Taylor Swift and the Great Ambition Forever

Is Taylor Swift making people... sick? - Photo: Billboard

That's the opening line of a song on the album Tortured Poets Department , the song So Long, London.

The lyrics seem to be inspired by the classic quatrain in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby , when Gatsby shows Nick the green light on the other side of the bay, symbolizing Gatsby's eternal, unattainable desire.

Is there any desire Taylor Swift hasn't achieved?

When Tortured Poets Department was released, Taylor Swift was on top of the world . She was everywhere in pop culture: her Eras tour was the biggest in history, she won an unprecedented four Grammy Awards for Album of the Year, and she was still re-recording her old albums with unreleased songs.

And then she released an album with 31 songs, 2 hours long - the size of a movie!

The Tortured Poets Department

Is the "green light" that Taylor Swift is reaching for not just greatness, which she has already achieved, but absolute, lasting, unchanging greatness?

Reaching the peak is not enough, she wants that peak to be maintained endlessly and expanded infinitely.

Swift is often talked about as a poet in music , and her ambition to become a true poet is evident in The Tortured Poets Department , an album whose title roughly translates to "department of tortured poets."

But as always, ambitions that are too expansive can backfire. The Tortured Poets Department is still an album of songwriting that reaches a level many would dream of, but this is Taylor Swift and it's inevitable that we'll be "double-standard" in expecting more.

Taylor Swift releases 31 songs for new album - Photo: Getty

Granted, Taylor Swift did a great job of playing the ideal literature teacher for her young fans, incorporating dense references to academic literature into her love confessions, including the poetry of Dylan Thomas, William Shakespeare, The Secret Garden, Peter Pan, A Wrinkle in Time, Greek mythology, and even the ancient philosopher Aristotle making a cameo in her "lecture."

Granted, Taylor Swift still writes songs that are as natural as breathing, like The Black Dog about a couple sharing their locations and then she sees him walk into a bar, or I Look in People's Window about a girl walking down the street, looking into the windows of the house next door for a familiar face.

Weak wine, drinking too much will make you drunk.

That is, Swift's poetry is still good, still full of a vocabulary that makes us gasp, and Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff's minimalist, guitar- and piano-centric indie arrangements still expand and develop from the Folklore era, the "drama" with ex-lovers is still hot, but the lack of truly outstanding songs that can stick in the listener's mind and anchor the album makes the 2-hour listening inevitably feel a bit long-winded.

"Weak wine, even if drunk too much, will make you drunk. A wise man, even if he talks too much, will become boring", or like the English idiom "too much of a good thing can be bad".

Is Taylor Swift overfeeding the world?

Taylor Swift's frequent appearances have led people to coin the phrase "Taylor Swift fatigue", the feeling of fatigue when seeing her everywhere, always seeing her, hearing her music everywhere, and every corner of social media is filled with stories about her.

Taylor's hard work (her fans jokingly call her "American buffalo") has only recently taken her to new heights, but in return, it has taken away from her the sense of mystery needed in an artist - the feeling that she won't always be here to sing for us and display her life on display in her songs like an exhibition.

After all, with art, sometimes disappearance is as important as presence.

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/taylor-swift-va-tham-vong-vi-dai-mai-20240428100825084.htm