The Heartbreak Chronicles: Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Written in Blood

Pop music was developed and kept alive by addressing basic concerns, despite its fetishization of novel sounds and postures. Say you had a broken heart. What would you do? I recognize that one fairly well. That being said, each love failure is unique. My anguish, my broken desires, and my longing for healing—a form of obliterating possessiveness—are triggered by its lonely pain. A kid with a shattered heart tears and wants to be held, caressed, and nursed until she is old enough to know how to function.

Swift vs. Beyoncé: A Battle of Perspectives

As true now as it was then when torch singers and blues queens performed society’s sobbing sessions, so is it in the age of the one percent glitter goddess. Taylor Swift’s 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department, is as nasty and belligerent as a respectable girl’s work can be, with blood on her pages in a classic shade of red. Since the introduction of “Teardrops on My Guitar” eighteen years ago, Swift has connected lyrics with the heart’s mending.

Swift’s friend and competitor Beyoncé, who sang “Your best revenge is your paper,” reminded her audience that while feelings may require tending, a safe money account is what counts. This was a long cry from Swift’s Lemonade days when her shattered heart converted her into a carrier of social justice.

Swift feels that the finest form of retribution is her pen. “The Manuscript,” one of the first songs from Tortured Poets whose title was revealed back in February (a vinyl-only bonus track, it turns out, but a crucial framing device), features a woman rereading her own scripted account of a “torrid love affair.”

One of the few literary ambitions Swift aligns with this project is screenwriting. At the Grove Mall in Los Angeles, Swift worked with Spotify to establish a mini-library where fresh lyrics were penned in worn books and on pieces of parchment in the days preceding its release. The scene was a fans’ photo op that evoked high art and even scripture. From the photographs of the installation that I saw, every bound volume in the library has Swift’s name.

Swift’s Literary Influences: From Plath to Angelou

The standard assertion about Swift’s teasing lyrical disclosures (and it’s accurate on one level) is that they’re all about piquing audience curiosity. But she also borrows from a far older and more established lineage of wounded poets; confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, memoirists from Maya Angelou to Joyce Maynard, and Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux are just a few of the women who have utilized autobiography as a weapon of justice in our time.

The practice is as old as the women saints who struck abusive fathers and priests in the name of an early Christian Jesus.”I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay, how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only home I ever have,” And, of course, Swift’s re

The Confessional Tradition: Swift’s Modern Interpretation

Even in today’s blather-saturated cultural environment, a woman speaking out after quiet could appear revolutionary; that this is a great deed is a key tenet among many authors’ communities. “I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay, how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only home I ever have”

Natalie Ginsburg explains in Writing Down the Bones, the most popular writing handbook of the 20th century. Although Swift chuckles lightly in the album’s title track, “I think some things I never say,” this is the album where she makes such statements.

All the things she thinks, about love at least, delving farther into the intimate zone that is her métier than ever before. Sharing her deepest cravings and most mortifying fantasies, she fills in the blank spaces in the story of countless much-mediated affairs and believes this an act of independence that has altered and finally strengthened her. She spares no one, including herself; sometimes in these songs, she examines her naiveté and wishfulness through a grown woman’s lens and realizes she’s made a fool of herself. But she embraces her grief now. She alone will have the ultimate word on its shape and its ramifications.

This covers other people’s sides of her narrative. The tracks on Tortured Poets, most of which are mid- or uptempo ballads spun out in the gossamer manner that’s defined Swift’s confessional approach since Folklore, build a limited universe of private and even stolen moments, inhabited by only two people, Swift and a guy.

With a few instructive occasions that depart from the album’s concept, she seldom looks beyond their interactions. The objective is not to study the world, but to expose the minutiae of one sometimes-shared existence, to lay naked what others haven’t seen.

Tortured Poets is the pinnacle of a catalog full of songs in which Swift has led us inside the bedrooms where men pleasured or misguided her, the bars where they lured her, the lonely playgrounds where sat on swings with her and promised something they couldn’t provide. When she sings again that one of the most strange individuals on the album told her she was the love of her life, she’s sharing something nobody other heard. That’s the point. She’s testifying under oath.

The Art of Songwriting: Transforming Pain into Power

Swift’s musical style has always been dynamic and engrossing. She’s developed her sounds by mixing country’s sturdy song structures with R&B’s moods, rap’s cadences, and pop’s glitter; as a personality and a performer, she’s all arms, hugging the globe.

The music of Tortured Poets delivers that familiar embrace, with pop tunes that dazzle with erudition and meditative ones that weave lots of comforting aura around Swift’s ruminations. Beyond a virtually undetectable Post Malone appearance and a Florence Welch duet that also serves as an homage to Swift’s current exemplar/best-friendly rival Lana Del Rey, the album alternates between co-writes with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, the producers who have helped Swift find her mature sound, which blends all of her previous approaches without favoring any prevailing trend.

There are the rap-like, conversational lines, the soaring choruses, the delicate piano meditations, the yearning synth sounds. Antonoff’s tunes come closest to her post-1989 mainstream smashes; Dessner’s fulfill her intentions to remain an album artist. Swift has also composed two songs on her own, a rarity for her; both approach as near to savagery as she goes. As a continuous listen, Tortured Poets harkens back to high points throughout Swift’s career, creating a calming background that both supports and balances the harshness of her narrative.

The Celebrity Persona: Swift’s Evolution as an Artist

Remember that parchment and her quill pen; her songs are her new testaments. It’s a power play, but for many fans, especially women, this impulse to be decisive seems like an essential correction to the misrepresentations or silence they meet from ill-intentioned or cluelessly entitled males.

Swift carries out her battle preparations with her pen, as always, especially when she lingers on the work and play of emotional connection. Her songs are hyper-focused, brimming over with detail, reducing the tangle of desire, projection, communion, and sorrow that characterizes romance into one sharp perspective, her own. She portrays her concept so strongly that it goes beyond confession and becomes a type of writing that can’t be refuted.

Swift has occasionally taken this idea to heart in the past, notably on her once-scorned, now revered hip-hop effort Reputation. But now she’s shouting from the hills, sparing no one, including herself as she attempts to prop up one man’s diminishing interest and then falls for others’ dishonesty.

“I know my pain is such an imposition,” Swift sang in last year’s “You’re Losing Me,” a prequel to the explosive confessional mode of Tortured Poets, where that pain grows nearly suicidal, feeds romantic obsession, and drives her to become a “functional alcoholic” and a madwoman who finds strength in chaos in a way that recalls her friend Emma Stone’s cathartic performance as Bella in Poor Things.

These accounts of insane behavior reinforce the message that everyone had better be scared of this album: especially her exes, but also her business associates, the media, and yes, her fans, who are not spared in her dissection of just who’s made her miserable over the past few years. Swift wails in the album’s window-smashing centerpiece carrying the same title; in “Daddy He Loves Me,” she goes about screaming with her dress undone and threatens to burn down her whole world….

I’m not going into the dirty specifics; those who desire them may listen to Tortured Poets themselves and readily unearth them. They’re spelled out so plainly that anyone who’s followed Swift’s obsessively chronicled life would immediately recognize who’s who: the depressive on the heath, the tattooed golden retriever in her dressing room.

Here’s my reading of her album-as-novel — others’ interpretations may vary: Swift’s first-person protagonist (let’s call her “Taylor”) begins in memory of a long-ago love affair that left her melancholy but on civil terms, then has an early meeting with a tempting rogue, who declares he’s the Dylan Thomas to her Patti Smith; no, she says, though she’s sorely tempted, we’re “modern idiots,” and she leaves him behind for a while.

Then we see scenes from a suffocating marriage to a sad child-man. “So long, London,” she exclaims, departing that dead end. From then on it’s the rogue on all cylinders. They bond, reject the daddy figures who say they’re bad for one another, and speak about rings and baby carriages. Those dads continue to intrude on my newfound liberty.

Swift writes about sensual desire in this main story arc like she has never written about it before: she’s “fresh out the slammer” (ouch, the terminology) her bedsheets are on fire, and she can’t stop rhapsodizing about this new love object and her dedication to their illicit hunger for each other.

It’s a “Love Story,” updated and supersized, with a proper Romeo at its center — a perfect match who’s also a catastrophic one. Swift peppers this section of Tortured Poets with name-drops (“Jack” we know, “Lucy” might be a tricky slap at Romeo, hard to tell) and instantly searchable references; he sends her a song by The Blue Nile and traces hearts on her face but tells revolting jokes in the bar before eventually revealing himself as a cad, a liar, a coward. She recovers, but not really

As a celebrity, Swift partners with others: her pals who are models and artists; her actor/musician/athlete consorts; brands; and even (warily) political causes. And with her fans, the co-creators of her celebrity. Her backstories are important to Swift’s attraction because they both retain her human size and increase her fame. Swift’s genius is wrapped up in her deployment of celebrity, a fluid state in which a genuine existence becomes legendary. Like no other before, she’s transformed her spotlit day-to-day into a conceptual project touching on women’s independence, creative desire, and the position of the intimate in the public arena.

It takes some effort to uncover the “we” in Swift’s soliloquies. There are plenty of songs on Tortured Poets in which others will find their own experiences, from the sultry blue eroticism of “Down Bad” to the click of recognition in “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can).” But throughout the album, Swift’s unwavering insistence that these songs speak for and to herself remains the main vehicle through which, negotiating unimaginable levels of renown, she continues to insist on speaking only for herself.

She also faces the way celebrity has cost her, fully pursuing concerns she suggested on Reputation and in “Anti-Hero.” There are signs, more than hints, that her romance with the rogue was derailed partially because her business associates considered it problematic, a danger to her prized reputation.

And when she looks away from the man-woman conundrum, Swift ponders the fleeting nature of the success that has made private decisions nearly impossible. A beautiful minuet co-written with Dessner, “Clara Bow” establishes a time-lapsed dialog between Swift and the power figures who’ve helped engineer her elevation even as she knows they won’t be bothered with her impending annihilation.

“You look like Clara Bow,” they comment, then later, “You look like Stevie Nicks in ’75.” Then, a turn: “You look like Taylor Swift,” the suits (or is it the public, the audience?) say. “You’ve got edge she never did.” The music stops abruptly — lights out. This scene evocative of All About Eve shows worries that all of Swift’s love songs seldom connect with.

Swift’s Impact: Redefining Celebrity and Empowering Women

Swift’s ability to make the personal enormous without worrying about its translation into universals is one of the reasons she moved from being a conventional pop artist to sharing space with Beyoncé as the defining spirit of the age. In her two decades of speaking out against heartbreakers, Swift has called out gaslighting, belittling, neglect, false promises, and all the hidden injuries that lovers inflict on one other and that a sexist culture often ignores or forgives more easily from men.

In “The Manuscript,” the additional track that alludes to a love story outside the Tortured Poets frame, she sings about being a young lady with an older guy who prepares “coffee in a French press” and then “only eating kids cereal” and sleeping in her mother’s bed after he dumps her. Any educated Swift fan’s thoughts will rac

With Tortured Poets, Swift is less strategic than usual, letting the facts fall as they might in a confession session among friends, without trying to convert them from unpleasant recollections into points of connection. She’s only sharing. Swift bears every fracture in her wounded heart as a method of questioning power hierarchies, suggesting that emotional work that males may avoid is yet needed from women who seem to govern the globe.

Her pop side (and presumably the influence of her co-writers) shines in the way she balances the claustrophobic referentiality of her writing with brilliant wordplay and well-crafted expressive gestures.

Throughout Tortured Poets, Swift is trying to work out how emotional violence occurs: how males inflict it on women and how women nourish it within themselves. It’s worth considering how helpful such a violent evisceration of one privileged private life can be in a bigger social or political sense; critics, like Leah Donnella in an excellent 2018 piece on the limitations of the songwriter’s reach, have addressed that topic regarding Swift’s songs for years.

But we should explore why Swift’s work seems so strong to so many — why she has become, in the eyes of millions, a standard-bearer and a freedom warrior. Unlike Beyoncé, who likes a good symbol and is always thinking about history and assisting the culture and communities she claims, Swift is making an ongoing statement about smaller tales still having an influence.

Her call-outs might be viewed as petty, demonstrating entitlement or even narcissism. But they’re also part of her struggle with the very concept of significance and challenging hierarchies that have shown to be so tenacious they might feel immovable. That Swift has reached such a peak of influence in the wake of the #MeToo movement isn’t an accident; even as that chapter in feminism’s history can seem to be closing, she insists on saying, “Believe me.” That isn’t the same as saying “believe all women,” but by laying claim to disputed storylines and fighting against silence she at the very least reminds listeners that such actions matter.

Conclusion: Swift’s Legacy in the Modern Music Landscape

while I listened to Tortured Poets, I couldn’t help but think of Sinéad O’Connor’s song “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance,” which she recorded while she was still in her prime and hadn’t yet been abandoned by the mainstream for her insistence on speaking politics.

Like her finest work, Swift’s lyrics are fairly precise, reportedly about a former manager and boyfriend, but her conviction and directness expand their reach. It was shocking and rare in 1990 that a lady in her mid-twenties would confront a condescending guy in this way. Taylor Swift emerged in popularity in a culture that was already beginning to create a place for such testimonials if not wholly equipped to celebrate them. She has enhanced the probability that they will be heard. “I talk and you won’t listen to me,” O’Connor wailed. “I know your answer already.” Swift doesn’t have to worry

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