I’ve tried this before but I always mess up at some point. It’s surprisingly difficult to listen to music everyday, even if it’s less than an hour a day (usually) and one of those things everyone likes and does constantly.
These will mostly be first reactions after one listen. It’s inevitable I’ll have a lot to say about some albums and little to say about others.
My current plan with this is to do it as a weekly round up every Friday. Not sure if this works better or not date wise but it’s a good week end cap for me so I’ll see how it goes.
I’d like to plan out what I’m listening to each week and mark classic albums or those I’ve listened to already. I’m currently waiting on a turntable and have a stack of vinyls I’m planning on listening to, so as soon as I get that I will be going through those again.
Taylor Swift – The Life of a Showgirl
I thought the best way to start this was going for the two “biggest” albums of last year, first, commercially, and then critically.
I originally self-boycotted this on release because of Actually Romantic, the diss track that she wrote about Charli XCX, a response to her song Sympathy is a knife. Listening to that left a bad enough taste in my mouth to put me off the whole thing, but I still saw all the memes slandering it.
I’m a lifelong Taylor fan, ever since my family played Fearless on repeat in the car. Statistically, I think she is the artist I’ve listened to most, according to my ten year old last.fm account.
Despite that, I’ve had a rocky relationship with her recent releases. The last album I liked was probably Midnights, but I was very much underwhelmed still. I originally liked the Taylor’s Versions re-recordings though each one seemed worse than the last, feeling more and more phoned in and not capturing the emotions the originals did.
It finally was feeling like her prolificacy was consuming the quality of her music and I currently want nothing more for her than to take 2 or 3 years off of music before she releases something else!
This album is the greatest symptom of that – when your most delusional fans are convincing themselves that this whole thing is a joke (like what happened with BBC’s Sherlock finale), it’s probably not a good sign.
Having actually listened to it now, it’s about as bad as I expected, but I at least understand what she was aiming for. The whole showgirl concept gives it a feel similar to Reputation, an album I actually love (despite it being panned), but this mostly falls flat on its face. Quality wise, it feels like if you made a Taylor album comprised entirely of the worst tracks on each album. There’s some level of competency to them but they’re so bland and this time around they’re being ruined by awkward lyrics that come off as someone trying to be edgy.
The worst offender of this is easily Eldest Daughter, which I think may be her worst song ever. It’s like a conveyor belt of all these terrible lyrics that are trying too hard to be provocative, all while being framed around a Tiktok trend/”idea” that will inevitably date it terribly. It’s fascinatingly awful.
A few of the songs come close to being good but they’re interrupted by some awful lyric. I don’t think I need to mention Father Figure‘s “I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger”. A lot of this to me felt like Taylor trying her hand at being Lana Del Rey. If she’s not doing that, she’s trying to be Sabrina Carpenter (see Wood). There’s only a few songs that feel traditionally Taylor, including The Fate of Ophelia, which was the big hit, somehow. It has a lot of weird empty spaces and is far too wordy to be catchy, so I’m confused as to why this was so big, other than it being so on-brand for her.
It’s all capped off by a bizarre title track as a closer that might work if the album was better. It’s basically Taylor signing off the album and saying all these songs and the chaos she’s been singing about are all just part of being the big popstar she is. Also, Sabrina Carpenter is now actually here for some reason. The only thing I can think of is Taylor’s feud with Olivia Rodrigo and this being some attempt at slighting her over the Driver’s License thing that nobody cares about anymore.
Other than The Fate of Ophelia, the track that felt most classic Taylor to me was Ruin the Friendship. It has a message about living without regret told through a sad story about an old friend/potential lover that dies. It’s relatively stripped back and carried way more impact than any of the other songs for me.
She namedrops Abigail here, so I think this is part of the whole folklore story thing. I’ll leave that to the theorists and easter egg hunters, but it does make me wonder if this was written a while ago and maybe that’s why it’s a standout against these other songs.
Rosalía – LUX
I have much less to say about this, other than the fact it’s a much better album! This topped most of the year end lists I saw, so I thought it best to actually get around to listening to it. I saw a lot of shows last year and seemed to spend most of my time listening to music in preparation for those. I might keep it quieter this year and hopefully stay more on top of new releases.
Rosalía is someone I’ve also loved for a long time. I first heard of her when she released Los Ángeles, with a more traditional folk sound than her follow up album that brought her into the mainstream. Even then she was still doing something very different and she’s continued to bring in a variety of influences and genres as she’s grown as an artist. Art pop is one of my favourite genres so it’s unsurprising that I’ve loved pretty much everything she’s done.
Probably most striking, and potentially very innovative, is the incorporation of opera. I knew Berghain was the standout for a lot of critics, but I hadn’t read about it. I was blown away by how seamless so many of these classical sounds are brought in on this album. I like opera a lot, having been raised on it by my dad, so it’s really cool to see it actually used in a mainstream pop album, even if it’s someone more left-field like Rosalía.
I’ll definitely be revisiting this but my first impressions are incredibly positive and I’m not at all surprised it’s been as acclaimed as it has.
My favourite song here was Berghain, but I don’t think another person needs to write about how great that song is. I’ll just say the video is very funny and worth watching, so if you’ve not seen that then check it out, doubly so if you haven’t heard the song still.
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