【搬运】【译】Pitchfork评Taylor Swift 2008年专辑《Fearless》

搬运自：微信公众号【评论搬一堆】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）

翻译：Whitney.L，Ryan-Chopin

校对：Lynn Liu

排版：Peter D

Today on Pitchfork, we are taking a critical look at the rise of Taylor Swift—from country underdog to pop superstar—with new reviews of her first five records.

今天在Pitchfork，我们将带着批判的目光对Taylor Swift前五张专辑进行一番新的评述，来看看她是如何从乡村小天后成长为流行巨星的。

When Taylor Swift moved to Nashville as a teenager with hopes of becoming a country star, she faced an uphill battle. “Basically, all the record companies went, ‘Ah, how cute. She’s just a little kid,’” Swift said in 2008. “They also said, ‘Give up your dreams. Go home and come back when you're 18.’” “I would feel like they were deleting me from their Blackberrys as I was telling them,” Scott Borchetta, president of her label Big Machine, told The New York Times of the Nashville industry’s reaction to signing Swift. She never wanted her age to be “the headline,” or a number that screamed to writers and producers that she was just a starry-eyed hobbyist making music in her bedroom.

Taylor Swift十几岁搬到纳什维尔的时候，她就梦想着成为一名乡村歌手，然而，这意味着，她即将面临一场艰苦的战役。“基本上，所有的唱片公司都说，‘啊，真可爱。她只是个孩子，”Swift在2008年说道，“他们还说，‘放弃你的梦想吧。赶紧回家，等你18岁的时候再来’。”“我感觉他们会像我对他们说的那样，把我从黑莓手机上删除”，Scott Borchetta是Taylor的唱片公司Big Machine的总裁，他在接受《The New York Times》(纽约时报)采访时，谈到了纳什维尔总部对签下Swift的反应。泰勒表示，她从不希望自己的年龄成为“头条新闻”，也不希望因为她的年龄，使得那些作曲家和制作人轻蔑地认为她只是一个，宅在卧室，不切实际的幻想家。

On her self-titled debut, Swift established herself as a precocious storyteller who could write love songs vague and ageless enough that anyone might find herself in them, perhaps to prove to Nashville that a teen could do it. Her second album, Fearless, is a rebuke to that approach, with Swift bringing listeners straight to the dreaded football-game bleachers and mean-girl maze of high school. She took her teen self seriously and demanded others do the same, navigating the cloying innocence of a girl who simultaneously experiences relationships like a dog-eared Nicholas Sparks novel and also has the wisdom to know that not all kisses end in a rainstorm.

在她以自己的名字命名的首张专辑中，Swift把自己塑造成一个早熟的故事讲述者，她写出了一些含糊不清的、永恒的情歌，任何人似乎都可以从中找寻到自己的痕迹，或许这也是为了向纳什维尔总部证明，一个十几岁的孩子是可以做到这些的。她的第二张专辑《Fearless》(无畏)则是对这种方式的一种谴责，Swift把听众直接带到激动人心的露台看台的足球赛场，以及刻薄女孩云集的高中。她认真对待着自己的少年时代，并要求其他人也这样做。她像Nicholas Sparks的纯爱小说叙述的主人公那样，她是一个有着淡淡忧愁的天真少女，同时经历着各种关系，也十分聪明，她知道，并非所有的亲吻都在暴风雨中告终。

Fearless straddles the line between country and pop, clinging really only to Swift’s faint, faux-country accent which magically materialized at some point between her hometown of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania and Nashville, and a few bits of fiddle and banjo that flicker in and out of the record. “I write as life happens to me,” Swift told Rolling Stone in 2010 and on Fearless it’s clear she’s dead serious; a day before she had to turn the album in, she begged Borchetta to add the track “Forever & Always,” a break-up song inspired by the pop singer Joe Jonas. The songs are diaristic not just in their images of fairytale romance and frustrated heartbreak, but in how Swift writes her lyrics like mini-stories with wordy, narrative structures. On “Love Story,” she rips from the play I’d assume is burned into every average American high-schooler’s brain, Romeo and Juliet, for a tongue-twister of a chorus (“And I said, Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone…”) She sounds almost breathless by its end. She likes to give a play-by-play, stacking minute summaries of a moment on top of each other like she’s story-boarding the perfect montage out of an indelible memory. “And I stare at the phone, he still hasn’t called/And then you feel so low/You can’t feel nothing at all,” she rattles off on “Forever & Always.”

《Fearless》跨越了乡村音乐和流行音乐之间的界限，只附带了一些模糊的，Swift所特有的乡村口音，这种口音可能来源于她的家乡怀俄密辛、宾夕法尼亚和纳什维尔之间的某个地方，同时，还有几缕小提琴和班卓琴的音符在这张专辑中若隐若现。Swift在2010年接受 “Rolling Stone”（滚石）采访时说:“我所创作的那些内容都是真实发生在我身上的”，不难看出，她十分认真地创作《Fearless》这张专辑。在她交出专辑的前一天，她请求Borchetta添加单曲《Forever & Always》（天长地久），这是一首受流行歌手Joe Jonas启发而创作的分手歌曲。这首歌是日记式的，它不仅记录了童话般的浪漫故事和令人感到失望的爱情，还包括了Swift所创作的像微型小说一样冗长、叙事型的结构。在歌曲“Love Story”（爱情故事）中，她从戏剧“Romeo and Juliet”（罗密欧与朱丽叶）中扯出了一句歌词(“And I said, Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone…”（罗密欧，带我去一个我们可以独处的地方……”)，唱到最后她几乎喘不过气来。我猜这出戏已经深深地烙印在每个普通美国高中生的脑海里了。她喜欢一场接一场的表演，把每一个时刻的每一分钟的总结叠加在一起，就像她在讲故事一样——从那些难以磨灭的记忆中拼凑出一段完美的剧情结构。“And I stare at the phone, he still hasn’t called/And then you feel so low/You can’t feel nothing at all,” （攥着电话的我，没有等来它又一次响起 /这真让人心灰意冷/你什么都察觉不到，”），她滔滔不绝地说着那句“天长地久”。

Prior to and after Fearless, there was a conversation in the press about whether Swift could actually sing, especially as she was still considered an underdog in a genre where her peers were vocal powerhouses like Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambert. On “Change,” the album’s blow-out finale, her voice loud and guttural in the mix, she proves the skeptics (or as she would say, haters) wrong. But Swift’s talky-delivery and conversational songwriting style—a mixture of personal intimacy and outright fantasy—sounds original and deliberate. With their dramatic arcs and plot twists, these songs often sound like Swift is quite literally speaking as she would to her subject, high off the adrenaline rush of a blindsiding breakup or meeting her new Prince Charming. “When I sit down and write a song, the only person that I'm thinking about in that room is the person that I'm writing the song about,” Swift told Marie Claire in 2009. “And what I want them to know and what I wish I could tell them to their face, but I'm going to say it in a song instead.”

在《Fearless》之前和之后，媒体都在讨论Swift是否真的会唱歌，尤其与她的同行Carrie Underwood和Miranda Lambert这样的声乐大咖相比较时，她难免被认为是输家。在专辑结尾曲“Change”（改变）中，她的嗓音响亮，并夹杂着喉音，证明了那些怀疑论者(或者她会说，黑子)，错了。但是Swift的健谈式以及对话式的歌曲写作风格——一种带有个人亲昵感同时又给人十足的幻想的组合——听起来既新颖又从容。凭借其戏剧性的演绎和曲折的情节，这些歌曲听起来就是Swift所渴望表达的主题的印证，就像当她得知她所喜欢的那个球员分手时以及遇见她的白马王子时肾上腺素的飙升。（译者注：歌曲“You Belong with me”以及“Love Story”中MV所叙述的情节）2009年，Swift在接受“Marie Claire”杂志采访时说:“当我坐下来写一首歌的时候，我脑海中唯一在想的人就是我写这首歌的主人公。”“我想让他们知道什么，我希望我当面告诉他们什么，我要用一首歌来代替我告诉他们。”

She serves straight Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul with “Fifteen,” half guardian angel and half alarming guidance counselor to high school freshmen everywhere, reminding them there’s so much they don’t know yet, and name-checking her real-life best friend Abigail. At times, the extreme specificity can feel like a misstep, with the album suddenly taking on the dated air of a copy of Swift’s yearbook we’re somehow privy to. Such is the case with “Hey Stephen,” a twee, passed-in-class love note of a song that could be a brother to Plain White T’s “Hey There Delilah.”

她通过歌曲“Fifteen”(十五岁)直接为《心灵鸡汤》提供素材，一半是守护天使，一半是给各地高中新生敲响警钟的辅导员，提醒他们还有太多不知道的东西，并指名道实地说出她现实生活中最好的朋友Abigail的名字。有时候，这种极端的具象可能会让人错乱阵脚，因为这张专辑突然呈现出一种不知何处而来的泰勒曾经生活的气息。“Hey Stephen”（嗨，斯蒂芬）就是这样一个例子，这是一首故作多情的、讲述课堂中传递爱的小纸条的歌曲，这可能是Plain White T的“Hey There Delilah”姊妹

What’s remarkable here is Swift’s earnest sweetness. In the years following, she would become a master at biting songs about exes, from “Dear John” to “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” There’s little to none of that vengefully confessional sentiment on Fearless. The closest she gets is when she calls Jonas a “scared little boy,” on “Forever & Always,” but even that insult, so wholesome, is still understandably tepid for a young woman wading through the minefield that is her first series of serious relationships. The best songs come when her writing is wielded with knife-like precision, revealing feelings with each cut rather than glamorizing the teen tropes of hanging by the telephone or yearning for crushes.

引人注目的是Swift真挚的甜蜜。在接下来的几年里，从“Dear John”（亲爱的约翰）到“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”（我们再也回不去了）里，我们可以看出她成为了写抨击前任的辛辣歌曲的大师。在《Fearless》中几乎没有那种报复性的忏悔情绪。可以说她最接近这种极端情绪的时候，就是在“Forever & Always”中，她称Jonas 是一个“受惊的小男孩”，但即使是这样的侮辱，如此盛气凌人，但是对第一次体验恋爱苦楚的女孩，仍然是温和的，这是可以理解的。她所创作的最好的歌曲是当她像刀刃一样剖析自己的情感，每一次都流露出真实的自己，而不是那种单纯的叙述青少年期间的感情，干巴巴的渴望爱情或者等待着回应。

It’s the fantasies that truly define Fearless; dancing in a storm in your “best dress,” a love that feels like a roller-coaster. While the teen pop stars of the early-aughts like Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears had their highly erotic, sensational hits written by Swedish pop masterminds, there was something novel about Swift being a teenager and writing about her reality in her own terms coming into that same mainstream space, redefining what “teen pop” could sound like in the process. But despite the fact that Swift was drawing from her real life on Fearless, the album speaks less to the actual reality of a teen girl than to a teen girl’s imaginative desires, desires which, for Swift, are remarkably pure.

真正定义《Fearless》的是幻想;穿着你“最美的裙子”，在暴风雨中跳舞，这种爱情就像坐过山车一样刺激。尽管像Christina Aguilera或Britney Spears等早期的青少年流行歌手都曾有过由瑞典流行音乐大师们所创作的极具情色、轰动一时的热门歌曲，但Swift作为一名青少年，用自己的话语描述了自己的现况，并且通过这种方式，进入了同样的主流领域，这是一件令人惊奇的事情。这一举措，重新定义了“青少年流行”，以及在这一过程中可能拥有的无限可能。尽管Swift创作《Fearless》是取材于她的真实生活，但这张专辑更多的是表达了一个少女的想象力，而非一个少女的真实生活，对Swift来说，这些欲望是非常纯粹的。

In 2008, teen pop culture was bending to influences of chastity. Swift’s Disney peers like Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers helped popularize purity rings and one of the biggest YA series and its movie adaptation, Twilight, implicitly preached the virginal values of its Mormon creator. “Love Story,” which culminates in being told to pick out a “white dress” for a wedding, or “Fifteen,” which mourns the fact that her friend Abigail gave “everything she had to a boy,” hit hard with this same audience. Their clean, plucky country-lite production cut through the colorful pop of artists like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé on the radio. As much as Swift was hailed for her ownership over her own image and voice, what she was serving to teen girls was still squeaky clean and parent-approved.

2008年的青少年流行文化多多少少与“贞操”挂上钩。Swift的迪士尼小伙伴们Miley Cyrus和Jonas Brothers等人帮助推广了贞洁之戒，以及最受青少年喜欢的电视剧之一《暮光之城(Twilight)》及其改编电影，含蓄地宣扬了这位摩门教徒创作者的纯洁的价值观。“Love Story”的闪光点是Taylor能在婚礼上挑选一件属于自己的“白色礼服”（婚纱），“Fifteen”则是为她的朋友Abigail的感情而悲痛，这位朋友把“她所拥有的一切都给了一个男孩”，在同样的听众中反响强烈。这些纯洁、勇敢的乡村音乐作品也在电台占据一席之地，电台中也不止Lady Gaga和Beyoncé这样的歌手丰富多彩的流行音乐了。Swift因自己的乖乖女形象和甜美声线而广受赞誉，且她向那些十几岁的女孩们所传递的东西仍然非常纯净

On Fearless, Swift also cultivated an underdog, misunderstood voice with songs like “You Belong With Me” and “The Best Day” that would, surprisingly, continue to haunt her music well into adulthood. “They don't like what I stand for,” Swift said of her classmates in 2008. “They don't like somebody who stands for being sober, who stands for anything happy.” Even the clunky refrain of “You Belong With Me” (“She wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts/She’s cheer captain, and I’m on the bleachers”) became ripe for parody in later years, a testament to how meaningless any of those signifiers are now. Yet the simplicity of that refrain was the clearest window into Swift’s potential as a mainstream pop songwriter. The explicit modesty of these songs may be fixed in 2008, but the songs nonetheless stick with you; Swift’s great remake of “Love Story” in slick 1989-era production is proof of its timelessness.

在《Fearless》中，Swift还在“You Belong with Me”和“The Best Day”中发出不被理解、被人误解的声音，这些问题一直影响着她的音乐，一直到她的成年岁月。“他们不喜欢我喜欢的东西，”Swift在2008年谈到她的同学时说，“他们不喜欢滴酒不沾的人，不喜欢为快乐发声的人。”甚至连“You Belong With Me”里(“她穿短裙，我穿T恤/她是啦啦队队长，我只是在看台上”)这语法错误的标题句，在后来的几年里都一直被人改写、模仿，这证明了这些语言符号现在是多么没有意义。然而，这句简单的歌词是Swift成为主流流行歌曲作者的最清晰的印证。这些歌曲里的大胆谦逊之态也许会在2008年广受推崇，但这些歌曲至今仍然会让你难以忘怀；Swift在《1989》时代再创作的流行版“Love Story”堪称经典，证明了这首歌曲不朽的经典。

Fearless remains not only Swift’s best-selling album, but her breakthrough into the pop charts, a world which would soon become her permanent home (or a permanent cage, depending on how you respond to her recent material). It was also the last time Swift was simply seen as an artist restless with promise and lived-in inspiration who was deemed a “savant” and a “prodigy” by critics before being saddled with the mark of a tabloid celebrity as well. No moment solidified this more than when Swift was called to the 2009 VMAs stage to accept the “Best Female Video” award for “You Belong With Me,” beating Beyoncé and prompting Kanye West to storm the stage and proclaim Beyoncé’s video better. “I like the lyrics about being a cheerleader and she’s in the bleachers!” West wrote later in an apology.

《Fearless》不仅是Swift最畅销的专辑，而且是她在流行音乐排行榜上的突破，流行世界很快就会成为她永久的家(或者一个永久的牢笼，这取决于你对她最近作品的喜好程度)。这也是Swift被单纯视为一个充满希望和灵感的艺术家的最后时刻了，被当时的评论家们视为“专家”和“天才”，后来Swift就被贴上“流量艺人”的标签。在2009年MTV音乐录影带大奖(VMA)上，Swift凭借“You Belong With Me”击败Beyoncé，获得“最佳女歌手录影带”(Best Female Video)奖，这一刻更是前文的印证，但这也激怒Kanye West跑上台抢过Taylor话筒宣称Beyoncé的录影带更好，而West后来在道歉信中写道“我喜欢这首关于啦啦队和看台的歌的歌词!”。

In Fearless, Swift captures and bottles a girlish sense of romantic excitement and suburban anguish that is all too fleeting, before real adulthood and the depths of the world’s cruelty actually hit her. For the rest of her career, she would uncork this nostalgia like champagne and pour it over her pop mega-hits. “This ain't Hollywood, this is a small town,” she sings, as if to remind herself that she’s still just the teen girl next door, a country singer with dreams of a bigger stage. In that all too brief moment, she was right.

在《Fearless》中，Swift捕捉并塑造了一种少女般的浪漫兴奋感和郊区小女孩的痛苦，这种感觉转瞬即逝，直到真正的成年生活和世界的残酷无情真正打击到她。在她接下来的职业生涯中，她会像开香槟一样，把这种怀旧之情倾注到她的流行歌曲中。“这不是好莱坞，这就是一个小镇罢了，”她唱道，仿佛在提醒自己，她仍然只是一个十几岁的邻家女孩，一个梦想拥有更大舞台的乡村歌手。在那一充满希望的瞬间，她想对了。