Taylor Swift – The Life of a Showgirl – Is the audio performance up to the marketing hype? – Review (CD,colored vinyl records, streaming,Stereo Atmos)

[Blake Klondike]

On the contrary, It’s rather easy for those of us with zero desire to listen to anything “Taylor Swift” to ignore this event, she has mastered the art of maximising her capitalist value whilst emptying the pockets of her dedicated/deluded fans with umpteen versions of her releases.

No doubt she’ll release an album of insipid breakup songs when she decides the relationship with her current beau is not good for sales



10 different versions of her album?, why………are the first 9 versions shit?……..she’s the equivalent of a Starbucks coffee store on every street corner.

yep she's lame. i'm glad that everyone who wants to hear music that sounds like that can listen to it. but to me she was a better writer at 15 than she is at 35. lots of false rhymes where actual rhymes were available, obvious metaphors worthy of a 12 year-old. if you have heard Ray Davies or Tom Lehrer or Adrian Lenker or Johnny Mercer, you would never rate her writing as anything other than juvenile. it is not serious music for adults, and the more serious she tries to get, the more embarrassing the results. that being said, since i am a guitar teacher and i have to teach her songs, i wish she would take lessons to expand her chord vocabulary and stop writing exclusively about what it's like to be famous or bang some dude. she's a prime example of the great flattening out of the creative end of the music industry post-2005 or so.

 

[Sal1950]

Recordings may be good but loud masters takes it all away. A proper cd quality old recording with good masters sound better than modern hires loud music. That is the reason Stealy Dan, Dire Straits, Diana Krall are still getting referenced

???. I've been thru this over and over. We're all aware of the loudness wars but you make it sound like the problem effects the "audiophile" community to any real extent. It mainly effects the pop and rap community and the facts there are that is mostly the way they WANT their recording to sound, SO. Classical and Jazz mostly completely avoids it. The place it hurt the most was the classic rock remasters done by some greedy engineers looking to take advantage of initial popularity of high resolution hype personified by HDTracks. That's now being turned around by the boom in multich over the last decade. All the old Quad recordings is being re-released by Quadio, Vocalion, Rhino on HiRez BluRay. The tons of that L-W crippled classic rock is now once again being released in 5.1 and Atmos on SACD, DVD-A, and BluRay discs has thankfully given us incredible sounding, high DR, high res music to play on our quality systems. There's never been a better time to own a great Hi-Fi

 

[TimF]

i suppose this thread will grow to 80 pages proving that although we don't much care for her crooning and crowing, we are caught up in her sexual energy. Not you, or course, but the others. The younger Billie Eilish interested me more than the current Billie Eilish. Sometimes I am a touch more interested in looking at them than listening to them. Sometimes youth is compelling, and Ms. Swift is all too swiftly edging out of it. Soon enough she'll be storming off the set of The View like what's her name.....oh yea, Joan Baez.

 

[Digital_Thor]

That's a two sided coin. I listen to Sinatra and Tony Bennett on occasion from the 1930s and forward and can easily hear the technical problems of the recordings from back in the day. OTOH I can first mostly ignore those issues, and secondly they're not something I listen to nailed to the "sweet spot" listening in the "audiophile type mode", mostly in fact they're being played as background while doing other things.
But todays quality recordings give me the kind of High Fidelity Reproductions that we could only dream about back before 1980s. Digital recordings combined with the multich layering first attempted in the 60s allows a level of detail to be heard on the individual performers/instruments undreamed of
only a few decades ago. Add to that todays mediums like bluray discs with space for Quad to Immersive technology at high resolution data rates are StarWars ahead of what we lived with before.

True, and I agree... I can definitely hear the short comings of recordings with Doris Day too ... But the quality of the recording is not bad enough to overshadow the enjoyment of some of her songs, which is my point...in a sea of compromises we experience all the time with hifi.
Though, when you have a favourite song and a high quality mix,recording, then it's definitely preferable.
I must admit though. With the improvements of everything I've learned in relation to my system - definitely also from this site - the easier for me, it is to enjoy my favourite music, whatever that might be.
Luckily there's soooo much music in the world, that I can almost always just find an alternative, if one given artist crosses my lowest level of threshold of audio quality.

 

[Talisman]

i suppose this thread will grow to 80 pages proving that although we don't much care for her crooning and crowing, we are caught up in her sexual energy. Not you, or course, but the others. The younger Billie Eilish interested me more than the current Billie Eilish. Sometimes I am a touch more interested in looking at them than listening to them. Sometimes youth is compelling, and Ms. Swift is all too swiftly edging out of it. Soon enough she'll be storming off the set of The View like what's her name.....oh yea, Joan Baez.

I don't know what sexual energy has to do with this.
But Billie Eilish is undoubtedly an artist. I don't know about Taylor Swift, I have reservations.

 

[Timcognito]

Remember the Beatles "I want to hold your hand" and the girls screamed. Really "I want to hold hand"? When I say that something, something you'll really understand, get ready for many more years of Taylor Swift because she has captured a new young generation, like it or not.

 

[kemmler3D]

Remember the Beatles "I want to hold your hand" and the girls screamed. Really "I want to hold hand"? When I say that something, something you'll really understand, get ready for many more years of Taylor Swift because she has captured a new young generation, like it or not.

I shouldn't get drawn into a Taylor Swift argument, but I think if her music was going to become interesting the way the Beatles' did, it would have happened a long time ago. Aside from that, from what I gather her music is less about love and more about self pity.

 

[Timcognito]

I shouldn't get drawn into a Taylor Swift argument, but I think if her music was going to become interesting the way the Beatles' did, it would have happened a long time ago. Aside from that, from what I gather her music is less about love and more about self pity.

Female anxiety, maybe we males will never get it. Guessing her audience is 90% girls and women. Is that really new?

 

[kemmler3D]

Female anxiety, maybe we males will never get it. Guessing her audience is 90% girls and women. Is that really new?

I say each to their own, I just can't really resist the bait of comparing things like that.

 

[Robin L]

Female anxiety, maybe we males will never get it. Guessing her audience is 90% girls and women. Is that really new?

"We" are not her intended audience.

 

[Timcognito]

I say each to their own, I just can't really resist the bait of comparing things like that.

Not sure what you mean. I was just pointing out that fame is fickle thing, is often associated with generational changes and mood of the times. I could could have said it more clearly. The Beatles had not reached their 30s when they disbanded so maybe Taylor is a passing fad. I don't listen to Swift much at all and unlike others don't want argue with success. The numbers speak for themselves.

 

[Mart68]

so maybe Taylor is a passing fad.

I suspect she isn't. If she doesn't decide to pack it in then I can see her in residency in Las Vegas, still packing them in at 70.

Obviously the audience will be her age give or take ten years, the youngsters will have something new by then.

 

[Mart68]

Reminds me when I went to see Steely Dan in about 1994 I was the youngest there by some margin (except for the two friends I was with).

When I saw them again 13 years later I'd say the audience were mostly around my age.

 

[kemmler3D]

Not sure what you mean. I was just pointing out that fame is fickle thing, is often associated with generational changes and mood of the times. I could could have said it more clearly. The Beatles had not reached their 30s when they disbanded so maybe Taylor is a passing fad. I don't listen to Swift much at all and unlike others don't want argue with success. The numbers speak for themselves.

Sure, I was just bristling at the comparison of T-swizzle and artists I actually like. You could make a fair comparison to "Help"-era Beatles and Taylor, but she's already well past the point that we should have had her Sgt. Pepper's, if she was going to do anything like that.

As for a passing fad, for better or worse I agree with @Mart68 , she's a face on the pop music Mt. Rushmore now, and even if she stopped recording today would still be able to draw crowds as long as she lives.

 

[Timcognito]

Sgt. Pepper's, if she was going to do anything like that.

I actually think Sgt. Pepper was a pile on to the Summer of Love Psychedelic rage that they were late to and the beginning of slow decline for the Beatles. IMO Revolver is their peak and fine album it was.

 

[kemmler3D]

I actually think Sgt. Pepper was a pile on to the Summer of Love Psychedelic rage that they were late to and the beginning of slow decline for the Beatles. IMO Revolver is their peak and fine album it was.

Plenty of discussion to be had on which is best, but Swift hasn't undergone any major stylistic evolution like that, is my point. I think what you see is what you get at this point.

 

[mhardy6647]

I shouldn't get drawn into a Taylor Swift argument,

It would be really embarrassing to get one's clock cleaned in a seedy bar some night by being on the wrong end of a Taylor Swift argument... wouldn't it?

 

[mhardy6647]

I actually think Sgt. Pepper was a pile on to the Summer of Love Psychedelic rage that they were late to and the beginning of slow decline for the Beatles. IMO Revolver is their peak and fine album it was.

I concur (FWIW). Revolver was the sine qua non.
It represented the biggest delta from that which came before it of their oeuvre -- arguably, of anyone's (at least in pop music).

I guess Tommy might have been in the running, at least for the 'OO... I guess...


In full and complete disclosure -- I love the Who... but I have never really been more than lukewarm vis-a-vis Tommy.
But it certainly sounded different than Maximum R&B, didn't it?
EDIT: Even as I typed the line above, I remembered Eyesight to the Blind was a cover of a Sonny Boy Williamson blues song. Derp.

 

[kemmler3D]

It would be really embarrassing to get one's clock cleaned in a seedy bar some night by being on the wrong end of a Taylor Swift argument... wouldn't it?

Well, in my mind I'm not sure what there is to argue about. It's music, either you like it and listen to it, or you don't. But it's easy to get baited into "X is better than Y" nonsense.

Some male friends of mine have been unironic Swift fans for at least a decade now and I never totally understood it, but if they're having fun, cool.

I think the real inadvisable music argument I actually like to get into is "Do the Red Hot Chili Peppers suck?" and my answer is yes, after Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The last good thing they did was cover Love Rollercoaster. I mostly like to bring this up to make people angry.

 

[Chr1]

Definitely :
Revolver
Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy... or Who's Next
Freaky Styley
...for me.

Plus. No doubt controversial here. But I'd rather listen to Swift than Janice Joplin myself.
Find her voice incredibly nippy personally.

(Joni Mitchell in the Jaco years waay more preferable to both tho for sure. Then there's Rickie Lee Jones... And Ella.)