Reputation Taylor Swift
Earlier this week, the news broke that Taylor Swift’s legal team had threatened action against a music writer who penned a scathing analysis of reputation’s lead single, “Look What You Made Me Do,” back in September. The piece posited Swift’s victim-role polemics as akin to the alt-right’s underdog platform, likening lines such as “I don’t like your kingdom keys” to neo-Nazi ideology. The pop star’s attorney decried the article as “malicious” and “baseless fiction,” arguing that its sole intent was to tarnish Swift’s image. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has defended the author’s piece as an exercise in free speech, and is currently awaiting a response from the singer’s team.
This story gives reputation, Swift’s sixth studio album, glaring context. Over the years, Taylor has gone to painstaking lengths to mold the public’s perception of herself. Even her acts of self-deprecation (take 1989’s “Blank Space,” for example) have been calculated, crafted with the intention of controlling the conversation. And therein lies the essence of Swift’s distinct distastefulness; in the pursuit of a scrupulous desire to preserve her likability, she has cast herself as one of pop music’s most unlikeable characters. Even apart from its alt-right undertones, “Look What You Made Me Do” is strikingly spiteful, an unnecessary swipe at any and every critic of her public image, and in her disavowal of its dubiousness, Swift has only distanced herself from sympathy.
On reputation, she attempts to escape the quicksand, primarily through playing the villain that she wants us to believe the media has created. She’s “New Taylor,” breaking hearts with intention and taking axes to detractors. She also experiments with hip hop here, a go-to move for pop stars that want to up their “edginess” (here’s looking at you, Miley Cyrus), collaborating with Future and letting Ed Sheeran rap. It sounds ridiculous on paper, and it doesn’t work much better in action; while tracks like “…Ready for It?” surely benefit from the extra bounce, Swift’s pimping of hip hop here recalls the sociological criticism that the video for “Shake It Off” inspired, and comes off as deliberate rather than the product of natural progression.
The album’s only saving grace is the undeniable talent that lies at its core. Swift recruits Max Martin, Shellback, and Jack Antonoff to craft glossy soundscapes for her to glide over, and her own songwriting abilities remain towering over her contemporaries. “Delicate” and “New Year’s Day” hint at the vulnerability of her best songs, and tracks like “Getaway Car” and “Dancing With Our Hands Tied” retain the massive hookiness of career highlights “Style” and “I Knew You Were Trouble.” None of this, however, excuses tracks like the ridiculously petty “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” which rewards her “real friends” for disregarding the tabloids. Significant errors in judgment such as these mar an otherwise salvageable piece of work.
Perhaps reputation works best in a bubble, free from interpretation and apart from reality. But unfortunately for her, Swift’s music exists in the real world, where stars aren’t spotless and fans are free to draw their own conclusions about their intentions. If “Look What You Made Me Do” adds fuel to the neo-Nazi fire, it’s Taylor’s responsibility to address it. As long as she doesn’t, she is a part of the problem. Her reputation is what she has made it. D