The 1980s theme felt like a colour filter rather than a meaningful tribute, and the motif-heavy lyrics seemed like a step back. Swift teased the album by saying it was her “most sonically cohesive” ever, and the more that was shared of it, especially the lifelessly twee ‘Welcome To New York’, the more that seemed like something to be wary of. It seemed, from the repetitive drive of ‘Shake It Off’ and ‘Out of the Woods,’ that she had condensed her lyricism from her usual narrative style into a string of pretty aphorisms that could almost have been written to become perfect social media updates (they then actually performed that purpose, later in the build-up to 1989‘s release). This sounds like a criticism, and when Swift shared the first three singles from her upcoming album, it was meant as one. The question on people’s lips when Swift announced the concept of her new record was “how does someone born in 1989 make an album that pays homage to what the late ’80s sounded like?”, but they missed a crucial fact: people born later than Swift do this every single day, with the filters on their iPhones. Taylor Swift’s latest – her first “documented, official pop album – is the musical equivalent of a ’80s photograph cropped, filtered and reposted with a #tbt caption.
20 years from now, if my kids want to know what pop sounded like in the Instagram era, I’ll hand them 1989.
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