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 context sings especially loudly, because on the eve of this release, Swift has been under fire for issuing a writ against a minor music blogger who criticised her for not disowning the far-rightwingers in her fanbase. (From the Swift perspective, the blogger did compare her to Hitler.) It is the latest twist in a wider controversy about her clout – Swift, net worth estimated at $280m, stands accused of bullying the blogger, who has called in the American Civil Liberties Union – and the nature of silence. In choosing not to engage with politics Swift has been accused of everything from collusion to luxuriating in white privilege.
Unsurprisingly, Reputation doesn’t introduce a new, woke Taylor. If you subtract the zeitgeist, Swift’s core business remains copper-plated. Passion is Swift’s life’s work – resulting in masterclasses such as Dress, where she confesses she “only bought this dress so you can take it off”. Like its most recent predecessors, Reputation is a roman à clef that begs the listener to decode which kiss-and-tell relates to which A-list former beau. With its ravey EDM chorus, Dancing With Our Hands Tied hints musically at Swift’s relationship with Calvin Harris.
Gossips will seize on Getaway Car, a two-for-one bonanza that appears to relay how Swift’s relationship with Harris ended when she danced with Tom Hiddleston. “I wanted to leave him, I needed a reason,” Swift confides. Less obvious is the song’s nuanced meditation on how no one comes out of this well – including Swift. “Us traitors never win,” she muses.
A handful of songs address the headlines. The excellent Call It What You Want tackles Swift’s reputational woes head-on and her dismay at a narrative that ran away with her. “My castle crumbled overnight,” she sings, “I brought a knife to a gunfight.” The defining story of her last few years has not been her romances, but Swift’s battle with Kanye West, one too lengthy to rehearse here.
Previously, Look What You Made Me Do sought to take the long-running fight back to West by declaring the old Taylor dead and a new, vengeful pop/R&B Valkyrie in her place.
Another track, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, also appears addressed to West. “You stabbed me in the back while shaking my hand,” Swift snarls; further lyrics point once again to someone who “got her on the phone” and “mind-twisted” her.
On the one hand, West’s treatment of Swift has been sexist and bullying. On the other, West had an original point about how the awards ceremonies tend to reward white performers disproportionately. The saga has ended up in a regrettable bind, in which hierarchies of victimhood are being fought out in a bigger battleground where race touches everything.
Moreover, …Nice Things is a great Swiftian chant-along, whose one-note playground taunt style has moved towards a more urban palette. After swapping country for mainstream pop, Swift’s more recent embrace of electronic and R&B tropes is now definitive. Nicey-nicey pop Taylor is dead, Reputation declares; in her place is a colder pop-R&B player. It’s not just Kanye in her sights – the steely (and excellent) I Did Something Bad sets Swift up as a glacial manipulator of men. It also features what could be her first-ever swear: “If a man talks shit/Then I owe him nothing.”
This tonal shift is not easy to unpack. In nodding to R&B cadences, is Swift guilty of cultural appropriation, as Miley Cyrus was circa 2013’s Bangerz? Does this make Swift more, or less, of a hate figure to observers who are furious about Swift’s reluctance to denounce racists? Should Swift have stepped out of her signature sound to sound like everyone else? The argument is complicated by the fact that the song that features Future as a guest rapper – End Game – isn’t very good, and certainly not a patch on the version of Bad Blood on which Kendrick Lamar guested.
If times were simpler, passion could really be Swift’s life’s work. Our times are not that simple, however. Roll on an album of duets with Beyoncé.