WHEN I SAW that Taylor Swift’s newest album was called The Tortured Poets Department, I nearly shit myself. American music in the 21st century has pooh-poohed poetry and literature as too sophisticated a topic for mainstream money-spenders, often eschewing intellectual discourse in favour of music about wet pussies and stinky dicks. While much has been conveyed on the heritage of western dicks and pussies, nothing of late has been said on the parentage of the western mind, and while I haven’t listened to Swift’s new album, I’m too excited not to write my preemptive thoughts on what The Tortured Poets Department is obviously about: 

1.“Would a Liquor Never Brewed Taste as Sweet” - Starting the album off on a quiet note, this track likely thematically ties the reclusive life of Emily Dickinson, failed by society, surrounded by death, and dying virtually unpublished and unknown, to Taylor’s torrid love affair with Kansas City Chief’s tight end Travis Kelce, positioning them against the backdrop of the loneliness and isolation of being unfathomably rich. In this song Taylor tries to shush the backup singers who opine that for many young people borne of the social media age, like Dickinson, parasocial relationships are often the only kind they have. The song ends with the backup singers slowly fading out, listing reasons why VR is preferable to real life.

2.“Don’t William Tell Me That” - Shifting to an upbeat anthem, Taylor references the tragic death of Joan Vollmer who was shot in the head by husband William Burroughs during a drunken gamble with a William Tell act, which Swift likens to getting her picture taken by the paparazzi. Swift also bemoans how she wishes she could just forget all the bad things she knows about the men in her life, dissecting the unresolved guilt of harbouring tradwife fantasies about an unnamed mega-rich football player.

3.“A Season in Hello, Dolly!” - An homage to the romantic musical genre, this number is about Arthur Rimbaud’s heated friends-with-benefits affair with Paul Verlaine which resulted in Verlaine non-fatally shooting Rimbaud, a companionship which Taylor likens to her torrid love affair with Kansas City Chief’s tight end Travis Kelce. The song ends with a slow plodding refrain about Rimbaud’s leg amputation and the bone cancer which ended him at 37 (just 3 years older than Travis).

4.“I’m Just a Poète Maudit” - The second song in Swift’s “Verlaine Diptych” centres around the abuse of Mathilde Mauté and her son Georges at the hands of Verlaine’s absinthe induced rages. With the chorus most certainly recounting a violent incident which likely contributed to the miscarriage of Georges’ twin brother a week before his own birth, this song attempts to demythologize the infant terribles and poète maudits whose lifestyles, while voraciously over-romanticized by cultural pathos are simultaneously punctuated by mental illness and substance abuse. The song points to the fetishization of chaos as a form of misogyny which often sweeps disturbing acts of men under the carpet of the collective unconscious, and is also a tribute to her torrid love affair with Kansas City Chief’s tight end Travis Kelce.

5.“Posthumous Pulitzer” - Track five is about the disturbing tendency of society to show a lack of recognition or support to creative individuals during their lives while simultaneously canonizing them after death, as exemplified in the life of John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969). This dirge eulogizes the depths of Toole’s misery and aloneness that he surely must have felt at the time of his suicide, relating them to Swift’s own feelings of loneliness before she began her torrid love affair with Kansas City Chief’s tight end Travis Kelce.

6.“Raven Lunatic” - Swifts most political song to date recounts the mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe, who some posit was the victim of “cooping”, an election fraud tactic wherein political candidates hired gangs to abduct voters, keeping them in a cooping room where they plied them with alcohol or gave them face beatings to get them to vote for the paying candidate repeatedly, disguising the victim in different outfits to fool voting officials. The fact that before his death Poe was found beaten near-unconscious (perhaps the only “tortured poet” on the album who was literally tortured) and not wearing his own clothes lends credence to this theory. A protest song in the lineage of Dylan, the songs verses recount the story of a bright young boy in a Kansas City Chief’s jersey (“The world is his oyster, his joyous eyeballs filled with moisture”). But in the next verse Taylor returns home from tour to see the same boy wearing a MAGA hat (“Did they coop you from TV? Is this what they mean by free?”), building to a crescendo which gives us one of her juiciest choruses ever, “He’s a raven lunatic, orange skin, no dick. He’ll usher in the house of farts, eructed from his tell-tale heart.” 

7.“I Wanna Be Your Sea Monkey” - Slowing things down, the penultimate track on the album pays tribute to the death of Virginia Woolf. This laconic ballad examines Taylor’s desire to fully sink into her torrid love affair with Kansas City Chief’s tight end Travis Kelce like a woman walking into the sea with her overcoat pockets full of rocks. 

8.“Ovenhead” - This boisterous album closer marks Taylor’s foray into dadaist post-punk. Told from the point of view of Sylvia Plath’s children as they play and eat bread baked for them by their mother as she gasses herself to death using the same oven in the room next door. The song includes a refrain from Plath, reunited in death with the ghost of the child she miscarried after being beaten by husband and fellow tortured poet’s department member Ted Hughes, a man who Swift is swift to point out in the chorus is “not at all like Travis Kelce (who’s a brony)”. The song itself fizzles out as it’s overtaken by the sound of crackling flames, a motif which parallels the suspicious posthumous burning of Plath’s final journals by Hughes, and closes out what fans now call Swift’s “Tortured Poets’ Miscarriage-Via-Spousal-Beating Diptych”. 

Over all, the album does a great job of disparaging the propensity of our western ethos to dramatize and romanticize suffering and illness as a so-sad quirk of other-ized “genius” which it then claims as its own. The album condemns governments for bypassing any concerted attempt to adequately treat or aid the suffering and illness of their populace, opting instead to hungrily feed that suffering using outlandishly regressive policies and draconian punishments to create a system of slave labour from its own imprisoned citizens, a practice upon which it was shamefully founded and continues to subsist. Swift, I would imagine, makes it clear, while America may only account for 4% of the world’s population, and 22% of incarcerated people worldwide, 100% of its citizens are prisoners of the corporate hellscape/rich-person tax evasion prison called America. Mercifully, she says all this without once commenting on the relative dampness of anyone’s genitals.

★★★★★