Enough of the Swift scourge! MAUREEN CALLAHAN slams Taylor as a money-grabbing, narcissistic, wannabe poetess and says this intellectually stunted, clichéd new album commits the worst sin of all

Call it the tortured audience response.

A global market bombarded by Taylor Swift must now endure another album, another promotional cycle, another round of reckoning with ex-lovers and a level of navel-gazing that makes J.Lo look modest.

Then again, Swift has never had a sense of humor about herself, has she?

So here we are, tired of the Eras tour and movie, of the Taylor and Travis show, of Taylor on the cover of Time as 2023 Person of the Year, of the reissue of two older albums last year, of Taylor at the 2024 Golden Globes… expressing serious displeasure after a joke about her overexposure, and Taylor at the Grammys, just a few months ago, appearing to snub terminally ill legend Celine Dion in her rush to grab that trophy and promote your next project.

Swift allowed no respite for gratitude, no moment to take in her record-breaking achievement, or at least show some decorum.

No, just a rushed pitch for her latest project on free network airtime while feigning complete disbelief that she, little Tay-Tay! – had actually won another award.

It seems that Taylor Swift draws more inspiration not from real artists but from titans of commerce. According to the immortal ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’, she ‘must always be closing’ yet another transaction.

“I want to thank you,” Swift told her fans, “telling you a secret I’ve been keeping from you for the past two years.”

This latest Grammy, accepted seconds earlier, was already in Swift’s rearview mirror.

“My new album comes out April 19,” he continued. ‘It’s called “The Department of Tortured Poets.” I’m going to go post the cover right now backstage. Thank you I love you.’

I’m surely not the only one who needs a good, long Tracy Flick break from lukewarm pop.

We have reached Peak Swift, the supersaturated cultural water table, drenching ourselves with its narcissistic runoff and bilge. So many evildoers, so many hints of revenge, so many complaints and endless settling of accounts.

Enough! Make it stop! It’s no wonder there’s a stubborn conspiracy theory that posits Swift as a CIA psyop controlling everything from the Super Bowl to the 2024 presidential election. She could have been used in Gitmo to crush terrorists.

Swift is a scourge, responsible, among other things, for: The unforgivable trend of wearing friendship bracelets on middle-aged women; charging tween and teen fans thousands of dollars for tickets; cynically announcing new albums and then suddenly releasing other versions with only one or two tracks added, knowing that their fans will pay the price, or, as with ‘TTPD’, announcing that there is actually a double-length edition just a few hours in after its release.

In other words, another marketing ploy to scam fans into buying what they thought was everything.

On Thursday night, Swift released at least four different versions of ‘TTPD’ for the first time, starting at $12.99 each.

Then, when the clock struck midnight:

“It’s a surprise at 2 in the morning,” he wrote. ‘Here is the second installment of TTPD: The Anthology. 15 additional songs. And now the story is no longer mine… it’s all yours.’ Closed with a heart emoji. Of course.

The total price of each version of ‘TTPD’, at the time of writing, is just shy of $200. And that’s not to mention the expensive merchandise (a hoodie costs $75) on their official site.

Taylor became a billionaire last year. But this tactic, so typical of her, is not just about money. It’s a way to dominate the charts, break sales records; actually manipulate the system.

It all seems patently unfair, especially for an extremely limited artist. Not in vain did her colleagues remain impassive when she picked up that record-breaking Grammy this year.

Swift has been making music since 2006, but in all that time, she hasn’t grown beyond a few very short-sighted topics: famous ex-boyfriends (almost always terrible), her own victimization; For such a powerful woman, she is never to blame. , she was never the architect of her own misery and high school mean girl stuff, with Kim K as her main nemesis.

Swift may be 34 years old, but intellectually, philosophically, and emotionally she is forever stuck at 13. Her discography will never improve, it will only regress.

Doesn’t “tortured poetry” say it all?

It’s a teenager’s idea of ​​deep thoughts, the cover equally chilling: Taylor in her underwear, writhing, one arm around her breasts and one hand on her crotch, as if this connotes: finally! —romantic and sexual maturity.

The same goes for dropping ‘f***’ repeatedly in ‘TTPD’. Courtney Love is right.

“Taylor Swift is not important,” Love told the U.K.’s Evening Standard last week. “She may be a safe space for girls and she’s probably the Madonna of today, but she’s not interesting as an artist.”

Hallelujah! The reaction is brewing.

While the American press remains too timid, NME gave ‘TTPD’ three out of five stars, calling it ‘devoid of any stylistic change or notable evolution’, with ridiculous lyrics about Charlie Puth and ‘a tattooed Golden Retriever’.

This, from ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart’: ‘I’m so miserable / And no one knows it.’

That feeling should be the exclusive province of teenage girls.

What really stopped me was the second track of the same name. Judge for yourself.

“You’re not Dylan Thomas / I’m not Patti Smith,” Swift sings. Oh really.

“This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel / We’re modern idiots.”

These lyrics evince a superficial knowledge of a past counterculture, referencing artists and places far more original, thought-provoking, confrontational, and expansive than Swift could ever hope to be.

It’s a cheap name check. It makes Swift seem like everything she claims to hate: a try-hard, a phony, who would do anything to be cool.

Does anyone really think Taylor Swift has read ‘Just Kids’? If so, you would know that Patti Smith was Robert Mapplethorpe’s muse and that Dylan Thomas, some 33 years Smith’s senior, never lived in Chelsea.

This is what we call a fraud. Swift has no advantage. She has no interests outside her hermetic world of studio sessions with producer Jack Antonoff, dinners with Blake Lively and Gigi Hadid on Via Carota, and the next love interest she’ll whip into the public square.

She is cliché after cliché after cliché, the epitome of basic, and the worst thing someone so famous can be: a bore.

Taylor Swift, despite all that pre-‘TTPD’ press about Emily Dickinson being a distant relative (a dead cat and a ’23andMe’ DNA test and we’re all related to someone notable), doesn’t present herself as a reader, a thinker or intellect. If only she had some of the wit and bitingness of that other Swift, the great 17th century satirist Jonathan.

Poor me. She is a mere force of will, a triumph of showmanship, branding and ambition, but that’s all.

Let’s remember the real highlight of this year’s Grammys. He had nothing to do with Swift. That moment belonged to Tracy Chapman, performing her indelible 1988 hit ‘Fast Car’ with country star Luke Combs.

This is a song Swift could only dream of writing. In just over four minutes, ‘Fast Car’ builds an entire world around two characters and tells a story of youth, hope, fear, romance and abandonment that feels both specific and universal. Chapman created a masterpiece that transcends eras, genres, age or gender, identity politics, and socioeconomics.

Chapman emerged from a room full of his peers, more than 30 years later, speechless and crying.

Taylor Swift, for all her money and fame, will never achieve such artistry.

For those of us who are tired of being suffocated by the Swift industrial complex with this latest incarnation of an aspiring poet, well, for now, this undeniable failure will have to do.