Taylor Swift Is Proof That How We Critique Music Is Broken
Whether you love or hate “The Tortured Poets Department,” there is no way to adequately digest its 31 songs and opine on it within hours of its release.
You know what should take a fortnight? Album reviews.
Source: YouTube
The way we digest new music needs to be fixed.
Within less than 24 hours of Taylor Swift’s release of The Tortured Poets Department and her surprise anthology, the internet was flooded with an inescapable number of reviews. In the New York Times, Lindsay Zoladz said Swift’s 11th LP is “sprawling and often self-indulgent” and “full of detailed, referential lyrics that her fans will delight in decoding.” But as a long-time admirer of Swift, I have to ask: Where’s the “delight” in staying up until dawn to finish listening to an album as if it’s a college paper we’re cramming to complete by the morning?