Taylor Swift is proof that how we critique music is broken
Whether you love or hate The Tortured Poets Department, there is no way to adequately digest its 31 songs and opine on it within hours of its release.
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Taylor Swift’s “surprise” anthology – an extra 15 songs that dropped – complicates things for critics on a deadline.
PHOTO: AFP
Jessica Karl
The way we digest new music needs to be fixed.
Within less than 24 hours of pop star Taylor Swift’s release of The Tortured Poets Department and her surprise anthology, the internet was flooded with an inescapable number of reviews. In The New York Times, pop critic Lindsay Zoladz said Swift’s 11th long-playing record is “sprawling and often self-indulgent” and “full of detailed, referential lyrics that her fans will delight in decoding”.