Now that New Music Tuesday is New Music Friday, I need to discuss Friday Night Parts with you. These are parts of songs that hook into the brain and take on a disproportionate level of importance. They are Friday Night Parts because they exist to be anticipated all week and savored during a focused listening session on a Friday Night after a long week of work. No matter what happens, the music will be there for you. Specifically, these parts of these songs will be there. You can hold them in memory, sure, but nothing beats the real thing. One such Friday Night Part is the line “feel the deadly cold freeze you from inside” on SLAYER’s “At Dawn They Sleep.” Specifically, it’s the effect on Tom Araya’s vocals when he sings “freeze you from inside.” It’s sick. His voice sounds like it’s being frozen in the middle of the line. There’s no other such vocal treatment on the album, which makes it stand out even more. It’s not a detail that requires repeated listens to elicit—it’s right there in your face the first time you hear it. There are many cool parts in the rest of that song, but the key element of a Friday Night Part is that it is brief and not necessarily the “best” part of a song. It’s just a part that stands out for a possibly inarticulable reason. Mine may not be yours.
Other Friday Night Parts of note include the final chorus to KELLY CLARKSON’s “Since U Been Gone,” specifically the descending vocalization on “want.” There’s many things happening at this part in the song. Fight to focus on this part and you will be rewarded with happiness. In a similar fashion, there’s a drum roll at the end of The RONETTES’ “Be My Baby” that seems like a throwaway moment but is actually really cool. When someone from the Wrecking Crew does a quick tom fill (at ~2:16), you’d better listen up. Finally, there is a funny Friday Night Part in ROXY MUSIC’s “Re-Make/Re-Model” where each instrument gets a chance to do a little improv measure. It’s a few silly noises right in a row, as if to introduce the band members via sonic signature, and it’s the kind of moment you look forward to hearing all week. Then you hear it and you can go on with living.
What do Friday Night Parts have to do with the new TAYLOR SWIFT album? Well, when the music industry decides to move album releases to Fridays, it is signaling that Friday is a great day for listening to music. You are off work or done with school and have the night or weekend to focus fully on your passions and interests. The industry is telling you to identify Friday Night Parts by releasing music on Fridays. It’s as simple as that. When I was at work on Friday, a few colleagues asked if I’d heard any of “The Life of a Showgirl.” Of course I hadn’t. I was waiting for Friday night! Sheesh.
The wait was not worth it. I even had the house to myself. I sprawled on the couch as the compact disc played on my home stereo. There’s a little drum fill at the start of “The Life of Ophelia” that got me excited. I was certain this was a winking nod to a variety of Friday Night Parts still to come. They never arrived. “Opalite” is the standout track, but that’s not saying much. The album was meant to be a no-frills affair compared to its predecessor. More fun, more straightforward, not overwrought. Only one of those things is true: a 42-minute pop album is quite straightforward. It fits easily on to one side of a 90-minute cassette, leaving you free to dub another album for your friend on the b-side. That sounds anachronistic because it is. Releasing an album on a major label in 2025 is anachronistic, too. I lean into it. For the fourth time since 2022, I bought the “new” TAYLOR SWIFT CD on my lunch break and picked up a Pumpkin Spice Latte along with it. (Well once it was just a flat white but I digress.)
As luck would have it, there’s another long-running country music solo artist who just released an album. Too bad AMANDA SHIRES’ “Nobody’s Girl” is too long to fit on the other side of that tape. It would deserve the a-side, anyway. Swift and Shires don’t need a forced comparison to establish their value; their records can stand on their own. That lesson came through to me in 1996 in the letters section of Hit Parader. A subscriber’s letter dismissed METALLICA’s “Load" by writing, “The new PANTERA is heavier than the new METALLICA” and the editor replied, “Yes, and the new INTERNAL BLEEDING is heavier than the new SOUNDGARDEN. So what?” The point of these temporal comparisons is just to stoke argument, not to validly claim that one album is better than another. Even if “Nobody’s Girl” hadn’t just come out, “The Life of a Showgirl” would still be mid.
Maybe I’m being too harsh in saying that. I know that I’m usually underwhelmed by new LADY GAGA (my modern pop North Star) singles at first. More often than not, they grow on me and I end up changing my opinion on them. I’ve listened to “The Life of a Showgirl” three times but I don’t think it will grow on me at all. The instrumentation is dull and the lyrics are trite. “You’re just now noticing this about TAYLOR SWIFT, Rob? Really?” Well, yeah. I was underwhelmed by “The Tortured Poets Department,” which I chalked up to being an attempt at some kind if literary sensibility or credibility. It feels silly of me to have thought a shorter, more accessible album would have led to a sea change in her approach. Quite the opposite! An album this brief needs to have powerful tracks and deadly hooks to pull in the listener. There’s hardly a memorable element to be found on these 12 songs. There’s not a lot of depth of sound or thought here. The timbre of the synths and keys, not to mention the bass and guitars, is thin as compared to something like “1989” or “Red.”
The lyrics are appalling. To claim the mantle of “English teacher” in a wedding announcement and then write these words is a little much. (Rhyming kitty with pretty with witty with city with legitly… come on now!) It dawned on me while listening to this album that Swift is still stuck in the same references she was making in high school. A lot has changed in the 18 years since she was a teenager; kids today are more easily in touch with a variety of musical and cultural traditions from around the globe. Swift has the acumen of an A student in an exurban school district who excels at multiple-choice tests but cannot generate an interesting thought when faced with an open-ended writing prompt. She has mastered writing to the test but stumbles into original thinking only by accident. Why else would Shakespeare’s Ophelia and Hollywood’s Elizabeth Taylor appear in the first two songs? These are hardly the most interesting or obscure references. They fit comfortably in the milieu of a suburban high school. Same goes for the ham-handed similes… “like a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse.” I’d wager Swift is also carrying around a set of Barron’s SAT Flashcards, given her use of protégé, discretion, exoneration, and kismet.
It’s not clear what she has to say with this album. What is the point of “Father Figure” or “Eldest Daughter”? (Is everybody “so punk on the Internet,” and why does that matter?) We get that she’s bragging about her fiancé on “Wood” and “Wi$h Li$t” and “Honey.” Good for her but it doesn’t even sound like an interesting relationship. I think it was on Twitter because I can’t find it now, but Tressie McMillan Cottom once advanced the argument that Swift is different from BEYONCÉ and ADELE because she is not a wife or a mom but she is past the age of 30. McMillan Cottom maintained that that combination of factors breaks people’s brains. Swift is engaged now. Maybe there’s something to settling down that has made her less interesting as an artist. The picture she paints in “Wi$h Li$t” sounds a lot like suburban midwestern anonymity. It could also be a version of Erich Fromm’s “égoïsme à deux” (a concept that I learned about in my suburban high school, lol) that she’s describing in that song. If so, a further inward retreat may reveal that the corners of her character have been rounded off and nothing else interesting remains.
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The best thing about this review is that it is simultaneously timely and thorough. I too have listened to the record three times and found that it was mid but in a positive way. A "take it or leave it" but not love it record. Swift's choice of source material and inspiration is absolutely Suburban English as the reviewer notes, but her content has never been as important as her prosody. Swift shines as a pop star, in my opinion, when her interior rhymes, alliteration, scansion and ear for intimacy clearly surface (as in "Say you'll remember me... standing in a NICE DRESS, SSStaring at the SunSet, baaaabe"). There are glimpses of that on this record, but I imagine it was written too hastily to explore greater experimentation with her natural talent for vocabulary.
ReplyDeleteThank you. I think this is the first time I've reviewed something within a week of hearing or reading or watching it.
DeleteThere are a few nice moments of wordplay on it, but lines like "girlboss too close to the sun" and the entirety of "Wood" are too much. To my ear, she also crams a few too many syllables into a line once or twice. Who is in a position to tell her that she might need to rethink a lyrical or musical idea at this point, though?