Taylor Swift - 1989*

Picking a single is usually not about picking the best song. I haven't heard this other song so I can't judge whether it's as catchy as "Shake it off" but I can easily see why "Shake it Off" was chosen.

 

The chorus to "Blank Space" is one of her best choruses. That song should be a single.

 

I can also see why it was chosen: it was a relatively safe way to introduce her "new sound," especially compared to some of the other tracks that are even more extreme departures from her past work. But if "Style" isn't an all-time #1 record, I have learned nothing about pop music in 40+ years of listening to it.

 

I thought "Bad Blood" was going to be a savage take-down on the order of "Better Than Revenge," but it's actually sort of wink-wink funny. And another instant ear-worm. "Wildest Dreams," wow. I can hear the Lana Del Rey influence, but, as one of the early reviews noted, Taylor does flip the script to make the boy the one pining over the girl, instead of vice versa.

 

Don't have time to elaborate right now (I'm almost falling asleep as I type this), but after two listens I love '1989'.

 

"How You Get The Girl" has some kernel of Brian Wilson-ness to it. Not in the production, not in the vocals, barely in the melody (but a little), but in the feel, the spirit.

 

I don't know, I think the bonus track "You Are in Love" captures that same vibe much better.

 

How does it actually "sound" - are there musical nuances that one can find on all of her albums up to this point or is it loud pop-synth through and through?

 

There is certainly a lot of synth, but, as the New York Times review suggests, she's aiming at a sort of classicism and conservatism that the "80s pop" pre-release shorthand completely misses. "Style" and "Wildest Dreams" are like a fusion of the Ronettes and Shangri-Las, Darkness on the Edge of Town-era Springsteen, and Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer."

 

come on someone pm please i havent been able to listen to it. im the only ***** who is still downloading it.

 

I would also appreciate a p.m.

 

I'm gonna wait it out until Monday, but these last two pages have me excited.

 

Finally listening.

 

Or the only song she's ever written? It's yet another I-V-vi-IV pop song, verse and chorus.

A live version this time...

 

That's pretty funny, even after the ~tenth time, but, you know, why should I care if I'm not going to sing or play any of these songs myself? I get that Taylor's, and pretty much everybody else's, chord progressions are not adventurous (at all, apparently), but there's more to a song than its chords.

I do like a lot of music that, I assume, uses unconventional chords (no idea what they are though), time signatures (have some idea), guitar tunings (again, no idea what they are) and so on (for example Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa and Steely Dan). Sometimes this progressive spirit enhances the music, sometimes it doesn't. I guess her music could be better with different chord sequences, but I really don't care as long as I like what I hear.

 

Anyone else want to speculate as to what "Clean" is about?

 

You quite possibly like what you hear because of the I-V-vi-IV ear candy, it's obviously an irresistible magic formula. A typical 21st Century pop star will fall back on it to notch up at least one hit, and it might merit an eye-roll. The extraordinary thing about Taylor Swift is the shamelessness with which she deploys Pop Formula No. 1 in dozens upon dozens of songs, many of which are her biggest hits. New songs which are now being grandiloquently compared to The Beatles and described as quantum-leap breakthroughs, radical new directions and the best she's ever written, laughably deploy I-V-vi-IV yet again. My posting of the Axis Of Awesome video is exactly as predictable as Taylor Swift's music - I'm only posting it as often as she's churning out songs that would be applicable.

A few times on this forum, a study has been brought up which claims that pop music since the 60s has become increasingly homogenized and limited in terms of its melodic and harmonic movements. Taylor Swift would have to be example number one. Her music isn't just less sophisticated than Joni Mitchell's, it's some of the most formulaic pop music ever devised. If the likes of The Guardian are taking it seriously, IMO that's a poor reflection on the standards of music criticism. I don't agree that the technical details are irrelevant to anyone not playing the songs, because it's not just what is played, but what is heard. I suspect that even if someone is not aware of the musicology, they must have a sense when they hear the same thing a lot that it has a generic, cookie cutter quality. If that doesn't trouble you (after all, it does sound quite pleasant) then of course it's irrelevant.

 

Like most of her other songs, it's about a relationship, I think. But the way she transforms that subject matter into a sort of magical realism narrative is really something. I don't want to quote snippets of lyrics or try to analyze the lyrics: their maturity and brilliance is simply self-evident to my ears. "Clean" and "Style" are the two tracks here where she takes her music to the proverbial next level.

 

I don't really understand the beef some folks have with repetitive, common harmony in popular song. Folkloric type of music -- and pop music is kind of like electronic folk music, it's vernacular dance and story and courtship type of social music -- has often relied not only on limited harmonic difference but also repetition.

Great songwriters have stuck close to well worn, limited harmony in the past. I mean, Hank Williams is one of the greatest songwriters of all time and pretty much all his material cleaves to the same, similar harmonic foundation. Willie Dixon and Chuck Berry wrote a lot of great songs on basic I-IV-V blues harmony. I'd count them among the greatest songwriters of all time too. All of 'em stuck to pretty close and similar melodic constructions time and again too.

Plus harmony's totally malleable. You can take the same song and set it too a completely different chord pattern and it's still the same song. I used to do a lot of that as a young musician in an attempt to learn about and experiment with harmony -- reharmonize stuff.

Hell, you can make great music with little or no conventional harmony at all, like atonal lieder of Webern, or a incredibly narrow conventional diatonic harmony like a James Brown song. Or you can take a diatonic harmonic pattern and write a million new melodies to it and make it new, like the boppers did countless times with "I Got Rhythm" changes. Or you can write a song with a dense harmony so closely linked to the melody that they're hard to separate -- like "Round Midnight" or "Star Dust." Any of these approaches can work equally well to make great songs.

 

This is a complete different album i applaud her that, the album is good but not better than the others. Shake it Off now feels like a positive refresh between all those songs.

Yep some songs are repetitive other kind of childish (the style she is singing now aka "bad blood"). Her first album feels more mature now.

But i mean i am not a female american teen lol i'm a little out of place here but i still like Taylor.

 

All these things are relative. You can have too much twelve bar blues too, which may be why rock and roll burned it out in a couple of years before breaking free with the Beatles. I-V-vi-IV was an established cliche a decade before Taylor Swift started running it into the ground and shows no sign of going anywhere, the big song from Frozen is yet another example. What can I say? I like music to be creative and imaginative. Beatles comparisons keep being thrown up in this thread but what I love about The Beatles and 60s pop, the sheer out-of-the blue inspiration and free-spirited unpredictability, is wholly lacking in the samyness of modern pop like Taylor Swift. If you neither value or demand surprise and originality in pop music, you won't mind when a lot of it is very similar.

 

Well there are all kinds of surprises and things to connect with and be moved by in a song. And there are all kinds of different pleasures. I will say the longer I live the less I value novelty, the more I hear of the past in everything that's new and the more find myself mostly just interested in overall emotional impact.

Sure great break though innovations are amazing especially when they're also moving but I don't need every piece of music to be The Rite of Spring or Trout Mask Replica or every novel to be Ulysses or every poem to be The Waste Land to be absorbed by it.

Great break though works are awesome, essential to progress and rare but they're not the only thing I find moving or enjoyable. There's magic to me in something like the real conversational speech turned performance in something like "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" that fills me with joy, excitement, recognition, a sense of shared experience. These kinds of less easy to parse aspects of art -- not so much the plumbing of harmony and melody and such -- are the most important things to me, not that I also don't enjoy, say examining the profound structural symmetry and invention of something like Webern's Symphony Op. 21. But in the end I find I care about the emotional and visceral gestalt more than any of the particulars abstracted from the whole.

 

I'm aware that I'm probably talking at cross-purposes with Taylor Swift fans here, almost all the positive and elaborate comments she gets are wholly concerned with lyrics and I tend to be far more interested in music, that's my own bias. I suspect when Driver 8 says that with 'Clean' TS "takes her music to the proverbial next level" he means lyrics, since the music itself so doggedly refuses to contemplate any other level at all.

In my defense it isn't the fact of particular technical details in music that concerns me, except as a means to identify or describe what's there. I react emotionally to music too. But I think that's because of what it's made of, and if pop music is assembled from generic cliches, it sounds generic and cliched. In much the same way, brickwall limiting sounds fatiguing and monotonous regardless of whether we identify it as brickwall limiting on a waveform. We still react emotionally to it.

 

I don't know if there are any musicians on this thread, but I had to pop into the local Music & Arts store today to pick up an accessory for my son's trombone. They had a poster up announcing the new cd and offering 2-for-1 songbooks and free sheet music when you buy the new cd there.

 

I've been listening to pop music (and classical and jazz) for a long time, and heard it all before, and "Style" and "Clean" managed to surprise and enchant me. That's all I can ask for from music.