


Despite Taylor Swift earning her first Grammy nomination in 2008 and her first Grammy win in 2010, onetime music tastemaker tabloid Pitchfork didn’t review a single album by Swift until 2015 — when the certified nine-times platinum 1989 was covered by a man.
Although the blog would retroactively go on to review Swift’s past albums more than a decade after their initial, chart-topping releases — without irony, reviewer Maura Johnston would lament that “back then, though, [Swift] had her doubters” — Pitchfork has returned to form.
Swift’s latest album, a surprise double release cheekily monikered The Tortured Poets Department/The Anthology, scored a contemptible 6.6 from the hipster music blog, a tenth of a point higher than what it gave the children’s record Peppa’s Adventures: The Album (as in Peppa Pig, the cartoon pig).
Pitchfork is not alone in its thinly veiled elitist disdain for Swift’s latest era. The New York Times branded her album “often self-indulgent” and “curiously insular” and said it was in need of an editor. Paste magazine’s cravenly anonymous review blasts Swift for “simplicity, empty language, commodification” and “infantilizing her own audience.”
“Sylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this,” Paste writes of the mentally ill poet who traumatized her children with her suicide, somehow pinning the blame on Swift.
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Alas, “the haters gonna hate,” but Swift still reigns supreme. Her simple, empty, infantilizing, and self-indulgent album just became the first in history to surpass 1 billion streams in a single week on Spotify, and within three days, the album sold more vinyls in one week than any other record in history, ironically breaking the previous record that she set. On top of the record-shattering commercial acclaim, Swift scored the endorsement that may matter most: Donna Kelce, the mother of her boyfriend, three-time Super Bowl winner Travis Kelce, branded Tortured Poets “her best work” yet.
Elite tastemakers such as Pitchfork may prefer female artists who court controversy, promote provocation, and embrace edge, explicit content, sex, drugs, and “woke” endorsements. But that’s not who Swift is, and her audience rewards her for staying true to herself. Pitchfork may only reward men for excelling as mere singer-songwriters rather than celebrities selling shock value, but in her mid-30s and at the height of a career at an age when plenty of females are discarded by the industry, Swift’s staying power proves she’s playing a much longer game than any of her haters understand.