Taylor Swift
“Blank Space”, #18
“Style”, #60
“Wildest Dreams”, #76
“Bad Blood”, #80
Fans choice: now that the album is out we find out what Swift’s audience wants to hear. In the past, nearly every track from a Swift album would chart, but fans are pickier now—or maybe, despite her dominance, she has more competition—so there are only four. What we get are easily the two best tracks from 1989, along with two that do little more than brush up some old cliches with timeworn hooks. Three of the four songs make mention of Swift’s red or cherry lips, which I’m assuming is her euphemism for sex, since “Style”, thanks to its timeless synthesizer throb and near fetishistic chorus, is the most erotic track she’s ever recorded. “Blank Slate” is, of course, tabloid-Taylor self-parody, but it’s also the fantasy of a woman who thinks she can control her love life the same way she controls her career. Despite all her talk of learning to live without love, she’s still a romantic at heart, and her ever more generic sentimental fantasies, good and bad (i.e., “Wildest Dreams” and “Bad Blood”) still drive her writing. She’s rich enough now to hide from the real world as long as she wants, but I await the day she realizes she’s too famous to ever rejoin it. I wonder what turn her fantasies will take then.
Imagine Dragons—“I Bet My Life”
#53
This is the sound of modern “folk”: a stomping 4/4 with a shouted singsong chorus and hired gospel singers to give it added spiritual heft, all in service to cliche lyrics about how if his woman leaves him he’ll die (no pressure there). They’ve gone from being “Demons” to overbearing, constipated macho wimps. As if there was ever a difference.
Nicki Minaj Featuring Drake, Lil Wayne & Chris Brown—“Only”
#54
Minaj invites Drake and Lil Wayne to ogle her T&A and fantasize, and they respond with their middle-school lizard brains in pretty much the way you’d expect. With Chris Brown around for the hook, Minaj has the opportunity to hand all three their dicks on a platter but let’s them go without even a warning. Label loyalty and past history may have something to do with that, but it’s also possible that Minaj is being more subtle. Hearing themselves preen like assholes on a lousy record may be all the warning they need.
OK Go—“I Won’t Let You Down”
#71
Decent standard-issue 80s pop-funk as soundtrack to one of their ever-more grandiose videos. I miss those treadmills.
Ella Henderson—“Ghost”
#75
This is a competent R&B rehash, and Henderson is an OK singer, but this is neither ghostly nor memorable.
Kenny Chesney—“Til It’s Gone”
#100
Putting aside his artistic ambitions for a spell, Chesney goes back to the second-rate country that made him a star. Some interesting chord choices on the verse, but that may just be the session guys keeping themselves awake.