Has Taylor Swift peaked?
the Beatles. She is halfway through the most lucrative concert tour ever. A film version of it grossed over $260m at the box office last year.
On April 19th she released a double album entitled “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology". Over the course of 31 songs, Ms Swift wields her scalpel and dissects every inch of her recent relationships. Few songwriters have been better at transmuting heartbreak into hits.
(“The high", as she sang on “Blank Space", has surely always been “worth the pain".) Unfortunately, on this album, she has eschewed danceable pop for something as downcast as the title implies. Gone are the irresistibly catchy choruses of “I Knew You Were Trouble" and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together", replaced with dreamy synths, muted drums and languorous vocals. Ms Swift can do melancholy and wistfulness well.
Yet “The Tortured Poets Department" is mournful without being memorable. For a woman who launched her career as a precocious country-singing teen, her new lyrics sound jarringly immature, with unimaginative rhymes. “Like I lost my twin / Fuck it if I can’t have him," she sings in “Down Bad".
It is a sign of her stardom that many Swifties rushed to buy the record anyway: within a day of its release “The Tortured Poets Department" sold 1.4m copies in America. But some are breaking ranks to confess that they think the songs are underwhelming and samey. Is Ms Swift falling into the trap that ensnares those who reach the highest echelons of their fields, from auteurs to chief executives? Perhaps no one—including her songwriting collaborators—wants to tell music’s biggest star that her tunes are bland.
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