This Perfect 'Sick Beat'

The seven-time Grammy Awards winner, Taylor Swift, with that bewitching and fascinating combination of strength and vulnerability, has undeniably transformed herself into one of the most inspirational singer-writer of this generation. The American blonde, who turned 25 last December, had struck yet another massive success with 1.287 million copies of her fifth studio album, 1989, sold out in its first week of release. The album broke numerous records as the 19^th album in music history to achieve more than 1 million first-week sales, and even succeeded in surpassing the Frozen: Soundtrack to be the best-selling record in the year of 2014.

  Inspired by the remarkable music produced in the 1980s, Swift blends her very personal and daring song-writing prowess into the genre of Pop, making an album louder and poppier than anything she had ever released before. Her act has been noted as a dare shift, for it is a verily risky decision to make, to put her reputation on an unpredictable wager. In fact, months before announcing the advent of her latest masterpiece, the I Knew You Were Trouble hit-maker promised her faithful fans for brand new changes in music, including gripping a ‘sonically-cohesive’ state that one never get to have from her four previous albums.

  Swift honourably named the record her ‘first official and documented Pop album’. It consists of 13 tracks, containing notable hits such as Blank Space and Style, which have both stormed the world with top rankings on international charts. It has well earned positive ratings from a long list of entertainment magazines and organizations (eg. The Rolling Stone, The Telegraph, Billboard, Time etc), boasting its popularity up to yet a greater plight no one has ever foreseen.

  A perfect example that marks the singer’s departure from pure country is the lead single off the album, Shake It Off. The song obtained 544,000 units of sale, becoming the longest debut sales week for a single in 2014. This marvellous tune made its climb to the peak of Billboard Charts for 4 non-consecutive weeks and even received nominations for ‘Song of The Year’ and ‘Record of The Year’ at the Grammy Awards 2015.

  The four-time multiplatinum album-maker filters the song with her recently-conquered life lesson of having to deal with everyday basis in a feeling of humiliation and to learn a peculiar sense of humour out of it. She builds her self-confidence up by shutting out the ear-splitting echoes of critics through her clumsy dance moves, creating significant T-Swift trademarks of the 1989 era.

  “For the last few years, I’ve woken up every day not wanting, but needing to write a new style of music. I needed to change the way I told my stories and the way they sounded.

  “There's a song that I wrote a couple years ago called ‘Mean’, where I addressed the same issue but I addressed it very differently. I said, "Why you gotta be so mean?" from kind of a victimized perspective, which is how we all approach bullying or gossip when it happens to us for the first time. But in the last few years I've gotten better at just kind of laughing off things that absolutely have no bearing on my real life,” Swift shared with NPR’s Radio DJ Melissa Black.

  “My decision to make a Pop album was an intuition thing. I wanted it to make people dance.”  

By,

Euan Thum,

Collaborated with,

Ronin Lim Jing Lii.

Written on
22/4/15,
Rated 5 out of 5.