base talk Honest question, what do you like / dislike about Taylor's music?

[The7thStranger]

When Taylor is good, it's because she's managed to tie together all of her best assets. She can be a talented wordsmith, have an ear for great melodies, and she does do a decent job of storytelling. False Gold, Cruel Summer, Ivy, Exile. She has that talent in her. But for every False Gold, you get petulant, immature stuff like Bad Blood, Karma, and ME!

 

Unfortunately, you really only get one or two flavors with Taylor. I've said multiple times on this forum that she's like a young-adult fiction writer making music, and I stand by that. If you're not into YA novels, you're also not going to generally be inspired by Taylor's style or want to go back for more. There are times where it hits right, but it's just not sustainable for me. I want somebody who can meet me where I am or impart some sort of wisdom, and given that Taylor and I are not too far off in age, I find it frustrating when I hear the stuff she churns out and can't find any way to relate to the vast majority of it. (Also, some of the lyrics on the album seem to be almost defending Mr. Healy, something I hope I'm wrong about. I mean, what the hell is that?)

 

But what has pushed me pretty firmly out the door is the complete and willful (over-)saturation of the market. While there is a lot that is organic about her meteoric rise to the top, she has done everything she can to prolong it while sacrificing quality and creative progression. And that is directly linked to the speed at which she puts out material, which, of course, she spreads around to boost her album sales. It feels like a bubble. She doesn't remind me of Madonna or Michael Jackson; she reminds me of Beanie Babies.

Edited April 22 by The7thStranger

[Bhabylon]

She just has no edge to her, and most of her songs sound bland, unseasoned and flavorless to me. She plays it too safe, which works fine for her. 

She's kinda become the Mark Zuckerberg of music, which makes me even less interested in checking for her new stuff.

[GreatestLoveofAll]

if im honest a lot about what makes me view her negatively or dislike her music to a small extent is her fans. Ofc not every artist is perfect, and not every artists' discography is completely terrible- objectively at least. What irks me is her fans thinking she is the second coming of Christ meanwhile nearly all her peers have far more substantial talent and plenty are just as stronger writers. Her insane success only makes them harder to accept the fact that she is largely not as great of an artist and the fact that she relies almost exclusively on her pen 70 percent of the time being good. And on this most recent album, its considerably worse. 

 

Yet despite my issues, when her songwriting hits, it hits. the entirety of folklore and evermore are some of the greatest stories told from a musician imo and throughout her career she has had many highlights. Her best material is very much her poppier stuff and she excels when she's doing that sort of sound- hence why reputation and lover and 1989 are the works I largely return back to (beside folklore). Her greatest talent might just be her ability to use her privilege, her immense stanbase, and her shrewd business skills to keep her relevant and for the last 5 years reestablish herself as one of the most recognized figures in history. I'll definitely give her that.,

[LoveA]

I like some of her previous songs, mostly those 1989 hits. Other then that I don't really enjoy her music, I tried, but meh it isn't for me.

[perfect blue]

She can churn out an earworm or two per album when she works with Max Martin but other than that she gives me 40-year old Hannah Montana vibes. 

[stevyy]

7 minutes ago, GreatestLoveofAll said:

if im honest a lot about what makes me view her negatively or dislike her music to a small extent is her fans. Ofc not every artist is perfect, and not every artists' discography is completely terrible- objectively at least. What irks me is her fans thinking she is the second coming of Christ meanwhile nearly all her peers have far more substantial talent and plenty are just as stronger writers. Her insane success only makes them harder to accept the fact that she is largely not as great of an artist and the fact that she relies almost exclusively on her pen 70 percent of the time being good. And on this most recent album, its considerably worse. 

 

Absolutely this. 

 

 

[pisuke]

She brings nothing new to the table. She doesn't even bring anything to the table, new or old.

 

Her lyrics are the worst. She is suposed to be this great songwriter, but it all sounds written by a 14 year old. 

 

Her music isnt any better. It is boring, insipid, bland... 

 

The only special thing going on with her is that she's far more successful than she should. 

 

You really have to not know much about music if you find her special or good. She's mediocre or average at best. 

 

[terrorblade]

i mostly dislike the forced "poetry" of nu-taylor

[Tm4074]

1. too corporate, "authentic" for the sake of selling records it doesn't seem genuine 

2. her songwriting is supposed to be her selling point but she has failed to impress me with her latest efforts. 

3. melodies are almost non-existent, no rhythmic diversity. idk how she can be such a celebrated songwriter with such uninteresting melodies. this is supposed to be music not poetry.

4. doesn't help her lyrics have been clunky, overly wordy and make no sense unless you are up to date with the past 15 years of Taylor Swift lore. A great songwriter shouldn't require you to be informed on her past 15 years of relationships for her lyrics to register. it's lazy songwriting imo

5. her obvious need for validation from others and the industry is off-putting. honestly this kinda makes me feel sorry for her rather than dislike her. it seems like she's searching for happiness/validation in all the wrong things. 

6. poor vocals sung within one octave with no support or emotional delivery. i prefer listening to actual singers just a personal preference. 

7. i feel newer artists including Olivia that pull inspiration from Taylor pull off her gimmick better than her as of late. Taylor is too far up her own ass atp. 

8. most of her fanbase is obnoxious and take any criticism as unwarranted hate stemming from jealousy or something. 

 

I do admire Taylor's work ethic and ambition, we can say a lot about her but we can't deny she is a hard worker. 

Edited April 22 by Tm4074

[AvadaKedavra]

I stan taylor cause her songwriting and the way she express her emotion speaks to your soul. She's also able to convey stories very well
She goes an extra mile and is detailed with the experiences and her feelings.
Its like someone reading my mind deepest thoughts and some past experiences and makin them music
Sometimes she fails but sometimes her songs can be real powerful
I also stan her cause her music feels very "american" to me and im a latino whos' very in love with american culture.
I also stan her cause her melodies are great and her voice is very pleasant and she knows how to use it properly to give substance to the songs.
Her vocal tone. If an artist has a bad vocal tone is hard for me to stan them...taylor has a soft cutesy voice
I also like her classyness and poised personality  and how beautiful she is. She looks like a princess from one of those german fairytales. 
I used to downplay her in her first eras even if i was a fan but then i saw her shine and potential

 

Edited April 22 by AvadaKedavra

[Taylor fanboy]

I love reputation. 
 

I don't like Lover apologists and TTPD : TA deniers.

 

 

 

[Dekkan]

Dislike, mainly due to 2 reasons:

1. production;
   Frankly speaking, I find her music straight up boring. My musical inspirations have always revolved around dance/house/EDM umbrella, I love interesting productions as well as harder electronic sounds. Taylor's music (especially in recent years) is the complete opposite of that. Most of her songs blend together for me.
2. relatibility;
   Many of you have mentioned her storytelling and perhaps you have a point, I honestly don't know her catalogue that much to judge. The thing is, she tells stories from a point of view that is completely foreign to me. I fail to relate to her so much that I perceive her lyrics and thus storytelling as childish and immature.

[LOTF]

Her flavorlessness

[gustavothehuman]

The Good: storytelling, imagery, catchy melodies, and soothing voice (love her lower tones).

The Bad: thinking she needs to make a word salad to be a good writer, extremely long tracklists, people-pleaser attitude, and being American.*

The Ugly: Matty Healy.

 

* Releasing unnecessary versions to increase sales, hoarding money to become a billionaire, not caring about the environment, handling international crises poorly due to a lack of cultural touch (ex. Brazil)... Everything problematic about her boils down to the capitalist culture promoted by the United States.

 

Edited April 22 by gustavothehuman

[Witnessed ET]

I like the fact that her lyrics are very vivid and they paint a picture in your head. And that's undoubtedly the one thing that gave her the "acclaim" from the industry critics, and then everybody was on board after that.

 

But that's where her appeal starts and ends for me. Even while talking about her lyricism, I think it's hit a plateau after folklore and evermore, and she's stuck in this cycle of making the same teenage mindset references for the most part that just doesn't show much growth compared to some other prolific songwriters in music like Joni Mitchell for example. And I'm not even gonna talk about her vocal range, versatility, Melodies, variety in composition, performance abilities, stage presence and showmanship….she's average at best in all of these categories. And that's fine, not everybody is 100% in everything. But I'm afraid after the whole industry has put her on this pedestal the past few years, even she's starting to believe that she's "the greatest" despite all her limitations. And her deranged insufferable fanbase doesn't help either. They're her biggest yes-men imo. Plus let me not get into the whole never-ending hunger for "numbers" and "records" with millions of physical variants to milk her impressionable fanbase to the nines, that's a topic for another day. 
 

 

Edited April 22 by Witnessed ET

[Hex]

Her writing does not sound genuine. It sounds like she sat down and asked herself what a 15 year old upper middle class white girl would relate to. But my main issue is with her melodies... or lack there of.

 

Her music for the past few years sounds like she's seeing how many words she can fit with zero attention payed to melody. The word choices sound like she opened up a thesaurus and called it a day. I don't even dislike her voice or the production of her songs - that's all great with me. The issue is her alleged "artistry" as of late.

[Cameltoe Chariot]

Every single thing she does in public is calculated and measured for her fans. She acts out the life on full display, and then creates music as a follow up to each relationship/scenario while OBLITERATING the lives of the subjects. She collects famous friends and either mimics them (Lorde, Lana) or uses them as publicity shields (Lena Dunham, Ice Spice) before casting them aside and moving on to the next obsession.

 

All of this amounts to a MCU Universe media cycle of Taylor "lore", easter eggs and "insider knowledge" that separates the hardcore fans from the rest... creating a cultural vacuum that very quickly starts to look like a cult. This lore has become insanely complicated and messy, and to the casual consumer adds up to a whole lot of nothing.

 

From a music production stand point though, one of my biggest issues is how nearly every song of hers is just a vocal melody with tons of clunky metaphors, and the actual music is only there to support it. There's never any impressive instrumentation or room for the music to breathe - it's simply a conduit to main line Taylor's diary entries. Compare anything from her catalogue to Lana's "Venice *****" as an example.

 

Taylor is and will always be remembered as one of the biggest pop acts of all time - but I don't think her fans realize how little that has to do with acclaim or artistic achievement. She cracked the code and is the physical manifestation of late stage pop music capitalism.

 

[crf13]

4 hours ago, Diesel is Desire said:

Haters don't like that she doesn't pop her p***y on stage or write about explicit sex. Otherwise they'd be stanning

 

 

Ummm no that would actually make her even more annoying given the lack of authenticity that would accompany it 

 

OT: What is there to like? 

[Gladiator]

Like:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dislike:

 

 

 

 

Edited April 22 by Gladiator

[More Than A Melody]

I've never sat down and consumed her music thoroughly and purposefully. I tried and got bored multiple times over multiple albums. So my critique will probably reflect that and not be entirely accurate, but it will also reflect my experience and why I never went for more.

 

1. I understand that she's objectively a good lyricist, but I cannot get into it. I just find her lyrics pretentious and try-hard. I don't think that's what "flows", that she gets inspired and automatically writes that way. I think she goes out of her way to be wordy and verbose, and it feels shoehorned in. I find a lot of her rhymes very clunky and the sentence structure is often so off ("green was the color of...") that it just takes me out of the song I'm listening to. I don't usually mind this type of verbiage in literature, but in music I think it just doesn't fit, because in order to write this way, you have to force the melody to follow the lyrics. Songs are supposed to flow, that's kinda the whole point of them being a song and not, idk, slam poetry.

 

There are ways of being verbose that don't result in this. I think the best example I can come up with that's quite mainstream is Alex Turner, who can actually concoct interesting metaphors and lengthy lyrics without sacrificing the hooks, the melodies, the music. Something like this

 

I've never come across that sort of thing with Taylor. I'm sure she has some songs that fit that description, but I've personally never found one that called to me in that way.

 

Aside from that, lyrically speaking still, she often mixes metaphors in a way that's just confusing or cringe. Like in "Who's afraid of little old me?" where she's a prisoner executed in a gallow, who comes back from the dead as a ghost, I presume, to interrupt a party... and then you throw in a record scratch simile, for whatever reason. I feel like she should commit to the metaphor if that's what she's going for. A gallow is such an old-timey device of execution that throwing in a metaphor about a record scratch completely takes me out. Then in the same song she's now a circus monster with no teeth that's now mean because they caged her?? If she was using a bunch of similes/metaphors in different verses then I could understand what she was going for, but she goes back and forth between these two metaphors, uses one in the bridge, the other in the chorus, then the one from the bridge in the post-chorus. And at this point I'm not enjoying the song anymore. I'm annoyed, and I don't even try to listen to the rest of the album.

 

It just feels like she writes a lot of lyrics, and I'm supposed to be impressed because she uses words not a lot of people use conversationally, but that's as deep as it goes. I read somewhere that she needs an editor and I can't help but agree.

 

2. The music is just not there. I've never listened to a Taylor Swift song and been enamored by the music. Admittedly, I've listened to a very small percentage of her music, but considering she has like 500 unique tracks, that's still a lot of songs, and I feel like at least one should've done the trick, but they just don't. Her songs seem like a device for her to tell us about her life and her thoughts. It doesn't feel like I'm listening to music, it feels like I'm listening to someone talk in rhymes over a background melody. Like she's a narrator from a movie. But worse because movie soundtracks tend to accompany the mood of what's being narrated, and I don't think her music fits the mood a lot of the time - and that can be a good thing, when done purposefully to contrast happy melodies with sad lyrics, but it doesn't feel purposeful with her. It feels like they just grabbed the first beat .mp3 Jack Antonoff had lying around.

 

A friend of mine said this today, when talking about why she stopped consuming Taylor's music "listening to her new records is like sitting at a café with elevator music in the background as your high school friend catches you up with what's happened with her life since she graduated, and after a couple of songs I wanna ask for the check and leave." And I felt that.

 

She doesn't let the instruments breathe. There's barely any instrumental breaks or interesting stuff happening in the background with her vocals. This is how I felt about One Direction's music, for instance. They were 5 vocalists, so a lot of voices to cram in a small space, plus the fanbase just wanted to listen to them, so we don't even try with production and instrumentation. It's just means to an end. Obviously the reasoning is different, so she actually tries with the lyrics, something 1D never really did, but the result in terms of production/instrumentation is the same. She also doesn't try to be innovative or do something interesting in terms of production. It is the same song over and over.

 

The only song of hers I like is Cruel Summer, as in, I don't change the station when it comes on the radio. It's a fun pop song. Her voice is nothing to write home about but it's a pleasant tone when it's in the studio, and the hooks are catchy. 

[dirrtydiana]

Never been a fan of her voice so that for me is thee deal breaker. I cannot sit through a song if I can't get into the voice. I do not relate to her at all. I don't find her interesting. Add on how her "stans" keep throwing "self written" around as a flex had the opposite effect on me after paying attention to her lyrics.

some things I do like about her are YBWM (and she ate as the brunette in the video), back to December, red.mp3, IKYWT and her excellent business talents

[kwek_kwek]

Taylor writes music like a teenager and for teenagers. She's like a 34yo woman trapped in a teenager body and mind. I don't relate to her music anymore. I used to relate in the early years of her career since I was a teenager back then. 
 

She does performative activism. She was vocal about LGBT+ issue back in 2019 quen she released Lover and YNTCD, after that I haven't heard about her being vocal for the community. 

Edited April 23 by kwek_kwek

[Alldeezy]

Always loved her since love story always came off as a down to earth girl and little bit of a dork and fact from girl I liked in 2008 grew up to be the biggest artist in the world made me proud 

 

However her most loved projects like folklore/evermore and her current one were the albums that made me kinda less of a fan sadly. Even though I still appreciate and love her as an artist I pulled away and have listen to her a lot less

 

Till rep TV comes out im having a Taylor break 

[toxicgenie]

I like her storytelling and songwriting.

 

 

[Summer Boy]

She has some bops, and beautiful songs, like exile. But her discography overall is very bland, uninspired and basic, it's very hard for me to get into her music. I tried multiple times to listen to Midnight but every time I stop after track 3 or 4 because it's too boring. She also has no singing talent and her writing is mediocre at best. Overall I don't dislike her, but her fans are insufferable and she's the most overrated pop star of all time.