billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - may 4, 2024

There’s a certain clarity that comes with weeks like this - yes, the big obvious story is Taylor Swift once again breaking records with a massive double album project, utterly overwhelming the Hot 100, but I think the follow-up comes with whatever fills in the gaps next week when a huge chunk of it falls away. Or hell, how much of it even falls out at all, for as much as a very loud chunk of the internet has been screaming that nobody likes this and it’s only doing so well because the cards are stacked in Taylor’s favour - which to some extent they are, billionaires can cut their own deal with TikTok to ensure their promo isn’t compromised - you’re also talking about the biggest pop star in the world and a large chunk of the fanbase that’s less online that doesn’t hear bad buzz, and given that I don’t really know the strategy for radio promo, it’s going to be interesting what lasts.

But in the mean time, this is perhaps the easiest run-through of the top ten we’ve had in some time… because it’s all Taylor Swift, and I can basically look at the streaming and sales charts to pinpoint the order. So from the top, ‘Fortnight’ featuring Post Malone handily takes the #1 - and with the added boost on YouTube and a frankly ridiculous radio push already, I can see it lasting into next week - ‘Down Bad’ at #2, and ‘I Can Do It With A Broken Heart’ at #3, getting a sales boost to plug up its streaming ahead of ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ at #4. Then we have ‘So Long, London’ at #5, ‘My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys’ at #6, ‘But Daddy I Love Him’ at #7, ‘Florida!!!’ with Florence + The Machine at #8, ‘Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me’ at #9, and ‘Guilty As Sin?’ at #10 - when you can basically look at the streaming chart to rattle off this order, it falls out fast.

Which naturally takes us to our losers and dropouts, and let’s get through the latter big group first, as album bombs this big and this high knock a lot of songs into recurrence. Let’s start with the songs that may recover but have fallen well-short of any year end list, like ‘Bandit’ by Don Toliver, ‘Training Season’ by Dua Lipa, and possibly ‘Man Made A Bar’ by Morgan Wallen ft. Eric Church. But then we have the big ones that definitely are not coming back but comfortably made their year-end spots: ‘Houdini’ by Dua Lipa, ‘Paint The Town Red’ by Doja Cat, ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ by Luke Combs, ‘Water’ by Tyla, ‘Snooze’ by SZA, and ‘Fast Car’ by Luke Combs. And now for the losers… well, here’s the problem, we have nearly sixty of them, it does not make sense for me to just rattle through them all especially when this episode is going to run long as it is. So what I’ll do is focus on the the gains that saw sharp losses, and the songs that didn’t move much at all: in the former group ‘Gata Only’ by FloyyMenor and Cris Mj collapsed to 58, ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ by Chappell Roan fell back to 62 - I expect a rebound soon, similar case for ‘Hell N Back’ by Bakar and Summer Walker to 72 - then we have the songs that might have Nashville support with ‘Bulletproof’ by Nate Smith at 79 and ‘Back Then Right Now’ by Tyler Hubbard at 73. Finally a few stragglers that lost their gains at the very bottom like ‘Tu Name’ by Fuerza Regida at 87 and ‘Let’s Go’ by Key Glock at 90… but thanks to recurrency rules and the high level impact of this album bomb, songs at the very bottom can skirt some of the impact, especially if they have radio support. So if we’re look at songs that didn’t move much, you get cuts like ‘Spin You Around (1/24)’ by Morgan Wallen at 98, or ‘Halfway To Hell’ by Jelly Roll at 93, or ‘Tucson Too Late’ by Jordan Davis at 92 - hell, in the country category I’d probably say ‘Wind Up Missing You’ holding at 76 fits close to that. The other category are gains that have held… most not for the better as we’ve got ‘Feel It’ by d4vd at 95 and ‘Tell Ur Girlfriend’ by Lay Bankz at 66, but hey, ‘A Bar Song (Tipsy)’ by Shaboozey actually saw growth to 27, it’s on path to be a thing, and given how great that song is, I’m excited!

This takes us to our one gain - there were no returns - and that’s for ‘FTCU’ by Nicki Minaj, which you can chalk up to a big remix with Travis Scott, Chris Brown, and Sexyy Red for a boost to 53… a remix that I’ve heard precisely zero buzz for, I don’t think it’s got staying power especially at radio. But the story here is the album bomb from Taylor Swift, we all know it, and with thirty one songs debuting, we’re absolutely in peak territory… and even then this is going to go long because we have fifteen in the top 20! Outside of those, from the bottom up… ‘Robin’ at 55, ‘The Bolter’ at 47, ‘Cassandra’ at 44, ‘I Look In People’s Windows’ at 39, ‘Chloe Or Sam Or Sophia Or Marcus’ at 36, ‘How Did It End?’ at 35, ‘I Hate It Here’ at 34, ‘The Prophecy’ at 32, ‘The Albatross’ at 30, ‘imgonnagetyouback’ at 26, ‘The Black Dog’ at 25, ‘So Long High School’ at 24, ‘thanK you aIMee’ at 23, and ‘Clara Bow’ at 21.

Alright, this is still a lot, but we’re not starting with Taylor Swift here…

96. ‘Us vs. Them’ by $uicideBoy$ - Well, this is long-overdue. For those who don’t know, $uicideBoy$ are a Louisiana rap duo who have been on the cusp of charting on the Hot 100 for years now as a consistently reliable streaming act that tends to get stranded in the Bubbling Under charts and never quite breaking through… and thus I appreciate the irony on a week competing against Taylor Swift they saw some penetration! Full disclosure, I’ve heard more around them than their music directly, so I was a little surprised how much I dug this! The ominous watery keys against the scratching boom-bap percussion to accent their nasal flows that remind me a lot of ScHoolboy Q, the menace is palpable and immediately conveys the bleak creepy nihilism that underscores their content, where the drug-abusing flexes and depravity is more a comment on them than anyone else. It’s interesting then that the song doesn’t go nearly as dark in its content as it could - if there’s violence, it’s inherently self-destructive, and the material success isn’t satiating them, which I find more interesting even if the song is more interested in painting the picture than adding dimension. That being said, it’s effective - this is pretty good!

51. ‘The Manuscript’ by Taylor Swift - …well, might as well add this one to the pantheon of fantastic bonus closing cuts with ‘Dear Reader’, because holy shit, this is devastating. And it’s such a spare and soft-focus song in its pianos and delicate arrangement until it starts to ramp into the bridge and then can fade away for the coda, it could have swung for the fences but in a rare case doesn’t need to - Aaron Dessner just nails the arrangement here, it’s striking. But I love how the opening verse is very meta between two songwriters who’ll inevitably talk about a relationship and there’s a hint of genuine collegiate earnestness in the flirting - it’s the best point on the album where the ‘poets department’ element feels in play… and then it’s over. And then you get daydreams of what it could have been… and where emotionally she actually is, which then has her second guess all of her old relationships; there’s a real danger to being told you’re wise beyond your years. But she finds a way to work through it through her art, and it comes together, she can contextualize that pain and maybe move on… and then we get the final sad lines where the story is now for the audience, not her anymore. I said this in the review proper, it’s an often unspoken limitation of relying so much on autobiography in art, not just because you have to reopen wounds over and over in performance, but you give a part of yourself in that conversation that can leave you feeling hollow on the other side; it’s a very different experience for the world to enjoy at a distance what you lived, and I think she finally gets it. Incredibly powerful song, best of the bonus cuts here, if there’s anything from that project worth hearing - well, beyond ‘Cassandra’ and ‘The Albatross’ and ‘The Bolter’ - it’s this.

46. ‘Peter’ by Taylor Swift - The funny thing is that I don’t think there are many outright duds on The Tortured Poets Department as a whole - many of those highlighted as glaring weakpoints, I’ll wind up defending and there’s a bunch coming - so let me point at one that’s not getting a ton of attention that I think is a little uninspired. Maybe it’s just the overexposure of Peter Pan metaphors on spare piano ballads, maybe it’s thinking it’s too obvious when talking about the dirtbag childishness that Matty Healy showcases, especially as Taylor has used the metaphor before, maybe it’s the vocal mastering that’s shakier than it should be and a really spare arrangement that isn’t quite strong enough on its own. The definition of a bonus throwaway for me, not precisely bad, but not worth revisiting.

20. ‘I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)’ by Taylor Swift - I’ve seen a lot of folks highlight this as the closest Swift got to a full Lana Del Rey song on this album, and I definitely hear that comparison: staying near her husky soft-spoken register with some of the upward inflections and the gauzy backing vocals, the echoing guitar and ramshackle percussion, and where she recognizes from a mile away that this guy is trouble when he walks in, but she’s drawn to it anyway despite everything. Of course, the difference is that while the bad taste bad boy attraction is there, the final swerve comes in the last line of the song, where she realizes that she can’t fix this dude and any passing glamour isn’t worth it; at this point of the album, it’s the pit-in-your-stomach realization it’s not gonna work, and while it’s a little muted for my taste, I still think this is solid for what it is, good stuff.

19. ‘Push Ups’ by Drake - So I know my reputation as a music critic, especially when it comes to Drake and Billboard BREAKDOWN, and I could have choreographed when he was going to put ‘Push Ups’ on the DSPs to take a passing nudge at Taylor Swift and launch his first real set of jabs at everyone coming for him. So I can imagine there are folks who think I’m going to come down on this hard because I prefer Kendrick as a rapper - but this is beef, and Drake has had his fair share of fights, both wins and losses. I’m not the biggest fan of how he moves in beef, but I know where he can be effective - ‘Duppy Freestyle’ works if ‘The Story of Adidon’ isn’t as much of a systemic dismantling as it is with some of the most biting lines in rap history - and thus I’m comfortable saying that Drake dropped a good song here. The brittle synth and pianos behind the trap percussion is rough but in rap beef I’m a little more forgiving when it comes to mastering - about the only time I’ll ever say that - and Drake gets some good shots off given that he’s had to go at everyone. The issue here is the real fight is between Kendrick and Drake, and to clear the field Drake has to get everyone else out of the way with pithy lines and slick shots while trying to bait Kendrick into showing more of his hand, no haymakers were being thrown here. You can also tell with whom Drake is looking to maintain relationships - Metro gets the most immediately recognizable punch, but there’s only a few words for Future - there’s way too many shared women between them, that could get ugly fast - a few lines for The Weeknd and his team - that’s some Toronto smoke which given I’m in the city is a deeper rabbit hole, pun only partially intended - a scathing set of lines for Rick Ross - of which Ross responded and the whole thing got very silly very fast, which I immensely enjoyed - and then a shot at Ja Morant who really should have been ignored just like A$AP Rocky, J. Cole’s whinging and Kanye inserting himself in conversations he doesn’t belong for clout chasing. And for Kendrick, there are good jabs here: the lines about label exploitation and SZA specifically proves that Drake also saw all the instability in TDE and Interscope, he’s right about Kendrick seeking out bad pop features - although that opens up the door for Kendrick to actually bring Taylor herself into this, which given ‘Taylor Made’ seems to be something Drake wants to get in front of fast because he loses that wealth battle - and the ‘What’s a prince to a king, he a son’ is a great flip, along with mocking those goofy pushups Kendrick was doing in the park. But I don’t like all of this: I hate Drake further validating anything around Kai Cenat and DJ Akademiks, some of the lines are clunkier than they should be, and Drake, I thought you learned your lesson the last time you mentioned someone’s wife in a song, you wound up putting out a statement about blackface, J Prince squashing it for you, and then whining on a couch with LeBron! But again, I know this is a jab, it’s not everything Drake has in the tank, he’s baiting Kendrick’s response… my guess was that it would come in a few weeks, and literally as I was writing this entry Kendrick Lamar drops a six-minute diss record called ‘euphoria’ on YouTube and fucking GOD, that was everything it needed to be as a haymaker, holy shit! We’ll get to that at a later time, this was a good song, but the beef is on!

14. ‘The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived’ by Taylor Swift - You know, I think a lot of the hyperbolic headlines saying Swift is responsible for all the disses flying in 2024 are badly misinformed - I think that’s still Megan’s title to lose - but then I go to this, where the song title is one of the more scathing things you can direct at a man, and recognize that Swift has some bars here as well. Against a gentle piano backdrop and steadily coursing beat, she rips into Matty Healy with venom, his pretentiousness, his lies, his emotional manipulation, his drug abuse, how he treated women, and his cowardice when confronted with any of this - what Swift highlights is how much of this is driven on a very fragile ego and a veneer of glamour, and what I really like is that Swift holds herself somewhat accountable - she looked past so much bullshit for this fling only to be treated badly, but once it wasn’t forbidden, there was no spark, the dagger line is that she’ll forget you, but never forgive. And when that bridge ramps up… yeah, great song, I’m here for this!

13. ‘The Alchemy’ by Taylor Swift - the interesting thing about this song is that it’s the only one on the standard edition where her current relationship with Travis Kelce is in view, with deliberate references to finally being the winner and meeting someone she thinks is on her level; not quite ‘Mastermind’ but more of a victory lap and borderline refutation, with the reference to the pseudoscience of alchemy is quite telling… because love is not science, it’s magic, and she can’t control it the way she once thought… but hey, they’re still at the very top so why not revel in the moment? But if you’re going to go for broke on that, I think the production needs a little more grandeur and swell - the verses feel very brittle and spare, a bit too watery for their own good, and while the joyous backing vocals add some heavenly touch to the hook, none of the instruments really pop and it feels like every switch to the verses deflates the energy. I dunno, I think this is really good, but as a penultimate track on the standard edition, it could have afforded to go harder, that’s all.

12. ‘loml’ by Taylor Swift - Now the tricky thing about a spare heartbreak ballad like this, leaning pretty much on piano and some touches of strings on the outro, is the open question of who it’s about, Joe Alwyn or Matty Healy… and my interpretation is that it could be either or both, capturing the fluttery heartache of it actually working, buying into the classy image and moments where you can see your life with them… only to see how phony and duplicitous it ultimately is, even your love was real. And a lot of the details really ring true here, be they the references that she was the one to turn their lives around, or how maybe she shouldn’t have reexamined any of it for her art when she can feel the mocking laughter of ghosts of what might have been, with the line about being a ‘bland goodbye’ stinging like hell because a lot of relationships don’t end climatically, a boring whimper not a bang. And while I think the flip of ‘love of my life’ to ‘loss of my life’ is a little thin to anchor a song with some solid description, I think this works - not one of my favourites, still a good song.

11. ‘Fresh Out The Slammer’ by Taylor Swift - One lingering fact I think I missed when I reviewed the album is that Swift and Matty Healy actually dated a bit briefly in the mid-2010s, that post-Joe Alwyn breakup there was a pre-existing connection to be reunited, which seems to underscore the arc of this song here as the reverbed blues guitar that honestly feels kind of runny against the warping synths and touches of strings as Swift runs through quasi-triplet flows describing her escape from Alwyn to Healy. Yes, the prison metaphor is a little ridiculous and overworked - Swift is a better writer when she claims her own agency, although given the implied chilliness I get why Healy would be such an appealing rebound - and I’m not sure the switch-up for the outro works as she and Healy try to imagine what a future might look like together, but there’s a core of relief to the song that I actually like. Not one of my favourites, but I get why it works.

10. ‘Guilty As Sin?’ by Taylor Swift - one of the complaints I heard about this album was that everyone was sick of Jack Antonoff and this sound, and that it all sounds the same… so when I get this track, which could have easily been a deep cut on Red or 1989 with that melody line and hook, I’m starting to wonder what the hell people even want. But the sound is only half the story here with its gentle guitars and vocal overdubs and spikes of echoing synth, the other half is that this is a love song for Matty Healy that is intensely conscious of the risk it represents - something to break the boredom, a yearning passion that can feel dangerous for how uncertain it is; a lot of this she’s kept predominantly in her head because actions are what ultimately matter, and if she can delude herself into believing there’s long-term potential, maybe it’s worth it? The sadness to this is that ultimately her suspicions were correct and it was doomed to fail, but the freedom to make the “bad” decision matters just as much on a song that feels very horny in a lot of its language, more sexual than Swift normally is… and boy, that’s a layer of subtext that should be unpacked! Overall, great song, probably deserves more attention than it’s getting.

9. ‘Who’s Afraid Of Little Old Me’ by Taylor Swift - I think this is going to be my most contentious opinion about this album, in that I think this song is one of the best on the project, and it’s not particularly close. For one this also feels like a culmination - Swift has been not so quietly showing her rougher, wilder edges in her writing for years now, and by that I mean the desire to be way more edgy when it’s questionable how much she can pull it off. This is her biggest swing in that territory in a while, where the reputation parallel is the starkest and the camp is highest with its funereal keys, echoing guitars, strings, and percussion ramping up… but there’s a different edge to this and it goes back to ‘mad woman’ on folklore, where women attempting to flex their power outside of their designed place are painted as crazy and unreliable. This is Swift leaning into that… and let’s be clear, even though I can appreciate the wild, fantastical lyricism, it’s not like there aren’t valid points here: the two-faced affection that’s more for control than genuine care, a work environment and stress that very few can fathom even at the height of fame, the grandstanding about her ‘sincerity’ alongside dismissals of her art are dumbed-down entertainment, and the fact that she’s been - let’s call it like it is - groomed for this since childhood, and confronting the abnormality of that with some of the first barbs Swift has ever thrown in her family’s direction means this is going to a different place. What makes the song work compared to, say, ‘Look What You Made Me Do’, is that despite the high camp of the execution I’m capable of recognizing the paranoid truth in all of it - and given I have a platform and have faced some degree of backlash, on an emotional level I get it - but again, I’m on the fringe, she’s at the epicenter, and ‘crazy’ gets treated different especially when it’s also paired with ‘oh, she’s safe and edgeless, she’s no threat, we have her contained’, and the fact that it spilled into her love life where she’s been desperate to find someone to make it work… that screams a bridge too far. In other words, it can play as pure melodrama… but I get how it strikes something way deeper - powerful shit.

8. ‘Florida!!!’ by Taylor Swift ft. Florence + The Machine - …I mean, sometimes for me it’s set up to win - I knew when Florence + The Machine worked with Jack Antonoff on Dance Fever that there was a chance Florence would meet up with Taylor Swift, and the collab is probably the most even-handed that Swift has had since ‘exile’! I don’t quite put this in the same ballpark - they’re both doing very different things, ‘exile’ had grace and dignity and maturity and instead we have a bloodsoaked, hedonistic escape this side of Spring Breakers. And like that movie, this song has split people, especially among those that think it doesn’t feel very ‘Florida’ - I hear that, I’m not sure I agree, this is less a party than a swampy murder anthem, where old wealthy people retire to and criminal flee to start over - cute parallel, I dig it. And there is a twisted, dark humour to this song, two divas drunk on their own pitch-black escapist fantasies, and given how much escape has factored into the themes of this album, there’s a lot of resonance there! But to blunt, so much of this is just on performance and execution - I love the brittle acoustics and pulsating groove that build into that huge, percussive hook, I love how Florence is given the air to completely take over the second verse and she’s got the pipes to fit the ramshackle vibe around Taylor, and as the backing vocal runs pile in, they blend unbelievably well, especially for that final hook, which is one of my favourite crescendos I’ve heard this year! I absolutely adore this song, on the majority of days it’s my favourite on the album - I think it’s too offkilter and bombastic to become a hit on the modern charts, but hey, I’ve been proven wrong before, it could happen… although it’s probably more likely for…

7. ‘But Daddy I Love Him’ by Taylor Swift - I’ve seen folks describe this as a sequel to ‘Love Story’… but man, this feels so much bigger than a fairy tale. It’s the album centerpiece, running damn near six minutes as she runs through a whirlwind romance that has considerably less approval from everyone around her and at some point it becomes less of a story and more a giant middle finger given to the fanbase who would speculate and critique Taylor Swift’s relationships, and some that again includes her family who ‘only want what’s best for her’! The most telling line on this song is ‘growing up precocious sometimes means not growing up at all’ - when you’re exceedingly talented and successful and even privileged as a white woman - let’s not run away from that, there’s a loaded societal critique that could be unpacked here - it can lead to feeling infantilized, coddled, smothered while being told you have it all, and Swift finally being sick of it has been a long time fucking coming! And yes, this is absolutely high melodrama running on pure naked emotions - the production building so much swell is a huge factor to it, I love how the acoustics ramp off the strings and galloping percussion - but again, it’s high camp, there’s humour here to balance the sting of the barbs - telling her parents she’s having his baby as a shocking joke is buckwild, and the song is tempered by the larger reality that the relationship didn’t work in the end, which means I can laugh at how exuberant and freewheeling it is. This is a tour de force that I really do love… not my favourite, but on a given day, it could be!

6. ‘My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys’ by Taylor Swift - Now if we’re talking about Taylor Swift song from the album proper that I really don’t like, it’s this one. The muted stuttering patter with the drum machines, the oily pulse of the synths, that had some potential especially as the brighter melody came in especially on that outro, but this is an example of Swift working a metaphor so hard that it loses impact in the love-hate relationship. There’s weight in describing the shift in power dynamic that comes with a bad relationship, where it almost feels like you’re trying to hold it together going through the motions even as he’s neglectful and abusive under the guise of ‘love’, especially highlighting how in his exit he tries to sell it as being better for everyone, but it feels depersonalized and one-sided here, especially as Swift’s more interesting songs about bad relationships show messier culpability instead of him just playing with you. Honestly a cut like this could fit on reputation… and that’s not exactly a compliment this time, it’s really clunky and doesn’t work for me - easy skip.

5. ‘So Long, London’ by Taylor Swift - This is the song that feels like the definitive end to the Joe Alwyn relationship… of course sitting alongside ‘You’re Losing Me’, but this sound encapsulates more of what that relationship has meant. The ethereal vocals, the fragmented synths, the very fast padded percussion, and the slow-burn heartbreak that comes with a relationship collapsing in slow motion. There are wells of emotion on this song that feel deeply buried but present - very English in that regard - where she is trying to cling to a relationship that’s falling apart in quiet miscommunications and emotional isolation, and then she has to give up, there’s nothing left to give. And what I love about the song is how truly angry it is - she gave years of her life and youth to this and would have seen it all the way, it taints how she sees a city she loved, and for it to feel so inconsequential and bland at the very end is infuriating for someone who seeks meaning, a cold slap in the face when she thought he was so much better. For me this was the first truly great song on the album - excellent cut!

4. ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ by Taylor Swift - I was among the people openly mocking the title of this album, and for good reason: it’s melodramatic as hell, if you’re placing a lot of weight on Swift as a poet compared to her compositional skills and theatricality, you might run into trouble… and yet the reason I like this song is because it’s the first solid clue of how much Swift knows she herself is full of shit! The song is on its face absurd - the nonsense with typewriters, saying that Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist, the play with rings at the table, the reference to both Jack Antonoff and Lucy Dacus, the latter of whom is smarter than both of you and has to roll her eyes at Healy being a melodramatic ponce… they literally call themselves ‘modern idiots’, she references trolling on the final post-chorus, the piss is being taken! And what I like is that there’s still a core of campy earnestness where Swift can find the emotional truth amidst all of it. I wouldn’t call this a favourite of mine on the album - the keys and gleaming synths against the thrumming bass and spare percussion feels very soft rock and I wish it would ramp up the drama a bit more, it’s a shade gauzy and soft-focus for me - but I think if you want a key to unlocking this album, it’s here; really good song.

3. ‘I Can Do It With A Broken Heart’ by Taylor Swift - okay look, I’m not surprised this looks to be primed as the next big pop single - I implied it when I reviewed the album, and… I mean, with that shuddering, fast-paced synth imported from a Bleachers album that builds into a very chirpy, bouncy hook, with the lyrics all about holding it together with the reality that so many of her songs circle heartbreak where she has to relive the angst alongside some songs cowritten by said ex, while on the biggest stages, I get the audience that’s really going to connect to this. I’ve seen a lot of folks call this a ‘girlboss anthem’ - that Taylor can still slay even despite falling apart inside - and to me I get it, but it feels a bit cheap and feels disconnected from the folks who have to go back to work after you get your heart broken, especially in service jobs where you have to fake the smile and positive attitude, and I can have some empathy for Swift who also has to do it while traveling and performing in a multi-million dollar position, where she didn’t cancel. Again, this isn’t a favourite of mine… but I think it’s decent, and I get why it works, which is similar to…

2. ‘Down Bad’ by Taylor Swift - yeah, this also plays to much of the same formula - that fragmented warble of synth around the bells and fizzy percussion, and combined with the synthesized backing vocals it’s trying to evoke a very spacey vibe, with the central metaphor of alien encounters probably being the first major chart crossover to do it since ‘E.T.’ by Katy Perry. And honestly she does it better by playing into how that relationship is perceived - it can feel like a magical moment that pulls you into a different world… and then you’re left behind back on earth and even if it changed your life, nobody believes you and you feel gaslit and hollow. And here’s the thing, Swift knows that can be hyperbolic - calling the song ‘down bad’ and the crying at the gym line has already gotten the same spurt of ‘girlboss’ mockery, but apparently when Swift was training for the Eras tour she used to run and practice singing simultaneously so she had her conditioning, and given the content and emotional weight of these songs, I can see it - and even then she recognizes it as teenage petulance and melodrama… and then there’s the flip of ‘New Romantics’ where being stranded isn’t quite as romantic as it used to be. Again, not a personal favourite - I think it’s missing another gear, it feels very optimized for streaming and not her biggest swing - but it has grown on me, similar to…

1. ‘Fortnight’ by Taylor Swift ft. Post Malone - There was a part of me that was dreading this album entirely because of this song with Post Malone - putting him in the same sonic universe as Taylor seemed like a recipe for disaster, we saw what happened with Beyonce. And yet, this somehow works, even if I do think some of its impact comes with it feeling like a culmination of things I’ve been saying for years - the functioning alcoholic line in the first four bars rings very loud now since I’ve been referencing that since 2017, which also explains why Post Malone makes sense here at all. Honestly, he sounds better here than he did on ‘LEVII’S JEANS’, I think his warble is better blended against the spare pulsating synth and twinkling groove, even if I’d argue Swift doesn’t give him much to do, but the focus is on her, where her instability is more in frame: he may have been able to move on more smoothly and cordial where her rebound was a temporary high, and while she can fake a smile at his champagne problems, she wants to kill his new partner and then eventually him, the tail end of an abbreviated love she’s still processing. I tend to think this song functions as more of an overture to the album - given the reference to ‘Florida!!!’ on the outro - and it also feels a little streamlined for streaming purposes in pop… but honestly, there’s enough lines here that allow me to call this a good song, I’ll take it too.

And that’s our week… my god, there’s a lot here, so let’s wrap up fast, and this is all about Taylor on both sides of the docket: worst is ‘My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys’, Dishonourable Mention to ‘Peter’. Best of the week… I’m going ‘Florida!!!’ with Florence + The Machine, but we have a close tie for the Honourable Mention between ‘But Daddy I Love Him’ and ‘The Manuscript’, and man it’s close indeed! Next week… well, the fallout from all of this, stay tuned for that!