Cruel Summer

The way some people on this forum are trying so very hard to revise the entire history of her career into her never being talented at all or outstanding in her field in any way, the desperate wishful thinking - you can tell how bad they've wanted the tide to turn and they really think this is it

Literally all she has to do in order to do so is lay low for a minute, release Debut TV late this year or sometime next, and come back with a better album at least a year from now, maybe a little more, that changes her sonic direction away from mainstream radio pop. Even just an album that goes back to being primarily country pop would be enough to turn the tide if she also challenges herself to do new things with her subject matter and lyricism.

Please don't give her more ideas, I can't afford the $31.13/mo she'd charge in this economy!

The way I predicted 185k, oh me!stradamus

Babylon is a 'Tis The Damn Season sister and the girls who get it get it and we're horribly depressed longing to go back to our small town roots whilst living in a city that feels a thousand times more lonely and dead than home ever did Hypothetically of course totally don't mean anything by this

And that's even if they all get their fervent, desperate wish and she finally relinquishes her sheer commercial dominance in the US starting right this second. A storied career with decades yet to come

The way they're already comparing it to regular album releases and pre-album singles because they just can't actually compare deluxe edition releases without looking like clowns, not to mention making up weird narratives that she's hitless or something… they're so desperate for her to be over

Ignoring the global numbers (I have no clue if this is even "bad" for a deluxe) and focusing on how she's still locking down the top four in the US

TTPD (song) being a hyperfixation of obsessed haters should have been the warning sign for where things would go by now, honestly, because the way they acted like she committed heinous artistic crimes over... um, mentioning a contemporary popular artist and using a golden retriever analogy

I think that pretending the critic score "matters" is maybe a little divorced from reality. Nobody who likes this song is going to have their mind changed because Pitchfork decides it's uncool trash, and nobody who hates it is going to be swayed if Rolling Stone says it's the best song of the year. Quality, sure - but clearly notions of quality aren't universal anyway.

The kind of sad part is that they didn't even actually, officially downgrade the score because it's done by panel rather than being assigned by the writer - the writer herself just spontaneously lost her spine and ability to stand up for her own work and made a snarky comment on her own review, coincidentally on the same day half the internet was snarking over her. The official score is still the same, though I'm sure they'll release one for the deluxe that's like 0.7 and filled with what they think are the most incisive lines ever written. Not that Pitchfork still had any credibility left whatsoever anyway, but the sheer cringe of being soooo beholden to clicks and half-viral stan twitter posts everyone forgets the next day

outros are important and all but that building synth in the background of Fortnight from 2:03 to 2:14 is the single most important sound ever recorded

beauty is a beast that roars down on all fours demanding, "more" only when your girlish glow flickers just so do they let you know it's hell on earth to be heavenly them's the breaks, they don't come gently

TTPD standard edition kinda eating up all her other pure pop albums combined when you think about it...

It's Saturday night, they have to do something to entertain themselves! Hate stream Cleveland for the hundredth time today while you're in here checking up on us, besties

If anything good comes of the reception to this deluxe, it'll be that she hopefully goes back to working with people like Bon Iver and The National and expanding that side of her musical circle and discography - and if she dares to finally convince Sufjan to do some some sessions

Even as someone who likes all four songs, I think she needs to go in completely different directions now anyway. She's done the pop star thing long enough to have lapped everyone else twice over. It's time to grow in a new, different direction and build on her legacy in a way that doesn't get tired for some listeners, which seems like the actual biggest problem here: even the most serviceable and good of all sixteen Showgirl tracks does absolutely nothing genuinely new for her, with the notable exception of Ophelia - hence it being one of the biggest and most widely well-received hits of her career.

I still think that publications hold her to a significantly higher standard than they do other pop artists, too. These new songs would be an easy 70+ from most artists but because they want Taylor to constantly clear an entirely different bar and because it's, and forgive me for this, "punk on the internet" () to hate her in this hyperbolic way that insinuates the music is as bad as the bottom of the pop barrel produced by alleged rapists, it will land around 40 or something - and that's if more favorable publications bother to review a deluxe edition, which is still not standard practice at all anyway. Just all very silly when you listen to the music and see that it's not remotely similar. Babylon alone with three tracks of nothing but wet fart sounds would clear any typical album in the 60s and below.

The way my one break from the new music so far was to stream Champagne Godblems and 'Tis The Holy Season

I'm not sure I'll touch that radioactive cesspool with a 130 foot pole, but I agree and I'm even enjoying the fourth just fine - they just don't understand that sometimes when people enjoy things it's more important to continue experiencing and enjoying them than arguing with literal brick walls on the internet

This is slander! We all know I'm actually a cheap Getaway Car ripoff, which pre-dates this song by the better part of a year - she still deserves prison obviously, but not for this.

I mean, Madonna was getting top ten hits thirty years into her career, her biggest tour was just a few before that, and the entire Confessions era came later in her career than Taylor currently is so… I think she kept doing fine!

The way they're spending their Saturday doing things like generating AI slop memes of Taylor fans and venerating some crusty old bastard who hasn't been particularly relevant since the late 70s but has just hyperbolically proclaimed her as the "APOTHEOSIS OF MEDIOCRITY" like honey that's not normal go to talk to someone

At this point, Taylor's status has gone way past simple pop girl territory and turned into a phenomenon like Beatlemania - and the internet social media era coinciding with that has yielded the unfortunate and disturbing new counter-phenomenon of a literal, actual second fanbase that thrives on negativity, trolling, and snark, using her essentially as a maladaptive coping mechanism for whatever feelings for which they struggle to find an outlet otherwise. An inverted cult of identity, obsessed with the ever-incoming downfall of someone they think is safe and acceptable to hate. You can't challenge their twisted world view without being attacked, because it genuinely means even more to them than experiencing and sharing positive feelings with music we like means to us. Sad!

Calling it now, Patient Zero will smash in the US, another multiweek #1, pop radio #1, etc secured