For almost a decade, Taylor Swift has been waging, and winning, a war, smiling all the while.
Country music has been — was — a natural enemy for her: hidebound, slow moving, lousy with machismo. She could break the rules and make people nervous simply by showing up. And yet country was also a hospitable host body. She faced almost no direct competition there, and it’s a genre that embraces success, grudgingly if need be.
Most important, country gave Ms. Swift context. It made her a transgressor, which means even her most benign songs could be read with mischievous intent. From the outside, she looked like a conquering titan. But from the inside looking out, even as the genre’s biggest star, she was always something of an underdog, multiplatinum albums and accolades be damned.
That she would one day abandon country has long been clear. It’s a big box, and a porous one, but a box all the same. “1989” (Big Machine), though, her fifth album and the first that doesn’t at all bother with country, manages to find a new foe.
Full of expertly constructed, slightly neutered songs about heartbreak, “1989,” which is to be released on Monday, doesn’t announce itself as oppositional. But there is an implicit enemy on this breezily effective album: the rest of mainstream pop, which “1989” has almost nothing in common with. Modern pop stars — white pop stars, that is — mainly get there by emulating black music. Think of Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber. In the current ecosystem, Katy Perry is probably the pop star least reliant on hip-hop and R&B to make her sound, but her biggest recent hit featured the rapper Juicy J; she’s not immune.
Ms. Swift, though, is having none of that; what she doesn’t do on this album is as important as what she does. There is no production by Diplo or Mike Will Made-It here, no guest verse by Drake or Pitbull. Her idea of pop music harks back to a period — the mid-1980s — when pop was less overtly hybrid. That choice allows her to stake out popular turf without having to keep up with the latest microtrends, and without being accused of cultural appropriation.
That Ms. Swift wants to be left out of those debates was clear in the video for this album’s first single, the spry “Shake It Off,” in which she surrounds herself with all sorts of hip-hop dancers and bumbles all the moves. Later in the video, she surrounds herself with regular folks, and they all shimmy un-self-consciously, not trying to be cool.
See what Ms. Swift did there? The singer most likely to sell the most copies of any album this year has written herself a narrative in which she’s still the outsider. She is the butterfingers in a group of experts, the approachable one in a sea of high post, the small-town girl learning to navigate the big city.
In that sense, the most important decision Taylor Swift made in the last couple of years had nothing to do with music: She bought a pad in New York, paying about $20 million for a TriBeCa penthouse.
It was a molting, the culmination of several years of outgrowing Nashville combined with interest in Ms. Swift that placed her in tabloid cross-hairs just like any other global star.
But it also afforded her the opportunity once again to be seen as a naïf. In Nashville, she’d learned all the rules, all the back roads. Now, with that place more or less in the rear view, she is free to make the John Hughes movie of her imagination. That’s “1989,” which opens with “Welcome to New York,” a shimmery, if slightly dim celebration of the freedom of getting lost in Gotham: “Everybody here was someone else before/And you can want who you want.” (As a gesture of tolerance, this is about 10 steps behind Kacey Musgraves’s “Follow Your Arrow.”)
Ms. Swift hasn’t been the type to ask permission in her career, but she has long seen herself as a stranger to the grand-scale fame that New York signifies. “Someday I’ll be living in a big ol’ city” she taunted a critic on “Mean,” from her 2010 album “Speak Now”; now here she is, making the New York spotlight her backlight.
On this new stage, Ms. Swift is thriving. And crucially, she is more or less alone, not part of any pop movement of the day. She has set herself apart and, implicitly, above.
The era of pop she channels here was a collision of sleaze and romanticism, of the human and the digital. But there’s barely any loucheness in Ms. Swift’s voice. Her take on that sound is sandpapered flat and polished to a sheen. The album, named for the year she was born, is executive produced by Ms. Swift and Max Martin, and most of the songs are written with Mr. Martin and his fellow Swede Shellback. Both men have helped shape the last decade of pop but what’s notable here is their restraint. (Mr. Martin also did almost all the vocal production on the album.) Ms. Swift’s old running buddy Nathan Chapman produced “This Love,” a mournful ballad that would have been at home of the “Hunger Games: Catching Fire” soundtrack, and the only song here that could be mistaken for a concession to country.
The best country-defying songs on her last album, “Red” — especially “I Knew You Were Trouble,” another collaboration with Mr. Martin and Shellback — were also a move toward forward-sounding pop. Ms. Swift has many charms but stylistic envelope pushing has not always been among them. And yet those songs showed her to be more of a risk taker than she’d ever been, and savvy enough to know her fans would follow.
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