Lindsay Zoladz

And I think there was...

just a level of cultural exhaustion that people were feeling around Taylor Swift, the celebrity, if not Taylor Swift, the musician.

And I think something that did not really do this record a service was how much this became about

other things, not just the music.

And I'm thinking specifically of the AMC film.

The film.

Oh, my God.

And something kind of clicked for me when I was there watching it and then watching essentially glorified lyric videos that another artist would have just uploaded to YouTube and been done with it.

You know, paying...

$20 to go see this in a theater felt a little just gross to me, honestly.

And that experience, which I think she bills as this communal experience for her fans, but she's still charging them fancy prices.

It was very cynical.

Very cynical.

Yeah, and I think the...

reception of that move was pretty negative and the way it was sort of tied into this album like I when I think about the life of a showgirl the cultural phenomenon the music is not the first thing that's coming to mind and and I don't know yeah if Karen you're nodding yeah you're 100% right Lindsay the conversation about this album was really not about the album

So as I was compiling these lists, I noticed some micro trends emerge.

The rise of the producer as artist, I think, is a trend that we've seen over the past two years.

One example of that from my list this year was Dijon, who we mentioned was a producer on the Justin Bieber album, also made an appearance on Bon Iver's album, which was on my list as well.

Dijon is both a solo artist and a rather forward-thinking producer, does a lot of really fragmented kind of

almost like shattered glass version of pop songs that just have all these interesting shapes.