Graeme Thomson has narrated this article for you to listen to.
How to explain the supercharged star power of Taylor Swift? An undeniably gifted artist, Swift’s albums 1989, Folklore and Evermore, in particular, are excellent. She has written a battery of terrific pop songs. She is a generous and skilled performer. To suggest she is overrated is not an insult, therefore, but simply a comment on the absurd critical mass of her popularity, in which every lyric, scrap of artwork, cultural reference and personal tit-bit is weighted with a monumental significance which, it is becoming apparent, does her work few favours.
Anybody listening to Swift’s new album without prior knowledge of the layers of gossipy context surrounding it might well wonder what all the fuss was about. There are perhaps half a dozen decent pop songs, a couple of pleasant piano ballads, a lot of mid-tempo, middling meandering – and words, words, words, crammed into every cranny like a chainsaw running through
a dictionary.
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