Three days following Taylor Swift’s release of her 31-track new album The Tortured Poets Department / The Anthology, Pitchfork released their reviews that rated 6.6 / 6 for the first and second half of the album, respectively.
I believe writing the Pitchfork review of a Taylor Swift album should earn you the medal of freedom for your courage.
–– Louie @DJLouieXIV, X
Swifties quickly flooded the comment section under Pitchfork’s twitter post–speaking any slightest negativity unanonymously against the most passionate and gigantic fan base on earth requires extra courage and care. When there isn’t a ground truth but exists multiple conflicting believes, how influencial voices speak become a tricky issue.
Maybe, this reflects that information design should not merely be about persuasion over perfectly rational utility maximizers. At least in this very case, it’s about managing aggregated emotions (fury, in this case) as well as the game-changing popularity that distorted opinions to an unprecedented extent. Treating the review just as a scalar that reflects a reviewer’s conflicting opinion that deviated from the floating expectation of her most enthusiastic fan base is somewhat insufficient in capturing the nuance in maneuvering public opinion.
To begin with, first it is important to bear in mind that in modern music industry, pop singers are characters built by the artist representing him/her, as well as producers, writers, musicians and engineers and public relation teams, and most importantly, under their operating managers and for their labels. As the famous saying goes
Art is Art. Everything else is everything else.
–– Ad Reinhardt
Popular music belongs to the latter collection–it transcends multi-faceted motives throughout its lifecycle: the artistic or career pursuit of the artist, the joint effort of the production team, the label’s incentive, push and compromises, to name a few. There is simply too many ugly issues well tangled and camouflaged behind a 3-minute hit. For example, for The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology that Swift maximally bloated with 15 (15!) additional songs. Fans cheer for such prolificus, as they interpret and reinterpret of the sheer quantity of clues and keywords over scrutiny of the lyrics–as if Swift would have us believe that this album represents an unprecedented level of access to her inner life. It’s not her fault though:
This data-dump release strategy is not at all unique to Swift; it’s a concession to the modern music economy, which incentivizes artists to batch as many songs as possible, in as many packages as possible, to juice streams and sales.
If the above is somehow straightforwardly true with a tender warning of the artist’s compromise, the true bomb of the review is remarkably courageous:
It’s not Swift’s fault that we’re so obsessed with her, but this album gives the impression that she can’t quite hear herself over the roar of the crowd. Tearjerkers like “So Long, London” and “loml” fall short when every lyric carries equal weight. There’s no hierarchy of tragic detail; these songs fail to distill an overarching emotional truth, tending to smother rather than sting. It would help if Swift were exploring new musical ideas, but she is largely retreading old territory—unsurprising, perhaps, given that the last three years of her life have been consumed by re-recording her old albums and touring her past selves. The new music is colored in familiar shades of Antonoff (sparse drum programming, twinkly synths) and Dessner (suppler, more strings). Songs sound like other songs—“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” like Midnights’ “Mastermind”; the intro of “So Long, London” like that of Folklore’s “My Tears Ricochet.” Her melodies feel staid, like they are made to fit the music, rather than the other way around.
Despite recent criticism of Pitchfork getting soft and somewhat biased, it is still regarded as perhaps one of the most influential and professional voice in music. Music reviews are multi-faceted. Because evaluating a product (or, art, if you’d prefer) on a 0-10 scale is just unrealistic and impossible. Looking at its written reviews, one can find how the media and its reviewers carefully balance public opinion, personal bias as well as mere quality of the music so as to sustain reputation as well as lead the opinions. It’s delicate. But, what’s left though, at the end of the day when the bubbles fade out, is music.