Enough of the Swift scourge! MAUREEN CALLAHAN slams Taylor as a money-grabbing, narcissistic, wannabe poetess and says this intellectually stunted, clichéd new album commits the worst sin of all

Call it the reaction of the tortured public.

A global market bombarded by Taylor Swift must now endure a new album, a new promotional cycle, a new round of reckoning with ex-lovers and a level of navel-gazing that makes J.Lo seem modest.

Then again, Swift has never had a sense of humor about herself, right?

So here we are, tired from the Eras tour and movie, the Taylor and Travis show, Taylor on the cover of Time as Person of the Year 2023, the reissue of two older records last year, Taylor at the Golden Globes of 2024 – expressing serious displeasure after a joke about her overexposure – and Taylor at the Grammys just months ago, appearing to snub terminally ill legend Celine Dion in her haste to grab her trophy.

Swift left no breathing room for gratitude that night, no moment to let her record-breaking achievement sink in, or at least show some decency.

No, just a hasty pitch for her latest project about free network airtime, feigning utter disbelief that she’s – little Tay-Tay! – had actually won another prize.

It seems that Taylor Swift is not most inspired by real artists, but by titans of commerce. According to the immortal ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’, she must ‘always be busy’ with yet another transaction.

“I want to thank you,” Swift told her fans, “by telling you a secret that I’ve been hiding from you for the past two years.”

This latest Grammy, accepted seconds earlier, was already in Swift’s rearview mirror.

“My brand new album comes out April 19th,” she continued. “It’s called ‘The Tortured Poets Section.’ I’m going to post the cover backstage now. Thank you I love you.’

I’m certainly not the only one who needs a good, long break from the Tracy Flick of lukewarm pop.

We have reached Peak Swift, the cultural water table is oversaturated and drenching us with its narcissistic drainage and culling. So much meanness, so many revenge tracks, so much endless whining and settling the score.

Enough! Make it stop! No wonder there’s a persistent conspiracy theory that portrays Swift as a CIA psy-op controlling everything from the Super Bowl to the 2024 presidential election. She could have been used at Gitmo to break terrorists.

Swift is a pest, responsible for, among other things: the unforgivable friendship bracelet trend among middle-aged women; charging tween and teen fans thousands of dollars for tickets; cynically announcing new albums and then suddenly releasing multiple other versions with only one or two songs added, knowing her fans will pay the price – or, as with ‘TTPD’, announcing that there is actually a double edition just hours after release .

In other words, another marketing ploy for Bilk fans who bought what they thought was the whole thing.

On Thursday night, Swift released at least four different versions of “TTPD” for the first time, starting at $12.99 each.

Then, after the clock struck midnight:

“It’s a 2am surprise,” she wrote. ‘Here is the second part of TTPD: The Anthology. 15 additional songs. And now the story isn’t mine anymore… it’s all yours.’ Logged out with a heart emoji. Naturally.

The total cost for each individual version of ‘TTPD’ is just $200 at the time of writing. Not to mention the expensive merchandise (a hoodie costs $75) on her official site.

Taylor became a billionaire last year. But this gamble, which is so typical of her, is not just about money. It’s a way to dominate the charts and break sales records – to essentially manipulate the system.

It all feels patently unfair, especially for an artist who is extremely limited. It is not without reason that her peers were left unmoved when she received that record-breaking Grammy this year.

Swift has been making music since 2006, but in all that time she hasn’t moved beyond a few very myopic topics: famous ex-boyfriends (almost always terrible), her own victimhood — for such a powerful woman, she’s never to blame, ever an architect of her own misery – and mean girls in high school, with Kim K her main enemy.

Swift may be 34 years old, but intellectually, philosophically and emotionally she is forever stuck at 13. Her discography will never improve, only deteriorate.

Doesn’t ‘tortured poetry’ say it all?

An adolescent’s idea of ​​deep thought, the album art is equally cringe-inducing: Taylor in her underwear, writhing, an arm around her breasts and a hand above her crotch, as if to imply – finally! – romantic and sexual maturity.

The same goes for repeatedly dropping ‘f***’ on ‘TTPD’. Courtney Love is right.

“Taylor Swift is not important,” Love told Britain’s Evening Standard last week. “She may be a safe place for girls, and she is probably the Madonna of today, but as an artist she is not interesting.”

Hallelujah! The backlash is emerging.

While the American press remains far too timid, NME gave ‘TTPD’ three out of five stars, calling it ‘without any noticeable stylistic shift or evolution’, with laughable lyrics about Charlie Puth and ‘a tattooed Golden Retriever’.

This from “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”: “I’m so miserable / And no one knows.”

That feeling should be solely the domain of teenage girls.

What really put me off was the second song of the same name. Judge yourself.

“You’re not Dylan Thomas / I’m not Patti Smith,” Swift sings. No joke.

‘This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel / We’re modern idiots’.

Such lyrics reveal a cursory knowledge of a bygone counterculture, referencing artists and locations far more original, thought-provoking, confrontational, and expansive than Swift could ever hope to be.

It’s cheap name checking. It makes Swift look like everything she claims to hate: a try-hard, a fake, a girl who would do anything to be cool.

Does Anyone Really Think Taylor Swift Has Read ‘Just Kids’? If so, she would know that Patti Smith was Robert Mapplethorpe’s muse, and that Dylan Thomas, some 33 years Smith’s senior, never lived in Chelsea.

We call this fraud. Swift has zero lead. She has no interests outside her hermetic world of studio sessions with producer Jack Antonoff, dinners with Blake Lively and Gigi Hadid on the Via Carota, and the next love interest she will flog in the public square.

She is cliche after cliche after cliche, the epitome of basic, and the worst thing such a famous person can be: boring.

Taylor Swift, despite all that pre-“TTPD” press about Emily Dickinson being a distant relation — wave a dead cat and a “23andMe” DNA test and we’re all related to someone remarkable — doesn’t come across as a reader, a thinker, or an intellect. If only she had some of the humor and biting character of that other Swift, the great seventeenth-century satirist Jonathan.

Unfortunately. She’s just a force of will, a triumph of showmanship, branding and ambition – but that’s all.

Think back to the real highlight of this year’s Grammys. It had nothing to do with Swift. That moment belonged to Tracy Chapman, who performed her indelible 1988 hit “Fast Car” with country star Luke Combs.

This is a song Swift could only dream of writing. In just over four minutes, “Fast Car” builds an entire world around two characters and tells a story of youth, hope, fear, romance and desolation that feels at once specific and universal. Chapman created a masterpiece that transcends eras, genres, age or gender, identity politics and socio-economics.

Chapman left a room full of her peers more than thirty years later, speechless and in tears.

Taylor Swift, despite all her money and fame, will never achieve such artistry.

For those of us tired of Swift’s industrial complex suffocating us, with this latest incarnation of a would-be poet, this undeniable flop will have to do for now.