Did you have to beam me up?
We're talking metaphors in "The Tortured Poets Department" on this week's AP Taylor Swift podcast episode
Today’s Summer School episode has us revisiting Episode 13: Metaphors (Spotify | Apple). There’s no shortage of metaphors across The Tortured Poets Department, from alien abduction and a city to prison and high school. We unpack some of the metaphors woven through the lyrics better to understand the songs and the album as a whole.
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🏫 This Week’s Extra Credit - Brought to you by Jodi
Taylor Swift is a master of metaphors. It makes sense that a songwriter would use metaphors as much as possible—a song is a pretty short amount of time to tell a story and convey emotions (unless you write a 10-minute song, but who does that!?), and metaphors let you symbolize or imply a comparison in just a few words. In our initial show-and-tell episode, we dove deep into Metaphors, and I’ll leave Maansi’s extra credit here so you can get a refresher on Metaphor 101.
This week we talked about metaphors specifically in The Tortured Poets Department songs, of which there were PLENTY: Alien invasion! London! Jail! Shipwreck! Albatross! For this week’s extra credit, let’s go beyond the lyrical metaphors and instead focus on the visual metaphors Taylor uses in The Tortured Poets Department’s branding.
Snakes and Butterflies and Fall, or: How Taylor Uses Metaphors in Album Branding
As every Reputation (Taylor’s Version) Clown will attest, Taylor uses distinct colors and visuals in her album promotion to define each era. And more often than not, these visuals are metaphors for the album themselves:
Red (Taylor’s Version) & Fall: Red was Taylor’s transition album from country to pop music, and there was no greater metaphor for this transition than Fall. This imagery was more overt in the re-release than in the OG album release in 2012—the original Red leaned more into academic/preppy clothing, a “back to school” aesthetic if you will, that hinted at Fall without diving in fully. However, the re-release leaned heavily into the fall branding, using this imagery as a metaphor for her musical transition and the change of seasons in her career.
reputation & Snakes: Taylor reclaimed the idea of being a “snake” by using it prominently in her album promotion and music videos. A snake is a metaphor for someone evil, or one who has committed a sin. Taylor famously entered her reputation era by being called a “snake” by Kim Kardashian for allegedly lying (tl;dr: Kim’s army of fans put 🐍🐍🐍 emojis all over Taylor’s socials, and it turns out Kim was the liar, yada yada yada). The snake has become the symbol of the reputation album, perhaps also because snakes shed their skin and go through a transformation symbolizing growth.
There are many more visual metaphors in her other albums, but I really want to focus on The Tortured Poets Department, so let’s go!
Studying TTPD Visual Metaphors
Now that we know how Taylor previously used visual metaphors in her album branding, we can look at some of the metaphors for TTPD to contextualize the album as a whole. Two metaphors stand out most to me: Academia and Frankenstein.
Academia
From The Tortured Poets Department announcement visuals we saw hints at the academic nature of the album’s branding. From file folders and stationary, to calling herself the “Chairman of the Tortured Poets Department” and the fact that the album references a department itself, it was clear Taylor was leaning hard into a school theme of some sort. But it’s not quite school—it’s not the classes and teachers that she focused on. Instead, it’s the bureaucracy and the structure of academic institutions.
Taylor herself referred to the scenery in the Fortnight music video as a “government or municipal building where they study the behaviors and minds of poets.” So we have a blending of academia, science, and government, all used with the intention of symbolizing structure, study, and examination.
What could warrant such studying and examination? Perhaps the relationships that inspired a double album of 31 songs?! In my mind, the 31 songs on the album are a means of unpacking and studying what happened and how she’s feeling. If Red was a transition (fall), and reputation was a transformation (snakes), I’d call TTPD an examination, and an academic metaphor makes sense.
Frankenstein
The other prominent visual metaphor again used in the Fortnight music video is Frankenstein. Written by Mary Shelley in 1818, SparkNotes (yes, I went there) describes the gothic novel as such:
The novel follows the ambitious scientist Victor Frankenstein, who, driven by a desire to overcome death and unlock the secrets of life, creates a human-like creature from reanimated body parts. The story unfolds through a series of letters and narratives, recounting Victor’s journey and the consequences of his creation.
Now I need to admit two things here:
I first and last read Frankenstein in high school, many MANY years ago
I hated it
I remember hating this book not because it was bad, but because I thought it would have been way more interesting if the monster wasn’t actually a physical, real monster, but instead a manic episode and completely in Victor Frankenstein’s head instead. Does that completely change the point of the novel? Yes. Yes, it does. But I digress!
The monster in Frankenstein is literally built out of pieces of other humans, is studied intrusively, and then eventually destroyed by its creator. Taylor uses Frankenstein imagery in the “Fortnight” music video as she’s having her brain examined and prodded by scientists (played brilliantly by The Dead Poet’s Society stars Josh Charles and Ethan Hawke). Her use of Frankenstein in one sense echoes the academic metaphors of examination and study, as the album is a study of her own experiences and behavior. However, using Frankenstein also symbolizes the idea that the album is a collection of re-animated experiences and interactions with people and relationships in her life, just like the monster was built from parts of other humans. TTPD brings to life dead relationships (“How Did It End?” and “So Long London” clearly capture dead relationships) to examine them and create new life—the album itself. And, we know from the “In Summation” poem that Taylor sees the album as a way to examine the consequences of her own actions, similar to how Frankenstein the novel recounts Victor Frankenstein’s consequences of his creation.
But wait, there’s more!
The concert visuals in The Tortured Poets Department set give us even more visual metaphors that if I wanted to write a dissertation on this, I would dive into: Victorian era, Surrealism, haunted houses, military, and old Hollywood to name a few. This album is long, it is dense, and as a result, it’s hard to summarize in just a few visuals. But I picked the two that stand out to me, and I want to hear what you think visually represents this album and what it means. Leave us a comment and let me know your thoughts!