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Big Machine | billboard.com |
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In my Superlative Albums I Wrote About in 2018 list, Reputation was awarded the Definitive Dark Roast for Super Bitter but also Nice and Earthy
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When Taylor dropped her first single in the leadup to her new album, I have to say I was worried.
‘Look What You Made Me Do’ is, of course, a certified smash. It had been three years since the sun-drenched masterpiece, 1989, flurried its way through hearts and minds and vaulted up the most played songs in my iTunes. It had been three years since Taylor completed her evolution from wholesome country girl to beloved pop sensation. After finally shucking the gingham dresses and cowboy boots she had long since outgrown, the question mark of what she would do next hung in the freshly rarefied air, still hot from the blinding sunbeams of that really damn excellent album. But before too long, the winds of change whipped up a stinging, sooty gale as America’s sweetheart found herself embroiled in celebrity scandal and drama. I’ve not been following as closely as I could have, but nobody could doubt that some of that mud was slung from her own perfectly manicured hands.
Still, any publicity is good publicity. The question was never if her follow-up would find a receptive audience, but to what degree it would eclipse what came before.
On ‘Look What You Made Me Do’, Taylor is incandescent with fury. She throws off the good girl mantle to lash out violently at those who would dare besmirch her, some blows cutting deep, others throwing her off-balance. It is a thing of assonance and of dissonance, a tune cut from square-edged sparking bursts of drum machine, a shallowed cavity of pettiness wherein some of the sharpest lyrics of her career (she snarls, “Honey, I rose up from the dead / I do it all the time”) rub shoulders with the bluntest (she snaps, “You asked me for a place to sleep / Locked me out / And threw a feast”).
It was a banger to be sure. But I was worried that Tay Tay had slipped down an icy precipice into the freezing fjordwater where the only remaining footholds are the icebergs of catty call-outs and self-righteous vindication. I was worried that she had left her inimitable talent for weaving richly detailed stories back on the toasty warm moral high ground.
And so, it seems, was she:
“I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come the phone right now /
Why? /
Oh, because she’s dead”
I’m relieved to say that Reputation put all my worries to rest.
Those looking to poke at a flimsy mannequin of cardboard and red lipstick will find Taylor in top form, especially if they look no further than the lead single and the sneering album cover. But those willing to indulge her with the benefit of the doubt will find a surprisingly insightful self-portrait of a young woman skyrocketed to superstardom at the tender age of fifteen struggling to reconcile her public persona with her private life.
Reputation finds Taylor at her most heartbreakingly honest. It is a miracle that until very recently she could do no wrong — the narrative of her life was never hers to control, but for a long time it haloed her with positivity. Everyone loved Tay Tay, and she returned the favour. But now the scales have fallen, the rose-goggles have shattered and tables have turned. Where once she spun endless spools of songwriting sympathy from her equally inexhaustible string of lying, cheating, undeserving boyfriends, now she is the one being wrung through the content grinder like so much mascara mincemeat.
And so we return to her new single.
This was the first glimpse of Taylor’s comeback, the first statement on the last three years of hatred and vitriol, the first reflexive attempt to seize control of the narrative. And taken at face value, it was cheap and unconvincing. A dreadful, overwrought flop. A failure, and worse, a disappointment.
But within the broader context of Reputation, ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ sticks out like a raised middle finger.
Campy B-horror-movie strings quaver in fear while daggers of piano dice and slice and stab. Breaking YouTube’s record for quickest accumulation of views, Taylor released an accompanying lavish, over-the-top music video wherein she reclines in a bathtub of jewels, perches atop a physical throne of lies, sips steaming tea served to her by a contingent of thirteen snakes, commands an order of sleeked-back leathered-up models with a riding crop and thigh-high boots, bickers with and lasers down younger versions of herself, bench-presses two motorcycles, and literally rises from the grave as a zombie.
It is a work of deliberate melodrama, thrown into still harsher relief sequenced between two of Reputation’s chillest tracks.
This new Taylor is wrought in the image sculpted for her, all swagger and braggadocio, stomping her way through anthems of vengeance and paeans to her own freakish Promethian immortality. She has called down a thunderstorm and embarked on a crusade against every man, woman and magazine that has ever slighted her, even as the bloodsoaked tatters of her reputation flutter away, forgotten.
She is a caricature of her former self. She is in fine form, and she is a decoy.
Because the old Taylor is more alive than ever.
Because the old Taylor is in love.
“My reputation’s never been worse /
So you must like me for me /
We can’t makes any promises, now can we, babe? /
But you can make me a drink”
This is the captivating contradiction at the heart of Reputation: one minute she’s finally happy with the man of her dreams, the next she’s scrambling to the floor to salvage the wreckage of her good name. Taylor doesn’t know if she cares or not. She is grasping tight the fragments of joy in her life until they cut her hands bloody, because she’s not sure how long it will be until they too disappear, like so much dust in the breeze. And that makes for damn good listening.
She’s giddy and irritable on ‘Gorgeous’, where we are first introduced to her beau festooned in slippery vibraphones lines and cheeky triangle pings: “You should take it as a compliment / That I got drunk and made fun of the way you talk”. That dorky sense of humour we know and love is still intact, flaring up in tandem with her frustration: “There’s nothing I hate more than what I can’t have / I guess I’ll just stumble on home to my cats”.
That featherlight jauntiness is something Taylor has had locked down since her debut album all the way back in the distant past of 2006, and when she dials it down for a nocturnal later number, it slips in smooth.
“Walking with his head down /
I’m the one he’s walking to /
So call it what you want”
It’s as happy an ending as Taylor is ever likely to find, and it wasn’t easy to get there. She’s detached and coolly introspective on ‘So It Goes’, the track saddled with the hefty responsibility of cleansing the palette after the spicy ‘Look What You Made Me Do’. Taylor’s voice inflects into an oblique liquid stream as she submits to the tides and currents, her patience finally exhausted. Aqueous production breaches into a roar, sending high-hats skittering to safety, shock waves rippling outwards to crash against the coast as synthetic tsunamis. But naturally, Taylor ebbs back and submerges once again. “You did a number on me / But honestly, baby, who’s counting?”
It is a testament to her skills as a musician and her strength as a brand that Reputation can pull double duty as such a genuine profile and such an obvious PR course correction. Taylor feels more mature here as the next decade of her life looms on the horizon, not least because of the repeated alcohol motif. (Out here, she’s swimming in a champagne sea; in there, she’s spilling wine in the bathtub.) Missions in her successful self-directed campaign to break free of her somewhat self-imposed arrested development include a command to her lover: “Come here dressed in black now / Scratches down your back now”, and a blushing latter-tracklist confession: “Only bought this dress so you could take it off”.
Still, Reputation is not without its awkward moments. Taylor sometimes muddles her metaphors, which do illuminate her thoughts and feelings, though not in the way she intends. She’s historically imprecise. “They’re burning all the witches even if you aren’t one / So light me up”. She dual-wields the elements. “If I get burned, at least we were electrified”. She concatenates her clichés. “My castle crumbled overnight / I brought a knife to a gunfight”. And most nonsensically, “There were sirens / In the beat of your heart”.
That last one is from ‘Getaway Car’, an extended metaphor for and self-referential spoof of her own boyfriend-hopping past, wherein she conflates witty lyrics with singing quickly, to positive results so long as you don’t squint at them too closely. Less successful is the raucous ‘This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things’, a spiritual successor to 1989’s delightfully bitchy ‘Bad Blood’ and a sequel of sorts to ‘Look What You Made Me Do’, seeing her dusting off her mankiller mask. It’s the only dud on an album packed with sweet tunes. The patronising put-downs and cackles of laughter don’t quite extend far enough into satirical territory, stranded in a no-man’s land of assholery.
It can’t be easy to be Taylor Swift. It can’t be easy to have your every movement analysed and photographed and recorded. It can’t be easy to always have to consider the most minute ramification of every letter of every tweet, every caption of every Instagram photo, to have to have your hair perfectly coiffed and outfit immaculately organised every time you step outside your own front door, lest you spontaneously spawn a dozen specious, speculative listicles — in short, to be forever observed but never seen. And it can’t be easy for the people around her, either. When she proposes a musical toast to her “real friends," you have to wonder just how many people she’s counting. When she invites two guest vocalists onto ‘End Game’ she inadvertently outshines them both, as if to emphasise her growing wariness at and distrust of those around her: “I bury hatchets, but I keep maps of where I put them”.
Taylor’s confusion is palpable, borne out in the occasional misstep, but even these serve to highlight her state of mind, reinforcing Reputation’s unifying theme of conflict between person and persona. And this tension gives rise to the best track on the album. The dizziness of ‘Gorgeous’ fizzles quickly, but ‘Delicate’ smoulders on. Taylor sketches an intimate narrative around the hesitancy of nascent love, of stealing moments of joy between obligations, of twilit sneaking and daybreak departures, always fleeting and all the more beautiful for it. Taylor’s swooning whispers are pinned down tight with a clean, simple four-on-the-floor rhythm, and it’s not hard to read the message there.
“Dark jeans and your Nikes, look at you /
Oh damn, never seen that colour blue /
Just think of the fun things we could do /
‘Cause I like you”
For the first time in forever, she is unsure of herself. And it’s enchanting.
“Is it cool that I said all that? /
Is it chill that you’re in my head? /
‘Cause I know that it’s delicate”
Endless hammering on the glassy glow of 1989 has cracked the seal just a little, and through a splintered gap a finger of contemporary mould has crept inside. The timeless style of yesteryear is gone, and Reputation firmly anchors itself in late 2017. Taylor curates her favourite fashions of today’s charts, leaning heavily into the very du jour fleet-footed Drakelike noir-pop: the trembling post-dubstep oscilloscope that underpins ‘Don’t Blame Me’, the glitched-up thunderclaps of ‘King of My Heart’, the offbeat fills and drops that strobe through ‘Dancing With Our Hands Tied’. In time, Reputation will expire while 1989 lives on ever fresh. But for now we have a smooth, creamy cheese, and folks, Reputation is just delicious.
I shouldn’t use the passive voice when I speak of design. Real people made it happen: the perennially undervalued producers behind the scenes, helmed by Swift herself, but under the lieutenancy of Jack Antonoff. The biggest name in pop custodianship scoops basslines ever deeper, sprinkles judicious sparkles of detail, burnishes the finished offering to a sparkling sheen. He helped to sculpt St. Vincent’s saucy MASSEDUCTION, he co-chiselled the prickly edges of Lorde’s seminal Melodrama (those two albums took out the bronze and silver respectively in my Top Ten Albums I Wrote About in 2017) and, of course, it was he who filled 1989 with its golden ichor.
The worst insult imaginable for a musician is not that their work is bad, or uninspiring, or derivate. It is that it is forgettable: so anodyne, so lukewarm that it enters one ear and exits the other leaving behind no impression at all. And whatever you think about Taylor, nobody could accuse her of going gentle into that good night. Her discography brims with personality. Her literal voice is a forceful instrument; untrained and unrestrained, instantly recognisable. She earnestly believes everything she sings, from her most personal storytelling to the most obnoxious banalities. Even as Reputation sees her dropping a my-lover-is-my-drug simile and repeating, word for word, “They say I did something bad / Then why’s it feel so good?” to the zip of vulcanised rubber, she sells every word of. And that’s a hell of a headstart over the competition.
And now, with her man beside her, the “Burton to this Taylor”, she can withstand any assault on her character. Reputation throws down a challenge on its opening track: “Baby, let the games begin”. You know you want it. Come and get me.
But while the effigy burns, she escapes into the night to have her cake and eat it too. Taylor’s latest is doubly subversive: a capitulation to and rebuke of the idea that she is no more than what people say she is; an opportunity to at once be the strawman and the one behind the curtain. And Reputation finally draws to a close with a song of endings and beginnings.
“There’s glitter on the floor after the party /
Girls carrying their shoes down in the lobby /
Candle wax and Polaroids on the hardwood floor /
You and me from the night before”
Taylor captures the perfect snapshot in just a few lines, a prodigious skill upon which her later work has placed less and less emphasis. She accompanies herself behind a sparse, dusty piano, alone in a darkened room on what is perhaps an acoustic glimpse into the future. It would be a logical next step after two albums of shiny, immaculately produced electropop. Reclaiming her reputation not with fire and fury, but with song at her fingertips and a smile on her lips.
Nothing can last. Goodwill is temporary, as is its corresponding enmity. “Hold on the memories, and they will hold on to you”. Attention will wane, friendships will fade, love will dim. And with Reputation, Taylor Swift has finally come to terms with that essential truth.
“I want your midnights,” she confesses, “But I’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year’s Day”.