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The Magic of Taylor Swift’s Folklore
If you would’ve told me 5 years ago that I would play a new Taylor Swift album several times in amazement, I wouldn’t believe you. As much as I liked 1989 when it released, I wasn’t playing it that often. For one, I was in high school and nobody was bumping T-Swift outside of the scattered cliques of white women. At that point in my life, no matter how much I adored her perfect song “Style”, I was a pretty staunch listener of rap and R&B. There was occasional exceptions but it wasn’t often I’d actively listen to and discuss pop stars. Whenever I did hear about Taylor, it was through YouTube pop discussions, social media, and the incessant overplay of “Blank Space” and other past hits. Fast forward five years, my music taste and openness about my preferences have grown substantially. Yet, the relationship I have with Taylor remained as complicated as ever before her new album, folklore.
In between those five years, she would release two albums, reputation and Lover. 2017’s reputation is one of the most misguided blunders in pop music from the last decade. The writing is venomous but immature while the music is clunky, vapid, and obnoxious. It was a full scale artistic makeover after her glossier and much better 1989. To replace the sillier “Shake It Off”, Taylor would opt for the dark, bitter “Look What You Made Me Do.” It was an album filled with petty shots aimed at her…
