Taylor Swift has come a long way since her golden curls and banjo twanging songs implanted her firmly in the public canon as America’s country music sweetheart. Instead of the innocent love songs that populated her 2006 self-titled debut, 1989 is all about the iconic red lipstick, bouncing bass and darker beats. As Swift’s fifth album, 1989 follows the pop sound of 2012’s Red to capture the sentimentality of living in New York.
Complete with both crooning ballads and chart-topping dance tracks, her album takes after 1980’s greats like Madonna and Phil Collins. Although the al- bum features the smooth voice and poetic writing Swift’s fans know so well, the overall feel of the album is much darker than would traditionally be expected of Swift.
Songs like “Bad Blood” and “All You Had to Do Was Stay” exhibit Swift’s anger towards those relationships she once considered close. These are fun dance songs, but they lack the depth and uniqueness that Swift has presented in the past. Hit single “Shake It Off” conveys a similar mentality to songs like “Mean” and “22” off of Swift’s albums Speak Now and Red, respectively, but the new song forgoes the banjo and twirling for a bass and twerking.
Co-written with and featuring Jack Antonoff, “Out of the Woods” presents a sound completely new to Swift. With the synthesized beats that are common to Antonoff’s music and the poetic honesty common to Swift’s, this song fits well in the album’s central themes: youth, recklessness and love.
Although the album exhibits a sound vastly different from anything Swift has done before, the songs on 1989 are still about love and boys. Like always, listeners will speculate who Swift is missing, complaining about and pining for, but the subjects of her songs are not what is important.
What matters is the brutal honesty that Swift continues to share with her fans. As with each of her previous albums, Swift pulls songs straight from her journals, shar- ing her life experiences with her fans, many of whom are young girls. Swift has been in the public eye for more or less, eight years, and she continues to be a positive role model.
She has transitioned from songs about wanting a boy to like her such as in “You Belong With Me” from 2008’s Fearless, to songs like “Shake It Off,” which is about stay- ing true to oneself despite what anyone else thinks or says. Although Swift’s visual image has become slightly more risqué recently, she is still a better role model to young girls than other popular singers.
Despite this positive influence, Swift’s songs tend to make sweeping generalizations about both men and women. In the song “Blank Space,” a bouncy and catchy track, Swift sings that “boys only want love if it’s torture.” The song “How You Get the Girl” is just what its name suggests: a sort of instructive track about how a boy should act to win over the heart of his crush.
In these songs, Swift assumes that her fans are all looking for love. She sings warnings and advice, but she places her listeners into a limiting box that promotes relationship clichés. While Swift presents herself as a good role model in that she does not prance around in her underwear, do drugs or get arrested, the message she sends to her impressionable fans is very singularly directed. In these songs, she teaches her fans to adhere to typical dating roles for fear of losing the affection of a crush.
That being said, 1989 is an honest and fun album. It is complete with dance music and quieter ballads as well as indie pop tracks and songs with a much larger sound and deeper bass. The album has certainly been received well: single “Shake It Off” debuted at number one on the Billboard charts. And as of press time, Swift has three singles on iTunes’s top five chart, with her album sitting pretty at iTunes’s number three.
Swift’s 1989 maintains many of the same themes that were typical of her previous albums, but now she presents an entirely new sound that will leave listeners wishing for a longer album.
Best tracks: “Blank Space,” “Style,” “Out of the Woods,” “Shake It Off” and “I Know Places.”
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