The real main character in Swift’s latest album, ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ isn’t an ex, but Swift herself. How she’s chosen to narrate her own life, and what she’s chosen to reveal through her music, is telling.
Long before anyone heard a note, Taylor Swift’s new album caused controversy among the grammarians.
The fuss was about the title, The Tortured Poets Department, and its conspicuously absent apostrophe. Should “poets” not have been possessive? If it had been, was the singular or plural more appropriate? Was this a mistake? Or by design? English teachers, grammar hobbyists, and the standards editor of The New York Times weighed in. There is, they said, no intrinsically correct answer—just one that differs based on the album title’s intended meaning. The Tortured Poet’s Department, for example, would imply a department belonging to a singular tortured poet, and perhaps her place of work or where one could go to find her. The Tortured Poets’ Department would suggest a similar situation, just with all the tortured poets. In omitting the apostrophe altogether, it’s the authors themselves who go under the microscope in The Tortured Poets Department—though perhaps the singular would have been most appropriate.
Few pop stars make their authorial voices as central to their work as Taylor Swift. She broke out in country music, a genre in which storytelling is fundamental. She writes her own songs, which are personal and, increasingly, meta-textual, in the sense that she has begun to tell stories about fame and its inherent self-mythologizing. In the best parts of The Tortured Poets Department, Swift advances this work, writing about herself not just as Taylor Swift the person but as Taylor Swift the performance. “This town is fake, but you’re the real thing,” coos an industry insider to a young Swift in “Clara Bow,” the closing track of the double album’s first half. But the Swift who wrote the song knows that “the real thing” is itself a sham when the job is telling tales. The Tortured Poets Department is full of its own stories—of goodbyes and getaways and ghosting—but its central character is Taylor Swift—author. And it’s consumed by whether or not she is a reliable narrator.
What does it mean to write your own life? On “How Did It End,” Swift processes a breakup through the need to explain it—to worried friends and eager gossipers alike—and sees the story become theirs before she’s even figured out the true answer for herself. “Come one, come all, it’s happening again,” she sings, announcing her own heartbreak. In the first verse, Swift’s use of “we” as she explores what went wrong seems to include just herself and her former partner. But by the second, the circle extends to friends, then cousins, then people around town. By the end, they’ve all drawn their conclusions—despite the fact that Swift herself is still asking the titular question.
Perhaps less subtly, “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” underscores that what we see from Swift is often an illusion. “Lights, camera, bitch, smile—even if you want to die,” she sings, over poppy production that evokes the closing numbers of her blockbuster Eras Tour. This song is a statement about an emotionally turbulent period in her life, sure, and you feel for her, but it’s also about what it means to be a performer and a professional—and a good one. “Try and come for my job,” Swift says, tossed off, at the end of the track. If you read the separation of the personal and professional selves on the song as healthy, it’s really a song about competence. Swift is practically begging her audience to understand that she is…
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