【搬運】【譯】叉婊Pitchfork評Taylor Swift 2012年專輯《Red》
搬運自：微信公眾號【評論搬一堆】（在原文基礎(chǔ)上添加了英語原文與排版調(diào)整）
翻譯：Tyler Smith，Nomanlandever
審譯：Ryan-Chopin
推送：Lynn Liu
In early 2012,?Taylor Swift?turned in 20 songs to her label for what would become her fourth album,?Red. They were all further outgrowths of the pop-country sound she had mastered in her early years, as a teenager finding her voice in the Nashville scene, trying on songs like “Tim McGraw” to reflect the starlight over Georgia and the allure and disappointment of romantic love through a lens that was unmistakably hers. As she amassed a body of work for?Red, she was still writing songs about love and its fugitive presence, songs about relationships that swelled like an obsessive thought, songs that picked up and enhanced the smallest pixels of intimate detail as if they were scanning security footage in a crime procedural. When she strummed a chord, it shimmered and just hung there. It sounded like Swift, an organic progression from her previous records.
在2012年早些時候，TS為自己第四張專輯《Red》創(chuàng)作了20首歌并遞交給了唱片公司。她小小年紀便開始在納什維爾追尋自己的音樂夢想，并寫出了“Tim Mcgraw”這樣的作品，這首歌里你可以通過TS獨特的視角感受到佐治亞州的星光以及浪漫愛情故事的迷人與悵然，而這20首歌正是她這些年對鄉(xiāng)村流行音樂摸索的結(jié)晶。在《RED》的創(chuàng)作時期，她仍然在寫著關(guān)于愛的萌芽與消逝的歌，每首歌都講了一段慢慢醞釀成癡迷的感情，TS像觀察犯罪過程的監(jiān)控錄像一般仔細，收集并用放大鏡放大最小的像素畫面。她輕輕撥動的和弦卻熠熠生輝，余音繞梁。不錯，《RED》聽起來非常泰勒斯威夫特，并且是她以往作品基礎(chǔ)上的一大進步。
Looking at the albums that followed?Red, it’s obvious Swift longed for the inorganic, to send her songs through the distortions of modern pop and see what kind of genetically-scrambled horror would come back. You can hear it immediately in the first song she wrote in collaboration with pop gurus Max Martin and Shellback, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”—a mutation is happening. A chord thrums from an acoustic guitar which then turns inside out as it plays, as if caught in the neck of a vacuum. It didn’t sound like the old Taylor Swift, the one who wrote 20 new Taylor Swift songs for a new Taylor Swift album. It sounded like a new version of her, being fitfully born.
當(dāng)我們把目光投向《RED》之后的TS專輯，很明顯TS渴望一些非原生態(tài)的東西，她將她的歌曲用現(xiàn)代流行的扭曲進行加工，并十分期待會得到怎樣的“混血怪物”。你可在她與流行音樂大師Max Martin和Shellback的首支合作曲“長長長（We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together）”中聽出她的這種趨勢，毫無疑問，“長長長”是一個變異物種：從原聲吉他中彈奏出的和弦變成了并非人撥弦而發(fā)出的聲音，仿佛會卡在真空中。這聽起來并不像那個為《RED》創(chuàng)作了20首歌的老泰勒，而是一個全新的她，在最恰當(dāng)?shù)臅r候向我們走來。
Swift was trying to push her music outside of its traditional boundaries, to stray into the interzone between pop and country. Pop was just beginning to mingle its DNA with EDM; dubstep, a once varied and relatively new branch of dance music, had been reduced to the stomach-flip of the drop just as its popularity in America crested. Martin and Shellback were aware of these shifts in pop’s geography; they incorporated many of them into?Femme Fatale, the Britney Spears album from the previous year. One of the other Swift/Martin/Shellback collaborations on?Red, “I Knew You Were Trouble,” starts as a pop-rock song but its edges mimic the queasy wobble of dubstep. Synths scream behind Swift’s voice like mechanical saws. It was as if she had finally found a musical backdrop sharp as her lyrics—the lakes and backroads of Tennessee and Georgia disappear, replaced with formations of jagged crystal, a perfect environment for a song about falling in love with someone you know will hurt you and leave you feeling empty as a canyon.
Taylor Swift嘗試使她的音樂突破以前的傳統(tǒng)模式，進入流行音樂和鄉(xiāng)村音樂的交叉地帶。當(dāng)時的流行樂才開始與EDM相融；Dubstep，一種曾經(jīng)形式多樣且相對較新潮的舞蹈音樂分支，在它在美國最受歡迎的時候已經(jīng)到令人反胃的地步。Max Martin和Shellback當(dāng)時已意識到這些流行趨勢的變化；他們在一年前布蘭妮的專輯《Femme Fatale》中做過許多類似的嘗試。Taylor?Swift與Max Martin和Shellback另一首合作曲為《I Knew You Were Trouble》以流行搖滾歌曲的架勢開頭，但它的副歌尾部模仿了Dubstep令人作嘔的搖晃感。Taylor Swift聲音后的“合成器尖叫聲”像機器電鋸一樣。就好像她終于找到了與她歌詞一樣犀利的背景音效——田納西和喬治亞州的湖泊和小路就此消失，取而代之的是鋸齒狀的水晶，為這首講述“愛上一個你明知會傷害你，讓你像峽谷一樣空虛”的歌曲營造出一個完美無暇氛圍。
Red?is an album of disappearances, of things that have gone or are just about to go missing—lost relationships, old sounds, previous Taylor Swifts, each photographed just as they’re receding out of frame. Even on the album cover, Swift is partially disappeared, her downcast eyes swallowed by a lip of shadow falling from a wide-brimmed hat. It’s her somewhat obvious way of referencing the front cover of?Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album?Blue, where a photograph of Mitchell’s face is submerged a blue-black lake of shadow.
《RED》是一張關(guān)于失去的專輯，是一張關(guān)于已逝或即將逝去之物的專輯，包括逝去的感情、舊時的聲音、以前的每一個泰勒·斯威夫特，每一幀畫面都在回憶即將消逝之際被存留下來。甚至在專輯封面上，TS也部分消失了，她垂下的眼睛被寬邊帽的陰影吞沒了，很明顯，她引用了Joni Mitchell1971年專輯《Blue》的封面，在《Blue》的專輯封面上，Mitchell的臉龐淹沒在了一片深藍色的湖影的。
So she sought out different producers and collaborators to give shape to these kinds of missing. She wanted the drum sounds that Jeff Bhasker brought to fun.’s 2012 pop album?Some Nights, hushed, cottony throbs that sound cobwebbed over. They bloom beneath the skin of “Holy Ground,” a song where Swift discovers a brief connection so glowing and true that she skips over the end of the relationship because it’s not important: “And I guess we fell apart in the usual way/And the story’s got dust on every page.” “Treacherous,” which she co-wrote with Semisonic’s Dan Wilson, initially sounds like an old Taylor Swift song, but it deepens over time like none of her songs before or since, a masterclass in dynamics from arrangement to lyric. It starts off relatively motionless, frozen in time by all the tension in Swift’s voice, as if by keeping absolutely still she might not fall for the song’s subject. Then the guitars and drums melt into dark, wet echoes like pelting raindrops, as Swift’s focus narrows toward a driveway in the distance: “Two headlights shine through the sleepless night/And I will get you alone.”
所以她找了不同的制作人和合作者來塑造這些逝去的美好。她想要 Jeff Bhasker在fun.樂隊2012年流行專輯《Some Nights》中創(chuàng)作的低沉但又柔軟得像朵棉花一般的鼓聲。這些鼓聲在“Holy Ground”中大放異彩，在這首歌中，TS發(fā)現(xiàn)了一個十分狂熱且真實的短暫感情，但她跳過了這段感情的結(jié)尾，因為這并不重要：“我猜我們是以最平常的方式分開的/但故事的每一頁上都布滿灰塵?！?/strong>“Treacherous”是她與Semisonic中的 Dan Wilson一起創(chuàng)作的歌，最初聽起來像是一首老式泰勒·斯威夫特的歌，但與她創(chuàng)作的所有其他歌不同的是，隨著時間的推移，這首歌變得更加深刻，從歌曲架構(gòu)到歌詞，都體現(xiàn)了大師級的張力和把控。這首歌的開頭十分平緩，TS聲音中的緊張將氣氛凍結(jié)，仿佛她完全靜止不動，就可以不再會想起這首歌中的一切感情。當(dāng)TS的注意力縮小到遠處的車道上時，吉他和鼓就融化成了像雨滴滴落一樣的低沉，陰郁的回聲：“兩個前燈照亮了不眠的夜晚/我會讓你獨處?！?br/>
Red?is also the first record where Swift directly echoes Mitchell’s writing, a once potential and hazy inspiration now coming into view. In a counterpoint to the musical wanderlust on display, there’s a newfound patience to Swift’s observations, a knowledge that narratives form out of brokenness and frustrated communication more often than they do out of ease or any emotional clarity. Many of Swift’s earlier, fantasy-driven songs, like “Love Story” and “Mine,” end neatly; both resolved with marriage. But real stories have a way of ending in places uneasy and uncertain, and what seemed to be the most enduring relationships splinter off into loose ends and glass shards. Swift knew this; she described?Red?in?Billboard?as being about “all the different ways that you have to say goodbye to someone... Every different kind of missing someone, every kind of loss—it all sounds different to me.”
《RED》也是TS直接致敬Mitchell的第一部作品，這是她曾經(jīng)一個潛在的朦朧靈感的外部展現(xiàn)。與音樂劇《Wanderlust（漫游癖）》相比，TS的耐心觀察為她提供了新發(fā)現(xiàn)：記敘類的故事是由破碎分離和不歡而散組成的，而并非什么簡單而清晰的感情。TS早期的許多瑪麗蘇歌曲，如“Love Story”和“Mine”，結(jié)尾都很簡單，都以婚姻而告終。但是真實的故事卻應(yīng)該是另一種結(jié)束的方式，它應(yīng)該結(jié)束在一些不安和不確定的地方，又或是曾以為天長地久關(guān)系變成碎片玻璃時。TS知道這一點；她在公告牌官網(wǎng)上將《RED》如此描述：“《RED》展現(xiàn)了每一個含淚揮手再見，每一次痛失摯愛，每一種悵然若失，對我來說，都是不同的。”
Even the songs she recorded with Nathan Chapman, the producer of her first three records and the initial 20 songs she turned in for?Red, are expanding, sometimes sounding like a bloom of sound from an empty arena. On opener “State of Grace,” guitars chime like sonar, as if trying to measure the diameter of Swift’s feelings: the early blushes of a relationship, when you seem to recognize something in someone else that you’re not certain anyone else has seen. “We are alone/Just you and me/Up in your room and our slates are clean,” she sings, wiring images into a lattice of memory, “Just twin fire signs/Four blue eyes.”
就連她與Nathan Chapman合作錄制的歌曲也在不斷聲勢壯大，有時聽起來就像從一個空曠的舞臺上綻放出的聲音。Chapman是她前三張專輯的制作人，也是她為Red創(chuàng)作的前20首歌曲的制作人。在開場曲“State of Grace”中，吉他像聲納一樣鳴響，仿佛在試圖測量TS感情的直徑:當(dāng)你似乎意識到，別人身上有些你不確定別人是否見過的東西時，那是戀愛初期的臉紅?！拔覀兪菃为毜?只有你和我/在你的房間里/我們的石板是干凈的，”她唱著，把圖像連接到記憶的格子里，“只有一對火象/四只藍眼睛?！?/span>
If?Red?holds together at all as it rockets through hybrid genres, it’s in the attentive way Swift dwells on memory and loss and the effect of time on both. In the liner notes, Swift borrows a quote from a Pablo Neruda poem—“Love is so short, forgetting is so long”—and accordingly, the songs on?Red?stretch to the length of their forgetting. “Sad Beautiful Tragic” sways like a slowcore desert mirage, a Taylor Swift song on the verge of signing to 4AD. “Time is taking its sweet time erasing you,” she sings, while the music simulates that stuttered crawl of days after a breakup, a soft melt of chords that make seconds feel like hours.
如果說《RED》在嘗試各種音樂流派的時候還能保持完整性的話，那是因為《RED》專注于描寫記憶和失落，以及時間對兩者的影響。在歌詞中，TS引用了Pablo Neruda 的一首詩——“愛那么短，遺忘那么長”——相應(yīng)地，《RED》中的歌曲從愛延伸到了遺忘部分的長度?！癝ad Beautiful Tragic”像沙漠中的海市蜃樓一樣緩緩搖擺，這仿佛是一首TS差不多在公元4年發(fā)表的歌曲。她唱道:“時間正在用它的甜蜜來抹去你的存在?！倍@首歌模擬的其實是分手后幾天痛苦的掙扎，柔和的和弦融化了時間，讓幾秒鐘感覺像幾個小時。
“Time won’t fly/It’s like I’m paralyzed by it,” Swift sings in “All Too Well,” the centerpiece of?Red?and potentially her entire career. It might be her own “Tangled Up in Blue”; like?Bob Dylan, she sweeps up drifts of time into loosely-chronological piles of images. “There we are again in the middle of the night,” Swift sings, “We dance around the kitchen in the refrigerator light.” The tenderness with which she observes this moment of intimacy makes it come to life; she reanimates a feeling instead of reacting to it, exploring all the howling negative space a person leaves behind when their shadow recedes—the things you talked about, the kinds of attention you gave each other, the arguments you had, the rooms where you held onto each other desperately.
TS在她職業(yè)生涯的最重要歌曲“All Too Well”中唱道:“時間不會飛逝/就像我被它麻痹了一樣?！币苍S這就是她自己的“Tangled Up in Blue”;像Bob Dylan一樣，她把時間的碎片按時間順序掃進松散的圖像堆里?！拔覀冇只氐搅宋缫?，”TS唱道，“我們在冰箱的燈光下圍著廚房跳舞?！彼貞涍@親密時刻的特殊親切感和溫柔時流露出的款款深情使這個畫面變得仿佛就在眼前;她重新激活了一種感覺，而不是對它做出反應(yīng)，用悲傷的咆哮發(fā)泄那個人身影遠去時留下的傷痛——你們談?wù)摰氖虑?，你們給予對方的那種關(guān)心，你們之間的爭論，你們迫不及待緊擁彼此的那個房間。
A kind of Chekhov’s Scarf that Swift sheds in the first verse reappears in the final verse (“But you keep my old scarf from that very first week/’Cause it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me”) as a metaphor for the continuity of their connection, how feelings persist long after they’ve lost their use. Nothing dies without leaving some trace of itself, she seems to say throughout the length of?Red, and in “All Too Well” she becomes one of those traces—“I was there,” she sings in the chorus. “I remember it all too well.” Swift, like anyone, is a hostage to her own experience, but she’s also capable of being a witness to it, able to see a relationship—even as it shrinks further and further away in her vision—for what it was rather than what it couldn’t be.
一條“契訶夫”式的圍巾在歌曲中首尾呼應(yīng)(“但從最開始你就一直保存著我的圍巾/因為它讓你想起我的天真爛漫，并且有我的味道”)是兩人關(guān)系持續(xù)糾纏不斷的隱喻,也表現(xiàn)了愛雖不在，但感情卻是漫長的。她似乎在整張《RED》中都在說，沒有什么東西會不留痕跡地死去，而在“All Too Well”中，她成為了那些痕跡之一——“我曾經(jīng)在那里，”她在副歌中唱道，“我記得太清楚了?！?/strong>TS和其他人一樣，都是自己回憶時不放手的人質(zhì)，但她也有能力成為它的見證人，能夠看清楚一段感情是什么，而不是不可能是什么——即使它在她的視野中漸行漸遠。
