Despite being titled The Department of Tortured Poets and having a somber black-and-white cover, Taylor Swift’s latest album is actually full of jokes, inside jokes, and jokes. “I’m going to have your baby. No, it’s not true, but you should see your faces,” she sings, to no one knows who in But Daddy I Love Him, the song on the album most linked to her country past.
Several songs on the album are based on irony or self-irony. In the first section would be the one titled Fresh out the Slammer, which could be translated as “fresh off the train” and would refer to a breakup after a long relationship, surely that of the singer with actor Joe Alwyn. And in the second, more fun section, that song titled I Can Fix It would fall. No, seriously, I can, in which the narrator paints herself as a romance addict who believes she can rehabilitate a semi-toxic boyfriend. At the end of the song, she slips: “Okay, maybe I can’t.”
As a lyricist, Swift has always balanced her more melodramatic tendencies with lighter verses, which have ended up being some of her most memorable. For example, “I can turn bad guys into good guys for a weekend” from Blank Space, one of her hits from her 1989 album, the one that sealed her as a superstar. In the last album, the one he released without even his most irredeemable fans having time to wish for it and the one that followed his imperial period, with a stratospheric tour still underway, he has allowed himself a more shameless tone, with many “ fuck” included. And in that she goes hand in hand with the other pop artists who are succeeding, it is not known if thanks to or despite her enormous influence.
Swift’s opening act on part of the Eras Tour, Sabrina Carpenter, a former Disney girl famous since her teens, is carving out a more playful image than her mentor. Carpenter has taken good advantage of the attention that being on that tour gives him and has turned his song Nonsense, which says in the lyrics “this song is more contagious than measles” into a wink to his fans, since at each stop on the tour she changes the lyrics to things like “I only go out with him if he pays my rent” or, as she sang in Buenos Aires, “when I’m in the bedroom all sexy, he has a good time, he calls me Messi.”
The singer released a couple of weeks ago a serious candidate for song of the summer, the also hyper-catchy Espresso, whose lyrics torture the syntax of the English language but are perfectly understood in the key of internet slang. Journalist Kyle Chayka, author of the recently published book Mundofiltro (Gatopardo), in which he analyzes how the algorithmic system is flattening cultural products, says in his weekly newsletter, One Thing, about part of the lyrics of that song: “it is sung with such emptiness that it sounds like an A.I. model. trying to identify himself, every sentence a non sequitur.” At the same time, in that same text, he recommends taking that song as a candy, to be eaten without looking at the ingredients.
“Turn me on like Nintendo,” Carpenter sings in Espresso, and there he completes the gamer triad of the year. In The Alchemy, Taylor Swift says: “Play me while your friends play Grand Theft Auto” and in Eternal Sunshine Ariana Grande asks her lover: “play me like I’m the Atari.”
You could say that, knowing they are winners, the pop girls are having a good time. Also Olivia Rodrigo, who declares herself indebted both to the rrriot girls of the feminist alternative scene of the nineties and to the leaders of commercial punk pop of the two thousandths, like Gwen Stefani, has adopted that conversational tone of Taylor Swift in her songs and the she sows messages, sometimes addressed to the men who have passed through her life – “I should have seen that it was strange that you only appeared at night,” she sings in one of her best songs, the round Vampire – and sometimes to herself, like when you ask and answer whether or not it’s a bad idea to meet your ex in Bad idea, right?.
In her confirmation album, Guts, Rodrigo adopts a double position: she sings like a dramatic post-adolescent and at the same time as someone who portrays herself as a dramatic post-adolescent and laughs at herself, which fits perfectly with a hyper-aware generation. He is like someone who makes an Instagram post that falls into the cliché and puts a foot in it where he admits that this, indeed, is an Instagram post that falls into the cliché. In few songs is this double pivot seen as clearly as in her Ballad of a Homeschool Girl, in which she says: “everything I do is tragic / all the boys I like are gay.” .
According to music critic Eva Sebastián, it seems natural that pop stars participate in the “memetized language and self-deprecating humor” that makes up the vernacular of the Internet. “Before, rappers had to be the toughest, and now solo women, who are the focus of the music market and now also of critics, have to be the funniest, the most ingenious,” she says. More than a playful era of pop, she believes that there is a certain goofy style that sells well and that, if it doesn’t come naturally, it becomes imposed.
Sebastián, however, draws a generational cut and distinguishes between the emerging singers of the Zeta generation, such as Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat and Chappell Roan (the latter would represent the theatricality, the energy of the child who goes to theater camps and forces his family to attend a 40-minute monologue starring him) and his millennial predecessors, like Swift herself, who are already in their mid-thirties. “The younger ones communicate naturally in that internet humor. They have that goofier universe. Doja Cat became known with a song called Mooo! in which she played a cow. On the other hand, when I see Taylor Swift trying to do that it seems to me that it’s like when Dulceida takes a bad photo and says ‘I’m a meme’. I think she doesn’t quite understand it but she wants to use that language. “She makes me feel a little embarrassed.” Sebastian, by the way, has bought tickets to see Swift in Edinburgh. He would belong to that faction of critical Swifties who do not buy into everything the artist does, even though they deeply respect her talent.
As a precedent for this humor in pop and the mirror in which twenty-somethings look at themselves, critics clearly point to Lily Allen, the first massively successful singer who emerged from MySpace in the first decade of the century and who always left traces of a sense of comedy with 100% British roots in its lyrics. In 2022, Rodrigo invited Allen to go on stage with her at the Glastonbury festival, where the Englishwoman was playing at home, and they both sang the song Fuck You, which they dedicated to the Supreme Court judges who had just condemned the law that same week. to abortion in the United States.
In the case of Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande, there is another message that both have slipped into their respective albums, more than with humor, with a certain exasperation. The message that the two singers send to the most altered and interventionist faction of their fandoms to let them live life in peace, make mistakes and have harmful boyfriends if necessary. Grande states it clearly in the song Yes, and?, in which she responds to accusations of being a homewrecker for divorcing her ex-husband, Dalton Gómez, and starting a relationship with a married man and father of a girl, the actor Ethan Slater. “Your business is your business and mine is mine,” she says. And she then asks her fans why they care so much who she sleeps with, only she says it in words less printable in a mainstream newspaper.
Swift also did not handle the reaction of her fans well when she had a brief romance with the singer of the band The 1975, Matty Healy, known for his pose as a classic upper-class British scoundrel and his penchant for getting into trouble.
In the song But Daddy I Love Him he could be alluding to that, when he recites, almost out of breath due to the number of syllables he has to fit into a sentence: “God reserved me for the worst critics / who say they want the best for me.” me / staging sanctimonious soliloquies that I will never hear.”
In forums in which pop analysis is carried out with precision (and humor), such as the podcasts Keep it and Las Culturistas, they have agreed to read those lyrics, and those two albums by extension, as a gesture of emancipation on the part of two superstars who want to continue being kidnapped by what fans expect of them, even if they later resort to those invisible armies to defend themselves from professional criticism and their various enemies. “I think what they are trying to do with this is to generate new links and even more legend around their figures,” explains Eva Sebastián. In the era in which pop is written and understood almost exclusively as a branch of autofiction, mainstream figures are indulging in a few laughs, but it’s less clear that they can do so at the expense of their fans.
