason are still reading this blog (hi mom!), I say that because this song is all about dat dank water.

"The rain came pouring down

When I was drowning that's when I could finally breathe

And by morning gone was any trace of you

I think I am finally clean"

Behold, the chorus! It takes the two most cliched uses of water (drowning and rain) and flips them on their heads, saying that these things are what give us our lives back after the worst of times.

"The drought was the very worst

when the flowers that we'd grown together died of thirst"

Maybe you're not as impressed by this blatant symbolism as I am. And maybe that's fair, after all it's not like Taylor invented the idea of water being desirable, an abstract concept also knows as "thirst".

That said, originality and quality aren't the same thing. In my opinion, one of the things a song can do that makes it exceptional is take well known elements (breakups, tranquility, water imagery) and combine them in a way that seems completely natural to the audience, but may have been non-obvious to come up with.

"There was nothing left to do

When the butterflies turned to dust that covered my whole room

So I punched a hole in the roof

Let the flood carry away all my pictures of you

The water filled my lungs I screamed so loud

but no one heard a thing"

This section is hilarious me to because it's so well written except when Taylor decides to punch the roof for some reason. Other than that, it works really well. That lingering post-breakup feeling is so hard to describe in an original way, but saying it's butterfly dust captures the feeling of sparks in a new relationship as well as what happens when those sparks die out. Saying they cover her room is actually pretty genius; the bedroom is both where you can be the most alone, but also the biggest reminder of where the most intimate moments with one's ex happened. Her solution? Flush that shit.

I have plenty more to say, but I'm going to cut myself off here. Before I go, I want to give a quick disclaimer; there is plenty about this song that I don't like. The aforementioned ceiling-punch came out of nowhere, and at the end Taylor falls back on the tired troupe of comparing a breakup to withdrawal from drugs. Nice! At least it fits in the with the idea of being clean. Anyways, that's all. I plan on talking about a song that's not as good tomorrow.

See you tomorrow,

-C

Day 2: The Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe

I don't think I realized at first just how much music Taylor Swift has made. Her debut album, Taylor Swift, came out in October of 2006 when she was 16 years old, which makes me feel both very old (I'm 5 years older than that wtf), but also very young (I was 9 years old when that album was released hmmm). Including that album, Taylor has published 6 albums total, one every 2 years up until her most recent album, Reputation, which was released 3 years after 1989 (which comes out to 2017, not 1992). These six albums contain 82 songs, totaling to about 5.5 hours of music, enough to listen to four times in one day (something I will very likely do at some point in the near future). Of course this doesn't include smaller projects like her Christmas album and movie roles, which I will undoubtedly talk about eventually. For those of you who don't know, the 2012 cinematic version of The Lorax stars Taylor Swift, Zac Efron, and Danny DeVito which is actually my dream come true. The only way this movie could get better is if it was live-action.

You go Danny

But I digress. These topics will all have their time, for now I need to decide the format that this blog is going to have. The experiment will last 100 days, but will there be a post every day? Right now, it's looking like yes, but if it gets to be too much I may change it. I would expect the general format to be relatively uniform; I choose a subset of Taylor Swift's work and talk about it critically for as long as I feel is necessary. Who knows how long the average post will be, but I imagine that this one and the previous post will be generally good landmarks for the average post length. 

So let's get right into it! Yesterday and today I have mostly been listening to 1989 and Red, just because those are the albums I am most familiar with, and right away I've started to notice some things. First off, the songs that have captured me most aren't the ones that I've heard most before (Blank Space, We are never getting back together, etc), but the ones that I've only heard a couple times. For now, I plan on talking more about 1989 in particular for the next few days so here's something to listen to in the meantime.

Oh my god, look at that face

That's all for today.

See you tomorrow,

-C

Day 1: The Experiment Begins

So there's this problem that I have with popular culture. I guess I should be more specific, the problem I have isn't with the pop culture itself, but with the consumption of said pop culture. The more popular something becomes, the more difficult it is to earnestly enjoy it. To me, there's no better example of this than music. Just think about it, every time a song like  Despacito or All Star comes on it just kinda feels weird. Of course a huge part of this is the repetition. It's like how if you say any word a thousand times it starts to sound meaningless, except the word is 3 minutes 34 seconds long, includes its titular word 56 times, and was played non-stop on the radio in 2010 for what was, by my estimate, about 3 eternities.

I've seen this video 1000 times and I only just realized Drake is in it

But we're not here to talk about you, Justin. As you, intelligent reader, may have already deduced this blog is about Taylor Swift. But we're not quite there yet! First I want to talk more about repetition.  A very strange thing happens to the human mind when it hears the same song repeatedly. To show what I mean try to answer this question. Do you like the song Gangnam Style by Psy? When I first thought about this question, I honestly couldn't come up with an answer. I enjoy the song when it's playing but afterwards I just feel kinda sick and dirty. It's like these songs are our booty calls that we tell ourselves we don't want but when we get that itch in our brains we just can't resist giving in.

I honestly believe that music becomes popular not just through how catchy it is, and songs like Friday and Chocolate Rain are worth much more than they're given credit for. So I wondered, what would happen if someone took repitition all the way to the extreme? If someone were to listen to the same set of music for an extended period of time would that actually give them a deeper appreciation for it, or would it only widen the dissonance?

Here's where we can finally get to Taylor. I don't know if there's a successful artist alive today affected by this on the same scale as her. Aside from die-hard Swifties or whatever the hell they're called, I don't think anyone actually admits to liking her music. As best, you'll get an "I used to like it" or "her old stuff was better". So here's my question. Is it possible to be a fan of Taylor Swift without being a Taylor Swift fan? I am a 21 year old man; I doubt that I will self identify as a Swiffer anytime soon, but maybe, just maybe, I can take something I only like ironically and find some real value in it.

Image unrelated

And who better a subject than Taylor Swift? I enjoy her music enough to make a fucking blog about it, and there's a ton to work with, most of which I've never even listened to. So for the next 100 days I will listen to nothing but songs by Taylor Swift. To make it a little more formal, I've listed out the rules I will be following below.

• Any song that has audio of Taylor Swift's voice is allowed
• All tracks, including bonus tracks, on her official albums is fair game
• During this period I cannot listen to other audio media like audiobooks or podcasts
• I can still watch videos like YouTube, TV, and Netflix, as well as playing video games with non-Taylor Swift music
• Not a rule but the last bullet point made me wish there was a video game with only TS song in it
• Music/Podcasts/etc someone else is playing  out loud don't count.

I have no clue how this is going to turn out. I may go insane and have to cut the whole thing short 16 days in, or maybe in two months I will be a full on Swifter going to concerts and shit. All that I know is that this is seriously going to fuck with my head, and honestly I can't wait.

As I am writing this it is 12:30 am on Friday October 26th, 2018, which means my last day will be February 2nd, 2019. 

That is a long ass time.

See you tomorrow,

-C