6 minutes ago, Josh said:

and Reputation doesn't? 

Also, yeah.

Hmm, I am not a Taylor stan, but I did use her heavily after she released 1989 & I loved Rep, but Lover made me stop checking for her  I was just not interested. I did enjoy Cruel Summer & Miss Americana though. IFYE is nice too.

Edited April 25, 20233 yr by Big Bad Wolf

Cause it has MEH! and You need to calm down.

because it's bad 

 

Edited April 25, 20233 yr by sunbathinganimal

I like Lover more than Reputation though.

 

Funnily enough I think LWYMMD was a worse single compared to Me!

generally unremarkable songs. the ones with good melodies/instrumentals are ruined by unfortunate thematic/lyrical choices (Me!, You Need to Calm Down, The Man)

the amount of filler outweigh the career highlights

The singles, the album cover, the aesthetic, the videos, the album name. 
 

The actual album tracks are really good though. It’s just everything surrounding it that’s pretty atrocious.

It has her worst material.  I cannot stand ME! and I forgot that you existed.  Then when you add on The Man, London Boy, and YNTCD it can be a chore to sit through.  However aside from those five songs it is immaculate.  If Taylor just got someone to pick lead singles and cut down her albums for her, she would be even bigger than she is now. 

its very mid 

The era was a mess, simple as that. ME! & YNTCD were panned and hated. She pulled all the stops for them to go #1 yet they still got blocked so it was her first pop era with no #1 single, not to mention it was her first album since debut to not be a multi-week #1 AND it broke her 1m debut streak.
 

All of this coupled with the glittery bubblegum kitty aesthetics as a woman pushing 30 who hadn’t proven herself with a folklore yet just didn’t help either. 

 

To non-swifties the era just looked like a panned/cheesy underperformance, and just seemed totally inferior to other 2019 releases like TUN & WWAFA where the artists actually seemed cool. 

Edited April 26, 20233 yr by Isaiah

12 minutes ago, Arrows said:

The singles, the album cover, the aesthetic, the videos, the album name. 
 

The actual album tracks are really good though. It’s just everything surrounding it that’s pretty atrocious.

Nailed it 

Lover isn’t a “bad” album. It’s just uneven with some really noticeable lows.

 

- I’m sorry to anyone who likes it, I’m sorry to the MEGAN movie, but absolutely no one would have cared if “It’s Nice To Have A Friend” had been deleted from existence.

 

- Even if you literally remove all of the baggage of it being a single (which is almost impossible), just purely as a song, ME! feels like Taylor Swift pantomiming herself. I like the idea of the song - it’s actually such an absolutely wonderful message. It’s just you can tell the verses are completely cliche and impersonal. “I know that I’m a handful baby UH / I never like to think before I JUMP” / “And when we had that fight out in the rain / You ran after me and called my name”. Like, these are the equivalent of Taylor AI-generating her own lyrics. And then she tried to make it a stadium song with the bridge, and it just felt so obvious. You could see the gears turning here.

 

- I’m sure “Soon You’ll Get Better” has its fans, and means a lot to a small amount of people (Taylor) but this album really, really would not have suffered if it was gone. It’s a pure momentum-stopper.

 

- I’m an Archer hater. I’m sorry. It will never work for me. It tried. She and Jack made a choice, and they tried. It’s one of the worst songs of any of her recent albums, imo. It starts off SO compelling and deliberately fizzles out and I just can’t stand it, and sorry, I don’t like the Humpty Dumpty metaphor.

 

- The Man, while I DO like the lyrics and message of the song, is kind of the opposite of songs like Delicate and Anti-Hero that don’t burn — musically, this burns *really* quickly. It just kind of grates. 
 

- “We could leave the Christmas lights up  till January” — I don’t care what she says, this will forever be one of her biggest and most confounding lyrical blunders. Just say “THROUGH” January, if you refuse to change the month.

 

- I love the song False God, I love that she took a risk, and this album sincerely needed it and more songs like it. That said, this is one of the few songs I’ve ever heard from Taylor where I truly wish someone with more soul had been singing it. Much like this album, you see what she’s trying to do, but she just can’t really get it to the level it could’ve gotten to. This song deserves, like, Erykah Badu or Sade.

 

- The Cornelia Street live version STOMPS on the regular one. The regular one just feels a little basic. Again, common theme of this album — you see what it’s aiming for (a kind of All Too Well), but it just…doesn’t get there.

 

- I like London Boy. It’s genuinely cute. She had a blast writing it, you can tell. I’m not mad it’s on the album - it’s gotten in my head a time or two. But ultimately, this song is pure cotton candy. *And that isn’t a bad thing* — except, this album already has a bunch of cotton candy with ME!, Paper Rings, even IFTYE.

 

 

Basically, Lover to me feels like perhaps her only album since becoming Pop that you saw what she was trying to do, but it doesn’t quite get there. It sort of wants to have its cake and eat it too, in that it can’t decide if it wants to be cotton candy fluff, or cool/soulful/sexy. Which ends up leaving it a little all over the place, which is ironic because you’d think this theme would be fairly simple to focus in on.

 

It does have some great songs, and I absolutely count YNTCD as one of them. YNTCD, I Think He Knows, Miss Americana, False God, Cornelia St (Live Version) DBATC, Cruel Summer, and Lover (minus that fugging opening lyric) are terrific. And you also have perfectly good stuff like Afterglow, Paper Rings and Daylight.

 

There’s 18 songs on this album, and basically, most people will pick 12 of them and say they are great, but really dislike about 6 of them. 

Cause it is?  
 

Not really a hard question to answer babes 

There’s nothing on this album that Taylor herself hasn’t done already and better elsewhere. I’m glad no one is dragging I Think He Slays, that’s a gem right there 

Cause only a few tracks from it are listenable. 

 

Most of it are fillers

 

Yet she left out AOTGYLB 

Edited April 26, 20233 yr by Johnny Jacobs

false god may be the only listenable song on that album 

I started to like and listen to Taylor with Red. 1989 turned me into a fan. Reputation was unlistenable so i unfanned her. Lover piqued my interest again in her music, but it was Folklore that made me want to listen to her music and check for future albums. Evermore, like Reputation left a sour taste in my mouth but Midnights restored my faith in her. Hope her next album won't be anything like Reputation or Evermore

Cause the girls hate the singles 

Because of the extistence of Soon You'll Get Fatter and False Music

ME!th

You Need to Call Max

The Panned

 

Edited April 26, 20233 yr by SwiftLover

Because most people couldn't look past the poor single choices and quite messy imagery of the era. With a different direction and a few tracks being cut or replaced, it would've been a really strong album, on par with 1989 even.

her album with the stellar tracks The Archer, Cruel Summer, Cornelia Street, Daylight, Afterglow and Lover? 

Could never be bad. Such a great pre-COVID moment and even greater transition to folklore.

 

I just try to move past the cringe visuals and horrendous lead single.

 

It just has a handful of bad songs, but it also has some of her best songs in it