Taylor Swift - Reputation

The Guardian 80

(Big Machine)
The pop star’s love life and squabbles take centre stage on a riveting R&B set that carries her even further from her country roots

By now, any self-styled grownup who still believes pop music is “just” pop music will be thoroughly disabused of the notion. Taylor Swift’s sixth studio album, Reputation, is a riveting record, whose release is hard to extricate from the context into which it drops.

Fifteen tracks long, and with songs that range from forgettable to exquisite, it is concerned with lust, loss and revenge. Tangentially, it takes in gender and power. As much as Reputation seeks to duck the conversation, it is an album in which victimhood, white privilege and freedom of speech loom large.

The excellent Call It What You Want tackles Swift’s reputational woes head-on

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Sun Nov 12 09:00:50 GMT 2017

The Guardian 80

It may be mired in bitterness and gossip, but the pop star’s songwriting smarts and lyrical prowess are impossible to deny on her sixth album

Some versions of the sixth Taylor Swift album come complete with a sleeve note, penned by the 27-year-old singer-songwriter. It opens with some general thoughts on social media: the rumours that abound on it are not always true, the images people present of themselves there not always reflective of reality. Then it moves on to the pressures of life in the glare of the media’s spotlight – “My heartbreaks have been used as entertainment” – and offers a swift rebuke to those who might attempt to interpret Swift’s songs as being about her personal life. “When this album comes out, gossip blogs will scour the lyrics for the men they can attribute to each song … there will be slideshows of photos backing up each incorrect theory.”

Her lyrics are, well, lyrical: ‘You should think about the consequences of your magnetic field being a little too strong’

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Fri Nov 10 05:00:09 GMT 2017

Drowned In Sound 70

It’s hard to know exactly when Taylor Swift’s dramatic heel turn began - and, more importantly, whether it was by mistake or design.

Anybody who’d been paying attention over the course of the last couple of Swift album cycles, for Red and 1989, would have picked up on a couple of things; one, that she was gradually shifting towards a full-throated embrace of the pop mainstream and two, that she’s an extraordinarily canny businesswoman and a terrific self-publicist. The problem was that as seamlessly as she seemed to musically be making the transition to out-and-out pop star - 1989, especially, was a tour-de-force - the cracks were beginning to show as the strain of balancing her all-American, girl-next-door persona with the cold calculation of her careerism took its toll.



The backlash was probably inevitable. It was one thing being the country-pop singer with a penchant for snapping back at ex-boyfriends in pretty PG-rated fashion; it was another entirely to be taking her cues from Regina George in manufacturing a daft feud with Katy Perry, culminating in a video for ‘Bad Blood’ that ultimately served as a very expensive way of announcing how many famous mates she had. By the end of the 1989 tour, people were getting sick of her pulling the same trick on stage, parading a succession of celebrity friends in front of the audience night in, night out.

Then there was her failure to take a side in last November’s presidential election, which reeked of self-interest before principle. Anybody clinging to the hope that perhaps she’d wisely realised that Hillary Clinton’s many A-list endorsements were only going to work against her in the rust belt states that ultimately swung the contest would have had the notion dashed by her recent filing of a lawsuit against a blogger who, in admittedly unvarnished terms, called for her to denounce the white supremacists who were trying to claim her as one of their own.

Still, if so much of the squandering of the considerable post-1989 goodwill seems self-inflicted, the most tabloid-friendly of her extracurricular distractions since that last record was not of her own doing; it wasn’t her fault that Kanye West chose to make her the subject of the sort of misogynist rhetoric that he continues to be given a universal free pass on, or that he would then take that to a revolting visual extreme with the invasive video for the track in question, ‘Famous’. There wasn’t much she could do, either, about West’s wife gleefully presenting inconclusive evidence of Swift having endorsed the offending lines as proof of the singer being a bit false, in one of the most astonishing instances of hypocrisy of recent times.

Swift wasn’t in control of any of that unpleasantness and, suddenly, somebody so used to artfully spinning potential controversies to her advantage - the ingenious publicity stunt that was her Apple Music letter back in 2014 being a case in point - found herself in need of the best possible damage limitation strategy. On the evidence of the first single from Reputation, she chose to own it; ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ cast her as a cartoon villain who’d gladly adopted the serpentine imagery that Mrs. West had bestowed upon her. ‘...Ready for It?’ followed, and had Swift sounding similarly combative even without an obvious target. When ‘Gorgeous’ provided a mellower counterpoint, it sounded anodyne by her standards. Ryan Adams, you suspected, would not be covering this record.

What made 1989 so compelling was that it was characterised by that magpie-like predisposition for pouncing upon anything musically shiny and co-opting it, the same approach that has defined some of the best pop records of the last few years; Paramore’s self-titled album and The 1975’s I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it both spring to mind. Adams’ version of the LP, for what it’s worth, drenched a vibrant and diverse collection of songs in a thick coat of MOR blandness that made it all the more frustrating that so many reviews of it - predictably, almost exclusively by middle-aged men - discussed at length how brilliant Adams was for managing to turn throwaway chart-pop into something more profound, rather than castigating him for robbing the songs of what made them sparkle in the first place.

Irrespective, he was never going to cover this album because regardless of what had gone on in Swift’s private life, the trajectory charted by Red and 1989 always strongly suggested that she’d complete the long-mapped move to fully-fledged pop on whatever came next. That’s precisely what Swift has done, and it means that the stylistic breadth that so defined 1989 has been sacrificed. Track to track, there’s no divergences as dramatic as the moves between the bombast of ‘Welcome to New York’ and the steely sparseness of ‘Blank Space’, or the flit from the Chvrches-fuelled electro of ‘Out of the Woods’ to ‘Shake It Off’s catchy silliness.

Instead, much of Swift’s pop positioning on Reputation falls in line with present trends. ‘...Ready for It?’ sets the tone with its thumping bass, one feature of a palette that runs through the record and seems primarily indebted to modern hip hop and R&B; there’s rattling percussion on ‘I Did Something Bad’, noisy synths on ‘Don’t Blame Me’ and ‘Dancing with Our Hands Tied’, and a consistent cool detachment to Swift’s vocal delivery that’s a world away from what we’ve come to expect from her. Plus, on ‘End Game’, there’s two rapped guest verses, from Future and Ed Sheeran. The latter, in an enormous upset, is nowhere near as bad as it sounds.

If the retooling of her approach to songwriting to accommodate what’s currently in vogue represents the much-mooted New Taylor, then it’s worth pointing out that rumours of the Old Taylor’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. The back half of Reputation is where the record’s strongest hooks lie; ‘Getaway Car’ feels like a spiritual successor to ‘Out of the Woods’, except that it might actually have an even bigger chorus, whilst ‘Dress’ is an exercise in the same sort of punchy pop minimalism that ran through so much of the year’s outstanding chart-ready record, Lorde’s Melodrama. It isn’t coincidence; both those tracks, and much of the second side of Reputation, is co-written and produced by the never-hotter Jack Antonoff, who was also behind the desk for Melodrama. As a couple of cuts on 1989 hinted at, his and Swift’s partnership is a formidable one, and renders the icy one-two of ‘This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things’ and ‘Call It What You Want’ the high watermark on Reputation.

When Melodrama was released, back in June, you wondered how Swift could possibly hope to match it, given that the emotional honesty at its core was its strongest suit and that such candour has never been part of Swift’s makeup, partly because she’s always constructed her image so carefully and artificially and partly because her squeaky-clean family-friendliness meant that she wouldn’t be able to get away with the sprinkling of swearing, sex and drug references that the edgier Lorde made clever use of. In truth, though, the Swift we’re presented with on Reputation is the most honest iteration we’ve seen of her yet; it was the butter-wouldn’t-melt Taylor of records past that was the put-on, not this new version who, for the first time, isn’t trying to gloss over her less appealing traits. Instead, she’s playing up to her reputation for vindictiveness and cunning with a knowing wink.

That’s how she’s able to include deeper and darker takes on lust and passion than ever before. The Old Taylor wouldn’t have pulled off lines about carving her name into bedposts, as she does on ‘Dress’, or been able to so openly revel in her own selfishness, as is the case on ‘I Did Something Bad’ and ‘Don’t Blame Me’. Reputation is three or four tracks too long and the ones that should’ve been cut are the likes of ‘Gorgeous’ and ‘Delicate’, where we aren’t afforded the thrill of Swift with her claws fully extended.

The midas pop touch that ran through 1989, on which she struck the perfect balance between her past and present selves, is lacking here; she’s sacrificed some of it for such a wholesale acceptance of current pop trappings. What’s refreshing about Reputation, though, is that she’s no holding holding the mask so tightly to her face. This isn’t the New Taylor - this is the same Taylor Swift there’s always been. It’s just that, after three years of media barracking, she’s past caring who knows it.

![105250](http://dis.resized.images.s3.amazonaws.com/540x310/105250.jpeg)

Wed Nov 15 23:47:52 GMT 2017

Pitchfork 65

Taylor Swift’s sixth album is an aggressive, lascivious display of craftsmanship, but her full embrace of modern pop feels sadly conventional.

Mon Nov 13 06:00:00 GMT 2017

Tiny Mix Tapes 60

Taylor Swift
Reputation

[Big Machine; 2017]

Rating: 3/5

“Here’s something I’ve learned about people.” 1

We talk like there’s only one thing. We assume the inevitability of the world the way it is. We maintain that we are singulars existing linearly in line with a reality that is already dictated, long ago and unchangeably so. Things that have been remain forever as are echos of were; the bottom line is the bottom. Things are their reputations, more or less all over again and always: “Hold onto the memories/ They will hold onto you.

It sucks sometimes, this reliance on reputation. It helps sometimes, like when you have to drag legs out of bed to get on the road to get on the clock, to get goods and achieve and survive. Some confidence in an unmoving reality is a comfort. It helps, it hurts. We wind up wrenching dissatisfaction back into reassurance. I am my me, and this oh-well world is the way things are. I don’t feel good, but maybe just enough can really actually be enough.

Except if you slip once or squint a little, there’s room to glitch and wiggle. Can you see you look two ways? Can you break2 your reputation’s reflection? There’s a lot more to you than there is to you.

“We think we know someone, but the truth is that we only know the version of them they have chosen to show us.” We think we know the world, but we just know the version everyone’s told us is. If we could peel back some of the inevitables, we might get something better than just enough. Are you ready for it?

“…Ready For It?” is track one on Taylor Swift’s sixth studio release, Reputation. It’s a scattered and fried slab of poached sounds: some trap drums that thrum, some liberally-dropped bass gristles. Taylor Swift waxes puns (“We’ll move to an island/ And he can be my jailer, Burton to this Taylor”) and lobs lust at the object of her attentions, “Younger than my exes, but he act like such a man, so.” The Joseph Kahn-helmed video, an unpinnable and unwinnable sci-fi slop, pits black-hooded maybe-replicant Taylor Swift against captive probably-real/sometimes-on-a-horse Taylor Swift. “…Ready For It?” is impossibly stupid, a wheeling stab at a pop snarl that’s mostly burnt marshmallows. Sometimes I’m really bored by it. Sometimes I feel like dancing.

There are plenty of reasons to not listen to Reputation. It’s an assertion of privileged desires (the dreary and overstuffed “King Of My Heart”) and a defense of bad choices (“I Did Something Bad,” flatulating baroque dubstep) made by Taylor Swift, who doesn’t exist, not like we do in our days and jobs and loves and dog walks. Taylor Swift Co. broke after Kanye West Inc. won, and neither of those things are real people and there’s nothing to win or lose except time and patience and maybe hope in pop music. Reputation is the boring screaming gesture on behalf of a marketing fleet, an advertisement reaching out expecting your righteous empathy.

Except if Taylor Swift could be a person (she is, somewhere), she could break a little; Reputation is what those shards might sound like, little slivers swept up and chipping into each other. Reputation applied to pop’s mythological (and imaginary) narrative is part marketing strategy and part public fanfic: Britney Spears, an American Dream rotted in incubus; Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, goddess fixture birthing futures; Mariah Carey, the renewed every new year train wreck. It’s nearly always our divas who we wall up and scrutinize. And that’s on us, a failure we’re still trying to right. Even in the phantasm field of pop music (supposedly dreams, supposedly forever), we’re all too content to script and restrict the narrative.

“The point being, despite our need to simplify and generalize absolutely everyone and everything in this life, humans are intrinsically impossible to simplify.” The point being, there’s a next you for you to be, if you want it.

Over the sirens and clomps of her broken Reputation, Taylor Swift sings, “This is why we can’t have nice things darling/ Because you break them, I had to take them away.” It’s the sound of an anxious and confident artist striving and trying to, like on her soundest victories, connect. But where past Taylor Swifts have sheened in cohesion, Reputation is all jagged edge. It’s not edgy, to be sure: the shapes of these songs (admirably co-fashioned by Jack Antonoff and Max Martin and Shellback) welcome accessibility and the abundant, and occasionally redundant hooks are like a shark’s dermal scales, interlocked rows of teeth that sink and hit in waves. You’ll all chomp the shouted chorus of “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” when you’re waiting for that Black Friday night table at the hometown Denny’s; “Getaway Car” has at least five spots you’ll hum when you’re shopping for a partner’s bathrobe or a cat’s favorite holiday-shaped crunchies. You’ll be in Target. Like listening to Reputation, you’ll feel engaged and a little let down. But you might dance, too.

That first single “Look What You Made Me Do” has a no-chorus that’s pretty dynamite. I swore there was nothing there until it wouldn’t go away. Taylor Swift’s care for craft remains, even if some of the flourishes are frantic. The good pop stuff (the kind that isn’t there until it won’t go away) looks like < >, a less-than/greater-than ballet: the artist has a single detail that gets blown up into a universal that resounds everywhere, only to re-narrow down to another individual. And for all the exhausting and eye-rolling album-roll out, the goddamn trucks, the perilously (and nearly damningly) apolitical hedging, Reputation is a testament to pop’s plastic doubling time. Taylor Swift broke some. Instead of Miley’s apologetic retreat into self-reducing nostalgia mode or Katy Perry’s cover band fart stab at #midtempo #weird, Taylor Swift and every single one of her problems doubles down on an exploratory pop mode, winked at on Red, exploded into on 1989. Taylor Swift broke some and didn’t apologize for breaking the reality we set for her. “Look what you just made me do.

And that pronoun might as well be about us. It’s Kanye and Kim, for sure and stupidly. But at its highest points, Reputation lobs pop responsibility back at the only party that matters: us. “All eyes on you, my magician/ All eyes on us/ You make everyone disappear, and/ Cut me into pieces.” Without a public willing to eviscerate and fandomize and tweet for, reputations vanish. “So it goes/ I’m yours to keep/ and I’m yours to lose.” Taylor Swift is willing to endure the idolatry and the idiocy; she’ll kill her one self dead in order to be the next new one in conversation with us (already immortal, never not cringe-worthy but also the most I’ve laughed in a pop song this year): “I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh. Because she’s dead.” She’ll point us in a new direction, one different from how things look now. Like anything intrepid, it might be way off course of where we thought we were headed. But pop’s premise is plasticity, a precedent set when The Beatles and Stevie Wonder and Kate Bush promised with each next thing that the next next thing would be different and changed in some way. It would react to the world, but not without a vision to change it: “So call it what you want yeah, call it what you want to

It’s still icky. It’s important not to forget the icky stuff. Corporatizing forces will see how we like to dance and change and move forward, and they’ll sniff a buck.

Part rumination on engaging with the pop icon and part deep end even after eating the meal, Reputation keeps the ball in the air, argues for moving forward, even if it’s herky jerky. It’s infuriating, how coached some of these flows are. It’s baffling how “End Game” spots guest verses from Future (!) and Ed Sheeran (!!) and manages to be a song fit snug in the part of our brains that makes us sway in the face of a world’s despairing. It’s joyous to barely see the invisible pulleys pulling my heart in on the hemi-clap of “Getaway Car;” those same pulleys almost undo the singer’s beating heart on “New Year’s Day.” Reputation is a bad idea, but it’s still an idea, the voice of a stranger I’d (want to) recognize anywhere. Reputation, almost utopia and frustrated icon splaying every direction, wishes the world in the new year will be a better place. Reputation has the ill-founded gall to actually envision what that world might look and sound like, even if it’s not this.

1. Bold text in this review is taken from Taylor Swift’s introduction to the Reputation, CD + Target Exclusive Magazine Vol. 2. (I bought this at the same Target where I bought my CD copy of Yeezus.)

2. Susan Sontag: “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.” Reputation does not seem to be a statement about the world so much as pieces of it, refractions that shine some of our part in the pop story back on the artifact.”

Wed Nov 22 14:30:02 GMT 2017