Taylor Swift and her ever-great ambitions.

Is Taylor Swift making people... fed up? - Photo: Billboard

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

The lyrics seem to be inspired by the classic passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald's *The Great Gatsby* , where Gatsby points out the green lights on the other side of the bay to Nick, symbolizing Gatsby's perpetually unattainable longing.

Is there any dream Taylor Swift hasn't achieved yet?

When Tortured Poets Department was released, Taylor Swift was at the top of the world . She was everywhere in popular culture: the Eras tour was the highest-grossing tour in history, she won the Grammy for Album of the Year for the fourth time (something no one had ever done before), while steadily re-recording her old albums with added unreleased tracks.

And then she released an album with a whopping 31 songs, two hours long – the size of a feature film!

The Tortured Poets Department

Could it be that the "green light" Taylor Swift is striving for isn't just greatness—because she's already achieved that—but absolute, enduring, and unchanging greatness?

Reaching the peak wasn't enough; she wanted that peak to be sustained continuously and expanded infinitely.

Swift is often described as a poet in music , and her ambition to become a true poet is evident in The Tortured Poets Department , an album whose title literally translates to "the department of tormented poets."

But as always, ambition, once it becomes too ambitious, can backfire. The Tortured Poets Department is still an album with compositions that many would envy, but this is Taylor Swift, and we can't avoid having "double standards" when we expect more.

Taylor Swift unveils 31 songs for her new album - Photo: Getty

Admittedly, Taylor Swift has truly excelled at playing the role of an ideal literature teacher for her young fans, weaving in a wealth of academic literary references into her love confessions—from the poetry of Dylan Thomas, William Shakespeare, The Secret Garden, Peter Pan, A Wrinkle in Time, Greek mythology, and even the ancient philosopher Aristotle has a cameo in her "lecture."

Admittedly, Taylor Swift continues to naturally write songs that resemble short stories, like " The Black Dog" about a couple sharing their location 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 houses next door for a familiar face.

Even weak wine can make you drunk if you drink too much.

In other words, Swift's poetry is still great, still brimming with vocabulary that makes us gasp in admiration, and the minimalist indie arrangements, centered around guitar and piano, by Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff continue to 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 serve as a foundation for the album makes the two-hour listening experience inevitably feel somewhat long and drawn out.

"Even weak wine, if drunk excessively, will make you drunk. A wise person, if they talk too much, even if their words are good, will become tiresome," or as the English idiom goes, "too much of a good thing can be bad."

Is Taylor Swift overwhelming the world?

Taylor Swift's constant presence has even given rise to the term "Taylor Swift fatigue," referring to the exhaustion of seeing her everywhere, hearing her music playing all the time, and having stories about her flooding every corner of social media.

Taylor's hard work (fans jokingly call her "the American ox") has recently propelled her from one peak to another, but in return, it has taken away the mystique that an artist needs – the feeling that she isn't always here to sing for us and showcase her life through her songs like an exhibition.

Ultimately, in art, sometimes disappearance is just as important as presence.

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