“The dialogue is too fricking long like really the song is nice but the video bugged the crap out a me still love her though.” Also, you can now submit reader scores! Click down to comments!
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[6.17]
Patrick St. Michel: Taylor Swift’s not the first (and she certainly won’t be the last) pop artist to incorporate American brostep into her work, but what separates “I Knew You Were Trouble.” from similar wub-loving singles is how appropriate it sounds in context. This is a song where Swift comes to term with a relationship gone sour — one that happened “a few mistakes ago” — and during the verses she’s turning this latest mistake over and over again, trying to figure out just why she got with this guy despite knowing it wouldn’t go well. The chorus — the drop? — is spent scolding herself for not heeding her own judgement and the aggressive electronics normally signaling aggression working just as well for frustration. Swift recognizes the emotional impact brostep can hide, and runs with it.
[8]
Anthony Easton: I was having dinner last night and talking about music this year, and someone asked if Taylor Swift was country. I couldn’t answer, and the question really doesn’t usually matter, but this is a pretty good example — the idea of a song whose chorus rests on trouble seems country, but the juicy, completely electronic production is anything but. I, for one, welcome, our new synergistic overlords.
[8]
Edward Okulicz: My tolerance for Tay songs about her dubious romantic choices is running out, so the next one had better at least be a belting tune. This one sure isn’t — leave the proof-of-concepts as demos, or use the concepts to create something interesting and novel. It should be beneath Swift’s ambition to write her laziest song to date (“lying on the cold hard ground,” really?) with her least-filled-out story to date, and marry it to the most overused musical gimmick going. There’s a fine line between inhabiting the zeitgeist and chasing it blindly, and Swift’s on the wrong side here.
[4]
Alfred Soto: Somewhere between “We Are Never, Ever…” and “Begin Again,” not to mention any of the other half dozen Swift “releases” since October, “I Knew You Were Trouble.” connects the stop-start cybernetics of Max Martin and Shellback with Swift’s furiously strummed post-country verses, and it works best as a meta-comment: she knew there’d be trouble working with these two pop scions, damned if she doesn’t try anyway.
[6]
Jer Fairall: The words tumble out of her mouth with such nimbleness to remind of how deft a performer and a songwriter she can be when she’s not being an idiot, but the mix of country sass with dubstep abrasion is so jarring that the whole thing grinds to a halt every time the chorus rears its ugly head. At least Shania knew to keep her “pop” and “country” mixes on separate platters.
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: What does it take to placate a Swift skeptic like me? Acute personal identification, to start. That’s probably how it works for everyone. Moving on. (In the blurb, at least. Whoa! No!) The deft “once upon a time / a few mistakes ago,” which condenses Swift’s entire career arc into two rapid-fire lines? Brilliant. The spit-out riot act? Fantastic, and falters only once: “a new notch in your belt” is muffled where it should be vicious, but it’s nothing karaoke can’t fix. The double-tracked vocals? Shiny, pretty. The increasingly unhinged bridge (“you never loved me — or her! or anyone! Or anything!“)? Perfect. There’s just one problem, and it’s major. It isn’t the pop varnish, garish as it is. It isn’t the dubstep at all; that’s so subtle that had music blogs not gone flipshit over a routine “sort of a dubstep thing” studio comment, no one would care. It isn’t even the celeb-literal “flew me to places I’d never been,” though that topples the fourth wall. It’s the toothless “trouble, trouble” — where catharsis should be, there’s filler; where there should be a climax, the song takes a step back without you.
[7]
Brad Shoup: I was amazed to discover that this is just the second appearance of “once upon a time” in a Swift lyric. Perhaps here it’s a nod to her image as author of fairy-tales-that-happened, a linkback tethered to the Sound of Seven Months Ago. The EDM touches work more often than they don’t. Her stuttering in the verses imitate remix work; the brostep buzz breaks no ground, but it blends into the current terrain. She’s canny, she knows that T-Swift dubstep means a lot of things to a lot of people, even though as a production gimmick, it’s fully wormed itself into her pop homeland. It works by virtue of its plainness, unlike the redlined repetition of “trouble,” seemingly inserted to presage what she’ll sound like on a future full-adulthood record.
[6]
Ian Mathers: Look, theoretically I’m not opposed to the idea of one of Swift’s massive choruses + dubstep, but neither the melody nor the drops here are huge enough to make the song compelling. My problem with Swift’s move into a different sound is actually that it doesn’t go far enough, and without any interesting lyrics or compelling melodies to make up for it, the half-measures show painfully. Minus another point or two for a video that’s a particularly egregious example of the rule that music videos that are significantly longer than their songs are horrible wastes of time (you could almost see the portentous, drawn-out opening working for a song like “Love Story” or even “Sparks Fly,” but not here).
[3]
Iain Mew: I’ve gone on about my enjoyment of brostep-pop before. This is not that. At least, not in the same way, because instead of coming up with a tune to match the aggressive force of the vworps and bass, they’re entirely subjugated to jaunty skipping. As a song it’s even less substantial than “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” but as a way of delivering dubstep thrills stripped down to the point where nothing is left apart from their newness, it’s remarkably effective.
[7]
Will Adams: So the whole “Is this dubstep? Well MAYBE!!” thing was a smokescreen, right? To distract from how awful her vocals are here? Or the fact that there is no evidence suggesting that this guy is trouble except that he… broke up with her? Or the lead balloon of a middle eight? Points for trolling half the nation by pairing Taylor with just a hint of wub, though the sweetest revenge would have been a song that was any good.
[3]
Jonathan Bradley: On returning to “I Knew You Were Trouble.,” it’s easy to forget how sunny the opening strums of Taylor Swift’s dubstep excursion are. That’s the point though; the big wedge of bass that rams into the chorus (it’s a drop primarily in intent) is a songwriting device, not just an attention-grabbing line from Red‘s pre-release promo copy. That shuddering intrusion is Taylor’s realization that she done fucked up in getting involved with this dude. Despite the claims of precognition, she had no idea what kind of trouble he was. There’s a charming prettiness in the verse’s equivocations — “I guess you didn’t care and I guess I liked that” — and the middle eight is properly disconsolate, but “Trouble” plants its flag on the violent ugliness of the hook and its interplay of sine waves and distorted wails. It should be no surprise that a songwriter as deliberate as Swift’s should handle the overused production trick of the moment with such precision.
[9]
Alex Ostroff: This is weird. My love for Taylor has always stemmed from appreciation for her craft and her writing; I most often praise her tracks that play with perspective and time and place and song structure. “I Knew You Were Trouble.” is none of these things; it’s lyrically awkward and imprecise, and often a bit too obvious, and the track privileges electronic ornamentation and the melody over Taylor’s words. But it’s also visceral, and not just in the wub-wub-wub way. RED was officially released three days before my first boyfriend broke up with me, but I spent the weeks before October 25th listening to her heartbreak waltzes and “Stay Stay Stay” and pondering whether I actually had major relationship issues or whether I was just listening to too much Taylor Swift. (Answer: Chicken/egg.) Then I listened to “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” a bunch and remembered that the one honest moment in that song is the word “exhausting”. At any rate, after the break-up, I played “Trouble.” into the ground. Despite its shortcomings, it’s among my favourite of Taylor’s break-up tracks. She’s moved past uncomplicated laying of blame (most of these type of songs pre-Speak Now) or admissions of fault (“Back to December”). Instead, Taylor captures the messy mix of frustration and disappointment and self-recrimination and anger at your ex and at yourself (“shame on me”) for not seeing the signs sooner, for not listening to friends, for recognizing the shape and size of the problems from the beginning but getting distracted from pragmatic reality by the emotional heights to which you were flown. The second verse captures the next few ambivalent months, layering the genuine desire to move on and be fine, and — perhaps more importantly — the desire to seem to be fine (“he’ll never see you cry”) and the stiff upper lipness that accompanies it all. Most of all, there’s the utterly gross (and uncomfortably real) bridge, exposing that saddest fear that creeps under the surface of it all – that there was never any there there and that your two years were just one big notch no different from him or her or anyone or anything. But even though all of this is real, none of this is the truth. “I knew you were trouble when you walked in (shame on me)” is, in its own way, just as simple as “One of us is innocent and the other is bad.” If the end was preordained, you had no agency, and all that’s left to do is make like Natalie Imbruglia wallowing in brostep on the cold hard ground. If you emotionally Eternal Sunshine their side of relationship, they had nothing at stake and the joke was on you. It’s a copout as emotionally honest as every single Los Campesinos! song and just as ugly. Which is naturally why I love it.
[9]