Ode to a Missing Apostrophe: Taylor's Brilliant, Tortured Poetry Powers Melancholy Anthology

 

I suspect every English teacher has a grammatical pet peeve (or 50), an error seemingly so basic that we just can't fathom how we continue to see it so frequently. As my students (the ones who mostly stayed awake, anyway) could tell you, mine is excessive apostrophe usage. It bothers me so much that early in my career I dubbed it the "slutty apostrophe" and have continued to use the term for the past couple decades, hoping nobody cancels me for being disrespectful to an item of punctuation.

I'm not sure how many needless apostrophes I've helped to eliminate in my classroom, social media, or during the dreaded Christmas card season, but I've always felt like it's a battle worth fighting. It became enough a part of my identity that when I joined Twitter, one of my former students, a young woman, messaged me: "You HAVE to be @sluttyapostrophe!!!" and a handle was born.

Thus, when Taylor Swift let slip a few months back that her new album was to be called The Tortured Poets Department, well, you could color me perplexed. Taylor is extremely detail-oriented. Nothing she does publicly is an accident. But there's just no good grammatical reason that "Poets" doesn't have a possessive apostrophe. It is the much less common inverse of the slutty apostrophe: the absent apostrophe. 

And then the album came out, and I had more questions besides "why no apostrophe?" Questions like:

Why does Taylor keep letting Jack Antonoff get away with it?

Why release what is essentially a B-sides album a mere two hours after releasing TTPD?

What, exactly, would be the allure of living in the 1830s (minus the racists and dowries)?

I listened to the album a couple times through and fired off a hot take on Facebook about all 31 songs sounding basically the same, smug in my ability to be objective about the only topic I even bother to resuscitate this blog for anymore. I kept listening, though. Particularly to the the first half of the Anthology. And I came to the same conclusion I usually come to whenever I perform any serious self-examination: 

I'm an idiot. 

Taylor always knows what she's doing. I still have no idea why there's no apostrophe on "Poets." But she does, and I'll bet that reason rules, somehow. Because TTPD is amazing (TTPD: The Anthology less so, but we'll get to that later). 

Taylor has been almost comically (intentionally, even?) misguided about picking lead singles from her previous albums, but from the opening strains of "Fortnight," it's clear she nailed this one. No one can make a couplet like "I love you/it's ruining my life" land like she can. Then there's that gorgeous bridge/outro with the first of several Florida getaway references. The first track is already better than anything on Midnights, which is not an album I've returned to much since it came out; whereas, I can see harkening back often to TTPD.

The album sails along with two more songs I've added to my "Best of Taylor Swift" Spotify playlist, the title track and the slightly upbeat (compared to the rest of TTPD, anyway) "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys," and one that's not bad but just missed the cut, "Down Bad." 

Next comes her now traditionally emotionally turbulent track five: "So Long, London." It's not "All Too Well," because nothing can be "All Too Well," but damn...Jake just nodded to Joe across the bar and offered to buy him a scotch. She sounds more wounded and rueful when she sings about Alwyn than she does angry (she saves the rage for Matty Healy, a person I am only vaguely familiar with), but after comparing the work she did to save their relationship to giving CPR, she gets off the searing "I'm pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free," and that's gotta sting. 

"London" transitions into the soaring "But Daddy I Love Him," which contains one of the few instances of levity on the generally melancholy TTPD, with the cheeky "I'm having his baby/No, I'm not, but you should see your faces." I cannot get past the rare cringy verbiage of "Fresh Out the Slammer;" although, it is amusing for me to wonder how many of her younger fans needed to Google what a "slammer" is, presumably alongside "who is Stevie Nicks?" on "Clara Bow," the latter being a name even my elderly ass only vaguely recognized.

I'm gonna declare "Florida" with Florence + The Machine to be Taylor's best collaboration with a female artist, edging out The Chicks on "Soon You'll Get Better" and Haim on "No Body, No Crime." It seems like she has been reluctant to be upstaged by other women on past tunes, as they haven't been given much to do. But Florence Welch is having none of it; she wails her verse, and their voices collide spectacularly on the bombastic chorus, which is refreshingly jarring on a mostly laid back album.

What follows is a comparatively weaker section of the album, with the mostly unremarkable "Guilty as Sin" (I'll let more passionate Swifties figure out if "One slip and falling back into the hedge maze/Oh what a way to die" is an oblique reference to The Shining), "I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)," and "loml" sandwiching the anthemic highlight "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" with her iconic response to the chorus' titular question: "Well, you should be." Cue John Mayer, Kanye West, Joe Jonas, etc. nodding in morose agreement. 

The closest thing to a bop on TTPD follows, as Taylor gleefully lilts through lines like "I cry a lot, but I am so productive/It's an art," on "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart," an absolute masterclass in smiling through the pain. This tune has the best post-"Fortnight" chance of being a radio staple imo, although I'm usually wrong about which ones will stick ("Karma" is probably Midnights' biggest hit, for instance; I'm not a fan). 

The Tortured Poets Department climaxes with Taylor unleashing her scorn for Healy (allegedly) on "The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived." Its structure is similar to Billie Eilish's magnificent "Happier Than Ever," and I mean that as the highest compliment. It's hard to choose the sharpest barb, but I'll go with "Were you writing a book?/Were you a sleeper cell spy?/In 50 years will this all be declassified?"

I would've made that the record's epic closing track, but she follows up with "The Alchemy," which is one of the better tracks musically, but I can't get over all the clunky football references ("I touch down/call the amateurs/and cut 'em from the team"), presumably in reference to current beau Travis Kelce. The aforementioned "Clara Bow" (she was a silent film actress; yes, I had to look it up) closes out the non-Anthology edition. 

Another thing I would've done: Just chosen the best 12-15 songs I had and made that the whole of TTPD. That's exactly what nearly every artist would've done. Two things, though: 1. As we've established, I'm an idiot. 2. Nobody else is Taylor Swift. She has earned the right to do pretty much whatever she wants.

Even though I've taken to referring to the second half of the Anthology as "the B-sides," there's some genuinely good stuff here (and unlike on Reputation, for instance, no actively bad tunes). "Black Dog" is a nice start to the second half; "imgonnagetyouback" is a clever ode to the love/hate nature of tumultuous relationships.

However, then the songs largely begin to blur together, sonically. There are exceptions, such as the Liz Phair-lite playful fun of "So High School" ("Touch me while your bros play Grand Theft Auto" lol). Whatever you think of holding a grudge going on the better part of a decade, Taylor absolutely eviscerates Kim Kardashian on "thanK you aIMee." Burns don't get much sicker than "Everyone knows my mother is a saintly woman/But she used to say she wished that you were dead." I find myself singing "You said you were gonna grow up/And you were gonna come find me" from "Peter," the ode to childhood nostalgia. "The Bolter" stands out as rythmically distinct from the rest of the tracks, which are mostly slow-to-mid tempo quiet tunes backed by either a soft acoustic guitar or delicate piano tinkling.

It's pretty silly to quibble with a bounty of songs that are sonically similar, even a bit snoozy at times, when you have songwriting of this magnitude to marvel at. It's become a bit easy to take Taylor for granted because of her prolific output. I always tell my classes when we read a particularly brilliant line from a classic (particularly Gatsby; your boy F. Scott Fitz could write, trust) that if I could come up with a single line as good as that, I'd be a writer, not an instructor of writing. Every time I listen to one of Taylor's tunes, even those I don't find that interesting musically, I'm amazed anew at what a master of the craft she is. As she matures she's only gotten sharper, which means her career is going to age a lot better than her peers who rely on their looks and/or spectacle to draw crowds. 

I still would love to see her move on from Antonoff. The first few times through the album all I could focus on were his signature clicks, beeps, and boops. The chimes, synths, and loops. It feels like her songwriting is overcoming his musical production instead of being enhanced by it, but you know what? If you guessed "you're an idiot?" again, then we have a winner. The album works. Maybe Antonoff is the secret sauce.

I'm not a talented enough musician to make a cogent argument about what should be different. Ok, that's not quite accurate; I'm not a musician at all. Still, they let me review album releases and concerts in college, and I got 40 cents per inch of copy, so yes, you are reading the opinion of a an actual (former) professional critic. A poet, however, I am certainly not. Taylor keeps proving she's got that department covered.

The Tortured Poets Department: A-

The Tortured Poets Department (B-sides): C+

The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology: B

Midnights: C+ (revised grade)

Evermore: B- (revised grade)

Folklore: B (revised grade)

Lover: A-

Reputation: C-

1989: B

Red: A

Speak Now: A-

Fearless: B+

Taylor Swift: Idk, I don't like country, never listened to it