It’s one in all a number of songs with a cheaply efficient patriarchal bogeyman in its sights: On the budget-Berghain “69,” Taylor lists all of the intercourse positions she’s into however forewarns any potential lover: “However the one factor I hate/’Cos I simply can’t focus/No, I simply can’t abide/Yeah, I’ve by no means the time to 69.” Meant as a touch upon how girls don’t put themselves first in mattress, it comes off like a tee-hee watershed comedy sketch about doing it, or an undesirable reminder of Lily Allen’s Sheezus. The dehumanized thrash of “Lies” completes the trifecta, drums roiling like whitewater as she admits how typically she hides her true emotions to maintain the peace. “I’ll make you fuckin’ hear me,” she rages. However she’s solely placing a blunt concentrate on what, by now, are long-accepted understandings of gender dynamics; it’s a far cry from how a lot she may include in a single line like “sexting you on the psychological well being speak feels counterproductive” on Prioritise Pleasure. Certainly we’re too far gone for “girls deserve orgasms” to nonetheless rely as a trenchant political assertion.
She contrasts the excessive dudgeon with pat anthemics. Taylor has cited Elbow’s rapturous “One Day Like This” as an inspiration to jot down songs that unfold their arms broad, primed to soundtrack victorious TV sports activities montages. Heavy with choir and limitless saccharine crescendos, the album ups the stagey vitality that labored sparingly on her final report (She additionally debuted it with a one-off theatrical residency in London, and A Difficult Lady feels prefer it was produced spectacle-first). “Focus Is Energy” grows heat and nostalgic as Taylor recollects being advised, “‘Don’t be too loud or too quiet’/However I obtained all this hearth.” “No matter is best for you will information you thru,” she sings on “If Not Now, It’s Quickly,” which is pure M Individuals. “Time is an opportunity to heal” goes “What Now,” because the choir roars and the Etsy checkout goes cha-ching.
Some listeners will really feel moved, and will they take the whole lot they will from this. Others could despair on the state of putatively feminist inspo-culture within the age of superstar all-women area crews reminding women that they too may sooner or later “put the ass in astronaut.” On the stage present premiering the album, Taylor and her dancers wearing pilgrim-style outfits that many critics in comparison with the capes of The Handmaid’s Story; their actions remodel from stiff and “shackled,” Taylor mentioned“then we exorcise it. Over the course of the present, all of it unravels and everybody finally ends up being themselves as a substitute of conforming to those societal norms.” However “be your self” tradition is, arguably, the defining societal norm of our instances, one used to justify quite a lot of individualism on the expense of precise society. Nobody album or musician needs to be burdened with fixing systemic injustice, however A Difficult Lady yearns to make A Huge Feminist Assertion. Right down to Moonchild Sanelly giving a really Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie-in-“Flawless” deal with amid the softly dashing Afrobeats of “In Plain Sight,” it’s one whose myopic focus is caught in 2013—women, you bought this; males, do higher—indifferent from the pretty urgent feminist issues of 2025.
Self Esteem broke out as an act of defiant self-definition, however A Difficult Lady’s wide-reaching, mollifying remit seems like Taylor attempting to be an excessive amount of to too many individuals, to reside as much as the validation that her final album occasioned. Its finest moments are probably the most private: singing about her relationship with alcohol on “The Curse,” which builds to a livid, yelled refrain of “I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t fucking work” that rings extraordinarily true; “Logic, Bitch!” is a susceptible, beneficiant tribute to Taylor’s ex-girlfriend and the way they “let the love evolve/Let it change and develop.” These two songs say extra about what traps and frees girls than any of the boilerplate rhetoric elsewhere. Mockingly, so does the way in which A Difficult Lady tries to make a case for a lady’s multifacetedness however winds up so boxed in by expectation.
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Self Esteem: A Difficult Lady
