The Performative Poets Department

In The Tortured Poets Department, American bard and billionaire Taylor Swift invokes the story of Cassandra, the Trojan princess who receives the gift of clairvoyance from the Greek god Apollo, a lover who later curses her never to be believed. “They knew, they knew, they knew the whole time / That I was onto something / The family, the pure greed, the Christian chorus line,” she sings on “Cassandra,” a folk-pop paean to going out on a limb to warn everyone about an unnamed dynasty of religious hypocrites. One of a pair of songs that seem to address the schism between Swift and Kim Kardashian, “Cassandra” implies that the ancient mystic got whacked because her prophecies infuriated the masses: “So they killed Cassandra first ’cause she feared the worst / And tried to tell the town.” But in the myth, spelled out in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the oracle survived the sack of Troy and was later murdered by Clytemnestra, the avenging wife of the tragedy’s titular king. Kanye West’s cavorting with white supremacists and Kardashian’s harrowing divorce from the man she torched Swift’s friendship to defend must feel like a lifetime “I told you so” card for the “Bad Blood” singer. But the metaphor is a stretch. People have always been suspicious of Kim and Ye. Poets assigns allegorical importance to the singer-songwriter’s struggles, leaning into a love of literary allusions and piling the weight of history onto its wounded aphorisms. Swift cherishes a delicate distortion.

Neither a straightforward breakup album nor a Reputation-grade heel turn, Poets, Swift’s 11th album, recounts private tension and public dissension between the end of her six-year romance with actor Joe Alwyn, her contentious stint with the 1975’s Matty Healy, and her courtship of NFL star Travis Kelce. It delivers a self-conscious counterpoint to the conquering majesty of the Eras Tour, fusing the bucolic soul-searching of folklore to the catchy, career-spanning reflection of Midnights. Poets also seems informed by Swift’s recent spelunking in Speak Now and 1989 tracks; the new album, touted as a 16-song affair but later bolstered by another 15 for a surprise “anthology” album, balances sparse folk-pop jams with Jack Antonoff and roomier Aaron Dessner collabs. While the Swifties wait for the singer’s campaign of re-recordings to barrel into the trap-pop and acrimony of 2017’s Reputation, Poets borrows its defensiveness to pick apart the foibles of exes and to express exhaustion with being in earshot of thousands of strangers’ unsolicited opinions. Mapping the mastermind’s machinations, you catch her wielding tall tales about herself in defense. In the threatening “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” she approaches Boo Radley territory: “So all you kids can sneak into my house with all the cobwebs / I’m always drunk on my own tears, isn’t that what they all said? / That I’ll sue you if you step on my lawn?”

In the real world, Taylor Swift is subject to close scrutiny and abrupt reprisal, but in between the lines of pages housing her lyrics, she is invincible. The odds and the analogies stack in her favor. Women of the past become touchstones for the sexist doubt and dismissal she faces. “I Hate It Here” unpacks an affinity for a gripping period piece — “You see, I was a debutante in another life” — as it seeks creative forms of escape from its problems: “I hate it here so I will go to secret gardens in my mind / People need a key to get to, the only one is mine.” It invokes the Frances Hodgson Burnett story and Bruce Springsteen song about girls and women slipping off to idyllic spaces of retreat, borrowing narrative devices from romance and fantasy stories about time travel and pocket universes: “My friends used to play a game where / We would pick a decade / We wished we could live in instead of this / I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists / And getting married off for the highest bid.”

A screenshot of those lyrics went viral over the weekend, trimming a treacly resolution: “Seems like it was never even fun back then / Nostalgia is a mind’s trick / If I’d been there, I’d hate it.” Having lingered in the atmosphere for too long, Swift doesn’t enjoy the most charitable interpretation. Musing about decamping to the Andrew Jackson years and switching racism off like an Instagram filter presented the irresistible opportunity to decry self-absorbed 2020s white-feminist capitalism, painting Swift as a jet-setter and tycoon. You’d think she’d be able to telegraph that response, as a history buff and a lightning rod for discourse. Slavery was still legal! But The Tortured Poets Department finds the star more interested in redrawing boundaries following an immutable media blitz. After reaching a higher, more turbulent plane of fame and losing battles in her personal life, Taylor Swift, like Kendrick Lamar in “Savior” and Doja Cat in “Demon,” is going to need you to back away slowly.

Poets’ title track lays out its tools: a sleek blend of synth-pop, hip-hop, and heartland rock; a centuries-old literary reference; a sighing vocal; and an apparent tribute to the speedy, highly publicized-and-criticized relationship with Healy. Last year, the duo’s fling sparked a minor Swiftie mutiny when the “Love It If We Made It” singer drew accusations of racism after a high-stepping onstage gesture was interpreted as a Nazi salute and a chortle at jokes about Ice Spice being Asian in a taping of The Adam Friedland Show. Fans expressed displeasure in hashtags and chats with news outlets; the duo went their separate ways a few weeks later. This was apparently a supercharging event. Nothing galvanizes Taylor Swift like being told what she can’t or shouldn’t do. She once released “The Man” — a withering update on the office gender politics of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” — after her masters changed hands between male record execs. She’s great at identifying and isolating clear-cut hero-and-villain distinctions. Revisit the Album of the Year acceptance speech, which shaded Ye: “There are going to be people along the way who try to undercut your success …” Poets’ fog of war obscures the uncomfortable particulars of the schism in the fandom. Her many 2023 complainants are mere grunts in its viewfinder, small-town gossips to strut for, like Bonnie Raitt in “Something to Talk About.”

Poets adapts trauma for the world stage, deeming forbidden love to be a sexier story than all the real-life parasocial petitioning. (“My followers worried that my man was secretly racist” is perhaps the most 2024 story. “We put Ice Spice in a potentially profoundly uncomfortable position” is more juicy abandoned real estate.) Swift sells conciliatory reproval of white conservative culture in “But Daddy I Love Him,” denouncing the kind of woman her opponents and some fans fret about her becoming — the wealthy Northeast Protestant brandishing faith like a blade against anyone outside their ethno-geographic siloes: “Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best / Clutching their pearls, sighing, ‘What a mess’ / I just learned these people try and save you / ’Cause they hate you.” It is brilliant, a breathtaking deflection in a country song that jabs the listener with the old TayTay sound and then seethes in perfect elocution as it builds toward the hushed assertiveness of a guest of honor inviting you to leave a soirée: “God save the most judgmental creeps / Who say they want what’s best for me.” Swift is right to stress that there’s no merch bundle that includes a say in her love life. But the true public-relations feat of “Daddy” is changing the subject from accusations of coddling bigotry to an examination of faith-based striations within white society.

Swift, who moved to Nashville to write country songs after growing up on a Pennsylvania Christmas tree farm, writes alluringly about the shortcomings of small-town social mores. As Midnights visited her past, it chronicled a nagging yearning for a better life than the one that seemed available, framing the performer’s ascendance as a hero’s journey. Poets surveys contempt and faded promise, weaponizing the rootsy aesthetic of the star’s early career two ways: It supplies the log cabin for the languishing and the perch for the trenchant observations about the flaws of the various parties who have gotten on her bad side over the last three years. She approaches not as international pop juggernaut but as the “dutiful daughter” of Americana, the Nashville nice girl, when she fixates on the callous judgment of devout women, guessing more than once that her holier-than-thou challengers would never pray for her.

The implication that there is no amount of nobility you can perform that throws this contingent off your tail is delicious, and when the singer lays off lashing out for bad press Healy might’ve defused if he had responded less caustically and defensively, she eases into lush meditations on moral quandaries. “Guilty As Sin” conjures Madonna: “What if I roll the stone away? / They’re gonna crucify me anyway.” Editing another epic, “Sin” envisions a sepulcher as a shield against assassins. “Fresh Out the Slammer” frames a cohabitation on life support as Fed time: “Handcuffed to the spell I was under / For just one hour of sunshine / Years of labor, locks, and ceilings / In the shade of how he was feeling.” Placing these songs near “So Long, London” — which namechecks the site of the Alwyn family’s Christmas polar-bear plunge — excites. You don’t expect the writer’s sympathy to lie with the rebound imbroglio. (The sentiment makes the more funereal folklore and evermore songs seem less fictional in retrospect.)

Exploring confounding ripples in her private life, Taylor Swift reaches stasis in her professional one. The Antonoff and Dessner songs are, with a handful of exceptions, situated in an oil-and-water arrangement, with the Antonoff tunes largely coming first and carefully teasing out pop hooks while the Dessner songs scatter lively accompaniments into mostly acoustic reflections. The credits bear out the differences in the two halves of what Swift is referring to as an anthology. Up front, there’s Jack, a multi-instrumentalist, and players from his orbit; on the back, it’s Dessner, members of Beirut and Wilco, and an orchestra.

With the Bleachers front man, Swift peruses familiar pockets. The two-note R&B cadence of “Down Bad” recalls “Midnight Rain”; the one in the Seussian “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” resembles the bridge in Reputation’s “King of My Heart.” Swift plays it straight in her duets with Florence Welch and Post Malone, selling unadorned emotion while her guests lean into the eccentricities in their vocal deliveries. The denser Dessner tracks almost seem to ask for more from the singer, teasing out chameleonic tendencies. The piano ballad “How Did It End?” dabbles in the breathy intimacy of a Billie Eilish or Fiona Apple; Swift greets the ’90s alt-rock airs of “So High School” with the gorgeous reediness of a Sheryl Crow or Aimee Mann. These performances can make the synth-pop plays seem calculating, like obligations to draft hits to play on the tours which boost local economies. The Antonoff cuts reach for the synth-inflected gravity of broken-hearted ’80s rockers like Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” or “Never Gonna Be the Same Again” off Bob Dylan’s Empire Burlesque, while seeking common ground between the autumnal folklore and evermore and the brisk “Cruel Summer.” But then the Dessner tracks affix a more alluring (Taylor’s Version) onto the main album with focused extras that address the same ideas while dispensing with the coating of self-aware slickness. Listeners choose their own adventures.

The over-two-hour anthology looks to recapture the streaming-service success of long albums by Drake, Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar, and others in this decade. But pieces stymied by overwrought lines — “It was the age of him,” “The Manuscript” announces imperiously — undercut the project of uplifting this work as epochal literature. They don’t hold up to the referential melodrama of “The Albatross,” whose image of the woman locked away in a tower appears to allude to the imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots in the wake of the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley, or “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” whose thirst for supernatural revenge recalls witch trials and Carrie. The country-turned-pop star playing with the National bros, saying “fuck” a lot, and name dropping the Blue Nile, the Starting Line, Patti Smith, and Stevie Nicks seems to ache for a stranger career path, in spite of Poets’ pointed accessibility. But you have to also entertain the possibility that this restlessness is another facet of the performance, just as much a thematic conceit as Poets’ bombastic phrasing and possessions of tragic figures, that while she’s very invested in broadcasting the impression that she’s bristling at the myriad expectations that come with being perceived by millions, the pop prognosticator is still cannily aware of what everyone wants and here to serve.