In 2014 Taylor Swift disintegrated the competition

Taylor Alison Swift was born in West Reading, Pennsylvania (USA) on 13 December 1989 and “1989” is the title of his fifth album released on October 27, 2014. “1989” it is her first album that clearly deviates from the country influences of her early years, she herself defined it as “officially pop”. Today we remember the tenth anniversary of one of the most important albums of the 1910s, even if only for the impressive sales, bringing back the thoughts on that album expressed by Pop Topoi who reviewed it for us at the time of its release.

The cover of Taylor Swift’s “1989” is a polaroid, and even in the lyrics of “Out of the woods” there is talk of a polaroid: it is taken by a companion who, we discover later in the song, will end up in the hospital with twenty stitches. It would be a snowmobile accident during a holiday with Harry Styles, but it is not certain: in the singer’s career, reality and mythology often overlap, and she is the first to disseminate clues and curiosities in her songs so that fans, gossip and critics can have fun speculating. But even if we weren’t interested in Taylor Swift’s private life (it’s an absurd hypothesis: everyone is interested in Taylor Swift’s private life), the song itself wouldn’t suffer: the artist has the ability to capture in every verse small moments (or polaroids) and decorate them with avalanches of details until they are animated with rare effectiveness. Taylor Swift is never generic because she is a storyteller coming from country.

“1989”, however, is not a country album, and if with the previous “Red” one could still discuss its belonging to the genre, here there are no longer any doubts: Taylor Swift makes pop, she does it well and she knows how to sell it (it seems that this album will be the only one of 2014 to exceed one million copies sold, and will reach the goal in less than a week). The year written on the cover is the one in which it was born as well as the inspiration for the sounds – mostly electronic and deliberately dated. The producers who follow the singer in the experiment are all the big names you expect to find in a pop album (Max Martin, Ryan Tedder, Greg Kurstin) plus a couple of unusual collaborators (Jack Antonoff of fun., Imogen Heap ), but Swift is never in the background. Indeed, despite the number of people involved, the result is homogeneous – a sign that it was directed with great confidence. The only track in which Swift seems to fully immerse herself in the guest’s world is “Clean”, but even Imogen Heap’s sounds and backing vocals fail to distract attention from the protagonist.

Even though she didn’t live through the ’80s, Swift studied their music carefully. But hers is not a philological work at all costs: unlike Lana Del Rey, who looks to the past with a nostalgic sigh and would jump on the first time machine, Swift just wants to capture an atmosphere with the right synth and find a more interesting framework for his new stories. Paradoxically, the ideas stolen from the last century make “1989” one of the freshest records of the year, and with “Welcome to New York” Swift disintegrates the competition from the first track: it is guaranteed that we will not hear anything equally kitsch and fun in 2014. Even at the lowest points (“Bad blood”, a bland hate song supposedly dedicated to Katy Perry; “How you get the girl”, which seems written like an advertising jingle and in fact already is, for Coca Cola ), “1989” is irresistible in ways that the paranoid listener tends to define as “guilty pleasure” and demonstrates that Swift, in addition to the talent for writing she honed in country, has also developed her talent for producing in a pop context.