Taylor Swift made a wise choice for most of 2017. Following her being outed in 2016 by Kim Kardashian as at least having partially lied about not giving Kanye West permission to name-check her on "Famous," she laid low for the better part of this year, doing the best she could to stay out of the public eye. It seemed like a perfect example of being able to read the room. After all, people were sick of her in the wake witnessing her take a continuous stream of losses: her seemingly fake relationship with Tom Hiddleston, her embarrassing assumption that Nicki Minaj was attacking her on Twitter, and her public branding as a living snake emoji. Even I, one of the biggest fans of her music, was starting to get awfully sick of her. The only person whose approval rating was lower than hers this year was the frothing orange man she refuses to denounce.
Well, whatever the opposite of reading the room is, then that's her latest album Reputation. She was completely on the wrong foot from the beginning, releasing the garish, unapologetic "Look What You Made Do" as a first single. Any hope for a Taylor Swift who learned and grew from her time away was gone -- instead, she took all the wrong lessons away from it. On Reputation, she steers straight into the skid of her heel status. The Swift of old prided herself on being the underdog, but on this album she finally acknowledges that she's the biggest entity in the world. She's the one who wields power on most of the songs, constantly breaking hearts, enacting revenge, and getting wild and drunk. The titles are even given winking, antagonistic names like "I Did Something Bad," "Don't Blame Me" and "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things."
Which is to say, this is probably the album that reflects Taylor Swift's personality the most -- the inner mean girl hiding under the "America's Sweetheart" veneer. But somehow, Reputation feels like it's the most fake record in her discography. The snake-adorned promotion, the Disney villain way she coos her lyrics, the self-righteous anger; it all just feels like empty posturing. The trouble is she tries to have her cake and eat it too, playing the villain and the victim. She puts on the evil witch persona, but then whines that "they're burning all the witches, even if you aren't one." It makes the whole angle of the album feel muddled.
Sonically, this is a real hodgepodge too. What's interesting about Taylor Swift's music is that it has always seemed to be just off-center of whatever landscape she was inhabiting. Even her "big pop move" on 1989 sounded like the radio three decades ago as opposed to now. This time around, she does take square aim at the mainstream pop music of today. Many of the songs -- the stormy mid-tempo number "Don't Blame Me," for instance -- have that same mechanical churn as the rest of the Top 40 charts. The result is something that feels a little less special than the rest of her music simply because, well, it sounds like you could hear it from anybody.
Of course, you can't do a complete survey of today's trends without tackling what is arguably the most popular genre of 2017: rap music. So with little interest in whether it's a good idea or not, she takes on a cadence resembling rap on opener "...Ready For It?" Even worse is that she subjects us to Ed Sheeran rapping a song later on "End Game." Trap beats with skittering hi-hats and big snares litter the record, and Swift navigates them with all the swagger of a white girl jamming with her sorority friends in the car. Needless to say, this album sounds like it has all the makings of a miscalculated disaster.
And yet...
Reputation is one of the most compelling listens of the year. It's a fascinating carnival of sounds, ideas, and emotions, and even when a moment misses the mark, the songs as a whole land in the exact pleasure center of your brain that requires very little processing. It speaks to her preternatural abilities that she's able to cannibalize all kinds of genres and spit out stainless steel melodies and hooks the way she does here. The aforementioned "...Ready For It?" seems like a bad idea on paper, but in execution it's one of the best songs on the album, a lurching stadium-crunch banger that's endlessly catchy.
Then there are moments that find Swift truly in her element, where the album completely soars. I'm thinking particularly about "Getaway Car," the clear highlight of the album. It's an airy retro-pop song that sounds like it would fit right in on 1989, and it features all of the signifiers that make her style sparkle. There's the proof that she can still turn a phrase with the best of them, as she sets the scene with the lines "The ties were black, the lies were white / In shades of grey in candlelight." And she toys with the classic lovers-on-the-run framework in the chorus: "You were driving the getaway car / We were flying, but we never got far / Don't pretend it's such a mystery / Think about the place where you first met me." That leads right back into her singing the words "riding in a getaway car," as if answering the last line in a circular manner. It's clever songwriting all around.
There are so many more moments that make Reputation crackle: "Delicate," a lithe tropical breeze that finds her comfortably toying with a vocoder, is probably her most successful bit of genre tourism on the album. On "Gorgeous," she sings "You should think about the consequence of you touching my hand in a darkened room," the kind of diamond-cut come-on she's been sharpening over the last decade of her career. Then there's the way the emo theatricality of the "I Did Something Bad" chorus careens into that pitched-down demonic robot sputtering that she does afterward. From the almost synesthetic detail of certain lyrics to all of the breathy ad-libs sprinkled everywhere, there are little nuggets that I like more and more with each listen. Even a song like "Look What You Made Me Do" makes some kind of perverse sense if you play it while driving at just the right speed on the highway.
So much of the pop landscape is founded on an anonymity that drives the catchy tunes. I can't say I know much about who The Chainsmokers really are after hearing a few of their songs, nor do I really get much of a distinct flavor from the music of someone like Katy Perry. That's fine, conveying personality isn't the central goal of the genre. But what has always added to Taylor Swift's music is that you can get a sense of her worldview through her songs, a clear psychology driving all of her work. There's a moment on this album where she says "Love made me crazy / if it doesn't, you ain't doing it right." That's a thesis that comes up over and over on her albums, the idea that "nothing safe is worth drive," as she once put it on "Treacherous." Reputation plays host to all of Swift's favorite motifs, from her love of playing with archetypes and classic iconography -- "Burton to this Taylor," Bonnie & Clyde, parties from The Great Gatsby -- to the concept of finding a sanctuary, be it literal or figurative, in order to sustain love in the face of celebrity. It makes this record serve not just as a new collection of songs, but a fascination expansion upon an existing universe.
In that sense, the thing that Reputation resembles most is, of all things, Kanye West's The Life of Pablo. Like that album, it's a snapshot of an artist's headspace during a time of extreme turmoil. West went through his trying time in a very public way while Swift retreated from hers, but both works reckon with alot of the same ideas. And just as Pablo was greeted with an initial "this is a mess" reaction, only to be acknowledged later as having some pretty stirring musical ideas, the same is likely to happen with Reputation once the thinkpiece fog clears.
It's funny, then, that Kanye West and Taylor Swift have been embroiled in a decade-long feud, because they're the same artist in many ways. Both are top-tier songwriters, the best and worst of both their work can be attributed to the fact that nobody can really say no to them, and they both may end up being destroyed by the psychic damage of fame. And with Reputation, Taylor Swift has channeled all of that into an album that's weird and wild and worrisome. But with all its evidence that she might have officially gone off the deep end, this is another worthwhile entry in a shimmering oeuvre. Maybe her nemesis said it best: Name one genius that ain't crazy.
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