#truly living up to my rambles tag here this sure is uhhh some words

[jamestaylorswift]

@godofsmallthings’ excellent tags on my previous post also made me think about the inevitability of Taylor going back to pop post-folkmore, and what her goals were in making this album. yes she could’ve leaned into the “we made this quickly” angle, but would that have sold a lot of records? or maybe that would’ve felt old, because folklore and evermore were made quickly. I just think about the (unfortunately unfulfilled) wish that she would have used techniques she flexed making folkmore in making new and fresh pop music (e.g. stories with flipped perspectives, triptychs, experimentation with song structure, massive amounts of detail, etc), and how while pop is the genre that she’s been in the longest, I feel like she’s not innovating in the genre like she used to. it’s partly a production issue - few things in midnights dazzle musically compared to experimentation in the past (e.g. IKYWT). I also think the fact that critics reacted so positively to something that didn’t represent a truly original pivot will be a net negative. (that said, I’ll be the first one to say that pivoting all the time isn’t necessarily the best thing.) I think midnights only succeeded as a “return to pop” and not as something “new and fresh” like they’ve said. (like, 1989 was innovative For Her and, because she was so popular, innovative in general, but by contrast I can’t say the same thing about any of her other pop albums.) it’s almost like it didn’t matter which direction she could’ve pushed further, but on midnights she didn’t push hard any one particular way and the result ended up lacking