You can almost hear her winking on every track. Her music was no longer just a diary entry. She was already famous when she wrote “Mean,” of course, but now she sounded like she was “big enough so you can’t hit me.” The big ol’ city was imaginary but on 1989, Swift writes and inhabits a fully-realized fantasy of self-reliance, confidence, and ensuing pleasure. On 1989’s opener “Welcome to New York,” she makes good on that promise. On Speak Now’s “Mean,” Swift told a critic that one day she would be “living in a big ol’ city,” while he’d never be anything but a washed-up hater. After a certain amount of pain, sometimes your best defense is to channel the burning energy of your big hopes and desires into a night of uninhibited hedonism. Swift’s voice is processed and couched in thrilling yelps and sighs, crunchy synth, and galloping drums. “New Romantics,” a surging, euphoric song from the deluxe version of the album that was released as a final single, does this particularly well. It can be just as freeing to shrug in the face of heartache as it is to spell out exactly why and how you were hurt. These were still love songs, so Swift’s familiar themes peak through-dismissal of doubters, pleas to remember a romance favorably after it ends, and heavy use of one of her favorite words, “forever.” Still, the glitzy sound and ethos provided an entry point for new listeners and a chance for old ones to come up for air, to recognize that everything doesn’t always have to be so serious. Though Swift’s interest in pop was evident on songs like Red’s “I Knew You Were Trouble” and Speak Now’s “Better Than Revenge,” 1989 was the first time an entire Swift album could exist as party music without slow-burning heartache. She looks at the camera almost as much as she does her lover, warning us that she knows what we think of her and she doesn’t care. On Speak Now’s “Dear John,” she’d lamented being added to a lover’s “long list of traitors who don’t understand.” Here, she proudly flaunts her own “long list of ex-lovers” who think she’s crazy, adding the sound of a clicking pen to heighten the gleeful melodrama. Is it about a real experience, or is it fiction? “Blank Space” weaponizes Swift’s newfound romantic skepticism: In the accompanying music video, an aristocratic romance deteriorates catastrophically, poisoned by her jealousy and need to control her partner.
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The polished, propulsive synth-pop of album highlight “Style” showcases it best, with lyrics that celebrate a lustful relationship between people whose most revealing traits are that they would look good together on a movie poster. Now the dramas of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet ( Fearless’ “Love Story”) or 1945 Americana ( Red’s “Starlight”) come with lower stakes her new fantasy world allows for broken hearts to be stored away safely in a drawer. Still, there’s an allure to 1989’s escapism. Yet 1989 is the album that feels least like spending quality time with your best friends. At the time, Swift temporarily disavowed dating to instead celebrate the power of female friendship and flaunt her celebrity “girl squad” with extravagant 4th of July parties and a different guest appearance every night of her tour. Where liner notes of previous albums offered hyper-specific hints about each song’s subject, these tell the story of a generic on-again off-again romance.
fights and dancing in refrigerator light are replaced with glossy odes to big cities and weekend flings. The album, named after the year she was born, treats heartbreak as if observing a painting on a wall, rather than a feeling she desperately needs to articulate. She has said that she would work in marketing if she didn’t work in music but, really, she has already been doing both simultaneously and spectacularly.įor those who might openly cry while listening to Red, the first listen of 1989 stings of indifference. On the album, Swift loses her naïveté, dons a sense of unfazed nonchalance, and learns to navigate a world that underappreciated her lyricism and shamed her for dating too many men. 1989 is in part Swift’s response to the negative, often sexist, press she’d received. The media surrounding that album critiqued Swift as clingy, boy-obsessed, and vindictive.
Its predecessor, Red, was the pinnacle of diaristic specificity, an album that blew up the tiny intimate details of her romances into public eulogies.
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