Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Every decade, as every year, is important, but some stand out in history more than others purely because of the times and memories associated to them. For 1989, not only was it the beginning of the end in terms of the cold war but it was the end of a decade in which could have seen the world truly destroyed by political stupidity, arrogance and fear. The decade saw strife world-wide, anger, decimation, terror, political brutality…but also the emergence of hope in the unlikeliest of places and driven forward by the most unlikely of men or women.
1989 was certainly a momentous historical year in a truly significant decade. In many ways it stands out clearer for those who lived through it than the 1990s ever would. A quarter of a century has been chewed up, torn to pieces and reorganised since but it also happens to be the central theme to Taylor Swift’s new album 1989, the follow up to the commercially successful Red.
For the American musician who perhaps unfairly gets labelled in between so many camps, 1989 maybe a sojourn into the pop world but also it hangs its hat into the realm of intrigue and unbiased great writing.
Tracks such as the heavily pop inspired but somehow compelling Welcome To New York, a song in which the listener really is transported to days when the city was cleaning up its image and the thrill of the experience of waking up in a place full of hope and potential rather than the undercurrent of secrecy and moral abandonment that seems to be creeping back in, the energetic Out of the Woods, the smile inducing Shake It Off and what only be described as the complex information gathering on how to treat a girl properly, a discussion in which many to this day really do find perplexing and signal driven in the song How You Get The Girl all fight, kicking and screaming, sometimes persuading with a cock of the index finger, to be suitably impressed with what you hear.
It is arguably in the final track of the album, Clean, it which the truth of addiction come out. Regardless of whether it is the narcotic, alcohol driven, the puff of what seems like a friendly smoke, the constant craving for chocolate or the company of one particular human being, being an addict is never an easy one to pull away from. No matter how much time is driven between the last and first sighting or smell of the obsession; it never truly goes away.
Clean may well be the song of a woman realising what she has bought upon herself but the sound generated by the various instruments within its heaving and often despairing heart is one of anger, of a mess that when all is said and done admits that the only way somebody can get sober, free of the need, is by their own will power or to have something else in line to replace the infatuation. Sometimes being clean is not enough, you will always stay an addict of something. The overall tone of the song is sombre and refreshing but tinged with the darkness that in the 21st Century invades all our lives, the need of want.
Even for those who never stray too far into the world of pop culture, preferring to stay well away perhaps and looking in occasionally to make sure their own preferred genre has not been infested with the genetic make-up of something perhaps flighty. However it seems that on those occasions it might just do some good to dip the smallest toe, the knobbly elbow or your whole being into another world for a while, for Taylor Swift and 1989, it is a vintage worth exploring.
Ian D. Hall