Midnights: A look into the genius behind the songwriter
A Review By Rhiju Chakraborty (he/they)
On a Sunday night out at the VMAs, Taylor Swift wearing a dress seemingly made out of diamonds announced to the world that her tenth studio album Midnights would be released on October 21st of this year. What followed next can only be described as two months of an aggressive marketing campaign. Going on TikTok live with a bingo cage in hand, she announced each track title with a gentle turn of the handle. Releasing carefully curated social media posts and revealing pieces of the album only she wanted us to know, Swift created a virtual experience that her fans could participate in from the comfort of their screens. Because It's not just sheer talent that has made Midnights an instant success, but the way that Swift has managed to make her music into a lifestyle for her millions of fans. We see her ethos in everything she touches, including when she starts off the album with the three words that we've become all too familiar with: Meet me at Midnight. (And that's exactly what millions of people did, resulting in the crashing of Spotify.) Staying up until the clock strikes 12, and reloading Youtube anxiously over and over again has become something that her fans, hungry for new music, have become accustomed to doing. It's a reward that's usually earned after months of furiously decoding easter eggs that have been placed everywhere, from her songs to her social media posts. These cryptic messages have become the secret language through which Swift communicates with her millions of followers. These cryptic messages are what have allowed Taylor Swift to break record after record, from the most streams in 24 hours on Spotify (184 million), to being the first artist in history to occupy every single song on the top ten of the Billboard hot 100. Because Taylor Swift is not just a lyrical genius, but a marketing one as well.
Sonically, Midnights is not just a concept album, but an album that shows a wiser and more mature version of Taylor Swift, looking back at her past. You can hear her traveling back in time to her different eras, in the songs themselves. The upbeat 1989 pop beats in Paris, the Folklorian strings in High Infidelity, and the Dark intensity of Reputation in Vigilante Shit all have faint traces of her music from past albums, but nothing is a copy. It's as if Swift, who's in the process of re-recording her first 6 studio albums, was forced to go on a journey through her past and take bits and pieces of bridges and melodies and alter them to fit the aural aesthetic of the album. Midnights, according to the singer herself is also her first autobiographical album since Lover. It's electric, moody, and marks a departure from the storytelling she did with Folklore and Evermore. In her 2 pandemic-era albums, where she focused solely on writing songs, inspired by either very real people in her family and current events, (Epiphany, Marjorie), or by creating fictional characters, and spinning out a story, (Betty, Cardigan, August, Illicit Affairs). But with Midnights she dived right back into familiar territory, writing about the thing she loves to write about the most: herself. With Swift, it's not narcissistic, but self-aware. She does it in a way that is less about who she actually is, and more of who the world perceives her to be. In her songs she's not a villain or a hero, she's the Anti-Hero. She's human, makes bad choices, and even sometimes dresses up for revenge (Vigilante Shit). It's also the first time since Lover that she's used her personal life to inspire her songwriting, like writing songs about her legal battles to get back ownership of her masters, her past romances, and of course the 13 sleepless nights that are scattered throughout her life. It's not that she doesn't create any stories in this album, it's just that this time the stories she's narrating are very much her own. And we hear these stories in some of her most painful lyrics to date, such as, "Living for the thrill of hitting you where it hurts... Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first", (Would've, Could've, Should've) and "You know there's many different ways that you can kill the one you love... The slowest way is never loving them enough" (High Infidelity). Using her personal experiences to inspire her music is something the singer has always been candid about doing, but to her fans, It doesn't matter what the context of the lyrics are in relation to the singer's biography, but the relatability of the lyrics. The way Swift takes universal experiences such as heartbreak, loss, and devastation and manages to sum it all up in a single sentence.
Melancholia, while a prevalent theme in her discography, isn't the only theme she explores. She experiments with the silliness that's scattered throughout the album in lyrics like, "Karma is a cat" (Karma), and "Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby... And I'm a monster on the hill" (Anti-Hero), perhaps to stop her listeners from going into a depressive episode (too late), or to poke fun at herself. Or perhaps she tried to grab our attention by adding something so strange, that it made us stop and think about the actual lyrics, only to realize that the lyrics do exactly what they're supposed to do in context of the song. For example, BookTok blogger Jack Ben Edwards, has theorized that the famed lyric from Anti-Hero, "Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby... And I'm a monster on the hill", is a reference to an episode from the show 30 Rock, where character Abby Flynn gets confronted by Liz Lemon (played by Tina Fey), for acting like a "Sexy Baby", a person whom according to Liz sexually infantilizes themselves. So in this seemingly silly lyric, Taylor Swift is essentially commenting on how women in the music business are infantilized and fetishized, and the realities she's had to battle with being a woman who is aging in the industry.
Few artists have been able to enjoy the enduring success that Taylor Swift has had in a career spanning nearly 2 decades. But few artists have been able to put out the amount of content she puts out in a single year. She's carved out a lasting legacy in an industry that sets time limits on its female artists, and even with 10 albums under her belt, Taylor Swift is just getting started.
