Poetic justice — Taylor Swift spills bad blood on ‘The Tortured Poets Department’: review

nypost.com:

Taylor Swift is embodying first the Everygirl, then the Everywoman — the Miss Americana in them all, from era to era.Beyoncé is a goddess, Taylor is a real life human — just like us.But there’s a moment on “The Tortured Poets Department” — the insanely anticipated 11th studio album by the Queen of the Swifties — when she embraces her power as the most famous, the most influential woman in America, if not on the planet.It occurs on “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” — one of two tunes that Swift wrote by herself with that wicked pen of hers.“I was tame, I was gentle/’Til the circus life made me mean/Don’t you worry folks, we took out all her teeth/Who’s afraid of little old me?/Well you should be,” she sings in the rumbling revenge song that brings some menace to the melody.And you can bet that Swift’s most recent exes — the 1975 frontman Matty Healy and, especially, British actor Joe Alwyn — have been quaking in their boots ever since the pop superstar announced “The Tortured Poets Department” after winning Best Pop Vocal Album for 2022’s “Midnights” at the Grammys in February.Sure enough — there is plenty of “Bad Blood” spilled on Swift’s latest.

And with the raw honesty and specificity of her lyrics, she is clearly in her “IDGAF” era.In fact, the album starts with back-to-back shockers that just might have you clinching your pearls — or, in this case, your friendship bracelets.“I was supposed to be sent away, but they forgot to come and get me,” she reveals at the beginning of album opener “Fortnight,” hinting at some kind of crisis.Then she digs deeper into the dirt with an even more jarring jaw-dropper: “I was a functioning alcoholic/’Till nobody noticed my new aesthetic/All of this to say, I hope you’re OK/But you’re.