Enlarge image
Pop star Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards in Newark, New Jersey (August 2022)
Photo: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic/Getty Images
They were a bit like a scavenger hunt, the past few days and weeks in pop if you're a Taylor Swift fan.
Swift had announced a new album for Friday, and as part of the launch campaign, was giving out all sorts of signs and puzzles that could make you obsess over great nonsense, like wondering if the blue color of the eyeshadow on the early revealed Cover has a deeper meaning (it doesn't, it turns out now) why she's playing with a lighter on the cover photo when she doesn't smoke (not sure yet) if a song called »Karma« would be on the record (he does, and that takes you straight to the heart of the Swift universe) and whether Swift will comment on her relationship status (yes and no).
If Taylor Swift were German, she probably would have enjoyed the word.
She builds her songs from things like the "scavenger hunt," from the memories they evoke, from the tensions found in the term itself, and from the distance one puts between oneself and one's past.
So there it is: »Midnights«.
Another one of those records that only Swift is making at the moment.
With the greatest possible intimacy, an artist whispers her deepest secrets into your ear, yourself and a few million others - and in doing so builds one of the biggest stages pop has right now: the Taylor Swift world.
The life and aging of the most important millennial pop stars, a space for their stories.
Because that's what she is: A great songwriter and storyteller.
Who declares her world to be our world.
At midnight, Swift wrote in an Instagram message, the album revolves around the dreams, fantasies, fears and thoughts of the beginning night, and somehow that's true, of course, that's what the thirteen songs revolve around.
Almost all Taylor Swift songs revolve around these feelings.
Isn't that what almost all pop songs do?
The millennial destiny: spoiling your luck
In fact, the very first song is a little masterpiece (and the answer to the question about the status of your relationship): »Lavender Haze«, purple smoke.
On the surface, a song about the happiness of being in a working couple relationship, in the very feeling of purple smoke.
Swift is dating British actor Joe Alwyn.
The term "Lavender Haze" comes from an episode of the series "Mad Men", where Swift picked it up and describes the 1950s love prison from which the protagonists can only free themselves with great pain.
Am I like that in the end?, the singer asks herself in reality.
Maybe that's why I feel good?
Is happiness just an illusion?
Or even more perfidious, an illusion of feeling good inside?
There's always something in Taylor Swift houses.
It's complicated.
Since she is quite the millennial superstar, all happiness has to be muddled with modern vocabulary.
Swift even succeeds in incorporating the concept of »covert narcissism« into a song ("Anti-Hero").
A life in hundreds of songs
Taylor Swift has told almost her whole life in her music.
From the teenage girl on her first records fantasizing herself into love stories she can only feel from TV, to the young woman who becomes a star and had trouble handling the mad pop star attention.
She has yelled various unfriendly songs at her various ex-boyfriends, and she has remained silent when she was unwell, resisting the image she projected for a while.
She's sung about moving to the big city in your mid-twenties and she's made an entire record about growing up slowly with Love -- and then ripped out two big albums out of the pandemic, Folklore and Evermore.
She was musically quite unpredictable.
Yes, their roots are in country songwriting.
But she has done everything from sugar-sweet girl pop to stadium-ready rock, there were beats influenced by dubstep as well as the indie sound of her pandemic albums.
What's next?
Who doesn't want karma to a friend?
»Midnights« can't really make up its mind.
Yes, it's an album about the uncertainties of the late hours, that shines through again and again.
But it's also an electronic pop record, which she co-produced with Jack Antonoff, as have many of their albums.
Aaron Dessner, head of the band The National, with which they made "folklore", is gone again.
But the art is never on the surface of the sound with Taylor Swift.
It really is in the stories she tells.
In how she intertwines her personal experiences with universal experiences - and makes them indistinguishable.
There's the song "Karma," for example—which is interesting simply because one of the unsolved mysteries of Swift's career is whether she once recorded an album by that title and never released it.
In 2016, when she was suffering from the stress of falling out with rapper Kanye West.
The song "Karma" on "Midnights" is at first glance an almost classic song about a woman who fantasizes about revenge on a man who treated her badly.
Karma will make sure that he doesn't feel good for too long.
"Karma is my boyfriend," she sings, "Karma is my hair in a breeze on the weekend." At the same time, Swift intertwined lines that are pretty blatant insults to Scooter Brown, the music executive from whom she's asking for the rights to her sees cheated early albums.
And in the end it's also a song that you can hardly get rid of: who wouldn't like to have karma as a friend?
Be like everyone else
There was a funny and short-lived fashion term a few years ago that described a desire to set yourself apart by being just like everyone else: normcore.
Taylor Swift is the superstar who's managed to make it one of pop's biggest and most interesting careers.
Every other young woman in pop tries to make it by being special.
Has more interesting problems than the others, more original sexual identity, better clothes, more exciting friends.
Taylor Swift does it differently.
Not the niche is her thing.
But her art of making stories from the intimacy of her life in which everyone can find themselves.