Taylor Swift, Drake, and How Expectation Shapes Music

Have you ever bitten into a piece of food, expecting it to be hot, only for it to be ice cold? It’s a pretty jolting experience. The human brain heavily relies on expectations at every moment of the day. And most of these expectations are so set in stone that we never even give them a second thought. When you wake up, your room will probably look the same. Your walls will probably be the same color, and your house probably won’t have been destroyed in your sleep, leaving only your bedroom standing. But what if one day you wake up and your walls are a different color? You’d probably be apprehensive, and you’d want your room to go back to exactly how you expected it to be (unless you really hate the color of your walls). Now, as you’ve probably realized by now, this is not an essay about paint colors. It is currently October twenty-second, 2022, 6:06 PM, approximately forty-two hours after the release of Taylor Swift’s album Midnights. Going into this album, I was expecting a folk-pop album, akin to folklore and evermore. It is not that.

Midnights is, as most of you probably know already, a pretty straightforward pop album. And, despite how much I liked Taylor’s last two albums, I was pretty let down by Midnights. While yes, there are very real faults of this album, such as the moments of thin-feeling production and poorly written lyrics, but I’ve also quickly realized that much of my and others’ disappointment with this album is due to the expectations many people had when going into it. As I mentioned, Taylor’s last two albums leaned very heavily on folk influences, with traces of her signature pop style. Consequently, these albums received widespread critical praise, due to how well she pulled off this shift in sound. So, going into the rollout of Midnights, a lot of people, including myself, expected another folk-inspired album, especially due to the subject matter of the album, which lent itself to a quiet and introspective sound. As I so eloquently put it earlier, it is not that. When I finished my first listen to Midnights, I was disappointed to hear Taylor return to a much more pop-heavy sound, but would I have been if I hadn’t been expecting something else? If we were living in a world where folklore and evermore had never come out, would I, and so many other people, still be disappointed in this album? It’s an interesting concept to think about. Granted, I would say that I, personally, generally prefer folk to pop in terms of overall genres, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still love and adore some pop music. As I pondered this idea, I found myself thinking about another of the biggest names in modern music.

On June seventeenth, 2022, Canadian rapper, singer, and whiskey connoisseur, Drake, released his album Honestly, Nevermind. And everyone lost their minds. Okay, everyone might be an overstatement, but everyone I know that listens to Drake and hip-hop in general hated this album. For those that don’t know, Honestly, Nevermind is not a hip-hop album. It’s not even an R&B album. This is a full-on house album. For those that don’t know, the name house music is often used interchangeably with dance music, and consists of songs that are often played at clubs, raves, and other similar settings, made for, as the name implies, dancing. Now, for anyone that is familiar with Drake’s other music, this is a far cry from anything else he’s made in his career. So, similarly to how people reacted to Midnights, Drake fans despised this album, because it completely caught them off guard. Nobody was expecting a dance album from Drake, a career rapper. However, I didn’t start consistently listening to Drake in the past month or so. As someone who wasn’t a Drake fan when this album came out and didn’t listen to it in full until recently, I actually think it’s quite good. Sure, it has plenty of flaws, and he certainly has better projects, but for his first house album, I really enjoy a lot of the material, and I think many other listeners would too if they hadn’t had such different expectations going in. Similarly to Midnights, Drake fans expected something completely different going into Honestly, Nevermind, so can you blame them for being put off? That’s for you to decide, but I implore the doubters of Honestly, Nevermind to re-listen to the album knowing what it is. It might not be as off-putting as you remember.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect people to go into albums with no expectations. It’s a natural part of being human. Not everyone is a music critic. Not everyone spends their free time writing analytical essays about music. However, I do find it interesting how much an artist’s previous releases can impact the reception of their future music, especially when they’re as big as Drake or Taylor Swift. If you decided to read this entire thing, you must have cared at least a little bit, so I leave you with this: go into music with an open mind. You never know what might change.