【搬运】【译】叉婊Pitchfork评Taylor Swift 2012年专辑《Red》
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：Tyler Smith，Nomanlandever
审译：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年早些时候，TS为自己第四张专辑《Red》创作了20首歌并递交给了唱片公司。她小小年纪便开始在纳什维尔追寻自己的音乐梦想，并写出了“Tim Mcgraw”这样的作品，这首歌里你可以通过TS独特的视角感受到佐治亚州的星光以及浪漫爱情故事的迷人与怅然，而这20首歌正是她这些年对乡村流行音乐摸索的结晶。在《RED》的创作时期，她仍然在写着关于爱的萌芽与消逝的歌，每首歌都讲了一段慢慢酝酿成痴迷的感情，TS像观察犯罪过程的监控录像一般仔细，收集并用放大镜放大最小的像素画面。她轻轻拨动的和弦却熠熠生辉，余音绕梁。不错，《RED》听起来非常泰勒斯威夫特，并且是她以往作品基础上的一大进步。
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.
当我们把目光投向《RED》之后的TS专辑，很明显TS渴望一些非原生态的东西，她将她的歌曲用现代流行的扭曲进行加工，并十分期待会得到怎样的“混血怪物”。你可在她与流行音乐大师Max Martin和Shellback的首支合作曲“长长长（We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together）”中听出她的这种趋势，毫无疑问，“长长长”是一个变异物种：从原声吉他中弹奏出的和弦变成了并非人拨弦而发出的声音，仿佛会卡在真空中。这听起来并不像那个为《RED》创作了20首歌的老泰勒，而是一个全新的她，在最恰当的时候向我们走来。
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尝试使她的音乐突破以前的传统模式，进入流行音乐和乡村音乐的交叉地带。当时的流行乐才开始与EDM相融；Dubstep，一种曾经形式多样且相对较新潮的舞蹈音乐分支，在它在美国最受欢迎的时候已经到令人反胃的地步。Max Martin和Shellback当时已意识到这些流行趋势的变化；他们在一年前布兰妮的专辑《Femme Fatale》中做过许多类似的尝试。Taylor Swift与Max Martin和Shellback另一首合作曲为《I Knew You Were Trouble》以流行摇滚歌曲的架势开头，但它的副歌尾部模仿了Dubstep令人作呕的摇晃感。Taylor Swift声音后的“合成器尖叫声”像机器电锯一样。就好像她终于找到了与她歌词一样犀利的背景音效——田纳西和乔治亚州的湖泊和小路就此消失，取而代之的是锯齿状的水晶，为这首讲述“爱上一个你明知会伤害你，让你像峡谷一样空虚”的歌曲营造出一个完美无暇氛围。
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》是一张关于失去的专辑，是一张关于已逝或即将逝去之物的专辑，包括逝去的感情、旧时的声音、以前的每一个泰勒·斯威夫特，每一帧画面都在回忆即将消逝之际被存留下来。甚至在专辑封面上，TS也部分消失了，她垂下的眼睛被宽边帽的阴影吞没了，很明显，她引用了Joni Mitchell1971年专辑《Blue》的封面，在《Blue》的专辑封面上，Mitchell的脸庞淹没在了一片深蓝色的湖影的。
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来塑造这些逝去的美好。她想要 Jeff Bhasker在fun.乐队2012年流行专辑《Some Nights》中创作的低沉但又柔软得像朵棉花一般的鼓声。这些鼓声在“Holy Ground”中大放异彩，在这首歌中，TS发现了一个十分狂热且真实的短暂感情，但她跳过了这段感情的结尾，因为这并不重要：“我猜我们是以最平常的方式分开的/但故事的每一页上都布满灰尘。”“Treacherous”是她与Semisonic中的 Dan Wilson一起创作的歌，最初听起来像是一首老式泰勒·斯威夫特的歌，但与她创作的所有其他歌不同的是，随着时间的推移，这首歌变得更加深刻，从歌曲架构到歌词，都体现了大师级的张力和把控。这首歌的开头十分平缓，TS声音中的紧张将气氛冻结，仿佛她完全静止不动，就可以不再会想起这首歌中的一切感情。当TS的注意力缩小到远处的车道上时，吉他和鼓就融化成了像雨滴滴落一样的低沉，阴郁的回声：“两个前灯照亮了不眠的夜晚/我会让你独处。”
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，这是她曾经一个潜在的朦胧灵感的外部展现。与音乐剧《Wanderlust（漫游癖）》相比，TS的耐心观察为她提供了新发现：记叙类的故事是由破碎分离和不欢而散组成的，而并非什么简单而清晰的感情。TS早期的许多玛丽苏歌曲，如“Love Story”和“Mine”，结尾都很简单，都以婚姻而告终。但是真实的故事却应该是另一种结束的方式，它应该结束在一些不安和不确定的地方，又或是曾以为天长地久关系变成碎片玻璃时。TS知道这一点；她在公告牌官网上将《RED》如此描述：“《RED》展现了每一个含泪挥手再见，每一次痛失挚爱，每一种怅然若失，对我来说，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.”
就连她与Nathan Chapman合作录制的歌曲也在不断声势壮大，有时听起来就像从一个空旷的舞台上绽放出的声音。Chapman是她前三张专辑的制作人，也是她为Red创作的前20首歌曲的制作人。在开场曲“State of Grace”中，吉他像声纳一样鸣响，仿佛在试图测量TS感情的直径:当你似乎意识到，别人身上有些你不确定别人是否见过的东西时，那是恋爱初期的脸红。“我们是单独的/只有你和我/在你的房间里/我们的石板是干净的，”她唱着，把图像连接到记忆的格子里，“只有一对火象/四只蓝眼睛。”
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.
如果说《RED》在尝试各种音乐流派的时候还能保持完整性的话，那是因为《RED》专注于描写记忆和失落，以及时间对两者的影响。在歌词中，TS引用了Pablo Neruda 的一首诗——“爱那么短，遗忘那么长”——相应地，《RED》中的歌曲从爱延伸到了遗忘部分的长度。“Sad Beautiful Tragic”像沙漠中的海市蜃楼一样缓缓摇摆，这仿佛是一首TS差不多在公元4年发表的歌曲。她唱道:“时间正在用它的甜蜜来抹去你的存在。”而这首歌模拟的其实是分手后几天痛苦的挣扎，柔和的和弦融化了时间，让几秒钟感觉像几个小时。
“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在她职业生涯的最重要歌曲“All Too Well”中唱道:“时间不会飞逝/就像我被它麻痹了一样。”也许这就是她自己的“Tangled Up in Blue”;像Bob Dylan一样，她把时间的碎片按时间顺序扫进松散的图像堆里。“我们又回到了午夜，”TS唱道，“我们在冰箱的灯光下围着厨房跳舞。”她回忆这亲密时刻的特殊亲切感和温柔时流露出的款款深情使这个画面变得仿佛就在眼前;她重新激活了一种感觉，而不是对它做出反应，用悲伤的咆哮发泄那个人身影远去时留下的伤痛——你们谈论的事情，你们给予对方的那种关心，你们之间的争论，你们迫不及待紧拥彼此的那个房间。
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.
一条“契诃夫”式的围巾在歌曲中首尾呼应(“但从最开始你就一直保存着我的围巾/因为它让你想起我的天真烂漫，并且有我的味道”)是两人关系持续纠缠不断的隐喻,也表现了爱虽不在，但感情却是漫长的。她似乎在整张《RED》中都在说，没有什么东西会不留痕迹地死去，而在“All Too Well”中，她成为了那些痕迹之一——“我曾经在那里，”她在副歌中唱道，“我记得太清楚了。”TS和其他人一样，都是自己回忆时不放手的人质，但她也有能力成为它的见证人，能够看清楚一段感情是什么，而不是不可能是什么——即使它在她的视野中渐行渐远。
